How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [71]
It is a difficult concept for the human mind to grasp, but Michael White and John Gribbin, in their biography of Hawking, make this analogy: Imagine walking all the way to the North Pole of the Earth. For the entire trip there you are heading north, but the moment you pass the pole you are now heading south. Similarly, imagine the universe as an expanding sphere beginning with the Big Bang, and that you are in a time machine traveling backward toward that initial point. For the entire trip you are heading back in time, but the moment you pass the starting point you are now heading forward in time. There is no beginning and no end—no boundaries. The universe always was, always is, and always shall be.
Whatever Hawking may mean when he speaks of God, he certainly does not mean the personal Judaeo-Christian God who created the universe and cares about us.
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Paul Davies’s God. Mathematical physicist Paul Davies is a believer in God and winner of the million-dollar Templeton Prize for “progress in religion.” In his book, The Mind of God, Davies reviews all the philosophical and scientific arguments for God’s existence, concluding that “belief in God is largely a matter of taste, to be judged by its explanatory value rather than logical compulsion. Personally I feel more comfortable with a deeper level of explanation than the laws of physics. Whether the use of the term ‘God’ for that deeper level is appropriate is, of course, a matter of debate.” If one of the great believing scientists of our age says that God’s existence cannot be proved, it would seem that some weight should be given to the position that belief in God is a matter of personality and emotional preference, also known as faith.
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Frank Tipler’s God. Cosmologist Frank Tipler’s answer to the God Question, while a theistic one, begins with a premise unlike that of most theists. In his books The Anthropic Cosmological Principle and especially The Physics of Immortality, subtitled Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, Tipler presents and defends his Omega Point Theory: The laws of nature and the configuration of the cosmos from atoms to galaxies is such that if you tweaked any of the parameters even slightly (and this often means a change many places after the decimal point in a number describing some aspect of nature), our universe, and we, could not exist in anything remotely similar to what we experience. Since “the Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history,” it does, and here we are. In other words, the universe had to be just so in order for us to be here, and the chances of it being just so are so small that it would have to have been made by some supreme being. More than this, says Tipler, “intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out,” so we must and we will take control of our universe and all other possible universes. In the process of doing this we “will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know.” This, says Tipler, “is the end.” It is the Omega Point—the all-knowing and all-powerful being (God as computer?)—that not only has the power but also the desire to resurrect everyone who ever lived or could have lived.
I have spoken to a number of cosmologists and physicists about Tipler’s theory, and the conclusions are generally the same. Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, for example, found nothing wrong with Tipler’s physics but concluded that his if-then leaps of logic between the steps of what must occur in order to reach the Omega Point were far too speculative to be meaningful; too much “hand-waving” between steps. John Casti, from the Santa Fe Institute, agreed with Tipler’s speculations on how intelligent