What you can show using physics, forces this universe to continue to exist, as long as you're using general relativity, and quantum mechanics, you are forced to conclude that God exists.
God exists. God is a cosmological singularity. I am not being blasphemous, I'm just following in the ancient tradition in saying science puts the tenents of religion up to the experimental test and we find that God exists.
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That's the problem with using the word God. I don't think Professor Tipler had the bible-god in mind, but something greater. When one approaches the Singularity, there's little chioce but to enter the mystical realm.
Welcome aboard, Professor, and I would recommend using a better handle for the Spirit of the singularity.
I once heard of a physicist that he believes there is something one might call "god" because the physics of today make no sense when applied on big bang or the gnab gib (the collapse of the universe after the point where all mass reverses it's current movement and starts to fall into one single point).
Pretty stupid, I think. That our equations make no sense in some cases should not mean there are no better equations or explanations and our physics are perfect; it's the other way round. Hey, humanity is doing physics with pen and paper for about 400 years now, that's nothing!
This is why when it comes down to it, there are no atheists.
If you (re)define God as being a cosmological singularity, then even Richard Dawkins and Bertrand Russell would be theists.
However, singularities have little or nothing in common with anyone's idea of God, so Tipler should stay within his own area of expertise and avoid Theology in the future.
This guy is actually serious and has some okay reasons. He has a "perfect" solution to general relativity he claims requires an initial observer or somesuch crap because of QM. Without his observer the initial state quantum waveform couldn't collapse into the singularity which precipitated the big bang.
Congratulations to him, he somehow solved what physicists have spend the last 90 years trying to solve in vain.
I don't accept his solutions but he's not some creationist quack so cut the guy some slack.
It's not really very fundie just out of context.
[edit] Oh it's Tipler, my bad I thought it was someone else. This guy IS a quack but I reckon he just does it to make money.
What you can show using physics, forces this universe to continue to exist, as long as you're using general relativity, and quantum mechanics, you are forced to conclude that God exists.
God? Why not Gods? And why does He still have to exist? Even if this theory were valid, his conclusions are nonsense, or at least sloppy.
Tipler is an interesting guy...
You're not kidding.
Tipler claims to prove the existence of life after death, provided by an artificial intelligence he calls the "Omega Point" and which he identifies with God. The line of argument is that the evolution of intelligent species will enable scientific progress to grow exponentially, eventually enabling control over the universe even on the largest possible scale. Tipler predicts that this process will culminate with a nearly all-powerful artificial intelligence whose computing speed and information storage will grow exponentially at a rate exceeding the collapse of the Universe, thus providing infinite "virtual time" which will be used to run computer simulations of all intelligent life that has ever lived in the history of our universe. This virtual reality exercise is what Tipler means by "the resurrection of the dead."
He's read too much science fiction and not enough science.
From the wikipedia article on tipler:
"Tipler's writings on scientific peer review have been cited by William A. Dembski as forming the basis of the process for review in the intelligent design journal Progress in Complexity, Information and Design of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, where both Tipler and Dembski serve as fellows."
Dembski and Tipler are fellows of The Discovery Institute - an offshoot of the (now nearly defunct) neo-con "thinktank" PNAC.
The Discovery Institute is the outfit that cooked up the whole idea of stripping creationism of all its constitutionally questionable content and calling it "Intelligent Design" in an attempt to have it accepted in public schools. Thankfully, the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District ruling pretty much killed that idea.
Tipler went off the rails a long, long time ago. Michael Shermer wrote at length about him in "Why People Believe Weird Things".
I don't know a whole lot about the physics involved, though there's an incredibly long string of interdependent ifs in the hypothesis, besides which I have this sense that something about this violates chaos theory.
Einstein formulated GR, he was an atheist, if GR proved God exists Einstein would have become a theist and scientifically explained why God has to exist. You lose.
That is a vacuous argument in and of itself, dumb ass, but the fact of the matter is that Einstein was a Spinozist.
Please remove your head from your ass.
This is why when it comes down to it, there are no atheists.
If you (re)define God as being a cosmological singularity, then even Richard Dawkins and Bertrand Russell would be theists.
However, singularities have little or nothing in common with anyone's idea of God, so Tipler should stay within his own area of expertise and avoid Theology in the future.
This is an interesting argument, but absolutely useless. You have basically said that one's entire beleif in a higher power is dictated by where they think the universe as we know it came into existence. I have a better idea. I choose apathy. The way i see it, i will never know the orgins of space and time b/c they are both infinite. So, i accept that my finite mind will never fully comprehend something that is not finite, thus i become complaisant on the orgins of the universe, and i'm still an athiest, as my knowing where my species came from has absolutely no bearing on my day-to-day activities.
Yet another in a long line of people who have posed an argument which, even if it were expected, would support a Spinozan "God, or Nature" rather than a classical Supreme Being -- who nonetheless seem to miss that gap entirely.
Suddenly, some of you are recycling christian fundie way of thinking to criticize this premise, mostly because of its definition of God. By christian fundie way of thinking, I mean the obvious gaps at real logic thinking.
The concept of a God ain't illogical, at least not in a broad definition (i.e not old man in a cloud, but perhaps something like Grof's Holotropic Universe or something). A (truly) rational person wouldn't be throwing stones at this kind of argument, it's just evaluating it and its "data" and trying to see if it works or not.
I, for one, think Tipler went off a tangent a while ago, though some of his ideas are "interesting" in the sense they amuse me. However, its a shame to see people so blindly chained to the "no god, doesn't matter, wrong what a wacko!" mentality when they happen to mock people with the "god, you're satan, wrong they are satanists" mentalities.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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