Ultimate Explanations: Comments on Tipler

Extract

Prof. Tipler and his colleague John Barrow, applying the results and methods of contemporary physics, have made a number of suggestions for pushing beyond the limits of science as ordinarily understood, sometimes suggesting that ideas once thought archaic and worthy to be discarded can be revivified in the light of our new theoretical understanding of the world. The role of the observer in quantum mechanics, they suggest, makes at least plausible “idealist” claims of the dependence of matter on mind. Cosmology, they suggest, provides a framework in which the idea of God as evolutionary endpoint of man-in-nature, familiar from Teilhard de Chardin, can be made concrete and plausible at least as a possibility. All of this, admittedly speculative, structure is presented in something like the form of an inverted pyramid, resting at its base on the much less ambitious, if much more secure, methodological posits of the sort grouped together under the (somewhat misleading) rubric of the “Weak Anthropic Principle.”