Mother and child Mother and Dad

This site is dedicated to my mother, a devout Catholic, who introduced me to theology, and my father, a self confessed "bush baptist" who introduced a critical element into my outlook. Both spent their working lives as general practitioners.

My mother was one of the first women to graduate from the University of Adelaide Medical School. Her family included nuns and nurses, but no doctors. That was a bridge almost too far in her day.

She subtly filled my mind with Catholicism and I did all the right things, catholic school, altar boy and ultimately aspirant priest. I joined the Dominicans and met the intellectual love of my life, Thomas Aquinas. This dream ended five years later when I was found to be a heretic and expelled from the Order.

From my point of view the priests and bishops Roman Catholic Church have stolen God, taken possession of them for their own political benefit. God belongs to us all, they are our world, we just have to learn to see them. Jeffrey Nicholls (2008): The Church that stole God

Jeffrey Nicholls: trying to get my stolen god back

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Abstract

My principal interest in school had been science and I read widely, following relativity and quantum mechanics, and also the sociology of science, particularly Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn (1996)

My lecturers told me that theology is a science. The first thousand years of Christian theology, from the crucifixion of Jesus to the early middle ages was built from the Hebrew Bible and the philosophical legacy of Plato. Then, just as the monastic schools that had survived through the "dark ages" began to evolve into the first universities, the returning crusaders began to bring the work of Aristotle into Europe and caused a theological revolution. Hebrew Bible - Wikipedia, Richard Kraut (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): Plato (429-347 bce)

Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas rebuilt the Christian model of god on Aristotelian metaphysics. This model has endured. The Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law provides that students for the priesthood study the work of Aquinas. Holy See: Code of Canon Law: Canon 252 §3

Writing nearly 2000 years before Galileo, Aristotle know nothing of the discoveries of modern science. It seemed to me that a new theological revolution was due based on what we have learnt about our world in the 800 years since Aquinas. I suggested that a scientific theology could be based on the idea that theUuniverse is itself god. My idea was that god, the universe and mathematics are bound by just one constraint: inconsistency cannot exist. Aquinas touched on this point when he discussed the omnipotence of god: even god cannot make it true that a man is a donkey. : Aquinas, Summa I, 25, 3: Is God omnipotent?, How Universal is the Universe

I had missed a small point. Although science is open to paradigm change, Catholic Dogma is not. The Church has defined itself to be infallible. It believes that it owns God. Its whole (very successful) business plan is built around this false claim to intellectual property. My position was (and is) heretical, and my career as a potential priest was terminated.

My teachers are all dead now so I can no longer offend them. I am getting old and feel that it is time to propagate what I know. Much of the scientific world thinks traditional theology is a mythological dream for which there is no evidence. True believers, like Pope John Paul II, see two sources of truth, revelation and evidence, and for them revelation takes precedence to evidence. I still think theology can be redeemed and rejoin the world of science by proposing and testing the hypthesis that the universe is divine. If this is so all the sciences are branches of theology as was the case in the medieval renaissance. Pope John Paul II (1996): Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences October 22, 1996

So, like green energy, the time has come to introduce scientific theology. I know that a century is a short time in theology, but the theory of catastrophes and tipping points tells us that there comes a time. Violent murders motivated by the mythological religions of the past are creating pressure for revision, just as global warming is creating pressure to abandon carbon based energy.

In a nutshell: most current theologies are based on the assumption that God is outside the world, an invisible mysterious other. It is impossible to know something we cannot see, so we have a jungle of arbitrary and competing theologies.

I assume that God and the Universe are identical. On this hypothesis, the Universe performs all the roles traditionally assigned to God: creator, sustainer, guide and judge.

If the Universe is divine all our experience is experience of God so theology can become a real evidence based science. Since there is but one God, true knowledge of God will put us on the path to the unification of theology, as science has unified other disciplines like physics and biology. Doctors have no borders because we all share the same human physiology. Human spirituality has no borders because we all share the same roots in the divine universe. Given one theology, the religions of the world may see that they have a lot in common, just as the health care professions are substantially united through the science of biology.

Cover images: Author supplied: Dr Philippa Nicholls (nee Gardiner) 6 June 1919 - 24 May 2016; Jeffrey Nicholls 12 January 1945 -

Lumen, (University of Adelaide) Spring 2017. Photo: Dr Philippa Nicholls and Dr James Nicholls 28 March 1919 - 7 July 2018. Lana Guineay: 70 years of family practice


I have registered the following sites to document my efforts to create a new vision of God and demonstrate its practical advantages. They are all incomplete works in progress, motivated by the acquisition of new territory on the internet every time I have a new idea!

