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THE DICHOTOMY OF JOHN POLKINGHORNE'S HERMENEUTIC:
COSMOLOGICAL AND ESCHATOLOGICAL APPROACHES
Karen K. Abrahamson
Critical Realism as the "Middle Way" to Interpretation
Albert Einstein once wrote to Niels Bohr: "I [believe] in a world of something objectively existing which I
try to catch in a wildly speculative way."
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Karl R. Popper notes that what Einstein "was after (though he knew he
would hardly catch it) was the real world, of which he hoped to give a true description."
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But capturing a true
understanding of the real world had suddenly become much more difficult, for with Einsteins discovery of special
and general relativity the picture of the world had dramatically changed. Suddenly physics was faced with the need
to incorporate both objective and subjective elements within its definition of reality from a scientifically and
critically realist perspective. The discovery of quantum mechanics and the notion of complementarity, with its
redefinition of what constituted objective reality at the subatomic level, only heightened this need. Commenting on
the contributions of physics to the field of metaphysics, Abner Shimony comments: "In my opinion the twentieth
century is one of the golden ages of metaphysics, probably surpassed by the fourth century B.C. in conceptual
innovations, but probably surpassing all previous ages in the control and precision of the best metaphysical
thinking."
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1
In a letter dated 7 November 1944, cited by Karl R. Popper, Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics,
from the Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, ed. W. W. Bartley III (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield,
1982), 102.
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Karl R. Popper, Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, from the Postscript to the Logic of Scientific
Discovery, ed. W. W. Bartley III (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 102.
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Abner Shimony, "Our Worldview and Microphysics," in Philosophical Consequences of Quantum
Theory: Reflections on Bell's Theorem, ed. James T. Cushing and Ernan McMullen (Notre Dame: Notre Dame
University, 1989), 25-26. Shimony, 26, notes that "at least four important factors can be cited to account for the
flowering of twentieth-century metaphysics. (1) There has been an unparalleled sharpening of logical, mathematical,