Can Science Find the Best of All Possible Worlds?
Alfred Russel Wallace, the nineteenth-century British naturalist whose name is permanently tethered to Charles Darwin’s for his co-discovery of natural selection, got himself into trouble in his quest to find a purpose for every structure and every behavior he observed. For Wallace, natural selection shaped every organism to be well adapted to its environment. His overemphasis on natural selection led to his hyper-adaptationism. He argued in the April 1869 issue of the Quarterly Review, much to Darwin’s dismay, that the human brain could not entirely have been the product of evolution because in nature there is no reason to have a human-size brain, capable of such unnatural abilities as higher math and aesthetic appreciation. No purpose, no evolution. His answer? “An Over-ruling Intelligence has watched over the action of those laws, so directing variations and so determining their accumulation, as finally to produce an organization sufficiently perfect to admit of, and even to aid in, the indefinite advancement of our mental and moral nature” (p. 394). The theory of evolution proves the existence of God.
Wallace fell into hyper-adaptationism because he believed evolution should have created the best possible organisms in this best of all possible worlds. Since it had not, there had to be another active agent—a higher intelligence. Ironically, the natural theologians whose beliefs Wallace’s evolutionary theories helped to overturn made a similar argument, the most famous of which is William Paley’s 1802 Natural Theology, which opens with this passage:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever … . But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given—that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose.
For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker—God. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire’s Candide (1759), in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of “metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology,” through reason, logic, and analogy “proved” that this is the best of all possible worlds: “’Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches” (1985, p. 238). The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be.
For most people, hope springs eternal that if this is not the best of all possible worlds, it soon will be. That hope is the wellspring of religions, myths, superstitions, and New Age beliefs. We are not surprised to find such hopes at large in the world, of course, but we expect science to rise above wish fulfillment. But should we? After all, science is done by human scientists, complete with their own hopes, beliefs, and wishes. As much as I admire Alfred Russel Wallace, with hindsight it is easy to see where his hopes for a better world biased his science. But surely science has progressed since then? Nope. A plethora of books, mostly by physicists and cosmologists, testifies to the fact that hope continues to spring eternal in science as well as religion. Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975) and especially The Turning Point (1982) unabashedly root for the blending of science and spirituality and hope for a better world. The Faith of a Physicist (1994) by the Cambridge University theoretical physicist turned Anglican priest, John Polkinghorne, argues that physics proves the Nicene Creed, which is based on a fourth-century formula of Christian faith. In 1995, physicist Paul Davies won the $1 million Templeton Prize for the advancement of religion, in part for his 1991 book, The Mind of God. The nod for the most serious attempts, however, has to go to John Barrow and Frank Tipler’s 1986 Anthropic Cosmological Principle and Frank Tipler’s 1994 The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. In the first book, the authors claim to prove that the universe was intelligently designed and thus there is an intelligent designer (God); in the second, Tipler hopes to convince readers that they and everyone else will be resurrected in the future by a supercomputer. These attempts provide a case study in how hope shapes belief, even in the most sophisticated science.
As I read The Physics of Immortality and talked with its author, I was struck by the parallels between Tipler, Wallace, and Paley. Tipler, I came to realize, is Dr. Pangloss in disguise. He is a modern hyper-adaptationist, a twentieth-century natural theologian. (Upon hearing this analogy, Tipler admitted to being a “progressive” Panglossian.) Tipler’s highly tutored mind has brought him full circle to Alexander Pope’s Indian in his Essay on Man (see the epigraph on the opening page of Part 5), although Tipler finds God not only in the clouds and wind but also on his own solar walk through the cosmos in pursuit of not a humbler heaven but a vainglorious one.
What in Tipler’s background might explain his Panglossian tendencies—his need to make this the best of all possible worlds? From his youth, Tipler was sold on the DuPont motto, “Better living through chemistry,” and all that it stood for—unalloyed progress through science. Fascinated by the Redstone rocket program and the possibility of sending a man to the moon, for instance, at age eight Tipler wrote a letter to the great German rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun. “The attitude of unlimited technological progress is what drove Wernher von Braun and it is what has motivated me all my life” (1995).
