Faith in the Multiverse
The Deeps of Time nails one out of the park:link-icon::
What happens when you discover that that the universe is improbably fine-tuned for life? If the conclusion that God may have had something to do with it is too much to swallow, you propose a wild scenario without any empirical evidence which says, essentially, that we happened because everything “happens.” That’s science. Scientists don’t often like to admit that they, too, operate with philosophical and religious pre-assumptions, but Discover lets the cat out of the bag and reports on the anti-theistic motivation behind the multiverse theory…
This is in response to this article at Discover magazine:link-icon:, which notes:
Consider just two possible changes. Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve. There are many such examples of the universe’s life-friendly properties—so many, in fact, that physicists can’t dismiss them all as mere accidents.
“We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible,” Linde says.
Physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.
Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.
The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable nonreligious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem” — the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.
“For me the reality of many universes is a logical possibility,” [Andrei Linde] says. “You might say, ‘Maybe this is some mysterious coincidence. Maybe God created the universe for our benefit.’ Well, I don’t know about God, but the universe itself might reproduce itself eternally in all its possible manifestations.”
What is of course immediately apparent is the rush to push God back out of the picture again, according to a false dichotomy that people on both sides of the religious/non-religious divide have built up. The assumption that faith in something beyond the merely empirical, especially faith expressed through a formal Religion, must be in conflict with science is a deeply-embedded prejudice for many people. But let us be clear: it is nothing more than a prejudice, and then a highly erroneous one.
To be fair, Linde could be correct: maybe there are an infinite number of universes, and ours is just the one that happened, by some fluke, to end up with all the necessary ducks in a row so that life could emerge in it.
But the article notes the key problem with the multiverse theory: there’s no way to prove it; it’s a faith claim, rather than a scientific conjecture. And its principle purpose is, as The Deeps of Time notes, anti-theistic in nature: it’s the only other suggestion, apart from the notion of some form of intelligent designer, that explains the exceedingly tight fine-tuning that is evident in the cosmos. And in a sense, it’s an extension of the tired argument that the likes of Richard Dawkins so often advance: that apparent design is just an illusion.
That argument will get you published, perhaps, but at some point it begins to wear thin. It might be useful when discussing e.g. how what we see with our eyes (the beauty of flowers and sunsets, the intricacy of the body and brain, etc.) seems to have an immense amount of thought put into its composition and operation. But when we’re talking about physical properties of the Universe, we’re not talking about things which we can perceive naturally (e.g. without the assistance of considerable amounts of technology and calculation). So even if we’ve evolved to think of a delicate flower as being something intricately designed, there’s no way we could have evolved to think of e.g. the fine structure constant as being similarly designed.
And yet, there is is, staring us in the face: the Universe we know is built upon a series of physical constants of exacting precision, and we would not exist had even one of these constants been even marginally more or less than it is.
Design is everywhere: we see it in the day-to-day operation of the world, in plants, animals, and our fellow human beings. And at the same time, design is there too in places we cannot see, in the very blueprints of creation itself.
Parsimony alone would suggest that at some point, what appears to be design should probably be considered to be design, especially when the very fabric of our existence seems to have been put in place with the emergence of life in mind. Suggesting otherwise — by, say, proposing a vast and unprovable myriad of barren alternate Universes — is as rational as suggesting that the world is merely 6,000 years old. Moreover, such a suggestion, though cloaked in the language and manner of science, is not a scientific suggestion at all. It is, as previously noted, a faith claim, and then a rather desperate one.
I started blogging back in 2004 -- in May, if the Wayback Machine is to be believed. Not that I remember the exact day. To be honest, I didn't take it that seriously then; it was a fun distraction, but nothing more.
That all changed, I think, once the Danish cartoons were published, and the assault on the right to freedom of expression became very visible. With the recent issues in Canada concerning the "human rights" commissions, the gravity of the matter has only increased, and my interest in blogging has increased right along with it.
I used to blog at a domain called Time Immortal, but it seemed to be the right time for a change -- there's been a lot of that in my life of late. Hence this blog: a fresh start, and proof positive that I won't shut up even if I get shut down once in a while.
