Frank Tipler’s latest book “The Physics of Christianity” makes a basic claim: Christianity is – potentially – a branch of physics and thus testable. Tipler defines miracles, not as violations of physics, but exemplars – miracles are unlikely, but spiritually significant natural events. They NEVER violate the laws of physics, they DO violate our human level expectations.
So what does Tipler claim? There’s a few historical claims, but they’re pretty minor. Here’s a few:
(1) He makes a case for Jesus’ Virgin Birth as being due to a parthenogenically produced diploid oocyte. Which isn’t that hard to induce in humans, apparently. He was an XX, thus no Y chromosome was required. What makes his case special – XX males aren’t too rare – was the transfer of all the male genes from the Y chromosomes of Mary’s lineage to the X chromosome – something that happens perhaps once in every 20,000 women per gene. For all the Y genes the odds are massively unlikely – thus miraculous by Tipler’s definition of a miracle.
(2) A supernova in Andromeda was THE Star of Bethlehem. He makes a pretty good case for this scenario and is well aware of all the competing theories, incorporating a few into the bigger picture.
(3) Modern day miracles of conversion are explicable by ‘natural causes’ (i.e. God’s laws.) Thus casting out of demons, visions of Jesus, raising the dead and miracle healing – all
have physical explanations. Respectively: ‘demons’ are like computer viruses of the mind (think: MPD), and exorcism is like a virus quarantine; visions are information from God; the ‘dead’ are resuscitated from suspended animation, not restored from rotted flesh (though see later), and healing is via mind-body interaction, otherwise known as the ‘placebo effect’, but induced by prayer and faith.
(4) The Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oveido possibly preserve real evidence of Christ’s resurrection via ‘reverse baryogenesis’ turning his baryons into neutrinos, thus uploading him into God. Both the Resurrection and Mary’s Assumption might also be testable by particle tracks in the rocks that formed the Holy Sepulchre and Mary’s Tomb.
And so on…
The big stuff is a bit more involved. Coming soon in my next post.
A first pass problem with claim (4) is that Tipler focuses a lot on the theories of Garza-Valdez on how a bioplastic film wrapping the threads of the Shroud’s cloth has caused the C-14 dating of the Shroud to be in error. Ray Rogers, whose work Tipler mentions briefly, strongly criticised Garza-Valdez’s theories and Rogers’s work on the C-14 sample area has made the bioplastic theory an irrelevance. The C-14 sample area was material different in chemistry and age to the rest of the Shroud – it was a Medieval patch, woven into the main body of fabric using invisible reweaving. Why it was chosen rather than random bits of the Shroud is unknown, but it has confused the scientific picture of the Shroud utterly.
The problem with the shroud of Turin is that it is a fraud. You can tell its a fraud just by looking at it. The image on the shroud depicts a face with narrow, northern European facial features. Christ, on the other hand, was of middle-eastern decent and, thus, would have typical Arab facial features. Also, all of the Roman accounts of Christ was that he was indistinguishable in physical appearance from his followers, who were all Arabs (after all the “bible lands” are in the middle-east).
Hense, the shroud of Turin is an obvious fraud.
It is notable that a scientist of Tipler’s standing would overlook such an obvious detail and consider the shroud of Turin to be real.
Of course, the whole “Physics of Christianity” suggests to me that Frank Tipler has gone around the bend, much like Sir Fred Hoyle in his later years. This is not uncommon for renouned scientists, by the way.