Approach to reconcile physical religious cosmology
Inphilosophy,theophysics is an approach tocosmology that attempts to reconcilephysical cosmology andreligious cosmology. It is related tophysicotheology, 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.
Paul Richard Blum [de] (2002) uses the term in a critique of physicotheology, i.e. the view that arguments for theexistence of God can be derived from the existence of the physical world (e.g. the "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]
Richard H. Popkin (1990) applies the term to the "spiritual physics" ofCambridge PlatonistHenry More and his pupil and collaborator LadyAnne Conway,[2] who enthusiastically accepted the new science, but rejected the various forms of materialist mechanism proposed byDescartes,Hobbes andSpinoza 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 ofEmanuel Swedenborg.William Denovan (1889) wrote inMind: "The highest stage of his revelation might be denominatedTheophysics, 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 thatKant's famous critique of physicotheology in theCritique 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 unethéophysique").[7]
Theophysics is a fundamental concept in the thought ofRaimon Panikkar, who wrote inOntonomía de la ciencia (1961) that he was looking for "a theological vision of Science that is not aMetaphysics, 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]
Frank J. Tipler'sOmega Point theory (1994), which identifies concepts fromphysical cosmology with theistic concepts, is sometimes referred to by the term,[9] although not by Tipler himself. Tipler was an atheist when he wroteThe Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986, co-authored withJohn D. Barrow, whose many popular books seldom mention theology) andThe Physics of Immortality (1994),[10] but a Christian when he wroteThe Physics of Christianity (2007). In 1989,Wolfhart Pannenberg, aliberal theologian in thecontinental Protestant tradition, welcomed Tipler's work on cosmology as raising "the prospect of a rapprochement between physics and theology in the area ofeschatology".[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]
^Paul Richard Blum, "Divine project: from physical-theology to theophysics",Philosophisches JahrbuchISSN0031-8183, 2002, Vol. 109, No. 2, pp. 271-282.
^Richard H. Popkin, "The Spiritualistic Cosmologies of Henry More and Anne Conway", inSarah Hutton [de] (ed.),Henry More (1614–1687): Tercentenary Studies. Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1990, p. 105.ISBN0-7923-0095-5
Theophysics. A website mainly about Tipler'sOmega 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".
