1. Dobson and John MacArthur fantasize about the downfall of America

Comment #48736 by Firefly on June 8, 2007 at 9:41 pm

If there's no lesbian sex in heaven, then I don't really want to go anyway.

2. Atheism is the absence of belief

Comment #48441 by Firefly on June 8, 2007 at 1:27 am

Wow! It takes guts to write something like this in a newspaper in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and sign your name to it. Bravo!

3. God Exists. A Formula Proves it.

Comment #40048 by Firefly on May 12, 2007 at 8:18 pm

I'd also like to point out that Tipler (along with John D. Barrow) is the one mentioned in The God Delusion as expanding on the anthropic principle in their 1988 book on the subject.

Unfortunately, I've discovered that Tipler has become involved with the ID folks since I was last acquainted with him.

4. God Exists. A Formula Proves it.

Comment #38275 by Firefly on May 7, 2007 at 11:26 am

sheepscarer:

"Let's be honest here - we're wasting our time trying to reason with this kind of believer. The desire to believe transcends all reason. Just watch Derren Brown's trickery in the US where even after he informs the gullibles that he has perfomed a trick on them and is not psychic or a miracle worker they STILL refuse to believe. This is not just in the teeth of all the evidence but the whole digestive system twice around the block and across the road to the brain-donars convention."

This is a complete mis-characterization of Frank Tipler. He is a reputable theoretical physicist who specializes in the future evolution of the universe. As I mentioned earlier, I took one of his courses at Tulane. Although I don't agree with all of his conclusions, I found him to be very open-minded and open to debate and criticism.

I'm sure fundamentalists across the spectrum will use his work for their own purposes and put their own flavor of spin on it, but that's not Tipler's fault.

5. God Exists. A Formula Proves it.

Comment #38268 by Firefly on May 7, 2007 at 11:12 am

Many of you are still jumping to conclusions about Tipler. He is not a creationist or a believer in intelligent design.

Tipler is a theoretical physicist who thinks that general relativity and quantum mechanics make a god-like being possible and probable at the end of the universe (evolved by natural selection from intelligent life in the universe). As misguided as he may be, he is not a fundie. He is not now, nor has he ever, advocated against evolutionary theory or established scientific explanations of the origin and evolution(up to the present time) of the universe.

The part where he goes off on his own deals only with the future evolution of the universe, a field of physics which is still in its infancy. Although he may take his assumptions too far and is probably wrong about many of his conclusions, he still has some interesting theoretical ideas on the future evolution of the universe and is still worth reading.

6. God Exists. A Formula Proves it.

Comment #37939 by Firefly on May 6, 2007 at 10:53 am

I actually took a course with Tipler at Tulane. It was an intensive writing course with his Omega Point Theory as the subject, so I might be able to shed some light on his views for everyone. Please don't base your judgments of him on that news report as it lacked any kind of details about what his theory actually is.

Tipler believes that the singularity at the end of the universe is God. He bases his theory on two main assumptions:

1. We live in a closed universe.

2. Intelligent life will continue to live and evolve throughout the future of the universe(not necessarily human or Earth life)

It's hard to summarize his theory in a short space such as this, and I'll probably butcher it, but basically in his Omega Point Theory, intelligent life evolves to be more and more complex, spreading throughout the entire universe. Eventually, this intelligent life (again, maybe, but not necessarily the descendants of humans) inhabits enough of the universe to actually control it on a large scale. This culminates with intelligent life reaching "perfection" through evolution at the singularity at the end of the universe. This "God" would understand quantum mechanics of the universe so well, that it would be able to trace back the history of every particle in the universe from the Omega Point back to the Big Bang; hence, it would be able to recreate (or resurrect) everyone who ever lived. I was never really clear on why such a being would necessarily choose to do so.

I was actually surprised to see this news report with Tipler still espousing his theory. I took the course with him back in 1999, before the evidence became clear that we do not live in a closed universe, i.e. the rate of expansion of the universe is actually increasing as time goes by. I'm curious as to what his response to this newer evidence is.