Tipler on God and Hume
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
Abstract
God: The Scientists’ Fad for God
Frank J Tipler (Department of Physics, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, USA) notes that it has become a foolish modern fashion of scientists to speak of God in their popular science books:
- Leon Lederman, a Nobel prizewinner, called his book The God Particle;
- cosmologist George Smoot says that finding the fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation is like “seeing God;”
- Stephen Hawking says the aim of science is knowledge of the “Mind of God."
It is all very trendy but lousy science, especially lousy popular science because these statements dupe some ordinary folk into thinking scientists are finding the personal God they have been taught at school to believe in.
It is not true. All of them are metaphors drawing upon the idea that God is supposedly the biggest and most important thing conceivable to suggest how important some of these discoveries in science are—but they are not admitting that anything approaching the Christian God has been discovered anywhere.
Lederman calls the Higgs boson the “God Particle” because it is the most important particle in particle physics today. Smoot refers to the awesome feeling of looking back in time to the beginning of the universe by dicovering the variations in the cosmic background radiation. Hawking is saying that in the Theory of Everything (TOE) is to be found the most fundamental of knowledge. All three of them—like most scientists of this century—are agnostics or atheists. None of them believe a “Person” created the universe.
Crucifixers, most of whom must be intelligent enough to realise that these are metaphors and not declarations of the discovery of God, try to use them to persuade their flocks that missionaries and ministers were right all along. They cite the words of the scientists themselves and also claim that their discoveries prove that there is a God lurking in the gaps in our knowledge of fundamental physics. The most basic physical laws, the biblicists say, are so strange and contrary to experience that God is just as good an explanation of them.
The singularity theorems imply the universe had an infinite density at some time in the past. Believers conclude the Einstein equations are wrong, and something more basic underlies them. That might be true but what “underlies them” does not have to be God. It could mean singularities are a new kind of exotic substance, just as real as matter, but different. It could mean that normal time does not apply in cosmology. In other timeframes, the singularities recede to infinite time.
Whatever the ultimate foundation of reality, to be called “God” rather than Nature or the Cosmos, it has to be personal in some meaningful sense. An abstract God going about His business unaware of what He is doing and unaware of the consequences of His actions is simply another principle of Nature to be discovered by science.
Hume: Miracles and Mystical Experience
Crucifixers decry scientists for rejecting miracles, and mystical experience, as proof of God.
Yet we must weigh the overwhelming observational evidence that dead people do not return to life against the central miracle of Christianity, the claim that Jesus appeared after his death. Believers accuse those like the philosopher, Hume, who asserted rational principles like this, of being intransigent sceptics who deny any evidence contradicting their expectations. The irrationalists conclude by telling scientists rejection of miracle is the antithesis of being open to the truth and uncongenial to scientific habits of thought!
Christians want people to be gullible and to believe what every ounce of their experience tells them is impossible—that a man dead and decaying rose up and walked and talked and ate and drank. Once they believe that, they will believe anything, and be enslaved by the priesthood. It is now well known that the human sensory system can misinterpret unfamiliar stimuli. So Hume, as a rational man, sure enough would not have believed even his own vision of a corpse acting like a living man. He would have sought reasons why his senses fooled him. Every Christian today does the same in practice, otherwise they would be worshipping every madman who said he was the incarnation of Napoleon.
As regards mystical experience, it is not an awareness of God’s presence, but a feeling of the wondrous unity of Nature. Timothy Ferris thinks it is an error of the function of the brain that allows us to distinguish ourselves as individual within the completeness of Nature. For the survival and evolution of animals it was necessary if the animal was to consider itself above whatever it was about to eat. For a thinking but destructive creature, like a human being, there might now be a reason for us to try to disengage this mental function, whenever we can, to make us appreciate the kinunity of the world in which we live. To imagine that our experience was that of another world altogether would be as counter productive as it always has been.
According to Tipler, Hume would advise us regarding books purporting to offer us “truth”:
If we take to hand any volume of divinity or metaphysics, let us ask, “Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?”
No.
“Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?”
No.
“Commit it, then, to the flames, for it is nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
Moses and Exodus
