Thinking God’s Thoughts

A host of philosophers, theologians, scientists, and mathematicians of the Great Western Tradition have been struck by the uncanny interconnection between three fundamentally distinct domains of reality: nature, mathematics, and the human mind. This resonance has been discussed since antiquity and often attributed to a transcendent rational source of both material and immaterial aspects of reality.

Johannes Kepler, a devout Christian who was greatly influenced by this intellectual tradition, was instrumental in transforming classical astronomy into a true celestial physics. He was convinced that a tripartite harmony of archetype, copy, and image explained the interconnections that made his natural philosophy possible—that allowed him to share in God’s own thoughts. Rather than being diminished by the past few centuries of scientific progress, Keplerian natural theology is a more robust explanation of cosmic comprehensibility than ever before.

Melissa Cain Travis follows that tradition from Pythagoras and Plato’s Timaeus through Augustine, Boethius, Proclus, Nicholas of Cusa and Copernicus to Kepler, and tells Kepler’s life alongside his ideas, from the boy who saw the Great Comet of 1577 to the epitaph he wrote for himself. Part II takes his harmony of archetype, copy and image into the twentieth century: Einstein, Wigner and Penrose on the mathematics of nature, and C. S. Lewis’s argument from reason.