Tales of the Turing Church
Tales of the Turing Church
Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology
My book “Tales of the Turing Church: Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology” is available for readers to buy on Amazon (Kindle | paperback).
The book explores intersections of science and religion, spirituality and technology, engineering and science fiction, mind and matter, and outlines a new cosmic, transhumanist religion. Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology.
For those who are unable to buy the book at this moment, there’s a free web version.
Of course there are some typos and some things that I should have said better. I am collecting needed changes in a document titled “Tales of the Turing Church: Errata.”
Introduction (excerpt)
This isn’t your grandfather’s religion.
Future science and technology will permit playing with the building blocks of space, time, matter, energy, and life, in ways that we could only call magic and supernatural today.
Someday in the future, you and your loved ones will be resurrected by very advanced science and technology.
Inconceivably advanced intelligences are out there among the stars. Even more God-like beings operate in the fabric of reality underneath spacetime, or beyond spacetime, and control the universe. Future science will allow us to find them, and become like them.
Our descendants in the far future will join the community of God-like beings among the stars and beyond, and use transcendent “divine” technology to resurrect the dead and remake the universe.
Science? Spacetime? Aliens? Future technology? I warned you, this isn’t your grandmother’s religion.
Or isn’t it?
Simplify what I said and reword it as: God exists, controls reality, will resurrect the dead and remake the universe. Sounds familiar? I bet it does. So perhaps this IS the religion of our grandparents, in different words.
God — an absolutely infinite, infinitely far, totally unknowable God — can’t be ruled out by science. In fact, one of my conclusions is that God is undecidable but plausible.
I am a theoretical physicist by training, and a transhumanist. I also believe in God, and in the afterlife. Inconsistent? Some will say so, but I don’t care. Some bureaucrats of philosophy will say all sorts of bad things and criticize me for mixing science and religion, but I really couldn’t give less of a damn. I haven’t written this book for them.
I have written this book for you.
If you are afraid of death, this book is for you. If you are grieving for the loss of a loved one, this book is for you. If you want to reconcile your belief in God with your scientific worldview, this book is for you. If you are a transhumanist who wants to believe in a transcendent reality, this book is for you.
Perhaps you have been told that science has (or will soon have) all the answers, and religion is a fairy tale.
Not so. Current science is very far from having all the answers, but future science and technology will validate and realize all the promises of religion.
My message is that, if you want, you can hope to live again with your loved ones, without abandoning the scientific worldview. If you want, you can believe in the essential core of your religion without betraying science…
Cover image background: Stars over Berlin, from Wikimedia Commons.
