How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [72]
One of Tipler’s most enthusiastic supporters, on the other hand, is the highly regarded German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, from the Institute for Fundamental Theology at the University of Munich. In a lecture given at the Innsbruck Conference in June 1997, Pannenberg concluded: “Tipler is justified in claiming that his statements on the properties of the Omega Point correspond to Biblical assertions on God. The God of the Bible is not only related to the future by his promises, but he is himself the saving future that constitutes the core of the promises: ‘I shall be who I shall be.’” Yet even Pannenberg must go beyond Tipler’s physics to admit that God is not just in the future: “In hidden ways he is already now the Lord of the universe which is his creation, but it is only in the future of the completion of this universe, in the arrival of his kingdom that he will be fully revealed in his kingship over the universe and thus in his divinity.”
I even had the opportunity to ask Stephen Hawking’s opinion of Tipler’s theory during his 1998 visit to Caltech. Hawking’s lecture dealt with something he calls the “pea instanton,” a particle of space/time resembling a wrinkly pea, out of which the universe sprang into existence. As this universal “pea” expanded, the wrinkles were pushed out, leaving the relatively smooth universe we observe today. In Hawking’s opinion, the question of the closed or open nature of the universe (Tipler’s theory demands a closed universe) depends on the model applied to the question, which means that the universe can be both closed and open, not unlike how light can be both particle and wave. Without ever mentioning God, Hawking skirted that metaphysical line in discussing the Omega Point and the Anthropic Principle, so I inquired:
You’ve been talking about the Omega Point and the Anthropic Principle. What is your opinion of your cosmologist colleague Frank Tipler’s book, The Physics of Immortality, and his theory that the Omega Point will reach back from the far future of the universe into the past to reconstruct every human who ever lived or who ever could have lived in the ultimate Holodeck?
Hawking composed his answer for about a minute, then his now-familiar computer voice responded: “My opinion would be libelous.” Tipler responded to this charge as follows:
All I do in my work is accept the logical consequences of the known laws of physics: quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I’m not proposing any new laws of physics, just asking people to accept the logical consequences of the laws they claim to accept. Libeling the Omega Point Theory is equivalent to libeling the known laws of physics. Almost all contemporary theology still presupposes the truth of Aristotelean physics. This being the case, scientists naturally suppose theology is nonsense, or in a separate realm from science. With the almost unique exception of Pannenberg, theologians encourage them in this latter opinion. Only if theology is kept separate can it retain its Aristotelean physical basis.
The reality that the ancients were trying to capture in the word “soul” is expressed by defining the soul to be a computer program being run on the human brain. With this redefinition, we can keep the religious concept, and make it consistent with the facts. But most importantly, the redefinition makes the scientist realize that immortality is perfectly possible: there’s no physical reason why a program cannot exist forever. Some of the programs now coded in our DNA have been around billions of years. Keeping the old definition makes Hawking want to libel a person whose book’s central postulate is that the biosphere