Notes

  1. . Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), p. 37.
  2. . A good survey and critique of these tendencies in mid‐twentieth century theology has been provided by the sociologist Peter Berger in The Heretical Imperative (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979). See especially chapters 4 and 5. Representative illustrations of what we might call the “empirico‐linguistic” method in theological reflection are Gordon Kaufman, An Essay in Theological Method (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1975); Wolfhart Pannenburg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976); and David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). “Natural theology” has been preserved by the so‐called “Chicago school” in America, but it has been most directly allied in recent times with process thought. A major example is John Cobb, Jr.'s A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965).
  3. 3. For a preliminary discussion of this changeover and a kind of prologue to the present article, see Carl Raschke, “The New Cosmology and the Overcoming of Metaphysics,” Philosophy Today (Winter 1980): 375–87.
  4. 4. Werner Heisenberg has characterized this tendency as the process of “unshaping” in both the esthetic and naturalistic thrust of modernism. See his essay “Abstraction in Modern Art and Science” in Across the Frontiers, trans. Peter Heath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 142–53.
  5. . Nigel Calder, Einstein's Universe (New York: Viking Press, 1979), p. 13.
  6. . Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (New York: William Morrow, 1979), p. 200.
  7. . Victor Weisskopf, Knowledge and Wonder: The Natural World as Man Knows It (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979), p. 111.
  8. . Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 76. A similar anticipation of this insight can be discerned in his statement that “the theory of objects is the theory of the comparison of events.” The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p, 144.
  9. . Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 144.
  10. . Niels Bohr, “Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher‐Scientist, ed. Paul Schillp (Evanston, Ill.: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), p. 210.
  11. . David Bohm, The Special Theory of Relativity (New York: W. A. Benjamin, 1965), p. 225. See Bohm's discussion of the revolutionary impact of quantum theory on the “new physics” in “Quantum Theory as an Indication of a New Order in Physics,” in Quantum Theory and Beyond, ed. Ted Bastin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 119–34.
  12. . This view, which is becoming more cogent among quantum theorists, runs counter to the opinions of the early pioneers such as Heisenberg. The older standpoint is expressed by Eugene Wigner, who talks about “two kinds” of reality: “the existence of my consciousness and the reality or existence of anything else.” See his Symmetries and Reflections (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 189.
  13. . Friedrich von Weizsácher, The Unity of Nature, trans. Francis J. Zucker (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1980), p. 235.
  14. . For an intriguing and provocative attack on the epistemological fundamentalism of modern philosophy and philosophy of science along these lines, which also has relevance for theology, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979).
  15. . Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1975), p. 130. For a brief synopsis of Capra's position, see his article “Buddhist Physics” in The Schmacher Lectures, ed. Satish Kumar (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 121–43.
  16. . Capra, Tao of Physics, p. 138.
  17. . Philip Wheelwright, ed., The Presocratics (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), p. 162.
  18. . See DavidFinkelstein, “The Space‐Time Code,” Physical Review  5D (June 15, (1972): 2922.
  19. . William Arkle, A Geography of Consciousness (London: Neville Spearman. 1974). p. 112. For a comparable analysis, see Edward Russell, Design for Destiny (London; Neville Spearman, 1971), pp. 124–26.
  20. . Zukav (n. 6 above), p. 282.
  21. . See John Wheeler, Geometrodynamics (New York: Academic Press, 1962).
  22. . Quoted in Bob Toben, Space‐Time and Beyond (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), p. 134.
  23. . Talbot (n. 1 above), p. 81.
  24. . See G. W. F. Hegel's defense of “science” as “self‐consciousness” that unites the certainty of all existence with itself in the world‐historical unfolding of the “shapes” of Spirit in the “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) p. 15.
  25. . Jorge Luis Borges, “John 1:14, “in In Praise of Darkness, trans. Norman T. di‐Giovanni (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), p. 17.
  26. . Conversation with Sarfatti in Toben, p. 154.
  27. . C. T. K. Chari, “Parapsychology, Quantum Logic, and Information Theory, “in Quantum Physics and Parapsychology, ed. Laura Oteri (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1975), p. 77.
  28. . See Michael Hare, The Multiple Universe (New York: Julian Press, 1968).
  29. . Robert Monroe, Journeys Out of the Body (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), p. 74.
  30. . Hugh Everett, “The Theory of the Universal Wave Function, “in The Many‐Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics., ed. Bryce S. DeWitt and Neill Graham (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 10.
  31. . See John Gribbin, Time Warps (New York: Dell, 1980) pp. 171–72.
  32. . See an exposition of this view in Fred Wolf, “The Question of Parascience: A Physicist's View,” cited in Toben, p. 158.
  33. . For a discussion of this transition, see Alexander Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957).