Before and After (page 46, published by the Natural Death Centre, 1995) carried a short feature about the book The Physics of Immortality - Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead by Frank Tipler (published by Macmillan, 1994, $39.95). Here is a longer review, an adapted extract from an essay entitled 'By computer and spacecraft to God and eternity', sent to the Natural Death Centre by John Wren-Lewis.
If you want to know what a real 'new paradigm' scientific world-view might look like, as contrasted with the old-hat pseudo-scientific world-views which often currently sail under the 'new paradigm' flag, read this book The Physics of Immortality by the professor of physics at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Having recently spent months struggling to find an arresting opening for my own book (I think with some success), this one leaves mine for dead:
"This book is a description of the Omega Theory," it begins, "which is a testable physical theory for an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent God who will ... resurrect every single one of us to live forever in an abode which is in all essentials the Judeo-Christian Heaven ... I shall make no appeal, anywhere, to revelation. I shall appeal only to the solid results of modern physical science ... I shall show exactly how physics will permit the resurrection to eternal life of everyone who has ever lived, is living, or will live. I shall show exactly why this power to resurrect, which modern physics allows, ...will in fact be used." The italics are mine, but Tipler is completely serious about all these claims, and gives detailed calculations to back them up.)
Tipler, the self-styled unrepentant reductionist, speaks like a true mystic who knows there is more to matter than evolution has yet uncovered - but true to his scientific brief, he makes no appeal to magic or the supernatural. He appeals to what science and technology are already uncovering right here in our present earthly back yard about the potential of matter to support intelligence in non-organic forms, in machines such as the one on which I am writing this review right now.
Tipler (who goes well beyond PhD level in Computer Complexity Theory) gives ground for thinking that, well before the end of the next century, we shall have been able to transfer our whole minds with the full sensuous enjoyment-capacity and feeling-capacity of our biological inheritance inside self-replicating nanotechnological computers weighing more than 100 grams each - and since they need experience no time-lapse while travelling, colonising the entire galaxy with (or rather as) them will be a piece of cake. With that much ecological space to play with (to say nothing of the fact that energy requirements of individual personal existence in that form are minimal), there is no question of scarcity, which, Tipler argues (again drawing on some pretty formidable authorities) is the root of all so-called evil impulses.
Colonising the rest of the universe will take a little longer - several million million years, in fact - but Tipler argues that because the most basic of all life-drives at the root of consciousness is survival, colonisation will surely happen, well before the point where the expansion of the universe goes into reverse towards the 'big crunch'. And at that stage, the vastly expanded collective intelligence of the colonised universe - the Omega consciousness - will have at Its disposal the unimaginable energy of gravity-shear, which will give It the power to stop the contraction and create a stable cosmic paradise of truly eternal finite life.
Tipler establishes, by appeal to game theory, that Omega consciousness must of Its very nature be utterly generous towards every sentient life-form that has contributed to Its own vast evolutionary struggle - so It will have both the power and the imperative t resurrect all who have ever lived, good and bad alike, into Its own blissful time-transcendence. And in that condition, there will be absolutely no problems of overcrowding or denial of space for individuality, nor any pressure on time for doing whatever each one wants to do - and therefore neither unfreedom nor boredom.
For the ultimate resurrection, Tipler argues in great detail that personal identity can be exactly reconstructed by progressive 'unpacking' of memory-data back through history, using advanced versions of techniques already known in a computer theory for 'fleshing out' imperfectly-recalled data - a deliberate employment of the processes that already happen when genes produce bodies and brains produce the memories that make up 'experience'.
At first sight, it's something of a puzzle that his book hasn't gone off like a bomb in spiritual and religious circles, considering the popularity of other books linking modern science with spiritual issues, like Capra's The Tao of Physics. True, there are many points where Tipler overestimates the general reader's capacity for grasping even simple ideas in relativistic cosmology; even I, who did the subject for my degree, am still quite unable to say whether his assertions about the Bekenstein Bound or the Higgs Boson make sense or not. But that kind of difficulty applied equally to Capra's book, and even more to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which had a far more negative conclusion that Tipler's, yet became a best-seller. So why is Tipler's book still only trickling off the shelves?
I think he puts his finger on the answer in the very last sentence of his main text, when he asserts that "Religion is now a part of science". This is implied by his whole argument, and I think he just does not realise that the psychological effect is to leave the great majority feeling 'left out', because it means there is no significant contribution they can make to humanity's 'salvation'. Since being born again as a mystic, I've come to recognise that the urge for personal significance is as fundamental to human consciousness as the urge for survival, and not to be dismissed as mere 'ego'. So I can quite see that it's not just clergy who might be less than wildly enthusiastic about Tipler's book, because it could make them redundant; he may not intend his Omega Point to seem too distant from our lives to matter, but that's how it come across, if the evolution leading up to it, from here on out, is mainly a matter of high science and technology.
But do read it, all the same, for even if his peers eventually declare his conclusions doubtful or invalid, it's still very important indeed in showing how even the most reductionist science today implies the spiritual perspective. And it should force us all to think again about whether current 'green' attempts to curb scientific and technological advances in the name of love for Planet Earth may not in fact be theologically short-sighted underestimates of humanity's spiritual destiny, which, according to both St Paul and Tipler, may be to the only means whereby our undeniably spectacular home planet, necessarily perishable in the long term on current world-views (and maybe the not-so-long term, if that wandering asteroid hits), could be resurrected to share God's eternity.
Professor John Wren-Lewis, 1/22 Cliffbrook Parade, Clovelly, NSW 2031, Australia. John Wren-Lewis's book about his own continuing mystical experience (induced by eating a poisoned sweet in Thailand) - The 9.15 to Nirvana - is due to be published before the end of 1996.
This webpage forms part of the Global Ideas Bank (www.globalideasbank.org).
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