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The Physics of Christianity Kindle Edition
Frank Tipler takes an exciting new approach to the age-old dispute about the relationship between science and religion in The Physics of Christianity. In reviewing centuries of writings and discussions, Tipler realized that in all the debate about science versus religion, there was no serious scientific research into central Christian claims and beliefs. So Tipler embarked on just such a scientific inquiry. The Physics of Christianity presents the fascinating results of his pioneering study.
Tipler begins by outlining the basic concepts of physics for the lay reader and brings to light the underlying connections between physics and theology. In a compelling example, he illustrates how the God depicted by Jews and Christians, the Uncaused First Cause, is completely consistent with the Cosmological Singularity, an entity whose existence is required by physical law. His discussion of the scientific possibility of miracles provides an impressive, credible scientific foundation for many of Christianity’s most astonishing claims, including the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and the Incarnation. He even includes specific outlines for practical experiments that can help prove the validity of the “miracles” at the heart of Christianity.
Tipler’s thoroughly rational approach and fully accessible style sets The Physics of Christianity apart from other books dealing with conflicts between science and religion. It will appeal not only to Christian readers, but also to anyone interested in an issue that triggers heated and divisive intellectual and cultural debates.
- ISBN-13978-0385514248
- PublisherImage
- Publication dateMarch 20, 2007
- LanguageEnglish
- File size1206 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“A thrilling ride to the far edges of modern physics.” --New York Times Book Review
“A dazzling exercise in scientific speculation, as rigorously argued as it is boldly conceived.” --Wall Street Journal
“Tipler has written a masterpiece conferring much-craved scientific respectability on what we have always wanted to believe in.” --Science
“More readable than Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind or Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach . . . an imaginative eschatological entertainment appropriate to the approaching end of the millennium.” --New Orleans Times-Picayune
“Undeniably fascinating…” --Seattle Times
“Tipler’s brash announcements are challenging—and entertaining. Although written from the viewpoint of a Ph.D., anyone should be able to get a kick out of the professor’s big-bang ideas.” --Publishers Weekly
“A book that proves the existence of the Almighty and inevitably of resurrection, without recourse to spiritual mumbo jumbo . . . Tipler does it all.” --Mirabella
About the Author
FRANK J. TIPLER is a professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University and the author of The Physics of Immortality. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction: Christianity as Physics
The latest observations of the cosmic background radiation show that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago at the Singularity. Stephen Hawking proved mathematically that the Singularity is not in time or in space, but outside both. In other words, the Singularity is transcendent to space and time. According to the theologian Thomas Aquinas, “God created the Universe” means simply that all causal chains begin in God. God is the Uncaused Cause. In physics, all causal chains begin in the Singularity. The Singularity itself has no cause. For a thousand years and more, Christian theologians have asserted that there is one and only one “achieved” (actually existing) infinity, and that infinity is God. The Cosmological Singularity is an achieved infinity.
The Cosmological Singularity is God.
“But,” the average person may protest, “the ‘Cosmological Singularity’ is not my idea of God. I picture God as a kindly, white–haired old man, loving but with immense power. The ‘Cosmological Singularity’ (whatever that is) is too abstract, too intellectual to be my God, the God I pray to every night. It sounds like some crazy idea some physicist would dream up. It’s definitely not the God of Judaism or Christianity.”
Not so. The Cosmological Singularity is the Judeo–Christian God. Think of it this way. Everybody knows that when you flip a light switch, the light goes on because an electrical current flows in the wires in the walls. Everybody also knows that electrons carry the electric charge whose motion makes the electric current. I invite you to imagine an “electron”—you must have some image of an electron, since you use the word.
Now let me ask you: when you imagined an “electron,” did you imagine an excitation of a quantized, relativistic fermion field, part of an electroweak doublet? Unless you are a professional physicist, I know you didn’t. You probably imagined a little ball of some sort. Such an image is good for some purposes, even in physics. One can compute a fairly accurate value for the “drift velocity” of the electrons through the wire using the “little ball” image of the electron. But did you know that the electrons which carry the current in the wire are at a temperature of 80,000 degrees Celsius (140,000 degrees Fahrenheit)? (1) You might wonder, If the conduction electrons are at that high a temperature, why don't they melt the wires? Why don't they start a fire and burn the house down? The reason is that the conduction electrons can't give up their high–temperature energy to the wires. But to understand why the electrons can’t give up their energy, one has to go beyond the “little ball” image of the electron. (One has to think “quantized fermion.”)
Similarly, everyone has an image of “God,” but to really understand what God really is and how He could interact with the universe, one must use a theory beyond everyday commonsense physics. Contrary to what many physicists have claimed in the popular press, we have had a Theory of Everything for about thirty years. 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, and most contemporary scientists are atheists. They don’t want God to exist, and if keeping God out of science requires rejecting physical laws, well, so be it.
