Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The Physics of Christianity

Well, Frank Tipler's latest book has just been published, and one can find the opening chapter reproduced here. It's hilarious stuff. Lawrence Krauss reviews the book in last week's New Scientist:

As a collection of half-truths and exaggerations, I am tempted to describe Tipler's new book as nonsense - but that would be unfair to the concept of nonsense. It is far more dangerous than mere nonsense, because Tipler's reasonable descriptions of various aspects of modern physics, combined with his respectable research pedigree, give the persuasive illusion that he is describing what the laws of physics imply. He is not.

For example, he argues that the resurrection of Jesus occurred when the atoms in his body spontaneously decayed into neutrinos and antineutrinos, which later converted back into atoms to reconstitute him. Here Tipler invokes the fact that within the standard model of particle physics the decay of protons and neutrons is possible, although he recognises that such decay would likely take 50 to 100 orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe: thus, the probability of such an occurrence is essentially zero. However, using a strange "Christian" version of the anthropic principle, a subject he once co-authored a book about, he then claims that without Jesus's resurrection, our universe could not exist - therefore, when one convolves this requirement with the almost, but not exactly zero, a priori probability, the net result is a near certainty.

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