Kepler's Trinitarian Cosmology

The theological framework for Kepler's cosmos is based on a metaphorical Trinitarian symbolism, with the sun as God the Father, the firmament as Jesus Christ, and the intervening space as the Holy Spirit. In his heliocentric cosmology the sun becomes the source of planetary movement just as in the Aristotelian geocentric universe God's love beyond the starry realm was seen as the source of the eternal motion of the spheres. Searching for a divinely rooted physical explanation of planetary orbital motion, Kepler began with his solar-oriented distance law, which miraculously led to his law of areas. Finally he chose the ellipse from competing curves because its focus (“hearth”) coincided with the sun, the source of God-given motion.     

HOW ACTS OF DISCOVERY TRANSFORM OUR TACIT KNOWING POWERS IN BOTH SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS INQUIRY

Abstract. In this essay I take Michael Polanyi's analysis of scientific discovery and extend it to encompass fresh encounters with the living God. Given the embodied character of all human knowing, Polanyi challenged objectivism and positivism as untenable. In its place, Polanyi noted that the tacit skills established when a physicist learns to detect radio waves has its counterpart in a Christian's being trained to find God. Once trained, stubborn organismic habits constrain both physicist and believer within a socially approved heuristic circle that can be broken only by the act of discovery. The puzzlement that erupts at the onset of an inquiry ultimately finds relief only in an expanded encounter with the realities that one has been trained to serve. Thus, the act of discovery not only serves to disrupt the tradition as it has been received but also reveals that the realities being served make themselves known in novel ways. The lifelong pursuit of God and the lifelong pursuit of novel manifestations of radio waves thus share a common epistemological and phenomenological underpinning.