My approach to reality is different. I believe that we have to accept the implications of physical law, whatever these implications are. If they imply the existence of God, well then, God exists.
We can also use the physical laws to tell us what the Cosmological Singularity—God—is like. The laws of physics tell us that our universe began in an initial singularity, and it will end in a final singularity. The laws also tell us that ours is but one of an infinite number of universes, all of which begin and end in a singularity. If we look carefully at the collection of all the universes—this collection is called the multiverse—we see that there is a third singularity, at which the multiverse began. But physics shows us that these three apparently distinct singularities are actually one singularity. The Three are One.
There is one religion which claims that God is a Trinity: Christianity. According to Christianity, God consists of Three Persons: God the Father (the First Person), God the Son (the Second Person), and God the Holy Ghost (the Third Person). But there are not three Gods, only one God. Using physics to study the structure of the Cosmological Singularity, we can see that indeed the three “parts” of the Singularity can be distinguished by employing the idea of personhood. In particular, physics can be used to show how it is possible for a man—Jesus, according to Christianity—to actually be the part of the Singularity that connects the Initial and Final Singularities. So the Incarnation makes perfectly good sense from the point of view of physics.
Traditional Christianity has always claimed that “miracles” do not violate ultimate physical law, although a miracle may violate our limited knowledge of physical law. Thus, if we know ultimate physical law—and if our Theory of Everything is correct, we do—we should be able to explain all the miracles of Christianity.
And so we can. The miracle of the Star of Bethlehem was a supernova in the Andromeda Galaxy. The miracle of the Virgin Birth of Jesus, the virgin birth of a male, is plausible if we use modern knowledge of exactly how DNA codes for gender. One expects that, in a virgin birth, all the DNA in the child would come from the mother alone. This is possible if Jesus were an XX male. In the U.S. population, 1 male in 20,000 is an XX male. Using modern DNA technology, it is a simple matter to test whether a male is an XX male. A DNA test was performed on the Shroud of Turin, claimed to be the burial shroud of Jesus, and the Oviedo Cloth, claimed to be the “napkin” that covered Jesus’ face in his tomb. The DNA on both relics is just what one would expect if it were the DNA of an XX male.
According to Christians, Jesus rose from the dead in a “resurrection body,” a body that we will all have at the Universal Resurrection in the future. This “Glorified Body” was capable of “dematerializing” at one location and “materializing” in another. Modern particle physics provides a mechanism for dematerialization: conversion of the matter of an object into neutrinos, which are elementary particles that interact very weakly with normal matter and thus would be invisible. Reversing the process would result in apparently materializing out of nothing. If this was the mechanism of Jesus’ Resurrection, there are several tests that could demonstrate it. In fact, some of these tests are so simple that an ordinary person could carry them out. The image of Jesus on the Turin Shroud has certain features we would expect to arise in the neutrino dematerialization process.
Christians claim that Jesus will come again, at the end of human history. Two developments in physics suggest that human history will end in about fifty years: computer experts predict that computers will exceed human intelligence within fifty years, and the dematerialization mechanism can be used to make weapons that are to atomic bombs as atomic bombs are to spitballs. Such weapons and superhuman computers would make human survival unlikely, and in his discussion of the Second Coming, Jesus said he would return when humans faced a “Great Tribulation” of such magnitude that we would not survive without his direct intervention. We will face such a Great Tribulation within fifty years.
From the perspective of the latest physical theories, Christianity is not a mere religion but an experimentally testable science.
II
A Brief Outline of Modern Physics
The Many–Worlds Interpretation is trivially true. — Stephen W. Hawking (1)
The [Many–Histories Interpretation] is okay. — Murray Gell–Mann, Physics Nobel laureate (2)
The final approach [to quantum mechanics] is to take the Schrodinger equation seriously, to give up the dualism of the Copenhagen interpretation, and to try to explain its successful rules through a description of measurer and their apparatus in terms of the same deterministic evolution of the wave function that governs everything else…For what it is worth, I prefer this last approach. — Steven Weinberg, Physics Nobel laureate (3)
I question whether quantum mechanics is the complete and ultimate truth about the physical universe. In particular, I question whether the superposition principle can be extrapolated to the macroscopic level in the way required to generate the quantum measurement paradox…I simply cannot convince myself that any of the solutions proffered to the quantum measurement paradox is philosophically [my emphasis] satisfactory. — Anthony Leggett, Physics Nobel laureate (4)
I’m afraid I do [believe in the Many-Worlds Interpretation]. I agree with John Wheeler who once said that is too much philosophical [my emphasis] baggage to carry around, but I can’t see how to avoid carrying that baggage. — Philip Anderson, Physics Nobel laureate (5)
I think we are forced to accept the Many–Worlds Interpretation if quantum mechanics is true. — Richard P. Feynman, Physics Nobel laureate (6)
I don’t see any way to avoid the Many–Worlds Interpretation, but I wish someone would discover a way out. — Leon Lederman, Physics Nobel laureate (7)
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world.” — John 18:36
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Product details
- ASIN : B000OVLKF4
- Publisher : Image (March 20, 2007)
- Publication date : March 20, 2007
- Language : English
- File size : 1206 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 338 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0385514255
- Best Sellers Rank: #681,423 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #252 in Cosmology (Kindle Store)
- #340 in Religious Studies - Science & Religion
- #885 in Cosmology (Books)
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Tipler takes us to the very frontiers of our ontological limits, by way of examining not the average, mundane mind, but the very essence of the keenest of physicists, and the farthest limits to which experimentation has taken them; and, at the ontological and epistemic edge of that he invites us to ponder what lies beyond.