Raised in the small rural town of Andalusia, Alabama, where he graduated from high school in 1965 as class valedictorian, Tipler intended to speak out in his graduation speech against segregation—not a popular position to take in the Deep South of the mid-1960s, especially for a youth of seventeen. Tipler’s father, an attorney who routinely represented individuals against large corporations and who also opposed segregation, insisted that Frank not go public with such a controversial position since the family had to continue living in the town after Frank went away to college. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he was raised a Southern Baptist with a strong fundamentalist influence, Tipler says he was an agnostic by the age of sixteen. Brought up in an upper-middle-class environment by a politically liberal father and apolitical mother, Tipler is a firstborn with one brother four years his junior.
What difference does birth order make? Frank Sulloway (1996) has conducted a multivariate correlational study, examining the tendency toward rejection of or receptivity to heretical theories based on such variables as “date of conversion to the new theory, age, sex, nationality, socioeconomic class, sibship size, degree of previous contact with the leaders of the new theory, religious and political attitudes, fields of scientific specialization, previous awards and honors, three independent measures of eminence, religious denomination, conflict with parents, travel, education attainment, physical handicaps, and parents’ ages at birth.” Using multiple regression models, Sulloway discovered, in analyzing over one million data points, that birth order was the strongest factor in intellectual receptivity to innovation in science.
Consulting over a hundred historians of science, Sulloway had them evaluate the stances taken by 3,892 participants in twenty-eight disparate scientific controversies dating from 1543 to 1967. Sulloway, himself a later-born, found that the likelihood of accepting a revolutionary idea is 3.1 times greater for laterborns than firstborns; for radical revolutions, the likelihood is 4.7 times higher. Sulloway noted that “the likelihood of this happening by chance is virtually nil.” Historically, this indicates that “laterborns have indeed generally introduced and supported other major conceptual transformations over the protests of their firstborn colleagues. Even when the principal leaders of the new theory occasionally turn out to be firstborns—as was the case with Newton, Einstein, and Lavoisier—the opponents as a whole are still predominantly firstborns, and the converts continue to be mostly laterborns” (p. 6). As a “control group” of sorts, Sulloway examined data from only children and found only children wedged between firstborns and laterborns in their support for radical theories.
Why are firstborns more conservative and influenced by authority? Why are laterborns more liberal and receptive to ideological change? What is the connection between birth order and personality? Firstborns, being first, receive considerably more attention from their parents than laterborns, who tend to receive greater freedom and less indoctrination into the ideologies of and obedience to authorities. Firstborns generally have greater responsibilities, including the care of younger siblings, and thus become surrogate parents. Laterborns are frequently a step removed from parental authority, and thus less inclined to obey and adopt the beliefs of the higher authority. Sulloway has taken this a step further by applying a Darwinian sibling-competition model in which children must compete for limited parental resources and recognition. Firstborns are larger, faster, and older, and so receive the lion’s share of the goodies. Laterborns, in order to maximize parental benefits, diversify into new areas. This explains why firstborns tend to go into more traditional careers, whereas laterborns seek out less traditional ones.
Developmental psychologists J. S. Turner and D. B. Helms noted that “usually, firstborns become their parents’ center of attraction and monopolize their time. The parents of firstborns are usually not only young and eager to romp with their children but also spend considerable time talking to them and sharing their activities. This tends to strengthen bonds of attachment between the two” (1987, p.175). Quite obviously, this attention would include more rewards and punishment, thus reinforcing obedience to authority and controlled acceptance of the “right way” to think. R. Adams and B. Phillips (1972) and J. S. Kidwell (1981) report that this distribution of attention causes firstborns to strive harder for approval than laterborns, and H. Markus (1981) concluded that firstborns tend to be more anxious, dependent, and conforming than laterborns. I. Hilton (1967), in a mother-child interactive experiment with twenty firstborn, twenty laterborn, and twenty only children, found that at four years of age firstborns were significantly more dependent on and asked more frequently for help or reassurance from their mothers than the laterborn or only children. In addition, mothers were most likely to interfere with a firstborn child’s task (constructing a puzzle). Finally, R. Nisbett (1968) showed that laterborns are far more likely to participate in relatively dangerous sports than firstborns, which is linked to risk taking and thus to “heretical” thinking.
