Frank Tipler Says Physics Proves Christianity

They don’t want God to exist, and if keeping God out of science requires rejecting physical laws, well, so be it.

Talking about God has no place in science, though if scientists want to talk about God and even to make claims about their religious conclusions flowing from science there isn’t anything wrong with them doing so, outside of Science and especially publicly funded science classrooms.

There are some atheists who wouldn’t want God to exist because they see God as a malevolent being. But on the whole, if there was someone who could actually answer prayers and give you real hope, what atheist wouldn’t want God to exist?

I’m sure that Hitchens would hate to think there was anything higher than he was. It would also mean some quick job searches for a number too, including one kind of washed up novelist I can think of. Actually, I’ve known some atheists who would probably feel it was better to rule over a tiny cult of admirers in the prelude to dust than to have hope in a God.

This reminds me of the Dickinson poem, “I taste a licquor never brewed”. You can look it up if that arouses your curiosity. There are two versions, I can’t remember which one contains the relevant line.

I knew Tippler had some odd ideas, but I didn’t know he know he had descended to this level of raving fundeism (Hmmm… new word. I like it).

This is going on my list of weird shit to read. I’m curious about his God = theory of everything claim. I suspect its “we can explain everything if we say ‘God did it, why he did it… who cares.'” That would be funny.

I saw Tipler “debate” Lawrence Krauss at Caltech a couple weeks ago. The man can only be described as a crackpot. When he concluded his initial statement with the prediction about Jesus returning in 50 years and the world being populated by cyborgs, I turned to the guy next to me and said, “He’s been watching too much Battlestar Galactica!”

It was surreal. I actually felt kinda sorry for the man. He’s obviously a bright guy, but a screw has come loose somewhere.

The only redeeming feature of the afternoon was getting to hear Krauss talk about real physics, and that was incredibly fun. He seems to be a great guy, and a wonderful teacher. And he – and everyone at the Skeptics Society for that matter – went out of their way to be polite and respectful to Tipler, no matter how nutty he got.

Shroud of Turin? Please. That one got disproved by carbon dating ages ago. Not to mention the fact that we don’t know that the universe will end in a singularity — some models suggest it will expand forever. Furthermore, there are other singularities predicted by our current theories besides those involving the whole universe — black holes! What are they? Angels? And we won’t have a theory of everything until we have a reasonable answer for what gravity looks like on a quantum scale. I doubt that Tipler does.

That man must be such an embarrasment to his university.

He seems to have a problem discriminating between fantasy and reality. I don’t know why the Skeptics society booked him.

Who’s next? Bobby Fischer lecturing about the Holocaust?

Anyway, I don’t think that the Skeptics society should have done that to the man.

The following account is true, and it is not the only one like it:

When I was a believer, in Bible College, in the late ’70’s, I had occasion to visit a church in Southern CA (actually, a building that was the meeting place for the church) that was a part of our denomination. The church had disbanded. The reason was simple: the Pastor had been preaching for sometime that he knew when Christ was going to return–he named a precise date. The Pastor advised his flock to sell all they had, cash in their investments, run up their credit cards, etc., in other words, to live like there was no tomorrow. Well, on the appointed day, the church had gathered together, and they were of course shocked when Jesus didn’t return. The Pastor tried recalibrating and setting a couple of other dates, but the damage was done.

Most ministers wouldn’t think of doing this kind of thing, and most believers wouldn’t buy it. However, it does happen.

Salary review indeed! Whatever that guy makes, it’s exactly that amount too much.

but will the robots believe in silicon heaven? and if silicon heaven isn’t real, where would all the calculators go?

I’d actually like to take an aside here about something Hemant mentioned and say that I, for one, would NOT like there to be a heaven within which we would all live forever and ever.

No moment or experience would be precious — you’ll have a gazillion of them and they would all be meaningless.

You’d never bother to explore your relationships with the other “spirits” once you got to the point of absolute predictability. There’d be no surprises; after a trillion years you’d know everybody too well.

No meals to look forward to. Probably no sex. Probably no drugs or drinking. Probably no fun poker games (but I bet Judas would have been a mean stud player — oh wait, he probably would not make it to heaven…). Probably no emotions — they are physical/chemical phenomena that wouldn’t exist in heaven. Right?

