No, *Atheist* Scientists Are Incompetent

[Abdul Alhazred]

No, Atheist Scientists Are Incompetent
PJ Media

From a right wing (though not specifically creationist) site, and the argument itself is pretty much the usual {!#%@}.

The gold is down in the comment thread.

Here's a sample:

... So, what you're saying is let's start the debate by choosing a definition which effectively ends the debate from the start. ...

[Flash]

Oh, Frank J. Tipler the Christian nutcase who doesn't know a good argument from a bad one. He accuses the atheist Lawrence Krauss of not knowing physics:

Lawrence Krauss is a physicist in name only. I’ve debated him in the past, and I know he does not understand either quantum mechanics or general relativity.

Lawrence Krauss happens to be one of more prominent physicists in the academia today. I think he is at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and a member of prestigious Perimeter Institute there. And he is a friend of Dawkins.

Look how Tipler starts his proof of the existence of God.

Let’s define “God” as the “supernatural being who created the Universe.” That is, God is the cosmological singularity.

Oh, WTF, it's all clear now Tipler tells us, God is a supernatural being who created the Universe and who is aka the cosmological singularity (or to people like us Jeebus)

Who needs {!#%@} proofs and evidence. Tipler's assumptions are all we need. From here he shows that any self respecting physicist has got to know that the cosmological singularities exist therefore God exists.

The cosmological singularity is the uncaused first cause, which is how Thomas Aquinas (“The Five Ways”) and Maimonides (“The Guide for the Perplexed”) defined “God.” All competent Christian and Jewish theologians have known for the past 2,000 years that God in His essence is not an old man wearing a white gown. One of the greatest Christian theologians, John Chrysostom, said that no created being can see God as He really is. So He appears to us in a form we can comprehend, often as an old guy wearing a white sheet.

So now, according to Tipler, the cosmological singularity is the uncaused first cause and we know for sure from that bubonic times religious fanatic named Thomas Aquinas that this is indeed god. And God, reveals Tipler, does not really wear white, flowing gowns people he just likes to look like he does.

[Abdul Alhazred]

Oh, Frank J. Tipler the Christian nutcase ...

Good denunciation fodder, eh?

Never heard of him before, but I'll be on the lookout.

[Flash]

From Wiki;

Tipler has authored books and papers on the Omega Point based on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's religious ideas, which he claims is a mechanism for the resurrection of the dead. Some have argued that it is pseudoscience.[3] He is also known for his theories on the Tipler cylinder time machine.

So, if anyone wants to know the truth about the resurection of the dead, the time machine and the Omega point go to Tipler. On the other hand;

Tipler's Omega Point theories have received criticism by physicists and skeptics.[18][19][20] George Ellis, writing in the journal Nature, described Tipler's book on the Omega Point as "a masterpiece of pseudoscience… the product of a fertile and creative imagination unhampered by the normal constraints of scientific and philosophical discipline",[3] and Michael Shermer devoted a chapter of Why People Believe Weird Things to enumerating what he thought to be flaws in Tipler's thesis.[21] Physicist Sean M. Carroll thought Tipler's early work was constructive but that now he has become a "crackpot".[22] In a review of Tipler's The Physics of Christianity, Lawrence Krauss described the book as the most "extreme example of uncritical and unsubstantiated arguments put into print by an intelligent professional scientist".[23]

[JamesRedford]

No, Atheist Scientists Are Incompetent
PJ Media

From a right wing (though not specifically creationist) site, and the argument itself is pretty much the usual {!#%@}.

The gold is down in the comment thread.

Here's a sample:

... So, what you're saying is let's start the debate by choosing a definition which effectively ends the debate from the start. ...

Hi, Abdul Alhazred. Physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler's argument given in his above-cited article entitled "No, *Atheist* Scientists Are Incompetent: Lawrence Krauss' claim -- all scientists must be 'militant atheists' -- conveniently fails to address the universe's origin" (PJ Media, Sept. 25, 2015) is not "{!#%@}" (sic), but rather a mathematical theorem per the known laws of physics.

GuaniloDC's quote which you provide is correct: Prof. Tipler's argument absolutely does end the debate. Rejoice: physics unavoidably says that God exists. And that of course is what any sane person wants: the debate not only ended, but ended in mankind's favor--for the alternative is eternal extinction.

The definition of God which Prof. Tipler gives in his aforesaid article is a quidditative definition of God. That is to say, said definition identifies a haecceity, i.e., a property which differentiates a thing from all other things that are not that thing. If *a thing* has even a single haecceity given by the word's definition, then *by definition* that thing is *the thing* to which the word refers, as the haecceity (or haecceities) uniquely *defines* a thing.

