Or perhaps one can declare that someday theology must subsume physics if physics is true. I know a lot of LDS who are more comfortable seeing it that way, though I’m a physicist myself.

The truth, sadly, is that we know next to nothing about the physics of God. I can see why traditional Christianity dodges this issue by making Him the complete Other, but I think our view, in addition to having the merit of being more correct, should make us more comfortable with science.

But if that’s true, there’s no sign of it yet in the recurrent evolution debates, which seem to have had some life stirred into them by the recent Sunday School curriculum. I recently had someone wonder out loud how I could question a universal Flood and still believe the Book of Mormon. I don’t think I need to elaborate on my reasons, but his attitude is unfortunate.

However, my original comment wasn’t to compare this to LDS doctrines at all. It was to point out the utter incompatibility of Tipler’s views to “traditional Christianity.”

Yet he sees himself as traditional Christian. If you can stretch “traditional” that far, we fit too.

Tipler’s theories have several points that are much closer to LDS doctrine, such as what might be called a God-collective. (My words, not his.) And “God” is entirely physics bound, a common LDS belief (though a minority view.)

He sees “souls” as the software that runs on our hardware bodies (like I suggested in my fiction post.) He sees the resurrection as recreations of our software in a future VR environment (the omega point) running during the big crunch.

I need to do a post to explain it all better. It actually far more marvelous then it comes across when I explain it half-cocked like this. Everything he’s come up with is, at a minimum, intriguing. And I suspect he’s on track in some areas.

I defintely agree with him that someday physics must subsume theology if theology is true. So I think he’s a trail blazer in that regard showing how it might be done.

Though I think Carl Sagan (of all people!) came up with a better one: Knowledge of good and evil was associated with the evolution of large brains, which causes painful childbirth. “In sorrow shalt thou bear children.”

I do not pretend to know how much of the Garden story is allegory and how much is literal. No LDS theologian I know considers it completely literal. No LDS theologian I know considers it complete allegory. Enlighten me if I’m mistaken on either assertion.

Hardly “traditional Christianity.” Mormons are downright traditional orthodox Christians compared to Tipler’s theology.

On the other hand, I give him credit for out of the box thinking. And his theology is *very* complete. It’s impressive in and of itself, regardless of whether or not it’s “Christian.”

Max, you go it. Now everyone is doing the same with quantum physics. It’s the new magic.

A non-LDS visiting professor for one of my physics classes joked about how political and humanities professors always wanted to co-opt Relativity to their own disciplines, mistaking it as a support for Relativism. He said that if they actually understood Relativity, they would realize that even though there are different frames of reference, the fact that one frame can be translated into another through Lorentz transformations is in fact an assertion of an objective, shared reality. So he insisted that, contrary to many of the non-physics professors suppositions, Relativity discredited their Relativism insofar as they meant that all points of view were equally valid.

Not sure that is really applicable here, but it reminded me, so I thought I’d share.