Attie Retief / Research

Journal articles

Under review
Conditional Consonance: An Operational Method for Theological Engagement with Speculative Physics

Theological engagement with physics increasingly concerns speculative research programs rather than established science, yet the methodological literature of the science-and-religion field offers postures rather than procedures, and guards against none of the failure modes that engagement invites. This article proposes an operational method, conditional consonance, comprising five components: explicit conditionalization of all consonance claims on named research programs; a three-register linguistic discipline; five demarcation firewalls adapted from recent philosophy of pseudoscience; a source discipline distinguishing common-grace insight from authoritative testimony; and a mandatory dissonance ledger. A worked case demonstrates the method discriminating between pedagogical value and evidential standing in a popular but unrefereed source. The method renders frontier engagement honest rather than forbidden.

Under review at a peer-reviewed journal · 2026

In preparation

In preparation
Quantized spacetime and the case against actual infinities

Finitism in the philosophy of religion in conversation with discrete-spacetime research programs in fundamental physics.

In preparation
Emergence and the argument from contingency

How emergent-gravity research programs sharpen, rather than dissolve, the Leibnizian question of why there is anything at all.

In preparation
Phase-transition cosmology and the doctrine of creation

Creatio ex nihilo and creatio continua in conversation with cosmological models that begin without a singularity.

In preparation
Topological persistence and created integrity

Matter as topologically protected pattern, the stability of created things, and the metaphysics of bodily resurrection.

In preparation
Incarnation as nucleation

A structural parallel between nucleation physics and the Incarnation — handled strictly as model, never as mechanism.

These papers form a single research program: each defends one load-bearing claim of a larger project on science and faith, under an explicit methodological protocol that the first paper in the series supplies. A book-length synthesis, Cosmic Wonder, is in preparation.