Category: Belief or Not

The real meat of Tipler’s book is his discussion of the nature of God and physico-mathematical proof of God-as-Trinity, thus proof of Christianity.

Tipler argues that God is the Cosmological Singularity of Feynmann-Weinberg Quantum Gravity, and the development of String Theory, Brane-worlds, Smolin Loop Quantum gravity and so forth are actually the evasion of the FACT of the existence of God by modern physics. Physicists can’t handle the real existence of the Singularity as implied by both General Relativity and the Multiverse of quantum theory applied to cosmology, because Tipler believes they’re in denial about the existence of an entity beyond space-time yet described by the laws of physics (the Singularity is Beyond, but connected to our Multiverse.)

So that’s his basic thesis – God is the Singularity pointed to by Quantum Gravity applied to cosmology. And that Singularity manifests, mathematically, as three ‘hypostases’ – the All Pasts Singularity, the All Presents Singularity, and the All Futures Singularity. He equates these with the Holy Spirit, the Son and the Father respectively. Thus God is a Trinity and (Orthodox) Christianity is objectively true.

Next post: my main issue with Tipler’s argument.

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.

As I noted below, the Bible contains history and has a history. During the course of its development certain quite notorious “exaggerations” of specific numbers crept in – famously the +900 year ages of pre-Flood patriarchs, like Methuselah’s 969 years, and the shorter, but still implausible, ages of post-Flood patriarchs. Abraham is said to have lived to 175, Isaac to 180 and Jacob only managed 147. There’s no evidence anyone ever lived so long in all human history, so such figures have to be either deliberately inflated by Biblical scribes or misread from old ancestor-lists. Either option is unacceptable to a believer in “Biblical Inerrancy”, but fits with the principle that God accommodates his message to its listeners and uses their pious scribblings to deliver His Word to those ready to hear.

Less obvious number games give us some exaggerated census figures in the book of “Numbers” – on two separate occasions Moses counts the Israelite men, 20 and over, as 603,550 and 601,730 – implying a much larger populace. By itself such figures aren’t totally absurd, but a moving population of over 2 million would have stood out like a sore thumb in the archaeological record of the Sinai. Tent traces, bones from their flocks, latrines, fireplaces and small personal items tend to last in such dry, dusty conditions, and they exist through archaeological time, but only for an estimated 20,000 or so people at any one time.

Also the Bible itself calls the numbers into question.

Firstly, it claims Israel was to displace 7 much larger nations – and that would’ve crammed the Levant with living traces that just don’t exist. A population of over 14 million just can’t live in that region with Bronze Age technology, and even today the few million in Israel/Palestine is stretching the limit.

Secondly, it gives us a proxy for the number of adult women by its recording of a count of Firstborn males, 1 month old or more, amongst the Israelites – surprisingly low at 22,273. Unless the average number of male children per woman was about 54 plus then clearly someone has messed up the sums.

So what happened? And why did no one notice?

The second is easiest to answer – misplaced piety. A bit of thought caused any rational person to say “there’s something wrong!” but no one wanted to commit “blasphemy”, Jewish or Christian, by questioning what “Moses” wrote. Eventually the Enlightenment brought rationalism to Biblical criticism, but of a rather negative variety that consigned all such Bible stories to the “pious fiction” bin. I want to avoid that trap, myself, so I’d rather believe some scribes got the figures wrong, and misplaced piety meant later scribes let the error stand.

The first question is much harder to reconstruct an answer to because we have no clear idea of what the original figures were. If we accept the 22,273 figure we also have to accept the number of Levites was 22,000 – which might be a bit high. Later in the book the number of male Levites between 30 and 50 is recorded as 8,580, which doesn’t quite fit the 22,000 total either. But if we accept that as an average, then 13 tribes of Israel (12 + Levi) has roughly 286,000 males, and the total populace is roughly double that. Still a bit high in terms of Firstborn… the average woman has had about 26 kids. Since earlier in the Book of Exodus only two mid-wives are mentioned this is a tad high.

Let’s call this one a work in progress. In an associated page I’m going to put down all the genealogical data in the relevant books and that can be the data to work off. Bright ideas welcome!

