The Deepakity still hasn’t learned that I don’t read Twi**er, and he’s still tw**ting at me.  I find this out only if I look at my alternative email account (which I do rarely), or someone tells me.  Here’s one that came yesterday:

Deepak is flogging his new book, and he’s tweeting about it all over the place (as if he needs more sales!). If you go to the article he mentioned at SFGate, “Why physics needs God but God doesn’t need physics,” you’ll see a piece that begins like this:

Recently I created a brief storm on Twitter by throwing out questions that physicists can’t answer. Twitter allows you to contact famous physicists directly, and it’s predictable that a handful will become irritated and even riled up if you dare to challenge them. “What happens in physics stays in physics” is their motto, apparently. But I’m on tour for a new book, The Future of God, and for decades, ever since the publication of books like The Tao of Physics and God and the New Physics, it’s become evident that physics can’t escape its meeting with God.

I don’t mean the clash between belief and atheism. What I cover in the book, and what makes some physicists with famous names turn ad hominem and outright abusive, is something else. They are going to need God to solve some fundamental questions about reality. Even more irritating to them, God exposes the current crisis in physics. After promising us that physics will one day have the answer for where the universe came from, what it’s made of, and where human beings belong in the cosmos, today physics may actually be farther away from an answer than ever. Such is the nature of the crisis.

What is physics missing? METAPHYSICS! That is, physics can’t answer the Big Questions™, which to Deepakity include these:

What does it mean to exist?
How do we know things?
What makes reality real?

And Deepakity asserts that answering these questions requires a comity of both physics and metaphysics, for he sees (as does E. O. Wilson) that the answer to the questions “Why am I here?” is a historical one.

Well, fine and dandy, and physicists are working on that. But Deepakity argues that a pure naturalistic answer doesn’t suffice. We need God! And who is this God? Here Chopra begins to morph into Karen Armstrong:

In The Future of God I argue that there is a version of the deity that isn’t a patriarch sitting above the clouds but rather a God defined as the source of consciousness, and as such, the deity isn’t a myth, a matter of faith, a divine Father or Mother–in fact, such a God cannot be captured in words or images. God is pure “meta.” Physics needs such a God in order to find the higher order of answers that will rescue it from crisis.

He then bangs on about the importance of consciousness, and how that’s beyond science, but I needn’t say more, for reader Grania has translated the whole short article into English that the average person can understand. Her translation:

Scientists laugh at me on Twitter when I troll them in my desperate need for attention and validation.

But I don’t care, because I am right because in my head I can imagine that I am right; therefore I am right.

Scientists don’t get metaphysics. But metaphysics is totally science because it has the word “physics” in it. However, science can only answer “how” questions, not “why” questions. Therefore my thoughts are superior to their thoughts.

Now behold my mighty word salad and despair, you scientist you:

“[P]hysics needs God, and if God in fact is the source of consciousness–transcendent, immutable, without beginning or end, timeless, a field of infinite possibilities–it’s obvious that God doesn’t need physics. The beauty of this realization is that this field of infinite possibilities exists in us. It is here, now, and always. It is our very essence.”