Prof. Tipler's Omega Point cosmology, which has been published and extensively peer-reviewed in leading physics journals, is a proof (i.e., mathematical theorem) demonstrating that sapient life (in the form of, e.g., immortal superintelligent human-mind computer-uploads and artificial intelligences) is required by the known laws of physics (viz., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics) to take control over all matter in the universe, for said life to eventually force the collapse of the universe, and for the computational resources of the universe (in terms of both processor speed and memory space) to diverge to infinity as the universe collapses into a final singularity, termed the Omega Point. Said Omega Point cosmology is also an intrinsic component of the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) correctly describing and unifying all the forces in physics, of which TOE is itself mathematically forced by the aforesaid known physical laws.

Said known laws of physics have been confirmed by every experiment to date. Thus, the only way to avoid the Omega Point TOE is to reject empirical science. As Prof. Stephen Hawking wrote, "one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem." (From p. 67 of Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated A Brief History of Time [New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1996; 1st ed., 1988].)

The Omega Point final singularity has all the unique properties (quiddities) claimed for God in the traditional religions. For much more on Prof. Tipler's Omega Point cosmology and the details on how it uniquely conforms to, and precisely matches, the cosmology described in the New Testament, see my following article, which also addresses the societal implications of the Omega Point cosmology:

* James Redford, "The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything", Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), 186 pp., doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708, https://archive.org/download/ThePhysics ... of-God.pdf , https://jamesredford.github.io/Redford- ... of-God.pdf , https://sites.google.com/site/physicoth ... of-God.pdf .

Additionally, in the below resource are different sections which contain some helpful notes and commentary by me pertaining to multimedia wherein Prof. Tipler explains the Omega Point cosmology and the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model TOE.

* James Redford, "Video of Profs. Frank Tipler and Lawrence Krauss's Debate at Caltech: Can Physics Prove God and Christianity?", alt.sci.astro, Message-ID: jghev8tcbv02b6vn3uiq8jmelp7jijluqk[at sign]4ax[period]com , July 30, 2013, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... QWt4KcpMVo , https://archive.is/a04w9 , http://webcitation.org/6IUTAMEyS .

* * * * *

A *god* (minuscule G) is an immortal sapient being who is still finite at any given time. Whereas *God* (majuscule G) is the infinite sapient being.

As Prof. Tipler noted, "Any cosmology with unlimited progress will end in God." (See Anthony Liversidge, interview of Frank Tipler, "A Physicist Proposes a Theory of Eternal Life that Yields God", Omni, Vol. 17, No. 1 [Oct. 1994], pp. 89 ff. [8 pp.].) This means that, e.g., any form of immortality necessarily entails the existence of the capital-G God, in the sense of an omniscient, omnipotent and personal being with infinite computational resources. This is mathematically unavoidable, for the reason that any finite state will eventually undergo the Eternal Return per the Quantum Recurrence Theorem. This is very easy to see by considering the simple example of two bits, which have only four possible states (i.e., 2^2): hence, once these four states have been exhausted, states will have to recur. What that means is that any finite state can only have a finite number of experiences (i.e., different states), because any finite state will eventually start to repeat.

Thus, immortality is logically inseparable from the existence of the capital-G God, since mathematically, immortality requires the existence of either an infinite computational state or a finite state which diverges to an infinite computational state (i.e., diverging to literal Godhead in all its fullness), thus allowing for states to never repeat and hence an infinite number of experiences.

Consequently, transhumanism--if the goal by that position is immortality--is inherently theistic, not only in a lowercase-G god sense, but also in the capital-G God sense.

Interestingly, this also means that the existence of biological evolution, far from demonstrating that God is unnecessary, is in fact a logical proof of God's existence *unless* one posits the additional postulate that there is a limit to evolution. Yet there is no logical limit to evolution other than infinite complexity; and there exists no empirical evidence that evolution is finitely-bounded. Thus, to believe that evolution has a finite cut-off would be to hold a belief without evidence, and thus it would be an irrational belief.

The concept of man being gods and becoming ever-more Godlike is simply traditional Christianity, going all the way back to Jesus's teachings (e.g., see John 10:34), that of Paul and the other Epistlers, and that of the Church Fathers. In traditional Christian theology, this is known as apotheosis, theosis or divinization. For many examples of these early teachings, see the article "Divinization (Christian)", Wikipedia, Oct. 6, 2015, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =684362358 . Though this traditional position of Christian theology has been deemphasized for the last millennium.

Indeed, the words "transhuman" and "superhuman" originated in Christian theology. "Transhuman" is a neologism coined by Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy (Paradiso, Canto I, lines 70-72), referring favorably to a mortal human who became an immortal god by means of eating a special plant. For the Christian theological origin of the term "superhuman", see the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.), the first appearance being by Henry Montagu, 1st Earl of Manchester, in his Al Mondo: Contemplatio Mortis, & Immortalitatis (London, England: Robert Barker, and the Assignes of John Bill, 1636).