PHIL BOWERMASTER writes on God and the Singularity. They’re not the same thing, he notes.

I’ve heard talk about the Singularity dismissed as “the rapture for nerds,” but I think that’s mere dismissal, and not very persuasive. It is, instead, an illustration of Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I wrote a song about that, too, once but it wasn’t a hymn!

UPDATE: Frank Tipler emails:

I beg to differ with:

“PHIL BOWERMASTER writes on God and the Singularity. They’re not the same thing, he notes.”

The word “singularity” has several distinct meanings. P.B. is referring to a sudden and radical change in technology. But “singularity” also has a precise mathematical meaning” “points” where quantities diverge to infinity (or are otherwise not defined). The laws of physics tell us that the universe began in a singularity in this precise mathematical sense 13.7 billion years ago. This initial singularity is the Uncaused First Cause. Maimonides and Aquinas defined “God” to be the Uncaused First Cause. Hence, by definition, the Cosmological Singularity is God!

Frank J. Tipler
Professor of Mathematical Physics
Tulane University

And yet when I note that most arguments come down to definitions, people accuse me of being too much of a lawyer . . . .