Observation: Across its narratives, physics invokes law, creation, eternity, infinity, and finality. These concepts are not neutral; they carry theological residues. Laws resemble divine decrees. Conservation mimics providence. Cosmological beginnings and endings echo Genesis and eschatology. Symmetry and unification parallel sacred order. The quest for final theory mirrors the quest for God.
Analysis: These traces are not incidental. They reveal how physics, in its conceptual scaffolding, inherits the metaphysical grammar of theology. Where theology spoke of divine command, physics speaks of natural law. Where theology posited creation, physics posits the Big Bang. Where theology longed for eternity, physics pursues timeless truth. The same metaphysical shapes persist, only secularised and naturalised.
Implication: This theological shadow matters. It risks disguising contingency as necessity, relational emergence as cosmic order, and human projection as objective truth. Physics becomes not merely a science of measurement, but an unwitting church of hidden gods, preserving metaphysical residues in the guise of explanation.
Conclusion: Recognising physics as secular theology is not to dismiss its technical achievements, but to clarify its conceptual inheritance. A relational ontology allows us to see laws, constants, and symmetries not as divine surrogates but as descriptions of emergent pattern. By bringing these residues to light, we open the way for physics to disentangle itself from its theological past and to embrace a world grounded in relation, contingency, and actualisation.
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