David Deutch - The Fabric of Reality

Tipler replies:The Omega Point will know everything that can be known . But the Omega Point will not know the unknowable (such as the Cantgotu environments), because this would involve a logical contradiction. In medieval theological terminology, God’s “omnipotence” was taken to mean that God can do anything except something involving a logical contradiction. In particular, God could not make a stone so heavy that even He could not lift it. In other words, traditional theology does not consider the inability to do something logically contradictory to limit God. It so happens that the dispute between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII involved this point, but both Galileo and Urban VIII were in agreement that God indeed could not do something which involved a logical contradiction. See page 166 of The Crime of Galileo, by Giorgio de Santillana (University of Chicago Press, 1959). Deutsch has discovered that a similar constraint applies to God’s omniscience!

Tipler replies:I regard Turing Principle as more fundamental than the laws of physics which apply to this universe and to the multiverse of which it is just one history. There is no reason to rule out other multiverses with other laws of physics, in which the Turing Principle also holds. This implies we should regard the Omega Point, the completion of ALL the multiverses, as the fundamental entity, and regard each history as “flowing” backwards in time from the Omega Point. According to Aquinas, this is what is meant by “God creates the universe”: He is at the end of all causal chains (causal chains go BACKWARD in time along a history). In each history, life is limited to the available matter and energy, but ALL histories, with ALL material and energies (consistent with the Turing Principle), “flow” backward out of the Omega Point. The Omega Point’s omnipotence is thus absolute.

Tipler replies:Indeed the people near the Omega Point cannot communicate with us, or work miracles on us. But the Omega Point can. The mechanism which He uses to communicate and perform miracles works as follows. The Turing Principle is a final boundary condition on the universe: the universe simply must evolve into the Omega Point. As Deutsch has pointed earlier in this extract, intelligent life must guide the universe into the Omega Point. If we decline to do so, some other intelligent life form will. If necessary, some other intelligent life form will be evolved elsewhere to replace us when we falter. Since the evolution of the universe is chaotic, the history of life is unpredictable in detail, but its broad features are predictable: the universe must evolve into the Omega Point. Thus if a certain historical event, completely unexpected and unpredictable given the state of life at that time, is necessary for the evolution of the universe into the Omega Point, that event will necessarily occur. Such a event, which can be inferred only from the requirement that the Omega Point exist, is what is meant by the “direct action of the Omega Point in the world today;” i.e., this is what is meant by “a miracle”. A miracle is thus an event which is certain given the Omega Point’s existence (its true probability is 1), but if we ignore the Omega Point’s existence, we would think the event exceedingly improbable. For example, evolutionary biologists believe that the evolution of intelligent life is very unlikely to have occurred even once in a closed universe of the maximum size allowed by unitarity. But the evolution of intelligent life is inevitable. Therefore (if the evolutionists are correct), intelligent life is a miracle, created by the direct action of the Omega Point! Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist who was Darwin’s chief 19th century defender in America, argued in his book Darwiniana that the “random” mutations required by Darwinism were merely unpredictable by biological means; they were really (at least in part) directed by God. Gray’s claim is a necessary inference of the Omega Point Theory. The fundamentalist leader William Jennings Bryan and Pope John Paul II announced that they could accept Darwinian evolution provided it is granted that humans qua rational beings are created by God’s direct intervention. (See Edward Larson’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Summer for the Gods, pages 130-31 (Basic Books, 1997), for Bryan’s opinion, and the recent encyclical on evolution for the Pope’s opinion.) The Omega Point Theory says such a miracle — act of God — did in fact take place (if the evolutionists are correct). Similarly, if “random” fluctuations in a certain human’s neurons — interpreted by him or her as a “message from God” — are necessary for the evolution of the universe into the Omega Point, then that brain event would in fact be a message from God. The “I SHALL BE WHAT I SHALL BE”, “heard” by Moses, may indeed have been such a message from God.

Tipler replies:I find it extraordinary that Deutsch would use the opinions of the average religious person as the touchstone of truth. As a Popperian, Deutsch should expect a leading theologian — such as Pannenberg — to be a much better critic of a theological theory than a non-expert. In fact, theologians and ordinary believers have given quite different meanings to the expressions “prayer” and “worshipping God”. By “prayer”, the average person (and Deutsch) means “petitioning a powerful being for a favor”, and by “worshipping”, the average person (and Deutsch) means “fawning on the powerful being in hopes that this fawning will induce him to grant the favor.” But in his circa 200 AD book On Prayer, the first great Christian theologian Origin pointed out that both of these meanings were inappropriate as applied to God. According to Origin, petitionatory prayer is ridiculous because an omniscient God already knows what you want, and an all-loving and omnipotent God will grant it to you automatically if the granting is logically possible, and if the granting will not mess up the cosmic plan (and/or you). Origin pointed out that “prayer” and “worshipping” instead mean “opening oneself to God’s message”. You can’t tell Him anything He doesn’t know, but He can tell you something. Another form of prayer is “thinking about God”, which is what you are doing as you read this. By “religious faith” Deutsch appears to mean “accepting a theory without criticism, and/or not permitting criticism of the theory.” Certainly the people of the far future will be opposed to faith in this sense, for the reason Deutsch gives. But the core assertions of the Judeo-Christian “faith” have always been defended by rational argument. In I Kings 18: 22-39, the prophet Elijah asserted that the question of God’s existence must be resolved by experiment. In I Corinthians 15: 5-20, Paul defended his claim that Jesus rose from the dead by appealing to witnesses. The true core features which a religious person wants in “God” are three: (1) “God” must be able to talk to him/her; (2) “God” must occasionally perform miracles, and most importantly, (3) “God” must be able to resurrect the dead. The Omega Point has these key properties, so it is reasonable to identify the Omega Point and the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God.

Tipler replies:Deutsch’s mile-high cathedral is poor choice for a counter-example, because the cost of such a building relative to our current resources is much too high. Given the fact that no government or commercial mile-high building has yet been built, in spite of the obvious prestige going to the builder — and dictators like Saddam like to build monuments to themselves, and have billions of dollars available for this purpose — it is clear that constructing a mile-high building would be at the very limits of current technology. It might even be beyond us today. But eventually that mile-high cathedral will be built. When he is resurrected, Deutsch’s ancient master builder could do it himself — as an inexpensive spare time hobby.