The Calling Card

Frank Tipler, Professor of Mathematical Physics. “The Physics of Immortality” 1994 We humans have a proclivity to believe we are right even when we are wrong. We find it so easy to bypass reason and convince ourselves black is white or white is black, especially when it comes to getting our own way. “One more drink and I’ll be alright to drive.” “One bar of chocolate won’t ruin my diet.” “I didn’t take her husband, that marriage was on the rocks anyway.” Where the secret designs of the heart are concerned we can all convince ourselves that what we believe or do is right. We hate to be proved wrong in an argument or debate, and we can become instant experts on any subject to prove our point. Politics, football, the weather, the stock market, medicine, education, religion, science…I met a man once who thought he was such an expert on science and religion that he called time on God. I was in a pub with some friends, it was getting late and it was also my round, so I headed briskly to the bar. As I was being served I couldn’t help catching the tail end of a heated debate about religion taking place between two men standing at the bar. The man on my right, dressed in a tweed jacket and Trilby, suddenly banged his drink down on the bar and announced with the authority of a coroner, “God is dead! Science has put an end to him and anyone who still believes in him wants his head looking at!” Just then the barman rang a bell and called time at the bar and there was the usual scramble for the last refill. A few moments later at our table, the barman came by collecting empties. Curious about who the man in the Trilby was, thinking maybe he was a professor from the local university, I asked the barman. “No, he owns a tobacconist shop in the town.” Here was an intelligent man, who sold tobacco for a living, but with no formal qualifications in Theology or Th eoretical Physics, making the stupendous claim…“Science has done away with God!” From where did he get such monumental “facts”? Th e answer is, the same places from which many of us feed our prejudices and pre-conceived ideas. Hearsay; the popular media; the man in the street; all feeding us untruths and half truths which we readily consume, and then use to construct in our minds our world-paradigm, a framework of belief which we want to be true as opposed what is actually true. Th is world-paradigm, even when not based on reality, profoundly aff ects how we relate to life and other people. As we saw in the last chapter, the world-paradigm of the atheist is worlds apart from that of those who believe in God. But, logically, only one of them is right. Only one of them refl ects the universe the way it is in reality. The other is a complete fantasy.