How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [73]
Similarly for the word “God.” If He is identified with the Omega Point, then the key religious meanings of “God” are retained, with science and religion integrated. As he wrote at length, the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg agrees that the Omega Point is in all essentials the God of the Bible. It’s easier for a German theologian to come to this conclusion than an English speaker. God’s Name, given in Exodus 3:14, was translated by Martin Luther as “ICH WERDE SEIN, DER ICH SEIN WERDE”—“I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” Failing to make this change of definition, which is to say, failing to give up Aristotelean physics, makes it difficult to accept the consequences of modern physics. These require the universe to terminate in its ultimate future in an Omega Point, a state of infinite knowledge, and infinite power.
Certainly it is time to reject Aristotelian physics and with it the ancient and medieval concepts of God and soul. And with Tipler’s narrow definition of life as information processing machines (with DNA coding for our anatomy and physiology and neurons coding for our thoughts and memories), it is conceivable the short-lived and fragile carbon-based, protein-chain life forms could be reconstituted into something more durable and long-lasting, such as silicon chips. A human life, by this analysis, is a “pattern” of information, and silicon can store the pattern much longer than protein, and there may be other future technologies we cannot yet conceive that could hold the integrity of the pattern still longer, perhaps approaching infinity, and thus immortality. As for God’s future tense, The Interpreter’s Bible notes that the common translation of Exodus 3:14 is “I AM WHO I AM,” with a secondary alternative of “I AM WHAT I AM,” and a tertiary translation of “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” Richard Elliott Friedman, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, told me: “Tipler and Luther are simply wrong. God is not a future-tense verb in biblical Hebrew.” Case closed. As for the Omega Point, Tipler says it is transcendent to time, but his God is the future c-boundary of the universe that acts back in time, not the personal anthropomorphic God who cares about us that most people think of when they think about God.
Why must the God conclusion be drawn from science? Why not speculate on the possibility of space travel, human occupation of the galaxy and eventually other galaxies, machine intelligence, and even the far future of the universe, without trying to tie it into some ancient mythic Hebrew doctrine created by and for people living on the margins of the Mediterranean nearly 4,000 years ago? What are the chances that this agrarian society, constructing myths and stories whole cloth out of traditions that preceded them sometimes by as much as a thousand years (and rewritten and reinterpreted to fit their social and cultural needs, as all myths are), just happened to anticipate one interpretation of late twentieth-century cosmology? Much more likely is that Tipler is pushing a particular rendition of modern cosmology and physics—one that is by no means shared by his colleagues—into and beyond the borderline between science and religion. It may be that someday science will reduce all religious and metaphysical questions to the equations of physics, but we are so far from that stage that wisdom would seem to dictate that we leave the God conclusion out of science altogether.
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God and the Cosmologists. After reading Tipler’s book I thought perhaps I was missing something and that I better read what other cosmologists, astronomers, and physicists were thinking about the relationship of science and religion. According to David Deutsch, whom Tipler quotes in support, there is no God in his