Resurrection Resurrected by Science

Dr. Sarfaraz K Niazi (e-mail: niazi@niazi.com)

Science and religion have long been at odds with each other on the concept of God and the theory of resurrection. It is rare to come across proclamation of the unification of science and religion. Now a remarkable new theory proclaims theology as a branch of physics and that physicists can infer by calculation the existence of God and the likelihood of the resurrection of the dead to eternal life in exactly the same way as physicists calculate the properties of electrons. A new runaway best-seller, The Physics of Immortality (Anchor Books Doubleday, New York, 1995) by Frank J Tippler, a renowned cosmologist and physicist and a former atheist, breaks the traditional mould of science and religion confrontation as consolidated in the affirmation of the highly revered US National Academy of Science on 25 August 1988: "Religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstanding of both scientific theory and religious belief." What Tippler concludes in this 500-page book filled with PhD-level physics is that God actually exists and that we will all be resurrected one day totally in line with Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought.

The systematic development of thoughts in this book, though sends readers into spin at times, proves that theology is actually a branch of physics, most appropriately, cosmology, and that all those who conduct research in religion and those who propagate it (our mullahs please take a note) must have a PhD in particle physics. To know God you must first know matter since God resides in the heart of every molecule, is the common dictum here. The arguments turn extremely complex from here on and require great depth of knowledge about both science and religion to understand them. "The key concepts of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition are now scientific concepts. From the physics point of view, theology is nothing but physical cosmology based on the assumption that life as a whole is immortal," concludes the author.

Planet Earth is doomed and life will vanish between 900 million and 1.5 billion years from now because of warming up of sun. Life must leave this planet and the author predicts, it will and engulf the entire universe. Man will be responsible for it by sending out robots to outer space that will, from the coding of DNA, reconstruct life at other planets. To do so we will need intelligent machines, machines that behave like humans. Can this be achieved? The author contradicts many negative assessments of this by previous authors. He concludes that to mimic human brain we need a machine with a memory of 1015 bits and speed of 10 tetraflops (a flop is floating point operation per second; a tetraflop is a trillion flops; the desk top computer of today does about a few million flops). Both of these ranges are easily achievable within a few years.

To act as humans, the machines must pass the famous Turing Test, i.e., if you can converse with them consistently and continuously, they are behaving like humans because over a period of time you will find that their responses give them a personalityEternal Return and Heat Death, have kept these ideas from coming to fruition. The Eternal Return says that all events repeat exactly and periodically and that includes the collapse and expansion of universe and the Heat Death talks about a state of uniform temperature throughout universe halting all life. The author shows through complicated mathematical details that both of these theories are no longer acceptable. The quality and quantity of life are continually getting better and not worse as these theories would predict.

Life can go on forever is the main core of the Omega Point Theory, the title chosen by the author to conclude all arguments. To appreciate this theory, we must first understand what how the physicists interpret "life." The "life" is a form of information processing, and the human mind

The Omega Point Theory predicts that life will eventually engulf the entire universe, some time after the Earth is destroyed (see the classic Penrose diagram) and the universe will converge to a single point, not physically but in its information base. The distinction between living (as we define) and non-living objects will be removed and the processing of knowledge will reach a stage where machines would be able to outdo the limited power of "living" object to process and synthesise. We will then be able to converge all information to an Omega Point, the final destiny of life, what the author calls the omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscience point

The duration of Omega Point is what we call eternity. The universal mind at the Omega Point is a persona

The real importance of the Omega Point Theory is that it provides a plausible physical mechanism for a universal resurrection, an idea that has long been inconsistent with the accepted physics of the day for a past two thousand years. Many twentieth-century theologians and scientists were mistaken in their attempt to combine science and religion concluding that the two disciplines deal with different realms of human experience: religion is primarily concerned with moral questions, while science deals with facts. Morality is based on imperative sentences ("You ought to do this"), the science on declarative sentences ("The sky is blue"). However, the self-interest of human beings as the core of all religions is derived from declarative, not imperative, sentences such as in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic teachings ("Though shalt not killbecause you'll go to Hell if you do!") and in the Hindu-Buddhist tradition, ("Though shalt not killbecause you'll be reborn as a cockroach if you do!"). Hell, the omnipotent God and reincarnation are all declarative in value (scientific, if you will). Religion is far more than theology, which the scientists now believe has a provable basis.

So, according to the physics of today, should we pray? Since God is omniscient, He knows exactly what you are going to say before you say, so you are not sending a message to God it is already there. It is the message coming from Him that we need to pray to get, a revival of belief that He exists, that He loves us, that events will eventually work out for the best and that we all will one day be resurrected to live forever with Him.

Theology is nothing but physical cosmology based on the assumption that life as a whole is immortal. A consequence of this assumption is the resurrection of everyone who has ever lived to eternal life. Physics has now absorbed theology; the divorce between science and religion, between reason and emotion, is over. Contradicting Steven Weinberg, the most revered physicist, science can now offer precisely the consolations in facing death that religions offer. Religion is now part of science.