Theophysics

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In

physicotheology
, the difference between them being that the aim of physicotheology is to derive theology from physics, whereas that of theophysics is to unify physics and theology.

Usage

argument from design"). Theophysics would be the opposite approach, i.e. an approach to the material world informed by the knowledge that it is created by God.[1]

Spinoza to buttress it,[3] as these, More and Conway argued, were incapable of explaining productive causality.[4] Instead, More and Conway offered what Popkin calls "a genuine important alternative to modern mechanistic thought",[3] "a thoroughly scientific view with a metaphysics of spirits to make everything operate". Materialist mechanism triumphed, however, and today their spiritual cosmology, as Popkin notes, "looks very odd indeed".[4]

The term has been applied by some philosophers to the system of Emanuel Swedenborg. William Denovan (1889) wrote in Mind: "The highest stage of his revelation might be denominated Theophysics, or the science of Divine purpose in creation."[5] R. M. Wenley (1910) referred to Swedenborg as "the Swedish theophysicist".[6]

Pierre Laberge (1972) observes that Kant's famous critique of physicotheology in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781; second edition 1787) has tended to obscure the fact that in his early work, General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens (1755), Kant defended a physicotheology that at the time was startlingly original, but that succeeded only to the extent that it concealed what Laberge terms a theophysics ("ce que nous appellerons une théophysique").[7]

Theophysics is a fundamental concept in the thought of Raimon Panikkar, who wrote in Ontonomía de la ciencia (1961) that he was looking for "a theological vision of Science that is not a Metaphysics, but a Theophysics.... It is not a matter of a Physics 'of God', but rather of the 'God of the Physical'; of God the creator of the world... not the world as autonomous being, independent and disconnected from God, but rather ontonomicly linked to Him". As a vision of "Science as theology", it became central to Panikkar's "cosmotheandric" view of reality.[8]

liberal theologian in the continental Protestant tradition, welcomed Tipler's work on cosmology as raising "the prospect of a rapprochement between physics and theology in the area of eschatology".[11] In subsequent essays, while not concurring with all the details of Tipler's discussion, Pannenberg has defended the theology of the Omega Point.[9]

See also

References

  1. ISSN 0031-8183
    , 2002, Vol. 109, No. 2, pp. 271-282.
  2. ISBN 0-7923-0095-5
  3. ^ a b Popkin, "Cosmologies", p. 98.
  4. ^ a b Popkin, "Cosmologies", p. 111.
  5. ^ William Denovan, "A Swedenborgian View of the Problem of Philosophy", Mind, Vol. 14, No. 54 (April 1889), pp. 216–229.
  6. ^ R. M. Wenley, Kant and His Philosophical Revolution. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1910, p. 161.
  7. Revue Philosophique de Louvain
    , 1972, Vol. 70, No. 8, pp. 541–572.
  8. ^ "Theophysics", raimon-panikkar.org
  9. ^ a b Theophysics: God Is the Ultimate Physicist
  10. ^ Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality, Chapter XII.
  11. ^ Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Theological Appropriation of Scientific Understandings: Response to Hefner, Wicker, Eaves, and Tipler", Zygon, Vol. 24, Issue 2 (June 1989), p. 255.

Further reading

External links

  • Theophysics. A website mainly about Tipler's Omega Point Theory, with links to short nontechnical articles mostly by Tipler, but also some by Deutsch and Pannenberg.
  • entertheophysics, A website containing the 12 principles of Theophysics as explained by the author, training consultant and conference speaker Lawrence Poole. Poole also relates several applications of Theophysics including a "unified field formula".
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