What would there be to explore after a few million years? (Especially if the universe had been swept away for the greatest temple to GOD ever imagined.) You can only read Thomas Pynchon novels so many times, you know.

A longer life would be nice (like, say, 300-400 years). Especially now: Look what’s happened to the world in that amount of time! But “Forever”? THAT is the REAL definition of hell. Think about it.

What we’re given is perfectly adequate in all its fragileness and its limited scope. That is why I think life has MORE meaning if you’re an athiest: it all comes to an end. I have a feeling that coming to terms with that each and every day until I’m gone will keep things plenty interesting.

Now I’ll go and enjoy something truly heavenly: a quiet beer on my modest porch, listening to the nocturnal insects in a gentle, temperate summer breeze, breathing in the scents of the herbs in my flower pots, letting my cat sit with me and allow her to live precisely in the moment while I contemplate that she is most likely better off to not be able to imagine the possibility of life after death.

This guy is nuts

The reason I sent the link to Hemant was (a) it was intrinsically interesting but also (b) the reviewer, Bryan Appleyard, is a respected British cultural critic. Also, I think, a believer. That he simply didn’t say the book was worthless is noteworthy. The fawning towards religion isn’t limited to the USA.

Most physicists dislike this Theory of Everything because it requires the universe to begin in a singularity. That is, they dislike it because the theory is consistent only if God exists,

IF (note the big if) this is true then I missed the part where he makes the connecting that this god is the god of the bible. It could just as easily be Allah, or Zeus, or aliens or the FSM, right? And the part about Jesus coming to save up from the super human computers . . .are we sure this isn’t science fiction?

“quantum theory” is generally a BS term thrown out by people who believe in magic. The thing is, it doesn’t apply to anything even as big as the nano scale. So, it certainly could not account for walking on water because once something as big as a foot is introduced, quantum theory no longer has ane effect.

So, it certainly could not account for walking on water because once something as big as a foot is introduced, quantum theory no longer has ane effect.

No, it still has an effect. The only thing is that the effect won’t be noticable unless every particle involved happens to undergo quantum changes in the exact same way. Since the probability of this can be abbreviated as 0%, it’s not going to happen, but it theoretically could, in the same sense that I could theoretically grow a second head on my left shoulder.

No need to worry about de-materialization weapons, rogue super-intelligent robots or walking on water:

Simply installing a bi-phasic tachyon particle inverter with gluon-muon dichotomy capability in strategic points around probable targets will reverse the polarity of the de-materialization beam causing a multi-dimensional backlog of an infinite number of nothings so that in effect the beam is forever caught in a nano-moment just before it strikes. Eventually the weapon’s quantum-quantum (in layman’s terms, meta-quantum) anti-anti-graviton battery will overload with plasma polluted anti-energy and freeze into a steaming blob of irritated quarks.

As for the rogue super-intelligent robots, we all know that intelligence makes one vulnerable to endless futile pursuits of solutions for paradoxes, and super-intelligence makes one super-vulnerable. It takes a bit of dumb wisdom to be able to dismiss a pointless activity as pointless and then actually stop. So simply asking the oncoming murderous robot if God exists or not will cause a cognitive feedback loop that will fry its circuits. Much the same effect has been witnessed many times in their so-smart-they’re-stupid human creators.

Miko is on the right track about Jesus using a large number of parallel universes to walk on water, but I will clarify the process:

If Jesus were able to direct uncommitted leviton particles (those that create levity to counteract gravity) from the 99.99999999% of the other parallel universes into the water under his feet it would stop the molecular vibration in a thin film corresponding to the water’s surface tension. Thus it would be temporarily solid enough to walk on. Of course, the molecules being absolutely still would be very cold, and uncomfortable on Jesus’s feet. He would have said, “Jeezus, this is frikkin’ cold!” Having all knowledge of the future he would know that “Jeezus, this is frikkin’ cold!” would become a popular exclamation for such circumstances and he would have uttered it without even thinking. The fact that this utterance is not recorded in any of the gospels throws more doubt on their veracity or completeness.

In the meantime all the other Jesuses (Jesusi?) in all the other universes would have plunged into the water, and coming up spitting and choking they would all have said some lame thing about his disciples having to, uh, be willing to jump headlong into his teaching, holding nothing back, or some dumb thing like that. It probably would have fooled a bunch of bewildered fishermen and things would most likely have turned out pretty much the same in the other universes with the exception of Olympic-sized pools installed in churches.

