Tipler, who is not a crackpot, once published a book called The Physics of Immortality, purporting, on the basis of orthodox physics plus some plausible auxiliary assumptions, to establish the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and altruistic “being” who will one day resurrect everyone who has ever lived to eternal life.

The first step toward that startling conclusion is the assumption that our descendants will not allow all life to come to an end. This in turn will require them to control the evolution of the Universe so that it doesn’t collapse in anything that human beings perceive as a finite amount of time; Tipler argues that they’ll quite plausibly have the technology to do that. But all this future tinkering with the shape of the Universe has consequences that (in a very rough sense) radiate backward and forward through time. From this and some highly technical but more-or-less standard physics, Tipler manages to conclude the existence of an Omega Point — a place where (again speaking roughly) all the information in the Universe is stored. Writing in 1994, Tipler never considered the possibility that the Omega Pont might be located in Mountain View, California. Instead, he stressed that in its omniscience, it’s something very like God.

Not only is the Omega Point omniscient; it’s also ominipotent in the sense that the information located there will allow our descendants to perform feats like resurrecting every one of us from the dead, something that Tipler says they’re sure to do because the cost will be essentially zero. The Omega Point turns out to be not only very like some generic God; it’s very like the Christian God. And the similarities don’t stop there (read Tipler for more).

Alas, Tipler observes in the book that the Omega Point theory also makes a rather specific prediction about the mass of the Higgs boson — it has to be somewhere around 220 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), give or take 10 percent or so. He offers this as a clear test of the theory. And the theory, it seems, is about to fail spectacularly. It looks like the Higgs boson is about to come in at somewhere around 125 GeV.

Tipler’s book had a huge intellectual influence on me, not because of its primary content but because of a tangential remark that triggered my first vision of the Universe as a purely mathematical object, a vision I later learned had been fleshed out by physicists such as Max Tegmark at MIT. Readers of The Big Questions will know that I find this vision extremely satisfying for a great variety of reasons. It provides plausible (to me) answers to a variety of questions that I’d always considered unanswerable, such as “Why is there a Universe in the first place?” Unfortunately, unlike the Omega Point Theory, this is not a vision that can be put to the experimental test.

Tipler’s theory, however, is designed to be put to the test, and if it fails that test (as it’s apparently about to), we should view that as a triumph. Science progresses through predictions so precise that we can know when they’re wrong. Now on to the next theory!

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Hat tip to my architectural consultant MRF.

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I can understand being simultaneously devout and a little hazy on religious history, but I don’t understand how you can be both devout and so hazy about the doctrines of your own church. In the words of Bryan Caplan, who blogged this first:

If people sincerely believed that their eternal fates hinged on their knowledge of religion, their ignorance wouldn’t be rational. If you could save your soul with 40 hours of your time, you’d be mad to watch t.v. instead. Unfortunately for religious believers, this leaves them with two unpalatable options:

Option #1: Deep-down, most religious believers believe that death is the end. (This is consistent with the fact that even the pious mourn their loved ones at funerals, instead of celebrating the good fortune of the deceased)….

Option #2: Most religious believers are so stupid and/or impulsive that they’ll knowingly give up eternal bliss for trivial mortal pleasures. But why then do so many believers show intelligence and self-control in other areas of life?

Now it seems to me that in the cases of the Jews and the Protestants, who were unable to identify Maimonides and Martin Luther, Bryan has overlooked a third option:

Option #3: Religious believers have better things to do than study history.

Unfortunately, this won’t work for the Catholics, for whom the analogous option would be

Option #3′: Religious believers have better things to do than to understand the doctrines of their religion.

This makes no sense, because religious believers should surely think that a) it’s important to have the right beliefs and b) the doctrines of their church contain (perhaps imperfect) information about which beliefs are right. (Otherwise, why subscribe to a religion at all?) So you’d think it would be well worth the while of those believers to acquaint themselves with church doctrine, even if they don’t plan to accept 100% of it uncritically.

