The Church in other universes
The notion of alternate universes (colloquially: “the multiverse”) is not a new one, though it has mostly been confined to the realm of speculative fiction…at least until recently. The multiverse concept has enjoyed more general recognition in the last few years, in its use by the New Atheists as an attempt to argue against those who maintain that our universe shows evidence of design (specifically: fine tuning). The atheistic argument, as I understand it, is that the apparent fine tuning of the cosmos is really just an illusion, a fortuitous coincidence. Our universe, the New Atheists maintain, is just one among many, and then the one in which things just happened to align in favour of the emergence of life as we know it.
Now, let’s separate the discussion a bit. I’ve no problem accepting the multiverse hypothesis, and I’ll even grant that various calculations support it, when done with certain assumptions. String theory touches on this matter, and evidently derives some value from it.
That’s all well and good, of course, but there’s a wee bit of a problem with how the New Atheists make use of the multiverse. Essentially, they assume too much, by which I mean that they step past the somewhat demonstrable existence of other universes and begin to speculate as to the nature, order, and operation of those universes.
These latter points are essentially unknowable by any means open to us, so it’s a bit odd that self-styled rational materialists make use of the hypothesis at all. Positing that other universes a) exist, b) are substantially different from our own, and c) show no evidence of design is a statement of conspicuously blind faith.
Or: it is equally reasonable to posit that any other extant universes a) are not radically dissimilar from our own, and b) show evidence of design, and then perhaps more obvious evidence than can be found in our own universe.
John C. Wright explored this idea somewhat, as I previously noted, albeit only tangentially; the principal point of his post focused more on the ruinous effects the expansion of Islam had on the course of human development:
Only in our timeline, where the southern half of Christendom was raped by the an obscurantist and legalistic heresy called Mohammedanism, the resources of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment was wasted in wars, resources that otherwise would have been used for civilization and progress. The amounts absorbed and lost in the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire cannot be calculated.
However, he did touch on the issue of how, in every universe in what he called the chronocosm, Christ was found to exist:
Historians are not merely shocked, they are angered, to discover that Christ exists in every timeline, including the Narnia-like world where lions rather than human beings are the dominant form of life.
Where Wright didn’t go, and where my own thoughts have tended to wander, is to the corollary of the above: if Christ is present in every other universe, then so too must be the Church. This is interesting for several reasons, not the least of which is that it would be as damaging to Protestantism as the discovery of Christ in other universes would be to atheism. Because where Christ is, His Church — his true Church — must necessarily follow, with her body of Sacred Tradition and her glorious sacraments.
What would the sacraments be like on other worlds, in other universes? I suppose that would depend on the nature of…well…everything, really. Sacraments are both outward signs of God’s grace and an actual means by which that grace is poured out on us; there is necessarily and always a natural component to them, in addition to the spiritual. So I suppose, in a sense, the sacraments we might find in other universes would depend explicitly upon the nature of those universes, on whether life in them is similar to or different from life in our own.
Which is a topic worthy of exploration, I think. That’s good: I need some practice with writing, not to mention an excuse to get the creative juices flowing again.