A. The author

[1] jeffreynicholls.net [Once a Catholic, now catholic, this site.]

B. Theology

[2] theologyco.com [A corporate entity, The Theology Company Proprietary Limited: ACN 097 887 075 ABN 74 097 887 075 Copyright: 2000-2024]

[3] naturaltheology.net [ Introducing the divinity of the Universe to pave the way for scientifically credible theology: my development site, many years of notes taken on the way]

[4] anewtheology.net [my honours years, the end of academia, thesis Prolegomenon to scientific theology]

[5] cognitivecosmology.com [the universe as omniscient creative mind. This is the most recent extended statement of my position. The next version will, I hope, appear on Quantum-theology.net ([10] below) before the end of 2024 dv]

[6] cognitivecosmogenesis.com [a revised and compressed version of [5] Cognitive Cosmology]

[7] physicaltheology.com [Following the steps of Aristotle via Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan from the physical world of Earth to the divine world of God, which is all here in the Universe. Similar to anewtheology.net (4 above)]

[8] scientific-theology.com [a draft of a book, an attempt to create a comprehensive description of scientific theology and religion. Largely a duplicate of A New Theology.net ]

C. Religion

[9] Lust-4-life.com [The moral and political implications of cognitive cosmology (5 and 6). The sites above correspond roughly to the Prima pars of the Summa Theologiae. I wish to develop this site along the lines with second and third parts of theSumma in mind.]

D. Back to physics

[10] Quantum-theology.net [an old site to be revised soon in the light of Cognitive Cosmology Principle 7: Symmetry with respect to complexity which provides a root for a theory of everything based on the idea that quantum theory is scale invariant. The communication between (say) electrons and people are generically identical (see site 5 above for detail)].

Further reading

Books

Kuhn (1996), Thomas S, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, U of Chicago Press 1962, 1970, 1996 Introduction: 'a new theory, however special its range of application, is seldom just an increment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man, and never overnight.' [p 7]  
Amazon
  back

Links

Hebrew Bible - Wikipedia, Hebrew Bible - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, The Hebrew Bible . . . is a term referring to the books of the Jewish Bible as originally written mostly in Biblical Hebrew with some Biblical Aramaic. The term closely corresponds to contents of the Jewish Tanakh and the Protestant Old Testament (see also Judeo-Christian) but does not include the deuterocanonical portions of the Roman Catholic or the Anagignoskomena portions of the Eastern Orthodox Old Testaments. The term does not imply naming, numbering or ordering of books, which varies (see also Biblical canon).' back

Holy See, Code of Canon Law: Canon 252 §3, 'There are to be classes in dogmatic theology, always grounded in the written word of God together with sacred tradition; through these, students are to learn to penetrate more intimately the mysteries of salvation, especially with St. Thomas as a teacher. There are also to be classes in moral and pastoral theology, canon law, liturgy, ecclesiastical history, and other auxiliary and special disciplines, according to the norm of the prescripts of the program of priestly formation.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2008), The Church that stole God, ' So far as I know, the two biggest beasts that ever walked the earth are the Roman Catholic Church and the Chinese Empire. Between them, they have controlled the lives of billions of people over thousands of years. We are wary of the Chinese, but somehow the Church has slipped beneath the radar. . . .. It remains nevertheless a militant organization whose stated objective is to control the mind of every person in the whole world. . . . .. The Church finds its mandate in Mark's Gospel: Go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News to all creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; he who does not believe will be condemned. (16:16).' back

Lana Guineay, 70 years of family practice, ' From rural South Australia to the jungles of Bougainville, in war and in peacetime, one talented husband-and-wife team have spent over 70 years dedicated to improving the health - and lives - of others. Their names might not be well-known - but University of Adelaide graduates Jim and Phillipa Nicholls have been making a significant, if unsung, impact on the health and wellbeing of South Australians for seven decades. This year marks a major milestone for the husband-and-wife GPs - the 70th anniversary of their graduation from the University of Adelaide.' back

Pope John Paul II (1996), Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences October 22, 1996 , 'Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seem irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being.' back

Richard Kraut (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Plato, ' Plato (429–347 B.C.E.) is, by any reckoning, one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy. . . . Few other authors in the history of philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank.' back

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