Since Bryan has ruled out Option #2 with his “But why then…?”, this, I think, leaves us with Option #1.

(For more on this subject, read Chapter 6 of The Big Questions !)

Note: For all I know, Protestants, Jews and Muslims are as ignorant of their own churches’ doctrines as Catholics are. I can’t tell because the Pew Forum website, with the raw survey data, has been down all night.

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(Go here if you’d rather watch this on a bigger screen.)

I was warned in advance that the audience would be hostile and that I had no hope of winning the final vote. This prediction proved entirely accurate.

Overall, I think we provided good entertainment without pretending that this was any kind of serious intellectual exercise. There are, of course, a few things I’d do differently given the chance, but I won’t indulge the temptation to enumerate them here. Enjoy the show.

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If somebody asked me, How do I get to Heaven, I would tell them that the only way I personally am aware of is faith in Christ, because I believe the New Testament. That’s the only map I got. Somebody says, Well, I got a different map. O.K.! You know what? If it works, I’m not going to argue with you.

Well, that makes sense. If somebody asked me, How do I get to Mount Rushmore, I would tell them that the only way I personally am aware of is Route 90, because I believe in Google Maps. Somebody says, Well, I got a different map. O.K.! You know what, if it works, I’m not going to argue with you. Unless, of course, I actually care whether you make it to Mount Rushmore or not, in which case I might take the trouble to defend my map.

Or maybe I don’t argue because I know Google Maps is sometimes wrong. (Ask me sometime about how it directed me across a field of boulders in Vermont last year.) But the analogue in Huckabee’s case would be knowing that the New Testament is sometimes wrong, and I don’t think he wants to go there. That leaves us to infer that he really doesn’t care whether you get to Heaven or not. That’s certainly his privilege, callous as it may be. But then, a little farther down in the same New Yorker piece, we get this (on why we should subsidize education in poor districts):

To be truly pro-life means that we should be just as much concerned about the child who is eight years old and living under a bridge or in the back seat of a car.

So there we have it. The governor, who surely considers himself truly pro-life, cares passionately about how things turn out for you at age eight (and, we may infer, at eighteen and at eighty) but pretty much not at all about how things turn out for you in the infinitely many years thereafter.

This sounds so implausible that I am forced to conclude he can’t mean a word of what he’s saying. (And as readers of The Big Questions are aware, similar implausiblities convince me that the same is true of very many ostentatiously religious people.)

Is there any way to spin this that makes any sense at all? Let’s do this as a flow chart (click to enlarge):

All paths, it seems to me, end in questions to which the only possible answer is “He doesn’t really mean it.” Is there a path I’m not seeing?

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Dinesh has done this before; I haven’t. So I’m calling on you guys to help me out here by giving me your best arguments—either on Dinesh’s side, so I can practice rebutting them, or on my side, so I can plagiarize them.

Remember that the ultimate question is whether religion makes the world a better place, not whether religion is true. (On the other hand, truth becomes relevant if you’re arguing that religion makes the world a worse place by making people believe false things.) So what have you got for me?

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[Before you tell me that giving up meat is socially beneficial because it holds the price of meat down, remember that low prices are good for buyers only to exactly the same extent that they're bad for sellers. Changing a price does no net good. The rigorous proof of this is part of the theory of pecuniary externalities, on which the Wikipedia entry is uncharacteristically useless.]

Observing Lent or Passover has much in common with things like running around a track: You push yourself to do something hard, you feel good about it, and you leave the world pretty much the way you found it. What a shame that you didn’t push yourself to do something useful instead. I bet you could have learned to feel almost as good about that.

The two tragedies have very different micro foundations. Athletic events are wasteful essentially because they’re arms races; the winner succeeds only by preventing others from succeeding. (I posted about this here and here.) On Passover, by contrast, we can all be equally successful at sticking to the same ridiculous diet. So athletic competitions and religious observance are tragic for fundamentally different reasons, even though they’re tragic in the same way.

