He thinks physics proves Christianity

Philly.com ^ | Jun. 10, 2007 | Bryan Appleyard

[mjp]

The Physics of Christianity By Frank J. Tipler

'I have a salary at Tulane," says Frank Tipler, "some 40 percent lower than the average for a full professor at Tulane as a consequence of my belief."

Physicists today, he says, are not supposed to believe in God. But he does, though I suspect that in itself would not reduce his salary. What may well do, however, is his belief that the Cosmological Singularity is God. In other words, he believes that contemporary physics has found God and that physics explains Christianity. In fact, it is probably true to say that Tipler does not believe at all. There is no need, for he feels he has proved Christianity through physics.

With his previous book, The Physics of Immortality, Tipler used physics to prove that death would be utterly conquered as future beings deployed vast energy resources, derived from the contraction of the universe, to resurrect the past, ourselves included. Here he goes much further. He says that modern physics has confirmed Christianity - from the Virgin Birth through the Turin Shroud and walking on water to the Resurrection - in detail.

Central to this argument is his conviction that there is no discontinuity between the insights of science and the revelations of the Gospels. Miracles, for example, are not, as is often claimed, sudden deformations or breaches of the natural order. They happen through known physical processes. Walking on water is accomplished through a particle beam and dematerialization through the multiple universe model implied by quantum theory. That they happen when they do is, of course, God's will, but, in making them happen, he does not violate the order of his creation.

This is not a limitation on God's power because he established the laws of physics precisely to encompass all these eventualities. Similarly, the existence of evil is neither God's failing nor proof of his nonexistence. If we could see the many universes - the multiverse - he has created, the problem would simply vanish. Our limited perspective means that we cannot fully understand this any more than we can visualize a four-dimensional cube, but, as with the cube, we can at least imagine the possibility.

The strong argument against relying so much on contemporary scientific knowledge is that, in years to come, much of that knowledge may be overthrown. Indeed, for the majority of physicists, the physics on which Tipler rests his case is already obsolete or at least debatable. The multiverse is generally regarded only as one possible interpretation of quantum theory. The Standard Model of particle physics is thought to be incomplete, and we have no theory of quantum gravity. The Theory of Everything that seemed to be looming in the late '80s now seems as distant as ever. Hope now resides in the exotica of string theory and supersymmetry.

Tipler rejects all this. We have a theory of everything, all the problems were resolved 30 years ago. Subsequent stringy speculations are just that, speculations without any experimental proof. To deny the multiverse is to deny quantum theory; a complete theory of quantum gravity was stumbled upon long ago by Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg, and the Standard Model is founded on rock-solid foundations of experimental evidence. Why, then, do the physicists deny all this? Because, says Tipler, they don't like the universe that emerges, a universe that begins and ends with God.

The experimentally based physics to which Tipler refers predicts a singularity - a point at which all known laws of physics break down and to which, therefore, our science has no access - from which the universe sprang. There is a further singularity at the end of the universe and a third joining the two. This is the Holy Trinity. The first singularity, says Tipler, is God the Father, the second God the Holy Ghost, and the third God the Son. The last, because of his role as the singularity that runs alongside the present, is able to appear in human history.

Though this may seem highly deterministic, Tipler insists we still have free will. Our role is to play our part in the drama that will lead to the final singularity. This is a technological matter, but clues to how it may be achieved were laid at the Resurrection. Notably there is the baryon annihilation process that will provide us with infinite energy, interstellar travel, and a mechanism that will advance the contraction of the universe toward its final encounter with God. Baryon annihilation will also provide us with appalling powers of destruction. It converts matter into energy with absolute efficiency. On that basis, a human body contains enough mass to create a 1,000-megaton explosion. Tipler expects the world as we know it to end within 50 years or so. Our destiny will be intact, however, as we shall have become backed-up computer programs, probably on our way to the stars.

I doubt this book will make many converts. Believers will continue to believe, perhaps with a little more confidence, and skeptics will continue to doubt, perhaps with a little less. But Tipler should not be ignored by anybody. His great virtue is that he dramatizes the possibility that there is a deep and so far unknown connection between our faiths, our intuitions and our knowledge. He is due, at the very least, for a salary review.

[stripes1776]

Physics proved the truths of Eastern religions three decades ago (The Tao of Physics), so why not Christianity, too? ;)

You are ironic, but I assume that is because physics, indeed all the sciences, proves nothing. Science is based on inductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning is never a proof because a scientist can never provide complete enumeration of the data. At best, science provides probability.

So a little irony and sarcasm are warranted. A sense of humor is a good defense against such claims of proof.

[toast]

Dang!!!

Talkin’ with the wrong orifice again.

[Excellence]

In the beginng God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void...

Someone please draw for me a formless void.

[Dr._Joseph_Warren]

I can understand how one could make a connection between physics and spirituality.

I do not see how one can claim that physics proves Christianity or any other specific religion.

[Stultis]

LOL! Tipler gets a little loonier (and more dogmatically so) every year. At the same time he has secularists smiling indulgently and slowly backing away, he’s got to be pissing off believers (at least those who scratch the surface) with his assertions that Divine Miracles are just parlor tricks with particle beams!

[Search4Truth]

Someone please draw for me a formless void.

It took a little doing. But I think I finally got it. It's right below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Excellence]

Where is the earth?

[Search4Truth]

Where is the earth?

Orbiting the Sun.

Is this a quiz?

[Excellence]

In the beginng God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void...