Sulloway is not suggesting that birth order alone determines receptivity to radical ideas. Far from it, in fact, as he notes that “birth order is hypothesized to be the occasion for psychologically formative influences operating within the family” (p.12). In other words, birth order is a predisposing variable that sets the stage for numerous other variables, such as age, sex, and social class, to influence receptivity. Not all scientific theories are equally radical, of course, and in taking this into consideration, Sulloway discovered a correlation between laterborns and the degree of “liberal or radical leanings” of the controversy. He noted that laterborns tended “to prefer statistical or probabilistic views of the world (Darwinian natural selection and quantum mechanics, for example) to a worldview premised on predictability and order.” By contrast, he found that when firstborns did accept new theories, they were typically theories of the most conservative type, “theories that typically reaffirm the social, religious, and political status quo and that also emphasize hierarchy, order, and the possibility of complete scientific certainty” (p.10).
Frank Tipler’s theory, far from being the radical idea he thinks it is, is actually ultra-conservative, reaffirming a hierarchical, ordered worldview and the ultimate religious status quo of God and immortality. Tipler may have rejected God at sixteen, but as he approaches fifty, he is arguing with all his scientific acumen for the existence of Paley’s Divine Watchmaker and Wallace’s Over-ruling Intelligence. “It’s a return to the great chain of being,” Tipler asserted. “The difference is that it is a temporal chain.” Even his physics is conservative:
My theory is very conservative from the physics point of view. What I say is take the standard equations—the old traditional equations of quantum mechanics and general relativity—and all we have to do is change the boundary conditions from the past to the future to understand the universe. It is counter-intuitive because we human beings always move from past to present to future, so we tacitly assume that the universe has to work the same way. What I’m saying is that there is no reason the universe should work in our way. Once you take the point of view of the future, the universe becomes much more comprehensible to physicists, just as the solar system did when looked at from the sun’s point of view. (1995)
The firstborn son is using his advanced science to conserve his parents’ religion. “My father always vaguely believed in God, and since he has always been a rationalist himself and he likes a rational foundation for religious belief, he naturally liked the book. And my mother was happy because it defends, in many ways, the traditional view of Christianity” (1995). Indeed, Tipler’s fundamentalist background shines through in his continued literal use of “God,” “heaven,” “hell,” and “resurrection,” despite the fact that many of his fellow physicists advised him to avoid using such terms (1994, p. xiv). But what are the chances that modern physics really describes Judeo-Christian doctrines? Pretty good, says Tipler: “If you look back and think about all the possible explanations there are for things like a soul, for instance, there aren’t very many. A soul is either a pattern in matter or a mysterious soul substance. That’s about it. Plato took the position that the soul consists of this soul substance, whereas Thomas Aquinas took the attitude that resurrection was going to be reproducing the pattern, which is what I argue in my book. With only two possibilities someone is bound to get it right” (1995). There is, of course, a third possibility, that there is no soul, if by soul one means something that survives the physical body. If this is the case, then no one “got it right” because there is nothing to get right. (Tipler says if “soul” is defined like this, then he agrees that there is no soul. But he claims the ancients defined “soul” operationally as that which makes a living being different from a corpse, and then argues only two choices exist. But this is not what most contemporary theologians mean by soul.)
Whereas most scientists do not dare publish such controversial notions until late in their careers, by the time he began studying physics at MIT Tipler was already entertaining ideas in the borderlands between science and science fiction:
I became aware of time travel in the dorm when a bunch of us physics students discussed it. We would talk about the real far-out ideas in physics, such as the many-histories interpretation of physics. I read Gödel’s paper on closed time-like curves. I was fascinated by that and went and got a copy of the second volume of Albert Einstein, Philosopher/Scientist. I read that Einstein became aware of this possibility when he was generating the general theory of relativity, and he even discussed the Gödel paper. That gave me confidence because the majority of the community of physicists may not believe in the possibility of time travel, but Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein did, and those were not lightweight scientists. (1995)
Tipler’s first published paper appeared in the prestigious Physical Review. Written while he was a graduate student, it proposed that a time machine might actually be possible. “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation” was revolutionary for its time; it was even adapted for a short story by science fiction author Larry Niven.
