New Frontiers for Theological and Scientific Imagination

This brief paper is based on remarks delivered as a panelist for the Science Engaged Theology session at the American Academy of Religion Conference in November 2022. In them, I explore spaces of potential interaction among theology, physics, and philosophy of physics. The first part looks at three topics from the frontier of quantum physics: entanglement relations, non-classical notions of time, and the multiverse hypothesis. The intent is to reveal how these fields have changed focus and made progress in recent decades, and then to re-invite theologians into these creative and increasingly interdisciplinary conversations. In the second part, I invite theologians to bring their expertise to bear regarding practices long familiar to them but largely unfamiliar within these new frontiers of physics. These practices include developing robust accounts of metaphor and analogical reasoning, engaging with non-empirical evidentiary sources, and cultivating radical epistemic humility.