Former Atheist Professor Believes in God After Researching Big Bang Theory
- By Emily Murdoch --
- 22 Nov 2014 --
Inspired by scientists who came before him, an American atheist professor has converted to Christianity and is working to prove God is real.
Physicists are typically viewed as very critical of religion because there seems to be a constant war going on between religion and science. However, that does not always turn out to be the case. In New Orleans, a physics professor has dedicated his life to discovering the secrets of our universe – and through the process, has left his atheist beliefs for that of the Christian faith.
Tulane Professor Frank Tipler says that when he first started out his research, he was “the ultimate doubter,” always questioning the information that was given to him, and trying to find out the unbiased truth. However, when he started looking into the history of science as we know it today, he realized that a huge number of those that we consider scientists were also religious theologians. St. Thomas Aquinas is one great example that really inspired Professor Frank Tipler to look into Christianity more closely. As he studied the Big Bang and studied Christianity, he came to a point where he believed completely that only God could have created something out of nothing – in essence, the Big Bang.
Professor Frank Tipler is not the only person to have made this link before; recently, Pope Francis the leader of the Catholic Church released a statement that said that there was no inconsistency with believing in a God, and simultaneously believing in the Big Bang theory. Professor Frank Tipler has now written a book entitled The Physics of Christianity, which includes the fact that he personally came to the realization that the laws of physics “gave me no choice but to be a Christian.” He has now taking things a step further by trying to prove that singularity theory, an idea accepted by scientists, is actually made up of three singularities: a trinity.
5 comments
Emily Murdoch
10:10 amFrank Tipler? Really? When did he ever claim to be an atheist? certainly at no time in his professional career, and absolutely no time in the last 30 years. I know a person who worked with him at Texas, and even then he was talking about using physics to prove god. How desperate are you?
Emily Murdoch
10:10 amYou asked “When did he ever claim to be an atheist?” He explicitly says: “I was an atheist” at the 0:25 mark in the video embedded in the article.
Emily Murdoch
10:10 amYes, he claims to have been one NOW, but he never did earlier in his career, and he’s been pursuing the “physics proves god” malarkey since VERY early in his career..
James Redford">Emily Murdoch
10:10 amHi, Randy Burbach. You state, “When did he [physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler] ever claim to be an atheist? certainly at no time in his professional career, and absolutely no time in the last 30 years.”
Prof. Tipler didn’t set out to physically prove the existence of God. Tipler had been an atheist since the age of 16 years, yet only circa 1998 did he again become a theist due to advancements in the Omega Point cosmology which occurred after the publication of his 1994 book The Physics of Immortality (and Tipler even mentions in said book [p. 305] that he is still an atheist because he didn’t at the time have confirmation for the Omega Point Theory).
Tipler’s first paper on the Omega Point Theory was in 1986 (Frank J. Tipler, “Cosmological Limits on Computation”, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol. 25, No. 6 [June 1986], pp. 617-661). What motivated Tipler’s investigation as to how long life could go on was not religion (indeed, Tipler didn’t even set out to find God), but Prof. Freeman J. Dyson’s paper “Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe” (Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 51, No. 3 [July 1979], pp. 447-460).
Further, in a section entitled “Why I Am Not a Christian” in The Physics of Immortality (p. 310), Tipler wrote, “However, I emphasize again that I do not think Jesus really rose from the dead. I think his body rotted in some grave.” This book was written before Tipler realized what the resurrection mechanism is that Jesus could have used without violating any known laws of physics (and without existing on an emulated level of implementation–in that case the resurrection mechanism would be trivially easy to perform for the society running the emulation).
Concerning the conformance and unique attributes of the Omega Point cosmology with Christianity, see my following article, which details Prof. Tipler’s Omega Point cosmology and the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) correctly describing and unifying all the forces in physics. The Omega Point cosmology demonstrates that the known laws of physics (viz., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics) require that the universe end in the Omega Point: the final cosmological singularity and state of infinite informational capacity having all the unique properties traditionally claimed for God, and of which is a different aspect of the Big Bang initial singularity, i.e., the first cause. The Omega Point cosmology has been published and extensively peer-reviewed in leading physics journals.
James Redford, “The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything”, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), 186 pp., doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708.
Additionally, in the below resource are six sections which contain very informative videos of Prof. Tipler explaining the Omega Point cosmology and the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model TOE. The seventh section therein contains an audio interview of Tipler. I also provide some helpful notes and commentary for some of these videos.
James Redford, “Video of Profs. Frank Tipler and Lawrence Krauss’s Debate at Caltech: Can Physics Prove God and Christianity?”, alt.sci.astro, Message-ID: jghev8tcbv02b6vn3uiq8jmelp7jijluqk[at sign]4ax[period]com , July 30, 2013.
Emily Murdoch
10:10 am‘Where do we go when we die? A simple answer and one from time immemorial, it depends on whether we are good or evil ultimately – A personal take’ –
http://worldinnovationfoundation.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/where-do-we-go-when-we-die-it-depends.html