While earning his Ph.D. in physics, working with the general relativity group at the University of Maryland, Tipler was laying the groundwork for his later books. In 1976, Tipler began postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, where he met British cosmologist John Barrow, also a postdoc. Tipler and Barrow discussed a manuscript by Brandon Carter which described the Anthropic Principle. “We thought it would be a good idea to take the idea and expand it out. And that became the Anthropic Cosmological Principle. In our last chapter we combined the idea from Freeman Dyson [1979] of life going on forever, with physical reductionism and global general relativity; the Omega Point Theory then follows.” Tipler’s steps in reasoning sound logical, but his conclusions push the limits of science:
I wanted our book to be completely general, so I said to myself, well, what about the flat universe and the closed universe [instead of an open universe]? One of the problems in the closed universe is communication because we have event horizons everywhere. So I said to myself, that wouldn’t be a problem if there were no event horizons. If there were no event horizons, what would the c-boundary be like? Aha, it would be a single point, and a single-point end of time reminded me of Teilhard’s Omega Point, which he identified with God. So I thought maybe there is a religious connection here. (1995)
Barrow and Tipler’s work is an attack on the Copernican Principle, which states that man has no special place or purpose in the cosmos. According to the Copernican Principle, our sun is merely one of a hundred billion stars on the outskirts of an average galaxy, itself one of a hundred billion (or more) galaxies in the known universe that cares not one iota for humanity. By contrast, Carter, Barrow, and Tipler’s Anthropic Principle insists that humans do have a significant role in the cosmos, both in its observation and its existence. Carter (1974) takes the part of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that says that the observation of an object changes it and extrapolates this part from the atomic level (where Heisenberg was operating) to the cosmological level: “What we can expect to observe must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers.” In its weak form—the Weak Anthropic Principle—Barrow and Tipler contend quite reasonably that for the cosmos to be observed, it must be structured in such a way as to give rise to observers: “The basic features of the Universe, including such properties as its shape, size, age and laws of change, must be observed to be of a type that allows the evolution of observers, for if intelligent life did not evolve in an otherwise possible universe, it is obvious that no one would be asking the reason for the observed shape, size, age and so forth of the Universe” (1986, p.2). The principle is tautological: in order for the universe to be observed, there must be observers. Obviously. Who would disagree? The controversy generated by Carter, Barrow, and Tipler lies not with the Weak Anthropic Principle but with the Strong Anthropic Principle, the Final Anthropic Principle, and the Participatory Anthropic Principle. Barrow and Tipler define the Strong Anthropic Principle as “The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history” and the Final Anthropic Principle as “Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out” (pp.21–23).
That is, the universe must be exactly like it is or there would be no life; therefore, if there were no life, there could be no universe. Further, the Participatory Anthropic Principle states that once life is created (which is inevitable), it will change the universe in such a way that it assures its, and all life’s, immortality: “The instant the Omega Point is reached life will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know. And this is the end” (p. 677). This Omega Point, or what Tipler calls a “singularity” of space and time, corresponds to “eternity” in traditional religion. Singularity is also the term used by cosmologists to describe the theoretical starting point of the Big Bang, the center point of a black hole, and the possible ending point of the Big Crunch. Everything and everyone in the universe will converge at this final end point.
Like Dr. Pangloss, Barrow and Tipler relate their incredible claims to a number of seemingly coincidental conditions, events, and physical constants that must be a certain way or else there could be no life. For example, they find great meaning in the fact that
Change these relationships significantly and our universe and life as we know it could not exist; thus, they conclude, this is not just the best of all possible worlds, it is the only possible world. Barrow and Tipler assume that this relationship, known as Dirac’s Large Numbers Hypothesis, is no coincidence. Change any of the constants and the universe would be different enough that life as we know it could not exist, and neither could the universe. There are two problems with this argument.
1. The Lottery Problem. Our universe may only be one bubble among many bubble universes (with the whole thing being a multiverse), each one of which has slightly different laws of physics. According to this controversial theory recently pioneered by Lee Smolin (1992) and Andrei Linde (1991), each time a black hole collapses, it collapses into a singularity like the entity out of which our universe was created. But as each collapsing black hole creates a new baby universe, it alters the laws of physics slightly within that baby universe. Since there have probably been billions of collapsed black holes, there are billions of bubbles with slightly different laws of physics. Only those bubbles with laws of physics like ours can give rise to our types of life. Whoever happens to be in one of these bubbles will think that theirs is the only bubble and thus that they are unique and specially designed. It’s like the lottery—it is extremely unlikely that any one person will win, but someone will win! Astrophysicist and science writer John Gribbin even suggests an analogy with evolution, where each new bubble is mutated to be slightly different from its parent, and the bubbles are competing with one another, “jostling for space time elbow room within superspace” (1993, p. 252). Caltech scientist Tom McDonough and science writer David Brin (1992) wrote melodramatically, “Perhaps we owe our existence, and the convenient perfection of our physical laws, to the trial-and-error evolution of untold generations of prior universes, a chain of mother-and-child cosmoses, each of them spawned in the nurturing depths of black holes.”
