There is a growing number of physicists, astrophysicists, and others, both scientists and laypersons, who believe in the existence of multiverses – the view that, apart from the visible Universe in which we humans live, and whose distant reaches are visible through the recent powerful telescopes that have been built by some of us very clever human beings, there exist one or more other universes that we humans can never access or even observe, except indirectly. Though the evidence for the existence of these postulated multiverses is scant at best, this has not discouraged the many credulous scientific simpletons from believing in something for which they have no direct visible evidence.
It is useful in this context to mention Ockham’s Razor, a medieval principle popularized by William of Ockham that declares that, of several conflicting alternative theories or explanations, the simplest one should be preferred over the others. Two other formulations of this principle, which are pertinent to the consideration of multiverses, are “Plurality should not be posited without necessity,” and “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.”[1]
Clearly, the belief in multiverses ignores the wisdom and simplicity of Ockham’s Razor. Although the truth is indeed sometimes complex, this does not mean that it is always so. In this context, what is the simplest theory or hypothesis about how the Universe first began and how it later developed into the particular structures that we can observe in it? The simplest hypothesis is that God created the Universe and everything in it, not individually one by one, as the traditional religious view would have us believe, but by promulgating laws that govern its development, such as the law of gravity, and also by fashioning certain processes, such as stellar combustion, which allows for the existence of the large, luminous, and long-lived entities that are stars.
Of course, this hypothesis, which is not merely a hypothesis but an indubitable fact, is categorically rejected by all scientific simpletons because it conflicts with their belief that the Universe and everything in it arose and developed in accordance with the many natural laws that scientists have discovered.
One question that this hypothesis easily resolves is “What happened or existed before the Big Bang, which gave birth to our Universe?” The answer, of course, is that God existed before the Big Bang and decided, prior to the Universe’s birth, to create it and give it the particular laws and form that it is observed to possess. Ever since the Universe began, God has continued to overlook Its Creation and decide how it will develop, by trying different things and seeing what effects they have, and then perhaps making subsequent modifications to it. For unlike the traditional conception of God, which posits an omniscient, omnipotent, and immutable divine being that doesn’t actually correspond to the God that created our Universe and Life on Earth, the real God didn’t know in advance exactly how things would unfold or occur. Another feature of the real God is that It likes to experiment in order to create new things and new processes. Ultimately, it is God, and not impersonal material processes, forces, laws, or equations, that will determine the Universe’s end – whether it will continue to expand forever, becoming cooler and darker over time until there are no more actively burning stars, or whether it will collapse back on itself and explode in another Big Bang, thus repeating the process of universal creation, perhaps the next time with different natural laws, or whether its fate will be something different. Since there won’t be any humans around at that very distant time in the future, we don’t have to worry about the Universe’s ultimate fate, unless one is inclined to spend one’s time trying to answer such unanswerable questions.
I will make some statements which I believe are true but which are perhaps difficult or impossible to prove conclusively:
1. The multiverse is a figment of humanity’s febrile imagination.
2. The mere fact that we cannot see all of the Universe, due to its rapid – and possibly accelerating – rate of expansion and the fixed limit of the speed of light, does not mean that it is infinite.
3. Physicists and cosmologists are approaching, or have already reached, the limits of what they can discover about the workings, structure, and development of the Universe based on the assumption that the Universe, and everything it contains, is due solely to observable natural laws and processes. In the future, they may need increasingly to have recourse to God in order to explain certain mysteries, inconsistencies, paradoxes, and other observations or calculations that cannot be explained by, or contradict, natural laws.
4. The reason why there are so many different phenomena in the Universe is because God likes variety, a divine preference that is also illustrated by the incredibly large number of different life forms that have existed or exist presently on the Earth during Life’s several billion years of existence on this planet.
5. Quantum uncertainty does not translate into a significant degree or amount of macroscopic uncertainty.
Regarding Proposition 1, it is remarkable the number of physicists, astrophysicists, other scientists, and laypeople who adamantly refuse to believe in God because they cannot observe It, but are quite ready, and in some cases eager, to believe in the existence of a multitude – perhaps even an infinite number! – of multiverses which they likewise can never observe. Since there is indubitable evidence for God’s existence, it is clear which of these two unobservable entities – God or the multiverse – should be preferred over the other.
