Madrid, Spain, Aug 30, 2024 / 07:00 am (CNA).
“Eternity Between Space and Time: From Consciousness to the Cosmos” is the title of an upcoming report to be released by the Vatican Observatory, where “unpublished reflections” on eternity studied from different disciplines will be presented.
The University of Padua in Italy together with the Vatican Observatory have investigated eternity from new scientific perspectives thanks to 24 contributions from some of the world’s greatest scholars in different disciplines such as physics, psychology, philosophy, and theology.
Contributors include Nobel Prize winners Gerard ‘t Hooft and Roger Penrose, joined by Federico Faggin, Mauro D’Ariano, Gabriele Veneziano, Massimo Cacciari, Giulio Goggi, and Kurt Appel.
Questions about God and consciousness are addressed alongside quantum theory, black holes, cosmic inflation, and the Big Bang and string theory, considering the contributions of neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
The report, which will be released on Sept. 6, is the result of the international conference on the theme of eternity held in May 2022 at the University of Padua.
The conference was attended by the world’s leading scholars in the fields of physics, philosophy, theology, and psychology.
The presentation of the report will take place at the headquarters of the Curia General of the Society of Jesus in Rome and will be attended by Father Gabriele Gionti, a member of the Vatican Observatory Research Group; Fabio Scardigli, Polytechnic University of Milan; Ines Testoni, University of Padua; and Father Andrea Toniolo, faculty of theology of Triveneto, Padua, Italy.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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So, now, do we have another sort of synodal roundtable, this time limited to “consciousness and cosmos”?
What if human “consciousness” is never quite equivalent to the ex nihilo/radical existence (!) and reality of substantive stuff (Leibniz: “why is there anything rather than nothing?”); and what if the space-time “cosmos” is never quite equivalent to the different reality of eternity? Hopefully real metaphysics is made fully present by those versed in philosophy (which philosophy?) and theology (whose theology?). And, not simply reduced to one outnumbered chapter “alongside” two-dozen others.
Or, instead, a subliminal drift toward monism? A blurring of the reality of a self-subsistent Other known as “God” versus only our cosmic “ideas” of God?
Just askin’…
Eternity between space and time intriguing, that it isolates the eternal as distinct from either yet in our experience the platform for both. More philosophical. A meta physical truth that is inferred by human understanding from the physical. Whereas consciousness and cosmos can lead to different venues of understanding.
Consciousness and the cosmos again pits our apprehension of the spiritual, an inference of the mind acquired by analogy. We can see the cosmos. The spiritual we cannot. It tells us the human mind is the measure of things, that which exists whether matter or spirit, and that the human mind, unlike anything it directly apprehends, speaks to eternity [in consequence immortality]. It is not subject to the essential transitions it perceives in the cosmos, rather it lasts.