Much is explained by this model. Our particular bubble universe is unique, but it is not the only bubble nor is it in itself unique in any designed sense. The set of conditions that came together to create life is merely contingent—a conjuncture of events without design. There is no need to posit a higher intelligence. In the long term, this model makes historical sense. From the time of Copernicus, our perspective on the cosmos has been expanding: solar system, galaxy, universe, multiverse. The bubble universe is the next logical step, and it is the best explanation yet for the apparent design of the laws of physics.
2. The Design Problem. As David Hume argued in his brilliant analysis of causality in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1758), an orderly world with everything in its rightful place only seems that way because of our experience of it as such. We have perceived nature as it is, so for us this is how the world must be designed. Alter the universe and the world, and you alter life in such a way that its universe and world would appear as it must be for that observer, and no other. The Weak Anthropic Principle says the universe must be as it is to be observed, but it should include the modifier “by its particular observers.” As Richard Hardison noted, “Aquinas considered two eyes to be the ideal number and this was evidence of God’s existence and benevolence. However, is it not likely that two seems the proper number of eyes simply because that is the pattern to which we have become accustomed?” (1988, p.123). The so-called coincidental relationships between the physical constants and large numbers of the universe can be found just about anywhere by someone with patience and a turn for numbers. For example, John Taylor, in his book The Great Pyramid (1859), observed that if you divide the height of the pyramid into twice the side of its base, you get a number close to >; he also thought he had discovered the length of the ancient cubit as the division of the Earth’s axis by 400,000—both of which Taylor found to be too incredible to be coincidental. Others discovered that the base of the Great Pyramid divided by the width of a casing stone equals the number of days in the year and that the height of the Great Pyramid multiplied by 109 approximately equals the distance from the Earth to the Sun. And so on. Mathematician Martin Gardner analyzed the Washington Monument, “just for fun,” and “discovered” the property of fiveness to it: “Its height is 555 feet and 5 inches. The base is 55 feet square, and the windows are set at 500 feet from the base. If the base is multiplied by sixty (or five times the number of months in a year) it gives 3,300, which is the exact weight of the capstone in pounds. Also, the word ‘Washington’ has exactly ten letters (two times five). And if the weight of the capstone is multiplied by the base, the result is 181,500—a fairly close approximation of the speed of light in miles per second” (1952, p. 179). After musing that “it should take an average mathematician about 55 minutes to discover the above ‘truths,’“Gardner notes “how easy it is to work over an undigested mass of data and emerge with a pattern, which at first glance, is so intricately put together that it is difficult to believe it is nothing more than the product of a man’s brain” (p.184). The skeptics’ skeptic, Gardner leaves “it to readers to decide whether they should opt for OPT [the Omega Point Theory] as a new scientific religion superior to Scientology … or opt for the view that OPT is a wild fantasy generated by too much reading of science fiction” (1991b, p. 132).
None of this deterred Tipler, who continued without John Barrow in The Physics of Immortality. He submitted a rough draft to his publisher, Oxford University Press, who sent it out for review. The book was rejected. Tipler received the “anonymous” reviews, but by accident their names were not blocked out on the photocopy. One of them, a physicist who is one of the world’s leading proponents of integrating science and religion, “said he could recommend this book be published only if I would write it as if I didn’t really believe this stuff” (1995).
A longer, more detailed manuscript was submitted to and accepted by Doubleday for publication. While sales were better in Europe (especially Germany) than in America, the reviews for the most part were devastating. Well-known German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, who believes in God as a future being, offered his support in Zygon (Summer 1995), but most scientists and theologians echoed astronomer Joseph Silk’s review in Scientific American: “Tipler, however, takes the search for a science of God to a ridiculous extreme. Humility in the face of the persistent, great unknowns is the true philosophy that modern physics has to offer” (July 1995, p. 94).
