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A conversation with Frank Tipler

And a guest post: How Intellectuals Should Find God, by Frank Tipler.

I had yet another great conversation with Frank Tipler. As I say at the beginning of the conversation, Frank is one of the thinkers who had a very deep influence on me.

This video is also on YouTube.

Frank Tipler and Giulio Prisco in conversation. January 16, 2025.

I mention Frank frequently in “Irrational Mechanics.” Here’s an excerpt:

“He could well be right and be proven right by future science. Time will tell. Meanwhile, I read his works as visionary, inspiring science fiction on steroids, scientifically plausible enough to suspend disbelief in the possibility that future science might have something hopeful to say about life after death…

I won’t repeat the summary of Tipler’s theory with commentary that I wrote in [Chapter 15 of Prisco 2020], but let me say this again: If I have to choose between Tipler and his critics, I'll take Tipler anytime, at least he is intellectually engaging in an inspiring way.

And to the many bureaucrats of science who attacked and continue to attack him, I’d like to ask this: are your own ideas celebrated in a poem penned by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature? The ideas of Tipler are [Miłosz 1995]. Of course this doesn’t prove him right, but it does show that our collective mind is yearning for new scientific paths to transcendence…”

Frank Tipler and Giulio Prisco in conversation. January 16, 2025.

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We start the conversation discussing Frank’s recent interview with John Horgan and Artificial Intelligence (AI) today and in the far future of the universe, when people and AIs will be one and the same form of intelligence running on the very fabric of space and time.

Then we talked about Frank’s work after the publication of “The Physics of Immortality” (1994), and in particular his 2005 and 2014 papers and his last book “The Physics of Christianity” (2007).

I mostly wanted to discuss Frank’s current ideas on free will and the concept of the cosmological singularity “creating” the universe in some sense. In my book I comment on some related passages in “The Physics of Immortality,” but now Frank has a somewhat different take.

We get to these things near the end of the conversation.

Free will: Frank is persuaded that we live in Everett’s quantum multiverse. The multiverse of many worlds evolves deterministically as a whole, but will happen in a particular branch of the multiverse (world) is unknowable. So what the particular you in this particular world will do is unknowable (non-predetermined). See the chapter “The Problem of Evil and Free Will” in “The Physics of Christianity.

The cosmological singularity creates the universe: Frank sent me a recent unpublished essay, very much related, and gave me permission to include it here. Here it is:


How Intellectuals Should Find God

Frank J. Tipler
Professor of Mathematical Physics
Tulane University

Intellectuals should find God via their intellect, not by their feelings. Yet in the Free Press article “How Intellectuals Found God,” all the people described found God via their feelings, not by their intellect. All the intellectuals discussed claim to be Christians, and Christianity has always insisted that the existence of God can be established by rational argument. The Bible verse usually cited for this belief is Romans 1:20: “For ever since the creation of the universe, God’s invisible nature and attributes, specifically His eternal power and divinity, have been made intelligible and clearly discernible in and through the created universe. So, people are altogether without any justification if they deny the existence of God (my translation).”

St. Paul’s language suggests that proofs for God’s existence would have to be based on physics. St. Thomas Aquinas certainly thought so, basing his Five Ways (five proofs of the existence of God) on Aristotelean physics: the First Way establishing God as the source of all motion and the other four Ways being based on the four types of causes in Aristotelean physics. In Chapter 1 of “Propositions of the Philosophers,” Part II of his Guide for the Perplexed, the greatest of the Jewish theologians, Moses Maimonides, presents essentially the same Aristotelean physics arguments for the existence of God. We no longer accept these arguments, since we now know Aristotelean physics, their starting point, is wrong.

However, in his 1946 book Space and Spirit, the great mathematician Sir Edmund Whittaker, FRS, Sylvester Medalist, and Copley Medalist, pointed out that Aquinas’ Five Ways are just mathematical sequence completion arguments that go through even better in modern physics than they ever did in Aristotelean physics. And so it has turned out.

In 2020, Sir Roger Penrose, FRS, Copley Medalist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his paper proving the existence of a singularity in the future of the universe. What is a singularity?

A singularity is a supernatural Being that created the universe out of nothing, and that controls everything that happens in the universe.

Let’s unpack this sentence in stages. First, “supernatural” literally means “outside of (or above) nature.” This is exactly what a singularity is: it is outside of space and time, so a singularity is outside of nature. Further, the great cosmologist Fred Hoyle emphasized that a singularity is not subject to any logically possible law of physics, so it is also above nature. Now consider what is meant by “creation of the universe out of nothing.”

We first will have to understand more about the singularity whose existence Penrose established. Stephen Hawking immediately applied Penrose’s argument to the past and established that an initial singularity had to exist. Hawking then generalized Penrose’s mathematics and proved that there was one single all-encompassing singularity in the past of the entire universe. My own mentor, the great physicist John A. Wheeler (two of his students, Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne, won Nobel Prizes in Physics) argued for decades that the future singularity established by Penrose should also be all-encompassing: all future histories must end in a single final singularity. I have proven that Wheeler was correct.

So, physics tells us that the entire universe is bounded in the past by a singularity and in the future by a singularity. Outside the universe and the supernatural singularity that forms its boundaries, there is nothing: no space, no time, and no matter. What determines what happens inside the universe, and even whether the universe exists at all? The singularity, of course.

To see this, consider how we reach the initial singularity out of which the universe began. The state of the universe now is determined by the laws of physics and the state of the universe a moment before. The state of the universe a moment before that is determined by the laws of physics and the state of the universe a moment before that, and so on. We thus have Whittaker’s mathematical sequence, and its completion is the initial singularity. This is the modern version of Aquinas’ Second Way, the argument from efficient cause. The initial singularity is the ultimate source of the state of the universe (“initial data” is the technical term) at any subsequent time.

Since there is only one universe, there is only one “state of the universe,” so this has the same unique status as the laws of physics themselves. John A. Wheeler also conjectured that the ultimate laws of physics would have only one solution. If so, the solution and the laws would be equivalent. I have shown that Wheeler’s conjecture is correct. Thus, the initial singularity is the source not only of the initial data, but of the laws of physics themselves. The initial singularity indeed creates the universe and determines everything that happens therein.

What about the final singularity? A fundamental principle of quantum mechanics called “unitarity” says that causality works in either time direction, and must give the same result. So, I could have done the above argument with the final singularity rather than the initial singularity. This would have been the modern version of Aquinas’ Fifth Way, the argument from final cause. Considering creation and determinism, the two singularities are the same singularity. Or if one looks at reality from the quantum mechanical Many-Worlds point of view, one sees that there is a third singularity out there, which connects the initial and final singularities, and obviously establishes the two singularities to be one and the same.

So, using only physics and rational argument, we can establish not only the existence of God, but God’s trinitarian nature. We are well on the way toward Christianity.

Full Christianity requires more steps. Richard Dawkins, in his Open Letter to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and in their God Debate, lists the main ones: Was Jesus really the Son of God (one of the singularities), was he really born of a virgin, did he really rise from the dead on the third day, and are we all resurrected, never to die again? To answer these questions would require a book. Which I’ve written: The Physics of Christianity.

I may be wrong about most of the above, but I am right about one thing: this is how an intellectual should find God.

Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. He is the author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press [with John D. Barrow, FRS]), The Physics of Immortality (Doubleday), and The Physics of Christianity (Doubleday).


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