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There are roughly 30 million self-professed fundamentalist Christians in the United States. How many of them really believe what they say they do? New evidence suggests that the number is somewhere around 100. Either that or fundamentalism breeds exceptional callousness toward ones’ pets:

Many people in the U.S.—perhaps 20 million to 40 million—believe there will be a Second Coming in their lifetimes, followed by the Rapture. In this event, they say, the righteous will be spirited away to a better place while the godless remain on Earth. But what will become of all the pets?

Bart Centre, 61, a retired retail executive in New Hampshire, says many people are troubled by this question, and he wants to help. He started a service called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets that promises to rescue and care for animals left behind by the saved.

Promoted on the Web as “the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World,” the service has attracted more than 100 clients, who pay $110 for a 10-year contract ($15 for each additional pet.) If the Rapture happens in that time, the pets left behind will have homes—with atheists. Centre has set up a national network of godless humans to carry out the mission. “If you love your pets, I can’t understand how you could not consider this,” he says.

Here is the full article by Mike Di Paola, writing in Business Week.

Edited to add: I shouldn’t have said 30 million fundamentalist Christians; I should have said (at least according to the Business Week article) 30 million who expect the Second Coming and the Rapture in their lifetimes.

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When my sister asked me this question over Thanksgiving dinner, I answered, with the utmost confidence, that it causes (quite instantaneously) an enormous flood. (Note the exact wording. This will be important later.) My sister nodded sagely and said “That’s what I thought, too.” My sister and I had the same mother, you see.

And then she asked, quite innocently, “So. How exactly does that work?”. And I was stunned—absolutely stunned—to realize not only that I had no answer to this question, but that there could not plausibly be an answer. Which somehow had never occurred to me in the half century or so that I’d been harboring this ridiculous notion.

My sister had seen the light just a few weeks earlier when her husband was filling the bathtub. The water level had gotten perilously close to the metal plate, and my sister had frantically cried out that he was about to cause an “enormous flood”. (My mother’s contention that she never taught us any such thing is severely undermined by the fact that my sister and I shared not only the same bizarre misconception, but the same phrase to describe it). Her husband, puzzled, had responded appropriately with something like: “Huh?”. And she’d realized she had no answer.

Readers of The Big Questions will be aware that in my opinion, much religious belief is very like my belief in the mystical power of bathtub hardware. That is, it survives only because it is unexamined. It does not, in other words, run deep. And as a consequence, it doesn’t affect the way most people live their lives—because as soon as it starts interfering with your life (or with your husband’s bath) you set it aside.

Such “beliefs”, it seems to me, do not deserve to be called beliefs at all. In the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “You do not believe; you only believe that you believe”.

I was recently pointed to a wonderful column by the philosopher Jamie Whyte, making the same point so vividly that I rushed to order two of his books from Amazon. As it turns out, they’re both the same book. Crimes Against Logic is the Americanized version of the original and very British Bad Thoughts. I randomly chose to read the British version, and it’s a blast. Whyte lists a dozen logical fallacies so blatant you’d think nobody could ever fall for them, and then gives you multiple examples of people who have fallen for them. Much snarky commentary ensues.

As Whyte documents, people speak a lot of nonsense. (I am one of those people. So are you.) You might be tempted to conclude that people are dumb, but I’m more inclined to conclude that people are busy. We’re all working so hard to be good carpenters, or good taxi drivers, or good teachers, or good parents, that we don’t have the time and energy to think hard about bathtub hardware or God or the consequences of a protective tariff. And most of the time, we don’t suffer for getting this stuff wrong. But every now and then it pays off—in some combination of enlightenment and entertainment—to pull out one of your cherished “beliefs” and ask: “So. How exactly does that work?”

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Although Belief in God in an Age of Science is a very short book, it is too long to review in a single blog post. Fortunately, though, much of the non-lunatic content is concentrated in roughly the first ten pages, so I’ll comment here only on those.