Frank Tipler faces the great unknowns not with humility but with eternal optimism. When asked to summarize his book in a single sentence, Tipler offered, “Rationality increases without limit; progress goes on forever; life never dies out.” How? Tipler’s complex arguments may be summarized as three points. (1) In the far future of the universe, humans—the only life in the universe, says Tipler—will have left Earth, populating the rest of the Milky Way galaxy and eventually all other galaxies. If we don’t, we are doomed when the Sun expands to envelope the Earth and burn it to a cinder. Therefore, if we must we will. (2) If science and technology continues progressing at its current rate (consider how far we have come from room-size computers in the 1940s to today’s laptops), in a thousand or a hundred thousand years, not only will populating the galaxy and universe be possible, but supercomputers with supermemories and super-virtual realities will essentially replace biological life (life and culture are just information systems—genes and memes—to be reproduced in these supercomputers). (3) When the universe eventually collapses, humans and their supercomputers will utilize the energy of the collapsing process to re-create every human who ever lived (since this is a finite number, the supercomputer will have enough memory to accomplish this feat). Since this supercomputer is, for all intents and purposes, omniscient and omnipotent, it is like God; and since “God” will re-create us all in its virtual reality, we are, for all intents and purposes, immortal.
Like Wallace and Paley, Tipler attempts to ground his arguments in pure rationality—no appeals to mysticism, no leaps of religious faith. But can it be pure coincidence that their conclusions create a cosmology in which humankind has had and will continue to have a place … forever? “Wouldn’t it be better if it were true that you actually made a difference to universal history rather than if whatever you do is ultimately pointless?” Tipler insisted. “The universe would be a happier place if that were true, and I think it is irrational not to at least entertain the possibility that the universe is this way” (1995).
This may sound like hope springing eternal, but Tipler claims that it “is a logical consequence of my own area of research in global general relativity.” And though he thinks that part of the problem is that his colleagues “are trained to detest religion so ferociously that even the suggestion that there might be some truth to the statements of religion is an outrage,” Tipler says “the only reason the bigger names in the field of global general relativity, like Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, have not come to the same conclusion is that they draw back when they realize the outlandish consequences of the equations.” Although Penrose and Hawking may retreat in deep understanding, in a revealing comment Tipler explained that most simply will not get it because “the essence of the Omega Point Theory is global general relativity. You have to be trained to think of the universe in the largest possible scale and to automatically view the cosmos in its temporal entirety—you envision the mathematical structure of the future as well as the past. That means you have got to be a global relativist. And there are only three out there better than I am, and only two that are my peers” (1995).
A prominent astronomer I spoke with said that Tipler must have needed money to have written such a ridiculous book. But anyone who talks with Tipler about his book for any length of time quickly realizes that he is not in it for the money or fame. He is deadly serious about his arguments and was fully prepared to take the heat he knew he would get. Frank Tipler is a man who, in my opinion, cares deeply for humanity and its future. His book is dedicated to the grandparents of his wife, “the great-grandparents of my children,” who were killed in the Holocaust but “who died in the hope of the Universal Resurrection, and whose hope, as I shall show in this book, will be fulfilled near the End of Time.” Here is a deeper motivation. Perhaps Tipler never really abandoned his Baptist, fundamentalist upbringing after all. Through hard work, honest living, and, now, good science, immortality is ours. But we will have to wait. In the meantime, how can we restructure the social, political, economic, and moral systems of society to ensure that we survive long enough to resurrect ourselves? The Dr. Pangloss of his time, Frank Tipler, will venture an answer in his next book, tentatively titled The Physics of Morality.
I enjoyed reading Tipler’s book. On any number of subjects—space exploration, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics, relativity—he writes with clarity and confidence. But I found six problems, the first four of which could be applied to any number of controversial claims. These problems do not prove that Tipler’s theory, or any other theory, is wrong. They just alert us to exercise skepticism. Although Tipler may very well be right, the burden of proof is on him to provide empirical data rather than relying almost exclusively on clever, logical reasoning.
1. The Hope Springs Eternal Problem. On the first page of The Physics of Immortality, Tipler claims that his Omega Point Theory is a “testable physical theory for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God who will one day in the far future resurrect every single one of us to live in an abode which is in all essentials the Judeo-Christian Heaven” and that “if any reader has lost a loved one, or is afraid of death, modern physics says: ‘Be comforted, you and they shall live again.’” So, everything we always believed to be true based on faith turns out to be true based on physics. What are the chances? Not good, I am afraid. And, after 305 pages of concise and cogent argumentation, Tipler finally admits, “The Omega Point Theory is a viable scientific theory of the future of the physical universe, but the only evidence in its favor at the moment is theoretical beauty.” Beauty by itself does not make a theory right or wrong, but when a theory fulfills our deepest wishes we should be especially cautious about rushing to embrace it. When a theory seems to match our eternal hopes, chances are that it is wrong.