I’m yet to read Tipler’s “The Physics of Christianity” past Chapter 1, which he offers online at his homepage, but over the past few years he has published a number of articles which give the basic outline of his argument – that Christianity’s basic claims are open to scientific verification or refutation, and case from the demands of physics means Christianity is true, the one true faith in fact. Just how the facts do support Xian dogma requires his Omega Point Theory to interpret them – God is the Singularity at the end of the Universe, in fact at both ends and not just our Universe, but all the Many-Worlds required by quantum theory, as explicated by Everett-Wheeler.

Personally I have problems with that initial claim – that the Everett-Wheeler Multiverse is the ONLY valid interpretation of Quantum Mechanics – as John Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation is as good and requires just one Universe. Also Ashfar’s experiments on Two-Slit interference of light still haven’t been explained away by Many-Worlds theorists.

That being said let’s give a summary of what his modification of his original OPT is now telling us about the Multiverse and Xian dogma.

• Universal acceleration is caused by the Higgs field being in a false vacuum. Reverse baryogenesis, employed by intelligent life, will eventually return it to its ground state allowing cosmic collapse into the Omega Point.
• Jesus performed many of his miracles through the reverse baryogenesis process, even if the miracle is strongly suppressed probabilistically speaking – how? Because the consistency of physics requires it.
• Jesus was born of a Virgin, Mary, as a parthenogenic XX male.
• Jesus was Resurrected via the conversion of his mass-energy into neutrinos, and reformed into a new “spiritual” body.
• This process – macroscopic sphaleron tunnelling – left traces on the Shroud of Turin as an apparent chemical reaction.
• Research on the process, using the Shroud perhaps, will give us the power of reverse baryogenesis – needed to colonise the Universe, but threatening humanity’s continued existence.
• Humanity is also threatened by the rise of human-level robots in the next 50 years. The combination of reverse baryogenesis and androids is the cause of the “Great Tribulation” that Jesus prophesised would proceed his direct intervention.
• ETIs exist, but beyond our Hubble horizon and their use of the macroscopic sphaleron tunnelling process independently of us will collapse the Cosmos.
• SETI will be able to confirm the existence of ETIs by building immense telescopes to image the home-planets of aliens billions of years in the past.

Tipler’s ideas can be found in several documents available online.

Firstly, his basic physics ideas can be found at the Internet Physics PrePrint archive…

Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model as a Theory of Everything

Intelligent Life in Cosmology

Closed Universes With Black Holes But No Event Horizons As a Solution to the Black Hole Information Problem

The Ultimate Future of the Universe, Black Hole Event Horizons, Holography, and the Value of the Cosmological Constant

Genesis: How the Universe Began According to Standard Model Particle Physics

Secondly his arguments with respect to the dogmas of Xianity can be found here…

The Omega Point and Christianity

…plus some associated comments by Wolfhart Pannenberg.

Finally, the first chapter of the new book is available online at Tipler’s webpage…

…which summarises many of his recent comments elsewhere.
I’ll go into more detail in Part 2

The Dead Sea Scrolls pose many mysteries to scholars and interested lay-people alike. A persistent puzzle is the identity of the Teacher of Righteousness (ToR) who has been identified with a huge array of people, most (in)famously John-the-Baptist and Jacob/James, brother of Jesus. Contra those last theories most scholars have thrown up their hands and settle for ToR to remain nameless, mainly because there is no one in the 2nd Century BCE who fits the bill, and retains a name, in the scant records we have from that time.

But the Scrolls themselves present us with quite a few names, most notably Zadok and Judah, as possible names for the ToR – albeit indirectly named via titles like “sons of Zadok” and “sons of Judah” for their followers. A case has been made for Zadok as the ToR and Judah as “the Priest”, a singualr term for the Scroll Community’s leader after the ToR. In that scenario both Zadok and Boethus (mentioned in Talmudic oral histories of the period) were disciples of a certain Antigonus of Socho (the Righteous “Shoot” before the ToR?) and split over religious differences – a pious way of putting the lust for power.

Alternatively the ToR could be Judah, and “Zadok” his precursor. Michael Wise’s controversial book The First Messiah takes this view, though I fear the rest of his case (Judah self-identified as a Messiah) has clouded the merits of the basic identification. Stephen Goranson is another Dead Sea Scrolls scholar who makes the same identification, which he argues in this essay (in pdf format), which argues a few points contra Wise on the identities of other players in the Scrolls drama.

