Rather than reply to Jamie's responses to my critical comments on parts of her original ppaper, I have divided my response into two parts.
Part I: Cosmology
In an attempt to take seriously the new version of the paper Jamie has made available, I have read that part of it which I understand, and have divided this very long response into two parts, dealing with the Cosmology as far as I can in part 1; and the ‘History’ in a second post which will appear after this one in the next day or so.
Since this thread was initiated by Jamie French, she has re-written the paper that she has made available on the weblinks in her post.
For those of you who do not want to read the whole of my refutation of the paper written by Jamie French, my resume is as follows:
The author, who claims that Frank Tipler’s work has been published in peer-reviewed science journals and that this gives Tipler a position of respect, deliberately ignores the ridicule and rejection that his version of ‘Intelligent Design’ has produced.
There are examples here:
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/v...sicsChrist.htm
http://www.joly.org.uk/gordo/ellis3.html
http://sfgospel.typepad.com/sf_gospe...ianity.html--a relatively positive review of
The Physics of Christianity.
Instead, Jamie uses Tipler’s anti-evolutionary cosmology to argue not only that God exists, but that most of recorded human history since the death of Jesus has been a giant conspiracy to undermine the legacy, the values and the message of Jesus Christ. Omega Point Cosmology not only proves the existence of God, it predicts a ‘Day of Judgement’ as an event –or sequence of events- in which those with the ‘Mark of the Beast’ will be punished, and those who have accepted Jesus into their hearts will be saved. A global conspiracy led by ‘the Rothschilds’ (phoney Jews who make a mockery of Jews and Judaism) has enabled the rulers of Empires and States to form secretive societies –the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Bilderberg Group et al- to maintain their campaign of financial greed and universal evil, based around a pagan pre-Christian and indeed,
Anti-Christian cult. Using Government as the instrument of absolute evil, God has forced humans to live through the evils of mass murder and hatred in order to learn the difference between it and the absolute purity of Christ’s message. No Pain, No Gain. The paper draws on numerous events in history to show how this Global Conspiracy has victimised ordinary people –mostly through hugely destructive world wars and genocide- and claims that only those who have lived in the way of Jesus will be saved.
I am not sure how far Jamie has actually understood the theory of Frank Tipler, but here is a succinct resume of his theories by a scientist:
In The Physics of Immortality, Tipler provided the mechanism by which we will all live forever. In a billion-billion years or so, life in the form of highly advanced and supremely intelligent robots, evolved from those that we humans invented and sent into space before destroying ourselves as a species, will have spread throughout the universe. At that point the robots will control the collapse of the universe down to a final singularity called the Omega Point. Following the teaching of the famous Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955, Tipler associates the Omega Point with God, in particular, God the Father, the First Person of the Trinity. This also follows from God's message to Moses in Exodus 3:14, "I SHALL BE WHAT I SHALL BE. The collapse to the final singularity takes an infinite time as viewed from inside the universe. During that time the robots recreate all the humans and life forms that ever existed in a computer simulation. Not only do we all live our lives over again in that simulation, but over and over and over again. And not just our lives, but also all the possible lives we ever might have had, good and bad. That's the immortality Tipler says we can look forward to.
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/v...sicsChrist.htm
It should be noted that Jamie has included this biographical note at the end of the paper:
Born in Austin, Texas and raised in the Leander, Texas hill country, James Redford is a born-again Christian who was converted from atheism by a direct revelation from Jesus Christ. He is a scientific rationalist who concludes that the Omega Point (i.e., the physicists’ technical term for God) and the Feynman–DeWitt–Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) are an unavoidable result of the known laws of physics (Page 128).
The starting point for Jamie’s version of Tipler’s cosmology is a book,
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986) co-authored by John D. Barrow and Frank J.Tipler. Works subsequently written by Tipler form the main body of work on ‘Omega Point Cosmology’.
I have no expertise in hard science and am frequently baffled by cosmology; and to me the author has done nothing to advance the cause of those who rely on cosmology for the ‘big picture’ of how the Universe was created, and where it is going.
Here is a key point that drives much of the paper’s arguments:
The Omega Point is a term used by Prof. Tipler to designate the final cosmological singularity, which according to the known laws of physics is a physically-necessary cosmological state in the far future of the universe. Per the laws of physics, as the universe comes to an end at this singularity in a particular form of the Big Crunch, the computational capacity of the universe (in terms of both its processor speed and memory storage) increases unlimitedly with a hyperbolic growth rate as the radius of the universe collapses to zero, allowing an infinite number of bits to be processed and stored before the end of spacetime. Via this supertask, a simulation run on this cosmological computer can thereby continue forever in its own terms (i.e., in computer clock time, or experiential time), even though the universe lasts only a finite amount of proper time (page 4).