Quite obviously, the finest minds of man a century ago, two centuries ago, three... did not have benefit of experimental results which would come later. And if the historical momentum of that is any indication, the finest minds of man today, in their own finest hours, may be expected to fall short of knowing what experimental results will further inform science in years to come.
How easily one already arrived at an insupportable atheistic stance, and fallaciously assuming he/she is supported in that stance by empirical materialism, presents himself/herself as being a skeptic. Yet the taking of any stance -- including one of atheism -- which is unsupportable by any empirical result yet known -- manifests blatant violation of the very core of scientific objectivity.
As Tipler demonstrates, in a way that even a non-scientist of moderate entry-level familiarity with science can grasp, the brightest geniuses
in physics have found that experimental results lead to unavoidable conclusions -- such as the mathematical necessity of an other-worlds phenomenon -- which runs counter to the normal and usual human adaptation to the ontological and epistemic cage in which human life plays out.
Tipler explains exactly how physics can account for every so-called 'miracle' proffered by the historical accounts of Judeo-Christian records. If those historical records be somewhat hard to confirm precisely, then they do not, by virtue of that, differ from any other historical account. History, after all, does not change what has occurred; it only attempts imperfectly to trace it back.
Scientists who are honest with themselves and others cannot, and therefore do not, hold that any experimental result obviates the necessity of something beyond a singularity. And physicists run into singularities
all the time.
Yes, in this book, Tipler takes the non-scientist to the brink of human understanding of materiality, and to the utmost limits of genius of man's brightest and most scientifically honest and shows us that all these things point -- microscopically, macroscopically, and beyond our furthermost understanding of these to what not only is the possibility but, also, the necessity of God.
I do not do him justice in this humble attempt to say it. The reader who is a true skeptic -- rather than one wrapping denial in a cloak of scientific evidence -- will find this book embracing not fantasy nor magic or raw imagination but, on the contrary, the directions toward which all the empirical evidence, and all the greatest genius of mankind, are pointing.
He must be appealing to a very small audience, because it would probably require a Ph. D. related to math and physics to be able to refute this man's explanations. As a layman, all I can do is to follow his ideas and take his word for all his formulas and scientific jargon. He claims Immanuel Kant had it wrong in his thoughts about our knowledge limitations. Tipler claims faith is not needed, and he delights me with the confidence he demonstrates in proving immortality, the resurrection of Christ, the second coming, etc. all based on his scientific proofs. Frankly, I have strong doubts about Tipler's claims , but I found the book to be a fascinating read, even though his concepts and scientific proofs are way above my head. As I was reading his Physics of Immortality, I began wonder if Tipler hadn't been the one to plant the thoughts into the creators of the Terminator series and/ or Space Odyssey 2001.
Tipler is employed by Tulane University and I have no doubts many students would probably chose to be in his classes. Tipler is obviously widely read in philosophy, literature, all branches of the sciences. I am not questioning his credentials, because he shows brilliance and creativity in many of his thoughts, and the way he defends his concepts makes this work unique. In my humble opinion, Tipler could be another H.G. Wells if he was so inclined. At least, those were my thoughts while reading this book.
Most people will understand the book's detailed explanations; if it gets too complicated, you can always skip to the conclusions. It's refreshing to read a book from a genius physics professor who's not afraid of backlash from the atheist God-haters in the scientific community. For example Prof. Lawrence Krauss and others have viciously attacked Tipler and yet this Arizona State University professor has publicly stated that incest is not a bad idea.
If you're interested in the science behind Jesus and his miracles; then this is a great start (in addition to Tipler's masterpiece "The Physics of Immortality").
. Was an interesting read for me-- explaining the immaculate conception as spontaneous egg fertilization-- like to certain animals-- which my Pastor said is not a logical conclusion....other explainations of resurrection of Christ-- (similiar to Star Wars moving of a man by molecule redistribution)-- End of world explaination related to computers sort of taking over our human responsiblities interesting.
Still an interesting look at science- and I do believe God does work within HIS physical as well as spiritual laws-- but not sure we have enought information from science yet to understand in detail...