A good lay-person’s review of Wise’s book can be found here, albeit from an religious sceptic point-of-view.

Prof. James Tabor – one of the experts consulted for “The Jesus Family Tomb” documentary – examines Wise’s case in some detail, plus drawing parallels with Jesus’s disciples and the disciples of David Koresh… here.

A transcript of Wise discussing his ideas can be found online here.

In the previous section I noted the apparent non-Orthodox burial tradition that Jesus was buried by his enemies, not his friends as the Gospels would lead us to believe. The Gospel of Peter states:

And then they plucked the nails from the hands of the Lord and laid him upon the earth: and the whole earth was shaken, and there came a great fear on all.

…yet oddly enough the Apostle Paul is quoted as saying (Acts13:29):

When they had carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb.

…[they being the rulers and people of Jerusalem.] This fragment seems even more unlike the tale about Joseph of Arimathea – whom Paul doesn’t mention – and more like an early tradition that avoided the Great Gospel Edit. All the Gospels have been subtly “retouched” by scribal copying over time, harmonising in ways that might cover-up conflicting points-of-view. Some conflicts did escape – John pointedly says Jesus carried his own cross, flatly denying a role to Simon of Cyrene. Also John’s Jesus dies almost serenely, without any great heart-rending cry, nor fantastic signs in the Temple or tombs of Jerusalem. And Mary heads to the tomb on Easter morning without any materials for preparing Jesus’ body, probably because Joseph and Nicodemus had already covered the corpse in “75 pounds” of myrrh and aloes. Again utterly unlike the Synoptics. And there’s no mention of Mary and the other women watching where Jesus was buried, perhaps again because Joseph & Nicodemus are in charge of that too.

Noted Bible Scholar Raymond Brown notes:

A sermon in Acts 13:27-29 reports: “Those who lived in Jerusalem and their rulers…requested Pilate to have him killed; and when they had fulfilled all that was written of him they took him down from the tree and placed him in a tomb.” John 19:31 tells us that the Jews asked Pilate that the legs of the crucified be broken and they be taken away. A variant reading at the end of John 19:38 continues the story: “So they came and took away his body.” Similarly in Gpet 6:21 we read, “And then they [the Jews] drew out the nails from the hands of the Lord and placed him on the earth.” Justin (Dialogue 97.1) phrases the burial thus: “For the Lord too remained on the tree almost until evening [hespera], and towards evening they buried him” – in a chapter where the context suggests that “they” may be the Jewish opponents of Jesus rather than his disciples.

[Reference… Raymond Edward Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: a Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels (New York: Doubleday, 1994), pp. 1218-1219. From Pete Kirby’s Internet essay on the Empty Tomb, conclusions my own.]

In the end what we might be seeing is how successive Gospels have “written in” Joseph into the fold of believers in JC. In Mark Joseph was one of the “bad guys”, the Sanhedrin, who buried JC out of pious commitment to a Deuteronomic command. He becomes more ambiguous in Matthew and Luke, and is made a secret disciple in John. Why? Notice also that John studiously avoids making Mary, and the other women, witnesses and burial attendants at the tomb – the men give JC a royal burial (75 pounds of aromatics remember.) Perhaps in the original version the first burial is a hurried emergency burial because the end of the day is approaching and to not break Deuteronomy‘s command (no bodies on trees overnight) Joseph, and the burial team (implied because the dead thieves were being interred too), had to commandeer an empty tomb to store the bodies for later disposal, perhaps the next day in a mass grave with a bucket of lime to sanitise the decaying remains.

If Mary had seen the burial, and not the next-day removal, she may well have come back to the other disciples with news of an empty tomb – and no one would ever know any different. In Mark and Matthew the disciples run off and are “told” via angelic vision to go to Galilee. In Peter and, perhaps, John 20, the disciples retreat to Galilee in fear for their lives. There, after an indeterminate time, they experience the Risen Jesus on a hill-top (Matthew 28: 16,17) – at least some of them do – and return to Jerusalem with an “infectious vision” convincing Jesus’ Brother James and eventually Saul/Paul.

To me, on my agnostic days, that seems like enough of a trigger, at least a decent throw-away line when arguing with Believers, that by the time anyone, enemy or friend, thought to check for an Empty Tomb or find JC’s body there was nothing to be found. However that might not be enough to explain how that Resurrection Belief kicked off. But what kind of Resurrection is it that gets this reaction:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.