Someone please draw for me a formless void.

We’re right back where we started.

[Gene Eric]

>> Physicists today, he says, are not supposed to believe in God. But he does, ...

The statement is misleading, and reinforced by the conjunction could be interpreted as:

“Physicists are supposed to disbelieve in God.”

[Clock King]

God requests a childlike faith in HIM, that all things are possible through Jesus Christ. NOT a childlike faith in the KING JAMES VERSION Bible (which didn’t exist in Jesus’s time because it was still being written).

[sirchtruth]

NOT a childlike faith in the KING JAMES VERSION Bible (which didn’t exist in Jesus’s time because it was still being written).

Alright. I get what you're insinuating. However, minus the "King's English" the TKJ version might be one of the more accuratley translated accounts we have.

What about the original version? Would you still not believe in the storied account of Genesis from the Hebrew or Greek Torah? I beleive Jesus most likely quoted from the Septuagint.

Let me make a serious point here. In all the versions of the bible, I think there is less than 2% error in copying, and those mistakes are minor misspellings, typos, and general word misusage. Trivial mistakes that do not take away from the main context of the message or the original copy. You will not find another book in the history of the world that has so many copies and has been so correctly translated or copied intact!

In even my limited years of studying the book, I will tell you the minute I start to not take the stories literally I find is the bane of misguided thought and direction toward The Truth. (Define "The Truth")

[doc30]

God gave the doctor the talent, and the drive to heal others. I pray about being sick, and go to the doctor when/if I must.

Modern medicine is not a talent given by God. It takes years of hard work and education to be a medical doctor. And all of that learning, and all of the doctor's tools, are the product of science and engineering which includes evolution, not a simple talent.

[doc30]

Why do you think the peoples of the Middle East did not eat pork? Until recently, if pork was not fully cooked, you could die from eating it. The Bible helped to save lives. The Ten Commandments are just common sense.

No, pork was considered spiritually unclean. Where in the Bible, or the Torah, does it say that it can be made spiritually clean by cooking? God said don't eat it so you don't eat it.

[sitetest]

Shades of Teilhard.

[wizr]

To me, the Bible is a God given manual for our lives. Not all things are spelled out. In fact, we must search it to try and understand what God is saying to us.

I would say that people had died from eating pork. Therefore, it was clearly noted not to eat of it.

I am not a scholar. I just know that there are reasons for all of God’s Word. We are to use it to safety walk through this treacherous world.

[mjp]

This has not been a good week for atheists.

the opossum data supports intelligent design's prediction that junk DNA sequences aren't random, but important genetic material. The stretches of "junk DNA" flanking hardworking genes are not junk at all. But the study goes further, indicating for the first time that the vast majority of the 3 billion "letters" of the human genetic code are busily toiling at an array of previously invisible tasks. Intelligent Design has Long Predicted This Day. Proponents of intelligent design have long maintained that Neo-Darwinism's widely held assumption that our cells contain much genetic "junk" is both dangerous to the progress of science and wrong.

What were the consequences of their failure to suspect function for junk-DNA? The article explains how there may be real-world medical consequences of the failure to presume function for non-coding DNA:

But much of it seems to be playing crucial roles: regulating genes, keeping chromosomes properly packaged or helping to control the spectacularly complicated process of cell division, which is key to life and also is at the root of cancer. .... [S]everal recent studies have found that people are more likely to have Type 2 diabetes and other diseases if they have small mutations in non-gene parts of their DNA that were thought to be medically irrelevant.

Could neo-Darwinism have stopped science from investigating the causes of these medical problems? It seems beyond dispute that the Neo-Darwinian paradigm led to a false presumption that non-coding DNA lacks function, and that this presumption has resulted in real-world negative consequences for molecular biology and even for medicine.

[mjp]

arXiv.org > hep-th > arXiv:0704.3276

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High Energy Physics - Theory

Title: Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model as a Theory of Everything

Authors: Frank J. Tipler

(Submitted on 24 Apr 2007)

Abstract: I argue that the (extended) Standard Model (SM) of particle physics and the renormalizable Feynman-Weinberg theory of quantum gravity comprise a theory of everything. I show that imposing the appropriate cosmological boundary conditions make the theory finite. The infinities that are normally renormalized away and the series divergence infinities are both eliminated by the same mechanism. Furthermore, this theory can resolve the horizon, flatness, and isotropy problems of cosmology. Joint mathematical consistency naturally yields a scale-free, Gaussian, adiabatic perturbation spectrum, and more matter than antimatter. I show that mathematical consistency of the theory requires the universe to begin at an initial singularity with a pure $SU(2)_L$ gauge field. I show that quantum mechanics requires this field to have a Planckian spectrum whatever its temperature. If this field has managed to survive thermalization to the present day, then it would be the CMBR. If so, then we would have a natural explanation for the dark matter and the dark energy. I show that isotropic ultrahigh energy (UHE) cosmic rays are explained if the CMBR is a pure $SU(2)_L$ gauge field. The $SU(2)_L$ nature of the CMBR may have been seen in the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. I propose several simple experiments to test the hypothesis.

Subjects:	High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)
Journal reference:	Reports on Progress in Physics, volume 68 (2005), pp. 897--964
Cite as:	arXiv:0704.3276v1 [hep-th]

Submission history

From: Frank Tipler [view email]
[v1] Tue, 24 Apr 2007 21:44:28 GMT (408kb,D)

Which authors of this paper are endorsers?

Link back to: arXiv, form interface.

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