Crucially, the Omega Point is the definition of God…well sort of, as the author writes:
The Omega Point final singularity and its state of infinite informational capacity is by definition God, due to it having all the haecceities claimed for God by the traditional religions (as is detailed in Section 7.1). The final singularity is actually a different aspect of the Big Bang initial singularity, i.e., the first cause, a definition of God held by the Abrahamic religions. (page 4).
The key point here is that of all the world’s religions and belief systems,
the only one that matters is Christianity. As the author remarks, without naming Islam, Hinduism Buddhism or any other religion of system of belief:
Christian theology is therefore preferentially selected by the known laws of physics due to the fundamentally triune structure of the Cosmological Singularity within the Omega Point cosmology, which is deselective of all other major religions (Section 7.1, p44).
Indeed, the author, having dismissed all other religions from her mathematical equation, goes further in claiming that
Jesus Christ founded the only civilization in history to pull itself out of the muck, and along with it the rest of the world. A great irony is that even antitheists benefit enormously from the civilization that Christ founded: indeed, almost all of the Earth’s current population—and hence, almost all antitheists—couldn’t even be alive were it not for the advancements made by Christian civilization (page 33).
There is no need to mention the achievements of ‘Science and Civilization in China’, no need to mention the crucial role that Islamic civilisation played in keeping alive the science of the Greeks and the Romans when Europeans were not interested in it; as well as its own achievements, because when you crunch the numbers, the Chinese and the Muslims are, quite simply, irrelevant to the history of science.
But to get back to that moment when the universe collapses and the super-computer starts up: If you want to know HOW this computational capacity has been reached, the author writes:
The known laws of physics require there be intelligent civilizations in existence at the appropriate time in order to force the collapse of the universe and then manipulate its collapse so that the computational capacity of the universe can diverge to infinity (Page 4)
This divergence is performed by human life that has transferred
its information processes to higher energy states, eventually using elementary particles to directly compute on via traveling waves and standing waves. As the radius of the universe goes to zero, the matter energy of the universe goes to positive infinity, thereby allowing the number of particle states in which to store information to diverge to infinity (page 5).
The computing power that these ‘higher energy states’ have enables them to compute the whole of life from the beginning of the Big Bang, and in the process go further by colonising space:
The interstellar colonization phase required for achieving the Omega Point will be accomplished by naturally-evolved sapient life forms (with such species independently evolved on average roughly every Hubble volume2) whose brains have been transformed (e.g., with nanotechnology) into artificial computers (such as quantum computers) onboard tiny starships of circa one kilogram that will exponentially colonize space, many times faster than mortal human beings. The incredible expense of keeping flesh-and-blood humans alive in space makes it highly improbable that such humans will ever personally travel to other stars. Instead, highly efficient substrate transformations of naturally-evolved sapient minds and artificial intelligences will spread civilization throughout space. Given the rate of exponential growth of human technological development, this colonization phase should likely start before 2100 (page 5).
The crucial point here is the way in which Tipler, supported by the author, presents human beings as machines, capable therefore of evolving into, in effect, super-computers.
The discussion of the Omega Point in Jamie’s paper continues by supporting the theory of Prof Tipler, and discusses the way in which Science has tried to accommodate itself or distance itself from God through various interpretations of the ‘Big Bang’, culminating in Tipler’s book
The Physics of Christianity (2007). Further discussion of science and the physics of the Omega Point are presented up to page 33, but I don’t understand it so I cannot comment.
The rest of the paper, from Section 6 on p33 to p121, is discussion of
the social, ethical, economic and political implications of the Omega Point cosmology (from the Abstract).
It is difficult for me to offer a summary of a cosmology that I do not understand, but I think I know enough about the history of civilisations to believe that it is nothing but pure arrogance, as well as a factual error, to claim that it is
only the work of European scientists working in a culturally and theologically Christian environment that has any value in the history of science. This is Western Imperialism of the Mind taken to a really quite offensive level. No allowance is made, for example, in the history of medicine, which is part of science, for the use of Quinine as an anti-malarial in China and Peru long before Ronald Ross in the 19th century discovered the transmission of the disease through the bite of an infected mosquito (in India). It is also the case that Tipler, rather obviously, believes that ‘Intelligent Design’ explains the origin of the universe, not evolution; and that there has been no human agency in the creation of climate change and advanced global warming, which has been caused by sunspots.
The colonisation of space has me completely baffled, it seems to me to an idea that has more relevance to
Star Trek. We have enough issues for science to deal with right here on Planet Earth, without seeing a need to send our robotic clones into the Galaxy to spread the word of Jesus.