2. The Faith in Science Problem. When confronting a limitation in one’s scientific theory, it is not enough to argue that someday science will solve it just because science has solved so many other problems in the past. Tipler states that to colonize our galaxy and eventually all galaxies, we will have to be able to accelerate spacecraft to near the speed of light. How are we going to do this? No problem. Science will find a way. Tipler spends twenty pages chronicling all the amazing advances in computers, spacecraft, and spacecraft speeds, and in his “Appendix for Scientists” he explains precisely how a relativistic antimatter rocket could be built. All of this is relevant and fascinating but in no way proves that because it could happen it will happen. Science does have its limitations, and the history of science is replete with failures, wrong turns, and blind alleys. Just because science has been enormously successful in the past does not mean that it can or will solve all problems in the future. And can we really predict what beings in the far future are going to do based on what we think (and hope) they will do?
3. The If-Then Argument Problem. Tipler’s theory runs something like this: If the density parameter is greater than 1 and thus the universe is closed and will collapse; if the Bekenstein bound is correct; if the Higgs boson is 220 ± 20 GeV; if humans do not cause their own extinction before developing the technology to permanently leave the planet; if humans leave the planet; if humans develop the technology to travel interstellar distances at the required speeds; if humans find other habitable planets; if humans develop the technology to slow down the collapse of the universe; if humans do not encounter forms of life hostile to their goals; if humans build a computer that approaches omniscience and omnipotence at the end of time; if Omega/God wants to resurrect all previous lives; if…; then his theory is right. The problem is obvious: if any one of these steps fails, the entire argument collapses. What if the density parameter is less than 1 and the universe expands forever (as some evidence indicates it will)? What if we nuke or pollute ourselves into oblivion? What if we allocate resources to problems on Earth instead of to space exploration? What if we encounter advanced aliens who intend to colonize the galaxy and Earth, thus dooming us to slavery or extinction?
No matter how rational, an if-then argument without empirical data to support each step in the argument is more philosophy (or protoscience or science fiction) than it is science. Tipler has created an extremely rational argument for God and immortality. Each step follows from the previous step. But so many of the steps might be wrong that the theory is essentially speculative. In addition, his clever switch of the temporal frame of reference to the far future contains a logical flaw. He first assumes the existence of God and immortality toward the end of time (his Omega Point boundary conditions—what he previously called the Final Anthropic Principle) and then works backward to derive what he has already assumed to be true. Tipler claims this is how all general relativists work (i.e., when they analyze black holes). Even if true, I suspect that most general relativists withhold confidence in their assumptions until there is empirical data to support them, and I have seen no other theories by general relativists which attempt to encompass God, immortality, heaven, and hell. Tipler has made a few testable predictions, but he is a long, long way from proving our immortality, and the end of the universe is, well, a long, long time away.
4. The Problem of Analogies. In The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modem Physics and Eastern Mysticism (1975), physicist Fritjof Capra claims that these “parallels” are not accidental. Instead, he argues, there is a single underlying reality that both ancient Eastern philosophers and modern Western physicists have discovered. Although the language of description is different, Capra can see that both groups are really talking about the same thing. (See Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters for a similar analysis.) Really? Or is it more likely that the human mind orders the universe in only so many ways and that there are bound to be vague similarities between ancient myths and modern theories, especially if one wants to find them.
Tipler has one-upped Capra. He is not just finding similarities between ancient Judeo-Christian doctrines and modern physics and cosmology, he is redefining both to make them fit together: “Every single term in the theory—for example, ‘omnipresent,’ ‘omniscient,’ ‘omnipotent,’ ‘resurrection (spiritual) body,’ ‘Heaven’—will be introduced as pure physics concepts” (1994, p. 1). With each, the reader finds Tipler straining to make the term fit his physics, or vice versa. In starting with God and immortality and reasoning backward, Tipler is not so much discovering these connections between physics and religion as he is creating them. He claims this is both good physics and good theology. I claim that without empirical evidence it is good philosophy and good speculative science fiction. Just because two ideas from separate realms seem to resemble each other does not mean that a meaningful connection between the two exists.
