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[[http://www.jesusnetwork.eu/de/doku.php/jn_de_2011_11_21|Deutsche Version]] [[Start|| Wiki Start]]
[[topics_collection_iii|| Topics Collection iii ]]

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======Play is Needed ...======


Monday, November 21, 2011. We had a chat this morning at breakfast, as part
of the workshop which I am attending. We talked about content and about
applications, about usefulness and insight into some subject. Is the focus
on usefulness always helping the insight?

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**How are we encouraging creativity? ...**

What can you do to encourage creativity and insight? Is it focus which is
helping science? What is a good setup on which creativity can grow?
 
It is an important observation which has been found by many leading people 
in science: to be creative you need freedom. You need to play when you want
to find something new and deep. Of course, science is a serious enterprise
with a huge number of applications. Our society would not exist as it is
without scientific discovery. But new things are often discovered by chance, 
when people play around with some problem. 
 
Today, it seems that it is important to find and keep some balance between
focussed research into some application and the freedom to try to understand
some area, some phenomena, to play with tools and techniques to combine them
to something new! This insight has, of course, important consequences to
our funding streams, the way we manage science in the research community and
beyond.

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**God loves to play! ...**

When I look into nature, then I usually feel a sense of what play means in
connection with creativity. When you study the shapes and colors of birds, 
for example, it seems that God played around and invented this or that type
of bird. 
 
Of course, we might consider the diversity as a result of the 
mechanism of evolution. But for me that is not a contradiction to the work
of the Lord. His way to play with shapes appear to us as random
variations. What we call selection is a part of his way to choose. He can
let things grow and develop, and he can intervene any time and move
things to where he wants them to move. 

But what is more important is that God has the sense of play. His creativity
is not completely absorbed by some particular goal or by the demand of
usefulness. Things will turn out to be useful later. But when he creates
something, it is just a game. It is a play. It is without thinking about
what it might be good for. He creates things, and they are good, just because
they have been made by him. 
(Roland Potthast)
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