The New Philosophy Vol 128 No 1-4, January-December 2025
In 2013, Ron Horvath teamed up with Ian Thompson and Steve Smith to discuss a problem that had been bothering him for 20 years: (In his words) “How the Divine, in a non-dimensional realm, creates time and space and all that is within it, and is presented in a way that a rational mind can understand.” They called their growing discussion group “The Creation Project,” as it set out to find (again in Ron’s own words) “a plausible, rational explanation for the Creation that would appeal to those who were open to the idea of spirituality, but were unable to get beyond the literal interpretation of Genesis.” This little group grew, and now calls itself the Theistic Science Group.
Introduction For millennia humankind has been fascinated, perplexed, and humbled, by the mystery of human consciousness. Despite all the sophisticated tools of modern science, despite ever deeper penetration into the microanatomy and electrophysiology of the human brain, the riddle of consciousness reigns paramount among philosophers and in the scientific world.
There are many ideas from Swedenborg that would not otherwise be suggested or occur to us. I want to recall how Swedenborg has been a source of ideas in my own life of understanding, so I describe how I found Swedenborg’s ideas to solve some problems in science. I have been interested in science for a long time, and I am going to address two parts of science.
First of all, I’d like to thank Andy and the Theistic Science Group for inviting me to speak today. And thanks to all of you for coming to hear my presentation. You’ll notice that they gave me the time slot after-lunch, a.k.a. the Graveyard Slot, so I did consider changing my title to “Introduction to Conscious Napping.” Let’s begin our power nap, I mean PowerPoint, and I’ll stick with my original title, “Goethe’s Swedenborgian Worldview.” This presentation explores Goethe’s approach to nature and how it can serve as a bridge between science and religion.
Near the beginning of the Arcana Coelestia we find the following teaching about the true order to approach science so that such a study can be filled with wisdom and intelligence, and not just knowledge: The true order is for man to be wise from the Lord, that is, from His Word, and then all things follow, and he is enlightened even in matters of reason and of science (in rationalibus et scientificis). For it is never forbidden to learn the sciences, because they are useful to life and delightful; and he who is in faith is never forbidden from thinking and speaking as do the learned of the world, but it must be from this principle, that he believe the Word of the Lord, and confirm spiritual and celestial truths by natural truths, in terms familiar to the learned world, so far as possible, Therefore his starting-point (principium) must be from the Lord, and not from himself. The former is life, but the latter is death (AC 129).
The abstract for this lecture says, “Intelligent Default 2.0.” In 2019 I wrote a book by that name about theistic evolution. Using the latest science and Swedenborg’s writings—from one end to the other—I attempted to explain how spiritual forms might enter into Nature and come into correspondence with natural forms. Here is some of what I had to say: There are two (and only two) possibilities for doing science. They are axioms from which our science starts.
