Why the Cosmos Has No Final Chapter
Physics, like theology, is haunted by endings. Heat death, cosmic crunch, vacuum decay — these are framed as eschatologies, narratives of the ultimate fate of the universe. They echo theology’s obsession with consummation: the final judgment, the last day, the ultimate closure.
But closure is a projection. It mistakes perspectival extrapolation for ontology. A model, stretched into infinity, is taken to describe the destiny of all being. This is not physics so much as secularised eschatology.
In relational ontology, there is no final chapter. Actualisations are always perspectival, always contingent, always emergent from relation. Possibility is inexhaustible; it cannot be consumed or extinguished. What appears to be “heat death” is simply one horizon of construal, one cut in the unfolding of potential.
The cosmos does not move toward an end. It phases, it transforms, it configures and reconfigures. Endings are local stabilisations of process, never the termination of process itself.
Theology needs an end to frame salvation. Physics needs an end to frame prediction. Relation needs neither.
Eschatology dissolves into endless unfolding. There is no omega point — only possibility without limit.
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