All four canonical Gospels tell us that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus out of personal piety and secret discipleship. Evangelists of the present day use the Empty Tomb as proof of a bodily resurrection of Jesus – but what if the Tomb burial tradition is wrong? Other traditions exist – here they are…

The Gospel of Mark 15:42-47. It was Preparation Day (that is, the day before the Sabbath). So as evening approached, Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body. Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died. When he learned from the centurion that it was so, he gave the body to Joseph. So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid.

The Gospel of Peter 21-34. And then they plucked the nails from the hands of the Lord and laid him upon the earth: and the whole earth was shaken, and there came a great fear on all. Then the sun shone forth, and it was found to be the ninth hour. And the Jews rejoiced, and gave his body unto Joseph to bury it, because he had beheld all the good things which he did. And he took the Lord and washed him and wrapped him in linen and brought him unto his own sepulchre, which is called the Garden of Joseph. Then the Jews and the elders and the priests, when they perceived how great evil they had done themselves, began to lament and to say: Woe unto our sins: the judgement and the end of Jerusalem is drawn nigh. But I with my fellows was in grief, and we were wounded in our minds and would have hid ourselves; for we were sought after by them as malefactors, and as thinking to set the temple on fire. And beside all these things we were fasting, and we sat mourning and weeping night and day until the Sabbath. But the scribes and Pharisees and elders gathered one with another, for they had heard that all the people were murmuring and beating their breasts, saying: If these very great signs have come to pass at his death, behold righteous he was. And the elders were afraid and came unto Pilate, entreating him and saying: Give us soldiers that we (or they) may watch his sepulchre for three days, lest his disciples come and steal him away and the people suppose that he is risen from the dead, and do us hurt. And Pilate gave them Petronius the centurion with soldiers to watch the sepulchre; and the elders and scribes came with them unto the tomb, and when they had rolled a great stone to keep out (al. together with) the centurion and the soldiers, then all that were there together set it upon the door of the tomb; and plastered thereon seven seals; and they pitched a tent there and kept watch. And early in the morning as the Sabbath dawned, there came a multitude from Jerusalem and the region roundabout to see the sepulchre that had been sealed.

The Secret Book of James. The Lord answered and said: “What is your merit when you do the will of the Father if it is not given to you by him as a gift, while you are tempted by Satan? But if you are oppressed by Satan and are persecuted and you do the Father’s will, I say that he will love you and will make you equal with me and will consider that you have become beloved through his providence according to your free choice. Will you not cease, then, being lovers of the flesh and being afraid of sufferings? Or do you not know that you have not yet been mistreated and have not yet been accused unjustly, nor have you yet been shut up in prison, nor have you yet been condemned lawlessly, nor have you yet been crucified without reason, nor have you yet been buried in the sand, as was I myself, by the evil one? Do you dare to spare the flesh, you for whom the spirit is an encircling wall? If you contemplate the world, how long it is before you and also how long it is after you, you will find that your life is one single day and your sufferings, one single hour. For the good will not enter the world. Scorn death, therefore, and take concern for life. Remember my cross and my death and you will live.”

Epistula Apostolorum (Ethiopic). He of whom we are witnesses we know as the one crucified in the days of Pontius Pilate and of the prince Archelaus, who was crucified between two thieves and was taken down from the wood of the cross together with them, and was buried in the place called [the place of the skull], to which three women came, Sarah, Martha, and Mary Magdalene. They carried ointment to pour out upon his body, weeping and mourning over what had happened. And the approached the tomb and found the stone where it had been rolled away from the tomb, and they opened the door and did not find his body.

The main things to notice:

In the Gospel of Peter Jesus’ enemies took him down from the Cross, not Joseph. In fact the highlighted Joseph segment seems to interrupt the story and is possibly an interpolation by an Orthodox scribe.

In The Secret Book of James Jesus is said to have been buried in sand, contradicting the honorable tomb burial in Mark.

In the Epistula Jesus is taken off the Cross with the thieves and by implication buried with them. This would grossly contradict the Orthodox version of events.

There’s two more versions of the tradition, but they’re in some surprising places. More next time.

