Another consequence of Stephen Hawking’s recantation of his belief that black holes dissipate scrambled energy with little retention of its previous information content is that Frank J. Tipler’s cosmology is rendered irrelevant.

Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality describes an expanding network of social interaction – a virtual simulation of interacting consciousness – proceeding infinitely faster by virtue of a collapsing universe. His justification for the collapsing universe rests on an argument that Hawking’s previous concept of a black hole, given the infinite time of an ever-expanding universe, would eventually dissipate and destroy all the information that entered it, violating a law of quantum physics, that information can never be destroyed. Thus, his cosmology and the attendant worldview is shattered, based on a faulty assumption.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, if he were alive, would probably not care all that much that Tipler’s empirical, entropic, and energetic explanation for the Omega Point – and the near immortality conveyed unto humanity by it – had lost its empirical justification. After all, his was the true power of faith, the real and observable merging into a projection of the ideal, and such a devotion is not easily shaken.

In any case, Teilhard’s philosophy had already come near heresy (even after surviving a swipe by Stephen Jay Gould, whose demonstration of one mechanism misinterpreted by Teilhard did not detract from his narrative), and a virtual existence in an ever-shrinking universe for whose inhabitants perceived time gets faster and faster, because if anything of the Catholic visions of heaven and hell held true in this scenario – as it is likely to suppose considering Tipler’s and Teilhard’s devotional backgrounds – such a vision of endless ennui scares me back to wanting to be in a state of grace.

Obviously Teilhard and Tipler both saw the connections between their faith and their empirical observations and through such devotion inspired a school of thought, response, counter-response, waves and eddies generated throughout subsequent time that eventually wash over far later thoughts, shaping them. The connection between Teilhard and Tipler – which is to say, the consilience between belief and empiricism –is one that has manifested itself in me. (Manifested, as I’m sure it has for many others.)

My beliefs cannot be classified as heresy, however, speaking as I am from outside the Church. I am an apostate, which is somewhat worse than a heretic, but that doesn’t necessarily prevent my views from being entirely consilient with the Church’s. Unless, of course, the definition of apostate means that any argument in support of these consilient views is wrong by virtue of my not believing it.