Transcription
True science points to truth and the evidence of our natural world is pointing strongly to the existence of an all powerful intelligent mind.
Hi there. This is Dr. John Bergsma from the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and the Franciscan University of Stevenville and welcome to Stunned by Scripture. This is a special episode on the idea of the multiverse or the concept that there are many many worlds out there of which ours is just one.
So where does this idea of the multiverse come from? It is essentially an atheistic response to the phenomena that we looked at in an earlier episode that we call cosmic finetuning. Cosmic fine-tuning is this incredible realization that modern science has come across that the numbers and the formulas that govern the behavior of our universe are all finely tuned to allow for the existence of intelligent life in ways that were completely not expected.
As we saw in our earlier episode, the cosmic fine-tuning involves parameters like the speed of light. If the speed of light was only slightly faster than what it is, the universe would be too hot and sterile to support intelligent life. Conversely, if the speed of light was only a little bit smaller than what it is, the universe would be too cold to support life. Similarly, we can talk about the constant of gravitational force. If gravity was only slightly stronger than what it is, the universe would have recolapsed into a great black hole just moments after the big bang. On the other hand, if the force of gravity was a little bit weaker than what it is, we would not have the coalescence of planets and stars and thus we would not have life. So we could go on and on. There's about 40 of these parameters.
And the first major point I want to make is that this phenomena of fine-tuning is not something acknowledged only by Christians or only by religious believers, but it is virtually universally acknowledged even by atheist and secular thinkers. For example, Stephven Hawking, the famous astrophysicist who died a few years ago sadly going to his grave as an atheist, nonetheless recognized the phenomenon of cosmic fine-tuning and conceded that one could accept it as an argument for the existence of God. Hawking writes concerning the what we call the cosmological constants or the numbers that govern the behavior of the universe. He says, "The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been finally adjusted to make possible the development of life." That's on page 125 of his classic, A Brief History of Time.
Well, you can tell by his language seem to be finely adjusted. It implies that there's a fine adjuster out there, that there is an agent, a divinity who has done this adjusting. Hawking continues. He says, "For example, if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded. And it seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the numbers for the constants that would have allowed for the development of any form of intelligent life. Most sets of values would give rise to universes that although they might be very beautiful would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty." And then Hawking goes on to say that this evidence could be uh pointing to a divine purpose in creation and the choice of the laws of science by God. Again, page 125 of a brief history of time. So again, this is not something only recognized by the religious but by the scientific community in general.
So what has been the response of the atheistic part of the scientific community? Well, they have recourse to what is called the multiverse theory. An article that was published in the popular science magazine Discover in April 2008 sums up the situation. The bold headline of this article uh announces science's alternative to an intelligent creator colon the multiverse theory and then the subtitle says our universe is perfectly tailored for life. See they concede that and it continues that may be the work of God or the result of our universe being the result of many. Interesting. You go on in the article and they never once argue or present any evidence or logic against why we shouldn't just accept that there's a god. Instead, the entire article goes into the possibility of many universes existing.
So, the idea is we ought not to be surprised at the finetuning of our universe because there's an infinite number of universes out there. One of them had to have hit upon the right values just by chance. And look, lo and behold, we are in that universe.
Well, what do we make of this kind of reasoning? The first thing I would respond by saying is you better have an infinite multiverse because you need an infinity to deal with the numbers that result from fine-tuning. I'll give just one example. The famous astrophysicist Roger Penrose calculated the degree of order that would be necessary at the beginning of our universe to explain the beauty and the complexity of our cosmos as we observe it today. And Penrose determined that the chances of our universe having the highly ordered state that it did when it emerged from the big bang is a chance of 1 in 10 to the 10th power raised to the power of 123. Again, 10 to the 10th to the 123rd. When you're putting exponents on your exponents, you are dealing with very large numbers. And as Penrose himself points out, this is a number so large that it cannot be written out in standard notation. Even if you used every fundamental particle in the universe to write a zero on. Every proton, every electron has a zero, you could still not write out this number. That's just to write it out. Not even to mention actually conceiving of a number that large. And that is just the degree of order. And we haven't added in all of the other fine-tuning of the constants of gravity of the speed of light. Most of which are greater than 1 in 10^ the 37th. That's the least sensitive of these values. Many of them are more in the order of 1 and 10 to the 55th etc. and you multiply those times the Penrose number and you start to realize how big the problem of cosmic fine-tuning is. So to deal with these huge numbers, you better go big or go home. You need an infinite multiverse or give it up.
And that leads to my second point, which is a truly infinite multiverse is not possible. Most mathematicians and physicists reject actual infinities because actual countable infinities in your equations produce logical and mathematical contradictions that cannot be dealt with. Furthermore, there's a very strong argument against an actual infinite number of multiverses and that is an infinite number of multiverses would have required infinite past time. These universes cannot all be formed simultaneously. It takes some time for them to emerge. And if there's an infinite number of them, that means infinite past time. But infinite past time is not possible because infinite means unfinishable and past means finished. So if you say infinite past time, you are saying an unfinishable finished period of time and that is a self-contradiction, a logical contradiction, the worst kind that you can have in logic and philosophy. So you need an infinite multiverse, but there are strong reasons to believe a true infinite multiverse is not even a logical possibility.