Now that I’ve been able to put all that to rest, Mr. Data, set a course for Hussongs Cantina and……Engage!

Richard, you’ve got to write a book!

Yikes! Sorry for the multiple posts back there. I wasn’t used to my comment not appearing right away. Please feel free to delete the extras if you have the ability.

Thanks to Karen for answering my question. I guess I blocked out all the Christian elements when I read the book that long ago. (I’m an SF fan, so I focused on those bits!) Using the Amazon search function reveals some pretty odd sentences (from the Physics of Immortality):

on Page 315:
“… If Jesus really did rise from the dead (which I don’t believe), and if his resurrection body really was a spiritual body, …”

on Page 306:
“… THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY for in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. I personally do not believe that the writers of these works had any revealed knowledge. Rather, I think that, …”

If these quotes are any indication, he certainly doesn’t have mainstream Christian beliefs. He seems to be some kind of Christian materialist. (Amazon won’t let me view more than brief quotes, so they are a bit choppy.)

The author is using the ‘Grey Goo’ theory, but there is no reason whatsoever to suggest that technology would be there within fifty years. It really seems like he is taking great liberty with modern science to adapt it to his pre-existing set of beliefs.

This ‘Theory of everything’ I’ve heard about seems pretty nuts to me, sounds like total scifi…

Walking on water is accomplished through a particle beam and dematerialization through the multiple universe model implied by quantum theory.

That quote is just awesome! I want to put it on a T-Shirt

Hi Leo

Your post is just bile. Do you actually have an intelligent point to make?

Sure these atheist buffoons are pillorying Tipler, but that’s the point of this particular blog post. As for the doubts about Heaven do you have any objective evidence for Heaven you’d care to share with us? If Tipler is right then you’re about 10 quadrillion years too early.

Someone has dragged out the Shroud of Turin’s supposed falsification by carbon dating, but if they’d bothered to read any recent literature on the subject they might have found the carbon dating has been cast into serious doubt – not because it was wrong, but because the sample came from a Medieval patchwork repair on the Shroud. The sample region is chemically and optically (in UV) distinct from the rest of the material, so the supposed debunking has been debunked. Other chemical based tests on the Shroud date it to between 3,000 – 1,300 years old i.e. probably as old as it is claimed to be.

Is JC’s rising from the dead proven then? No. There will always be room for doubt or for faith. But there is no room for absurdities like a “mythical Christ” who didn’t exist in history. Jesus is as real as any other historical figure, but you can either accept the message or you can reject the messengers as untrustworthy. Considering the hypocrisy of so many Christians I can understand why the second option is so popular.

Adam

Hemant Mehta, you greatly underestimate the hatred of many in acedemia for belief in God, especially Christianity. This is the same Western academia that defended and covered-up for the U.S.S.R. and Mao Tse-tung’s China. During which time the Soviet government murdered over 61 million of its own noncombatant subjects, while the Communist Chinese government murdered over 76 million of it own noncombatant subjects. (The preceding figures are from Prof. Rudolph Joseph Rummel’s website at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ .)

Western academia in no small part helped enable those mass-slaughters with its faithful adoration of those regimes and the socialist ideologies upon which they were founded. Instead of shining a spotlight on the tyranny and horrors of Communism (and thereby helping to diminish it by focusing world attention on it), they instead acted as Communism’s intellectual bodyguards. Still to this day not much is said in academia or the major media about the biggest mass-slaughters by far in human history.

Concerning the Omega Point Theory:

The known laws of physics (i.e., general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Extended Standard Model of particle physics) force us to the conclusion that computational resources in the universe must diverge to infinity (i.e., in order for the known laws of physics to be mutually consistent at all times). The final state of infinite informational capacity (which is never reached in experiential time) is identified as being God.

