Most contemporary thinkers would hesitate to say that they have found the absolute truth, but they would not hesitate to say where the absolute truth will eventually be found: in the sciences. And if any science can lay claim to providing the absolute truth about the way the world is at its most fundamental level, that science is physics. Given the aspirations of physical science, what attitude should we take toward the traditional study of "God", that is, toward theology? At one extreme are thinkers who claim that the sciences – and physics in particular – can replace, or obviate, or repudiate traditional theology. At another extreme are thinkers who claim that the sciences and theology deal with completely independent subject-matters – "non-overlapping magisteria." Prof. Halvorson argues that neither of these extreme positions can be sustained in the light of our best account of the nature and structure of physical science.

 

Hans Halvorson, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous papers on physics, the philosophy of physics, and the overlap of physics with theology including “The measure of all things: quantum mechanics and the soul”, and (with Helge Kragh) “Theism and physical cosmology”. He is editor of Deep beauty: understanding the quantum world through mathematical innovation (Cambridge 2011) and co-editor of Quantum entanglements: selected papers of Rob Clifton (Oxford 2004).