The (meta)physics of immortality: Death and eternal life in Frank Tipler and Robert Lanza’s theories

Abstract

In an age when the explanatory and consolatory narratives of religion about death seem to lose their appeal, referring to scientific backgrounds to develop new theories about life after death seems an effective alternative. A demonstration of this assumption is given by the success of theoretical physicist Frank J. Tipler’s books The Physics of Immortality (1994) and The Physics of Christianity (2007), and of the ones by famous physician Robert Lanza (in collaboration with the astronomer Bob Berman) Biocentrism (2009) and Beyond Biocentrism (2016). Both Tipler’s Omega Point theory and Lanza’s Biocentricism are based on particular interpretations of the concepts underlying the so-called “new physics”, in particular quantum physics, the physics of time, and the cosmological anthropic principle. These two theories attribute a decisive role to the consciousness and thus to intelligent life in the construction of reality, proposing the hypothesis that life is destined to last forever. This implies that the individual consciousness of every human being, after death, should persist in other forms and contribute to the evolution of the universe.