For much more on the technical details of the above, see the below resources:

F. J. Tipler, “The structure of the world from pure numbers,” Reports on Progress in Physics, Vol. 68, No. 4 (April 2005), pp. 897-964. http://math.tulane.edu/~tipler/theoryofeverything.pdf Also released as “Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model as a Theory of Everything,” arXiv:0704.3276, April 24, 2007. http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.3276

“Omega Point (Tipler),” Wikipedia, January 6, 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Omega_Point_%28Tipler%29&oldid=182549075

“Frank J. Tipler,” Wikipedia, January 5, 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frank_J._Tipler&oldid=182407923

Theophysics http://geocities.com/theophysics/

The only way to avoid the Omega Point cosmology is to invent tenuous physical theories which have no experimental support and which violate the known laws of physics, such as with Prof. Stephen Hawking’s paper on the black hole information issue which is dependant on the conjectured string theory-based AdS/CFT correspondence (anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory correspondence). (See S. W. Hawking, “Information loss in black holes,” Physical Review D, Vol. 72, No. 8, 084013 [October 2005] http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507171 .)

That is to say, Prof. Hawking’s paper is based upon invented and unconfirmed laws of physics. It’s an impressive testament to the Omega Point Theory’s correctness, as Hawking realizes that the known laws of physics require the universe to collapse in finite time. Hawking knows quite well that the black hole information issue must be resolved without violating unitarity, yet he’s forced to abandon the known laws of physics in order to avoid unitarity violation without the universe ending in finite time via collapse.

So we have confirmation from no less than Hawking himself that one can’t get around the universe ending in a collapse in finite time if one sticks to the known laws of physics. The only way to get around that is to invent new laws of physics.

Some have suggested that the universe’s current acceleration of its expansion obviates the Omega Point. But as Profs. Lawrence M. Krauss and Michael S. Turner point out in “Geometry and Destiny” (General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 31, No. 10 [October 1999], pp. 1453-1459 http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9904020 ), there is no set of cosmological observations which can tell us whether the universe will expand forever or eventually collapse.

There’s a very good reason for that, because that is dependant on the actions of intelligent life. The known laws of physics provide the mechanism for the universe’s collapse. As required by the Standard Model, the net baryon number was created in the early universe by baryogenesis via electroweak quantum tunneling. This necessarily forces the Higgs field to be in a vacuum state that is not its absolute vacuum, which is the cause of the positive cosmological constant. But if the baryons in the universe were to be annihilated by the inverse of baryogenesis, again via electroweak quantum tunneling (which is allowed in the Standard Model, as B – L is conserved), then this would force the Higgs field toward its absolute vacuum, thereby forcing the universe to collapse. Moreover, this process would provide the ideal form of energy resource and rocket propulsion during the colonization phase of the universe.

Prof. Tipler’s above 2005 Reports on Progress in Physics paper also demonstrates that the correct quantum gravity theory has existed since 1962, first discovered by Richard Feynman in that year, and independently discovered by Steven Weinberg and Bryce DeWitt, among others. But because these physicists were looking for equations with a finite number of terms (i.e., derivatives no higher than second order), they abandoned this qualitatively unique quantum gravity theory since in order for it to be consistent it requires an arbitrarily higher number of terms. Further, they didn’t realize that this proper theory of quantum gravity is consistent only with a certain set of boundary conditions imposed (which includes the initial Big Bang, and the final Omega Point, cosmological singularities). The equations for this theory of quantum gravity are term-by-term finite, but the same mechanism that forces each term in the series to be finite also forces the entire series to be infinite (i.e., infinities that would otherwise occur in spacetime, consequently destabilizing it, are transferred to the cosmological singularities, thereby preventing the universe from immediately collapsing into nonexistence). When combined with the Standard Model, the result is a Theory of Everything (TOE) correctly describing and unifying all the forces in physics.

Appealing to one coincidence does not make Tipler’s speculations valid.

“Newton, like many historicist prophetic commentators of his age, believed that the prophetic time periods 1260, 1290, 1335 and 2300 days actually represent 1260, 1290, 1335 and 2300 years using the “day-for-a-year principle”.”

http://www.isaac-newton.org/update.html

Tipler’s ideas sound at best historicism, just like Newton’s theological predictions because they aren’t falsifiable in a scientific fashion. The previous comment provides a misplaced appeal to scientific authority (when Newton wasn’t using science to make his theological predictions) instead of give scientific evidence and also uses a combination of straw man and ad hominem arguments. Usually when someone does that I think it is out of desperation because of the lack of scientific rigor supporting the thesis.

Yet another crazy?

Wake up, nutball. This dead thread is two years old.

Go dig a hole and live in it. Tipler’s end of the world is two years closer!

I swear, the insane shouldn’t be allowed the internet. It’s like crack to them.