Dr. Anthony B. Kelly

What follows is an extract from the Flinders Journal.

Vol.9 No.20

November 1998

Published by The Flinders University of South Australia.

Finding a purpose in the cosmos

In his 70 years, Tony Kelly has seen a fair slice of life - the father of five served as a union official and industrial advocate for many years, once stood as a State parliamentary candidate and in the early 1950s, as the last member of the Camel Patrol of the Northern Territory Police, was the sole representative of law and order in 68,000 square miles of Central Australia.

Now - for something completely different - after seven years of postgraduate research in philosophy and a further two years in theology, he has been awarded a doctorate.

Mr Kelly said that the initial interest in questions of moral philosophy which led him to take up tertiary study derived from his mixed experiences of human nature while serving in the police force rather than his time spent in the desert on his camel patrols. His interest in the effects of human culture was heightened by his experience of the culture of primitive Aboriginals, as well as by his investigations into the backgrounds of law-breakers.

The ultimate result of his curiosity is a thesis which examines nothing less than the relationship between God, humanity and the history of the universe, exploring unresolved philosophical questions about the cosmos and human nature which go back to Aristotle.

Mr Kelly, like Aristotle, believes that the existence of the world requires the existence of a necessary God as the source of its being.

But where Aristotle could not explain why this contingent world would be worthy of divine concern, Mr Kelly identifies the cosmic processes of the universe as a vehicle for the "self-creation" of an entity which through its development of a spiritual dimension will come to be worthy of God's love and the act of creation.

"Of course I have the advantage of modern cosmology, a coherent scientific explanation of the universe which Aristotle knew nothing about," Mr Kelly said.

And according to Mr Kelly, human morality - the awareness of good and evil, and the free will to choose either path - is a necessary part of developing a spiritual sensibility.

Mr Kelly drew on the ideas of German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann, an influential thinker in the first half of the 20th century, who identified differing levels of reality, from the physical and instinctive up to the conscious and the spiritual.

"But like others before and since, any time he got anywhere near theology he ran away in the opposite direction," Mr Kelly said.

Mr Kelly said that he saw the metaphysical and theological aspect of his theory as a necessary and logical step in understanding the universe.

"To me, Cosmologists like Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies are like people trying to get from the mainland Australia to Tasmania who won't fly and won't take a boat, but insist they have to get there on the physical train.

"I argue that the cosmos is operating as a process, with the purpose of the process (which will not necessarily be achieved) being the establishment of an entity similar to God," he said.

Aristotle's Project Completed

The formal citation upon admission to the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy reads: The dissertation provides a well-written, clearly presented metaphysical argument based on contemporary cosmology, altering the context of the theodicy problem and completing Aristotle's project to provide an explanation of man and the world. Utilising Nicolai Hartmann's ontology and phenomenology and Samuel Alexander's emergent Evolution, it proposes that the universe exists to enable the self-creation of an entity similar to God and so worthy of God's loving concern.