J.B.S.Haldane was a biologist at the forefront of his field in the 1920s & 30s, and like a lot of scientists then, a Marxist. But he wasn’t the usual duckspeak Party Marxist with nothing original to say. Here’s one little essay about JC…

IF JESUS LIVED TODAY

Most of my readers are, at least nominally, Christian. I am not. I can say to them, as Blake did :

* The vision of Christ which thou dost see
* Is my vision’s chiefest enemy.
* Yours is the healer of mankind,
* Mine speaks in parables to the blind.

I see Jesus as a man whose perception of spiritual facts was extraordinarily intense. He was far more intelligent, as appears from his sayings, than his disciples They misinterpreted his words, and as we only see him through their eyes we cannot know how he would appear to our own.

If Jesus were born in our time of a poor Jewish mother in capitalist Europe or North America he would receive a far wider education than 1900 years ago, when his reading was probably confined to the law and the prophets. Perhaps it was for this reason that his general ideas were always stated, either in parables drawn from everyday life, or in the terminology of religion. Today he could talk in terms of science, psychology, an economics. So quite possibly we should not think him primarily as a religious leader at all. In his own time he tried to simplify religion, and was accused of blasphemy. Today most religious people would probably regard him as an infidel.

Most of us would first learn of his existence through the Press. A reporter sent down to investigate a story of unprofessional cure of mental diseases writes a curious account of it, The healer is of an unusual type. So far from being sanctimonious, he is a confirmed beer-drinker. Indeed there is a story about that he miraculously put back all the pub clocks in Whitechapel at closing time. He has a keen sense of humour, and refuses to give a straight answer to religious queries. `Come and live with me,’ he tells the reporter, `if you want to find out about God.’ `I almost took him at his word,’ adds the reporter.

Later the police begin to take notice. This man is always talking about the coming revolution, sometimes in very violent terms. But it is difficult to pin him down. At one moment he says that he is an enemy of peace and has come to stir up disorder at another that the revolution must take place in the mind. And his attitude to the rich is surprising in a revolutionary. He wants to abolish wealth, not because rich men are wicked, but because they are unhappy. `It’s easier for a motor lorry to get through a keyhole than for a rich man to enjoy life,’ he is reported to have said. The Communists hate him even more than the police and the parsons.

After two or three years he becomes an intolerable nuisance to the authorities. His followers have been making disturbances in churches and public places. The movement appears to be growing. Crucifixion is out of date. A trial offers too great an opportunity for publicity. A simple method is available for imprisoning an innocent man for life without trial. It is effectively used today by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Canada against their opponents. The man has seen visions. A witness says that he stated that he was one with God. Another asserts that he stated that he could rebuild the law courts in three days. Two doctors, already jealous of his unprofessional healing activities, certify him insane. A devoted police agent who has actually managed to become treasurer of the Man’s movement smoothes the way for the arrest. His suicide shortly afterwards merely proves that this maniac has spread insanity around him, or so the Press affirms. Soon afterwards it is announced that the madman has died in an asylum. The plain man breathes a sigh of relief, and turns to the financial column of the Press. He is one of the many who, in the words of the Man, keep their hearts in their safe deposit.

But the affair is not over. Some of the Man’s followers say that he is still with them. Others are beginning to spread his doctrines. They say that he has revolutionised psychology, and made it as practical as chemistry. He has taught the art of happiness. You cannot love yourself unless you love your neighbour first. If you find fault with him it is a sign that you are really angry with yourself. Some of these men and women disciples certainly seem to exhibit a wholeness of personality which is something fresh in the world. It often lands them in prison, but an increasing section of the public is attracted by their ideas, and still more by their manner of life. The revolutionary idea is in the air that the rich are a set of mutts who do not know how to enjoy life. A few rich men and women actually give up their fortunes and claim to be tasting happiness for the first time. But another section of disciples have different ideas. They stress the mystical side of their master’s teaching and his remarkable cures of disease. The authorities encourage them. This will only be another new religion, and the State is not afraid of religions. In spite of occasional aberrations, religion makes for stable government.

The future is unknown. Has the Man started the real world revolution, or only another religion ? The world’s future depends on the answer.

(Published in a 1932 collection of essays entitled The Inequality of Man.)

…found online at Haldane on Life, Death and Jesus.