Polkinghorne begins in awe. He is awestruck by the extent to which our Universe seems to have been fine-tuned to support life; this is the subject matter of the much-discussed anthropic cosmological principle. To take just one example (which Polkinghorne does not mention): The very existence of elements other than hydrogen and helium depends on the fact that it’s possible, in the interior of a star, to smoosh three helum atoms together and make a carbon atom; everything else is built from there. But it’s not enough to make that carbon atom; you’ve also got to make it stick together long enough for a series of other complicated reactions to occur. Ordinarily, that doesn’t happen, but now and then it does. And the reason it happens even occasionally is that the carbon atom happens to have an energy level of exactly 7.82 million electron volts. In fact, this energy level was predicted (by Fred Hoyle and Edwin Salpeter) before it was observed, precisely on the basis that without this energy level, there could be no stable carbon, no higher elements, and no you or me.

That energy level is only one of many (apparent) cosmic coincidences that make us possible; change any of the fundamental physical constants (like, say, the strength of gravity) by a little bit in either direction, and the Universe would, as far as we can tell, become completely inhospitable to life. So one does tend to feel that there’s something here that needs explaining.

Some have attempted to dismiss the issue by turning the direction of causality on its head: Here we are, so of course the laws of physics must allow for our existence. Case closed. Douglas Adams, for example, offers this brief and brilliant parable:

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’

But I have some sympathy for Professor Polkinghorne’s refusal to accept this dismissal. Instead, he takes his stand with the philosopher John Leslie:

The fine tuning is evidence, genuine evidence, of the following fact: that God is real, and/or there are many and varied universes.

I agree with that (with the proviso that evidence is not proof). I agree with it to exactly the same extent that I agree with this:

The fine tuning is evidence, genuine evidence of the following fact: Either invisible pink bunny rabbits, created at the time of the Big Bang, fine tuned the physical constants in order to make the Universe hospitable to lettuce, and/or there are many and varied universes.

Or, more succinctly:

The fine tuning is evidence, genuine evidence of the following fact: There are many and varied universes.

Polkinghorne wants to reject this second horn of Leslie’s dilemma, but he manages to do so, I think, only by taking too crabbed a view of what those many and varied Universes might be. First, we have the parallel worlds promised to us by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory; Polkinghorne is absolutely right to say these can’t be the worlds we’re looking for, because they all obey the same basic laws of nature. Higher on what Polkinghorne calls the “scale of bold speculation” we have suggestions from quantum cosmology that Universes are bubbling up all the time as quantum fluctuations in some universal substrate. But again, Polkinghorne is right to say that this only pushes the mystery back a bit—why do those fluctuations obey laws that have even a chance of producing a habitable Universe? Where do the laws come from?

This is the point where Polkinghorne gives up and falls back on God. But it seems to me that he has given up just one level of abstraction too soon. A Universe is fundamentally a mathematical object—it’s an abstract pattern that might or might not contain subpatterns that might or might not be sufficiently complex in just the right away to achieve an awareness of their surroundings, and might or might perceive those surroundings as physical objects. And of course there are many Universes, because there are many mathematical patterns, including, as just one of a dazzling infinity of examples, the Universe in which we live.

That, in any event, is the best explanation I can come up with, and it’s an explanation that feels completely right to me (which admittedly proves nothing). In The Big Questions, I’ve elaborated on what I mean by all this, how it can be true, and why it is entirely consistent with mainstream physics and the stated views of many mainstream physicists.

Now, Professor Polkinghorne might or might not buy this vision, but my point is that he never even contemplates it. He makes the leap to theism by considering and rejecting all of the weakest alternatives, but ignoring the only one that makes sense. This oversight is all the more remarkable because Polkinghorne devotes his closing pages to a rousing defense of the independent reality of mathematical objects, in clear and convincing language that had me wishing I’d written these pages myself.

The rest of the book is far worse. I might come back to that in a later post.

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