The Omega Point as Eschaton: Answers to Pannenberg’s

Questions for Scientists

Frank J. Tipler

Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science, Vol. 24, Issue 2 (June 1989), pp. 217–253

Originally published as Frank J. Tipler, “The Omega Point as Eschaton: Answers to Pannenberg’s
Questions for Scientists,” Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science, Vol. 24, Issue 2 (June 1989), pp.
217–253; doi:10.1111/j.1467-9744.1989.tb01112.x. Republished as Chapter 7: “The Omega
Point as Eschaton: Answers to Pannenberg’s Questions to Scientists” in Carol Rausch Albright and Joel
Haugen (editors), Beginning with the End: God, Science, and Wolfhart Pannenberg (Chicago, Ill.: Open
Court Publishing Company, 1997), ISBN: 0812693256, pp. 156–194, from which the subsequent pages
are taken.
The immediate text below is from the Zygon journal’s abstract of the article at <http://www3.
interscience.wiley.com/journal/119442501/abstract>:

Frank J. Tipler is professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana
70118.
This paper was presented at the Second Pannenberg Symposium, held at the Chicago Cen-
ter for Religion and Science, Lutheran School of Theology, 15–17 November 1988. The author
thanks Frank Birtel, Wim Drees, Wolfhart Pannenberg, John Polkinghorne, Robert John Russell,
and Michael Zimmerman for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. This work was
supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant number PHY-86-03130.

KEYWORDS
computer models of the mind and reality • eschatology • grace and the beatific vision • personal
God • physical cosmology • resurrection of the flesh

ABSTRACT
I present an outline of the Omega Point theory, which is a model for an omnipresent, omniscient,
omnipotent, evolving, personal God who is both transcendent to spacetime and immanent in it, and
who exists necessarily. The model is a falsifiable physical theory, deriving its key concepts not from
any religious tradition but from modern physical cosmology and computer science; from scientific
materialism rather than revelation. Four testable predictions of the model are given. The theory
assumes that thinking is a purely physical process of the brain, and that personality dies with the
brain. Nevertheless, I show that the Omega Point theory suggests a future universal resurrection of
the dead very similar to the one predicted in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. The notions of
“grace” and the “beatific vision” appear naturally in the model.