Why Some Scientists Embrace the ‘Multiverse’

Last week, in Nice, France, I was privileged to participate along with 30 scholars, mostly scientists and mathematicians, in a conference on the question of whether the universe was designed, or at least fine-tuned, to make life, especially intelligent life. Participants — from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia, among other American and European universities — included believers in God, agonistics, and atheists.

It was clear that the scientific consensus was that, at the very least, the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life. It appears that we live in a “Goldilocks universe,” in which both the arrangement of matter at the cosmic beginning and the values of various physical parameters — such as the speed of light, the strength of gravitational attraction, and the expansion rate of the universe — are just right for life. And unless one is frightened of the term, it also appears the universe is designed for biogenesis and human life.

Regarding fine-tuning, one could write a book just citing the arguments for it made by some of the most distinguished scientists in the world. Here is just a tiny sample, collated by physicist Gerald Schroeder, who holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he later taught physics.

Michael Turner, astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and Fermilab: “The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bullseye one millimeter in diameter on the other side.” Paul Davies, professor of theoretical physics at Adelaide University: “The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly.

Roger Penrose, the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, writes that the likelihood of the universe having usable energy (low entropy) at its creation is “one part out of ten to the power of ten to the power of 123.” That is “a million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion zeros.”

Steven Weinberg, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, and an anti-religious agnostic, notes that “the existence of life of any kind seems to require a cancellation between different contributions to the vacuum energy, accurate to about 120 decimal places.” As the website explains, “This means that if the energies of the Big Bang were, in arbitrary units, not:

1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

Unless one is a closed-minded atheist (there are open-minded atheists), it is not valid on a purely scientific basis to deny that the universe is improbably fine-tuned to create life, let alone intelligent life.

Additionally, it is atheistic dogma, not science, to dismiss design as unscientific. The argument that science cannot suggest that intelligence comes from intelligence or design from an intelligent designer is simply a tautology. It is dogma masquerading as science.

And now, many atheist scientists have inadvertently provided logical proof of this.

They have put forward the notion of a multiverse — the idea that there are many, perhaps an infinite number of, other universes. This idea renders meaningless the fine-tuning and, of course, the design arguments. After all, with an infinite number of universes, a universe with parameters friendly to intelligent life is more likely to arise somewhere by chance.

But there is not a shred of evidence of the existence of these other universes — nor could there be, since contact with another universe is impossible.

Therefore, only one conclusion can be drawn: The fact that atheists have resorted to the multiverse argument constitutes a tacit admission that they have lost the argument about design in this universe. The evidence in this universe for design — or, if you will, the fine-tuning that cannot be explained by chance or by “enough time” — is so compelling that the only way around it is to suggest that our universe is only one of an infinite number of universes.

Honest atheists — scientists and lay people — must now acknowledge that science itself argues overwhelmingly for a Designing Intelligence. And honest believers must acknowledge that the existence of a Designing Intelligence is not necessarily the same as the existence of benevolent God.

To posit the existence of a Creator requires only reason. To posit the existence of a good God requires faith.

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His most recent book is Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

To those who are perishing, these other dimensional realities are 'realities without reason'.

Just to add to my earlier post: These "other dimensional realities" are "realities without reason" to minds who think of "reason" in its instrumental sense. That is, as an analytical tool. Yet reason as an analytical tool only works if there is Reason understood as the ordering principle of the cosmos (or universe, or God's Creation) — which is what the classical Greeks, especially Plato, thought Reason — Nous — is. It is Reason — the ordering principle of the cosmos — that makes the world intelligible to minds capable of reasoning in the instrumental sense.

Minds suffering from the "disease" of aspernatio rationalis — contempt of reason — basically aren't interested in the way the world actually is, preferring to construct alternative or "second" realities that they find more personally gratifying. By this maneuver, however — which Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness — they manage to reduce the world to the measure of their own thinking about the world. Any psychotic can do this. We expect better from scientists and other responsible parties in society.

In the process of this reduction, they also reduce Time to the way mortal man directly senses Time — as linear, serial, irreversible, "moving" from past to present to future. They fail to recognize that any universal concept (such as a physical law, or pi, for example) does not rise from, or reside in this "flat" temporal line.

As you suggest, dear brother in Christ, our nominal sense of time is insufficient to grasp the meaning of all that there is (to pan). Upon further reflection, it seems to me an honest thinker will admit at least one other temporal dimension/extension; that is, volumetric time — a "time" that can account for (1) universals and (2) human experience as it is actually lived in its fullness — as necessary to rational analysis.

We get a tremendous insight into this situation in the wonderful observation of a very great poet, T. S. Eliot:

Man lives at the intersection of time and timelessness.

Of course, science cannot "measure" timelessness. But it seems to me it will pile up errors if it refuses to take the problem of timelessness into consideration, not to mention that such refusal denies the very reality and provenance of universal law that its own methodology absolutely depends on.

Time is the realm of particularity and mortality; timelessness of universality and immortality. Man lives in the "in-between" — the only creature in God's Creation that does so.

At least, I do believe Plato came to this conclusion. And personally, after much reflection, I find this assessment of the problem quite convincing.

Don't know if I should be embarrassed to admit that I never read Plato's or Aristotle's writings and thus know not what they thought....

It is doubtful to me that many people read Plato anymore. But I have been reading him since age 17, which is to say over four decades by now.

It's funny how I got started with him. At the time (age 17), I picked up Plato — Symposium — for the first time. And, at the very same time, decided to read Sigmund Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

Well, to make a long story short, even at that tender age, I figured one of these two guys must be totally nutz. I decided the nutty one was Freud. And I've been reading Plato ever since — with great difficulty at first.

So don't feel "embarrassed" about not reading Plato. Practically no one does nowadays. Folks just don't have the patience for it, or see it as relevant to the times we live in.

But Plato was the very first psychologist; he pioneered the field which arguably Freud abandoned. Few psychologists — with the notable exception of Viktor Frankl and his "logotherapy" approach to curing psychic disorders — now follow his (to me enormously valuable) lead.

Unfortunately, what people do "know" about Plato nowadays often is gotten second hand from thinkers like Ayn Rand — who doesn't have a clue about where Plato is coming from, or what his life's work means....

Oh well.... life is short....

Thanks so much for writing, Robert DeLong! (Have we met before?)

I do not see how they can continue to ignore it.

Time is the realm of particularity and mortality; timelessness of universality and immortality. Man lives in the "in-between" — the only creature in God's Creation that does so.

So very true!

Thank you for all your wonderful essay-posts, dearest sister in Christ!

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