5. The Problem of Memory and Identity. Tipler argues that Omega/God, toward the end of the universe, will reconstruct everyone who ever lived or ever could have lived in a super-virtual reality that will include their memories. The first problem is that if memory is a product of neuronal connections and our flawed and ever-changing reconstruction of these neuronal connections, how will Omega/God reconstruct something that does not really exist? There is a vast difference between every memory that could be reconstructed and an individual’s actual set of memory patterns, the vast majority of which are lost to time. The controversy over false memory syndrome is a case in point. We have very little understanding of how memory works, much less how to reconstruct it. Memories cannot be reconstructed in the sense of playing back a videotape. The event occurs. A selective impression of the event is made on the brain through the senses. Then the individual rehearses the memory and in the process changes it a bit, depending on emotions, previous memories, subsequent events and memories, and so on. This process recurs thousands of times over the years, to the point where we must ask whether we have memories or just memories of memories of memories.
We have another problem, too. If Omega/God resurrects me with all of my memories, which memories will they be? The memories I had at a particular point in my lifetime? Then, that won’t be all of me. All the memories I had at every point in my life? That won’t be me either. Thus, whatever would be resurrected by Omega/God, it cannot possibly be me, with my very own memories. And if a Michael Shermer is resurrected, and he does not have my memories, who will he be? For that matter, who am I? These problems of memory and identity must be worked through before we can even begin to speculate well about resurrecting an actual person.
6. The Problem of History and the Lost Past. A human being may be only a computer consisting of DNA and neuronal memories, but a human life, that is, the history of a human, is much more than DNA and neuronal memories. It is a product of all a person’s interactions with other lives and life histories, plus the environment, itself a product of countless interactions as a function of countless conjunctures of events in a complex matrix with so many variables that it is inconceivable that even Tipler’s computer, which can store 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 bits (a 1 followed by 10123 zeros), could represent it. (This figure depends on the Bekenstein bound being real, which cosmologist Kip Thorne says is highly questionable.) Even if it had the computational power to reconstruct all the innumerable historical necessities—climate, geography, population immigrations and emigrations, wars, political revolutions, economic cycles, recessions and depressions, social trends, religious revolutions, paradigm shifts, ideological revolutions, and the like—how does Omega/God recapture all the individual conjunctures, all the interactions between the contingencies and necessities of history?
Tipler’s answer is that quantum mechanics tells us there can be only a finite number of these memories, events, and historical conjunctures, and because the computers of the far future will have unlimited computing power, they will be able to resurrect every possible variation of you at all given times in your life. But, on p. 158, Tipler confesses to a significant problem with an aspect of this answer: “I should warn the reader that I have ignored the problem of opacity and the problem of loss of coherence of the light. Until these are taken into account, I cannot say exactly how much information can in fact be extracted from the past.” The problem of the irrecoverable past is serious, since history is a conjuncture of events compelling a certain course of action by constraining prior events. History often turns on tiny contingencies, very few of which we know about. Given the sensitive dependence on initial conditions—the butterfly effect—how does Omega/God resurrect all the butterflies?
This perception of history derails Drs. Tipler and Pangloss, as Voltaire noted at the end of Candide:
Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: “All events are linked up in this best of all possible worlds; for, if you had not been expelled from the noble castle by hard kicks in your backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been clapped into the Inquisition, if you had not wandered about America on foot, if you had not stuck your sword in the Baron, if you had not lost all your sheep from the land of Eldorado, you would not be eating candied citrons and pistachios here.” “’Tis well said,” replied Candide, “but we must cultivate our gardens.” (1985, p. 328)
Namely, whatever the sequence of contingencies and necessities in our lives and in history, the outcome would have seemed equally inevitable. But in Candide’s response is another kernel of truth. We can never know all of the contingencies and necessities guiding history at any given point in time, let alone the initial conditions of any historical sequence, and from this methodological weakness comes philosophical strength. Human freedom—cultivating our gardens—may be found not only in our inability to process all the data of the past and present but also in our ignorance of the initial conditions and conjunctures of events that shape our actions. We are free in our ignorance, free in the knowledge that most of the causes that determine us are lost to the past … forever. It is in this knowledge, rather than in the physics of immortality and resurrection by supercomputers, that hope springs eternal.