Time&Eternity

notes to chapter 4 307
stance, then it makes sense to imagine life detached from flesh and blood and embodied in
networks of superconducting circuitry or in interstellar dust clouds.”
122. Dyson, “Time without End,” 455.
123. Ibid., 456.
124. Ibid., 459.
125. Ibid., 456. Dyson hereby specifies the complexity of a single human as Q = 10 23
bits and the complexity of the human species as Q = 10 33 bits; ibid., 454.
126. Ibid., 459.
127. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, 117f.
128. What, for example, will happen in ca. 5 billion years when the energy of our sun is
consumed and a “red giant” ultimately becomes a “white dwarf”—which, in turn, may
well represent an extremely marginal event for the universe as a whole—can hardly have
any practical significance for the lifespan of a human of this millennium or of future millennia.
The perspective of what in comparison to this order of magnitude is an extremely
short evolutionary history of life and of what is an even shorter history of humankind adds
to this impression.
129. On the connection of cosmology and eschatology in the notion of the heavenly
Jerusalem, cf. Hübner, “Eschatologische Rechenschaft,” 151, as well as the literature listed
therein. Cf. also the historical study of the tradition of the eschatological and heavenly
Jerusalem by Söllner, Jerusalem. This study aims to elucidate the multilayered nature of
this tradition, as well as its potential for the dialogue between Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam.
130. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality, 14.
131. Gunton, The Triune Creator, 216.
132. Cf. also the critical discussion in Drees, Beyond the Big Bang, 128–41; Polkinghorne,
The Faith of a Physicist, 165f.; and Worthing, God, Creation, and Contemporary
Physics, 164–75. In Unendliche Weiten, Ganoczy also discusses Tipler’s proposal, among
others; but, in my opinion, he avoids the actual discussion by rushing prematurely to the
conclusion that the theological view of the end of the world integrates, from the material
perspective, a lot from scientific models but reaches beyond these models in its formal exposition
(67–79).
133. Cf. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, 119: “I do not make any clear distinction between
mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of
our comprehension.” Here, Dyson combines a “mind” pantheism (whereby “mind” is understood
as that which infiltrates and controls matter, 118) with a god-of-the-gaps model.
134. Tipler, Physics of Immortality, 9.
135. Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist, 165.
136. “.l.l. [d]as ungelöste und stets unterdrückte Problem im Zeitverständnis der
Metaphysik,” Picht, “Die Zeit und die Modalitäten,” 71.
137. Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit, 360. Peter Manchester provides another
example of relation in his article “Time in Christianity,” in Balslev and Mohanty, Religion
and Time, 133. Like Theunissen, he relates faith to the past, but then he describes hope as
the relation to the present; and, finally, he relates love and the future to each other. This difference
illustrates the dilemma of these types of classifications; they cannot escape the suspicion
of arbitrariness.
138. Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit, 340ff. He distances himself, e.g., from
Heidegger by saying that Heidegger’s concept of the future is “only a name for transcendental
self-relatedness” [nur ein Titel für transzendentale Selbstbezüglichkeit], 344.
139. “Vergangenheit und Zukunft sind auf (mögliche) Gegenwart, Notwendigkeit und