Christ, creation, and the world of science: against paradox

Both the incarnation and quantum theory have been deemed paradoxical. Yet in investigating the paradoxicality of both issues, there is an implicit assumption that it is possible to divide the world into discrete binary categories such that something is either A or not-A. Whilst such Boolean logic has served the progression of modern science well it rests on the idea that it is only possible to make unambiguous statements if one has already suppressed and/or ignored the apparently “irrelevant” features. This particularisation of the world is not given a priori as an ontological “brute fact” but arises from our context dependent categorisation. In this thesis I argue that the metaphysical “paradox” of the incarnation is caused by an implicit adherence to binary logic, misrepresented as ontological fact. In contrast to this, the holistic ontologies provided by Michael Esfeld and Hans Primas’ interpretations of quantum theory offer a metaphysics more suited to accounting for the “fuzziness” of reality. In doing so they provide the theologian with two alternative accounts of reality, which are not only in line with current scientific understanding of the world but that offer opportunity to remove the charge of “unreasonableness” from one of the central Christian doctrines – Christ was fully God and fully human. This thesis examines the role that radically holistic, scientifically informed, metaphysics may have on our understanding of the connection and interaction between the divine and human “substances” in Christ. How the incarnation occurred rightly remains a mystery, but holism offers chance to reconsider the metaphysical claims associated with our interpretation of Chalcedon.