Multiverse Mavens Hoisted on Own Petard
6 March 2010
Barry Arrington
UncommonDescent
Several factors are combining to increase belief (of the “faith” variety, not the “demonstrated fact” variety) in the multiverse among materialists. Two of these factors are relevant to ID at the biological and cosmological levels. At the biological level materialists are beginning to understand that the probability that life arose by random material processes is so low (estimated in this article written by materialists to be 10 raised to -1018) that infinite universes are required for it to have occurred, the implication being that we just happen to live in the ever-so-lucky universe where it all came together.
At the cosmological level, the probability that the fine tuning of the universe necessary for the existence of life arose by sheer coincidence is so low that again the multiverse is invoked to provide infinite “probabilistic resources” to do the job (see here).
Of course, there is another possible explanation for both the emergence of life and the fine tuning of the universe. These phenomena may be the results of acts of a super powerful being whom we might call God.
Obviously, the whole reason materialists have invoked the multiverse in the first place is to avoid resorting to agency to explain the emergence of life and cosmological fine tuning. But isn’t it obvious that given the very premises invoked by materialists in the multiverse scenarios that we can just as easily conclude that God exists.
Here is how the logic runs: The materialists says, “Yes, the probability that life emerged through random material processes is vanishingly small, but in an infinite multiverse everything that is not logically impossible is in fact instantiated, and we just happen to live in the lucky universe where life was instantiated. Similarly, we happen to live in the Goldilocks universe (which, again, is one of infinite universes) where the physical constants are just right for the existence of life.”
But the theist can play this game too. “The existence of God is not logically impossible. In an infinite number of universes everything that is not logically impossible is in fact instantiated, and we just happen to live in one of those universes in which God is instantiated.”
I do not believe in the multiverse. The entire concept is a desperation “Hail Mary” pass in which logical positivists and their materialist fellow travelers are attempting to save a philosophical construct on the brink of destruction. The point is that materialists’ own multiverse premise leads to the conclusion that God exists more readily than the opposite conclusion. Ironically, far from excluding the existence of God, if the multiverse exists, God must also exist.