Thirdly, what observational evidence do we have for any universe other than our own? Big fat goose egg. Okay, zero. We have no empirical evidence that another universe exists besides our own. Yes, there are some mathematical models that will allow for additional universes, but no direct observational evidence. To me, this is so ironic because most atheists get into atheism in their adolescence when they are teenagers. And in their teenage years, they read some author who argues against religious people saying something like this. Religious people are silly because they believe in things that cannot be empirically demonstrated. They believe in things that are not present to our five senses. We can't see God. We can't touch God. We can't hear God, so why should we believe in God? It's really a rather simplistic argument for atheism, but many find it appealing. Okay, I'm not going to believe in anything that I can't see, touch, hear, etc. that I can't uh access by my five senses. That's how many begin their journey into atheism. But we find with multiverse theory that you may have begun your trip into atheism that way, but at the end when you find out about cosmic fine-tuning, then you take recourse in a theory that holds to an infinite number of realities existing, none of which are accessible to your five senses. So, who's believing in things that are unproven now? Who's believing in things that can't be detected or can't be sensed? Now you begin by that objection but you end up by accepting everything and anything existing that's not accessible to your senses and not attainable by direct observation.
Fourthly, the infinite multiverse proves too much. If there's truly an infinite number of universes out there, then there must be a universe out there in which Christianity is true. And hey, maybe that's the universe that we're actually in. I think the chances are just as great that we hit the one magic universe where there's life that we also hit the one magic universe where Christianity is true. And anybody could use this. Muslims could use this to argue for the truth of Islam. Buddhists could use this to argue for the truth of Buddhism. And anybody could argue that, hey, we're just in the universe where my worldview happens to be true. So it leads to a kind of chaos of competing world views. The multiverse proves too much.
Fifthly, the most promising mathematical models for the multiverse have already been shown to be wrong. I'll give one example and Father Robert Spitzer talks about this more in a video that we will link in the show notes. But ironically, Stephven Hawking himself, who went to his deathbed, as far as we know, as an atheist, in his last academic paper published before his death, deepixed the most promising mathematical model for the multiverse that was popular up to 2018. This was the fractalike infinite multiverse. If you've ever gone on the internet and looked at a mandler set and drilled down into it and seen that you can go down and down and it just repeats itself, that is an example of a fractal. And whether you go down or whether you go up, the fractal just repeats in in uh great variety and beauty, etc. And so some are trying to model the multiverse on a fractal-like pattern that goes down and up and uh keeps repeating infinitely. But Hawking in his last paper showed that such a multiverse could never give rise to the universe that we exist in which has mathematical properties that are incompatible with such a multiverse. And he also showed that such a multiverse could not produce an infinite number of universes, but only a small number and they would largely be similar to one another. Yes, people are still trying to come up with a mathematical model of the multiverse. I predict they are not going to succeed because as we've already pointed out, a true infinity has problems, logical issues that cannot be resolved.
Sixly, even a multiverse would have to be finely tuned in order to achieve the universe that we observe. This is an extremely important point. There are an infinite number of theoretical multiverses which would never give rise to a universe that can support life. For example, you could have a multiverse that kept on pumping out the same kind of non-lifeup supporting universe one after another indefinitely. Or you could have a multiverse that produced a variety of different universes, but all of them were too crude or too rough to reach the degree of, you might say, German engineering, so to speak, that's required to support life in our universe. The multiverse that we would need would have to actually be designed to carefully search through what we call design space of possible universes systematically searching for the degree of fine-tuning necessary to support life. And a multiverse that would actually search design space at that high resolution would be highly unusual and contrived and would itself be an argument for having been designed, having been intended and set up precisely to do that task of finding a lifeupporting universe. So again, even a multiverse would have to be fine-tuned.
Seventhly, the multiverse is the ultimate violation of a logical and philosophical principle that we call AAM's razor. AAM's razor is a principle used in philosophy that goes back to the middle ages that holds that all things being equal, the simplest explanation is to be preferred. When we look at the finetuning of our universe, the simplest explanation of the phenomena of cosmic finetuning that we observe is the existence of God, an all powerful intelligent creator. In fact, if you study the philosophy of God, the philosophers and theologians will tell you that God is the simplest being. That's a topic for another episode. But now rather than taking the simple explanation that there's an intelligent creator, atheists and other thinkers looking at cosmic fine-tuning reason to the most complex possible explanation for the phenomena that exists, which is namely that maybe all conceivable states of affairs actually have existence somewhere in the reality that we exist. And therefore we should not be surprised that this highly contrived highly unusual state of affairs holds in the world that we actually exist in. So in order to explain one world we have to posit that all possible worlds exist. This is the least economical explanation that one could conceive of. Multiverse theorists are literally willing to believe in anything and everything rather than believe in God. Again, the title of that Discover Magazine article says it all. The infinite multiverse, science's alternative to an intelligent creator. But they're wrong. It's not science's alternative because science is not committed to atheism. It's just atheism's alternative. True science points to truth and the evidence of our natural world is pointing strongly to the existence of an all powerful intelligent mind which we call God.