Regarding Proposition 2, those who believe that our Universe is infinitely large overlook a rather simple fact about the Universe: the only way for a universe that began at a single point, as ours did, to become infinitely large in the finite amount of time since it began is if its rate of expansion were also infinitely large, which clearly is not the case. Even during what is called the Great Inflation, when, immediately after the Big Bang, it is believed that the Universe expanded by many orders of magnitude in a very short period of time, it did not expand at an infinitely large rate. Hence, it is highly unlikely that our Universe is infinitely large, as more than a few scientific simpletons believe.
Regarding Proposition 3, the recent widespread belief in unobservable mysterious objects or forces like dark matter and dark energy, the existence of which has not yet been proven despite scientists’ determined efforts to do so, are, in my opinion, the result of trying to explain everything in the Universe solely by having recourse to natural laws, natural phenomena, and natural processes. For example, if God wanted to alter the rate at which the Universe is expanding, could It do so, in defiance of the law of gravity? I believe It could, since God created the Universe and set its original and later parameters and laws, including the law of gravity.
Regarding Proposition 4, the vast majority of the different life forms that have existed or exist presently on the Earth were created from pre-existing non-living matter, in the case of the first life forms, or fashioned from other existing life forms via divine modification, in the case of different kinds of single-celled organisms, or, after God invented and perfected the extremely complex process of sexual reproduction, from pre-existing sexually-reproducing organisms, again via divine modification. Thus, contrary to the Biblical account, God probably selected a sexually-reproducing species of primates and made various modifications to some of them in order to beget the present species of human beings.
Certain species of organisms, such as the many different species of lemurs that exist in Madagascar or the many different species of bats that exist worldwide, may have arisen due to natural selection and speciation, given the genetic variation that existed in the original lemur or bat population, but this is roughly the extent of what can be achieved by these very limited biological processes, since, in accordance with the Randomness Principle, random changes most certainly cannot beget the major changes, transformations, and differentiations that are visible in both the fossil record and also among living organisms. We can say with a high degree of certainty that all these numerous major changes and transformations were the result of God’s repeated interventions in the development of Life on Earth. In other words, contrary to the claims made by the theory of evolution by natural selection, there would neither be Life, nor would there be the great variety of Life that has existed and continues to exist on our planet, without God’s continual interventions during the course of Life’s existence.
Regarding Proposition 5, here is an excerpt from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
The uncertainty principle is significant only on the atomic scale because of the small value of h [the Planck constant] in everyday units. If the position of a macroscopic object with a mass of, say one gram, is measured with a precision of 10−6 metre, the uncertainty principle states that its velocity cannot be measured to better than about 10−25 metre per second. Such a limitation is hardly worrisome. However, if an electron is located in an atom [measuring] about 10−10 metre across, the principle gives a minimum uncertainty in the velocity of about 106 metre per second [or 1000 km/s].[2]
If quantum uncertainty did in fact result in a significant degree of macroscopic uncertainty, then the extremely accurate devices that are atomic clocks, the most accurate of which has an estimated uncertainty of one second in thirty million years, or approximately 1 x 10-15, would not be possible. Other examples are that no one says, I cannot find something, such as a child or one’s keys or glasses, because of quantum uncertainty. No one falls down the stairs because a step suddenly disappears in a quantum-uncertain way. Although future events are often uncertain, again, this is not because of quantum uncertainty.
The silliest version of the belief in multiverses, which is already a very silly idea, is the belief that, due to quantum uncertainty, every single possibility that arises, whenever an individual, object, or system is faced with one or more options or possibilities, and is not chosen or realized, continues to exist in a parallel universe in which it was chosen or realized. Since these kinds of alternate pathways occur all the time, this means that each parallel universe in turn gives rise to other parallel universes, in a process that goes on and on and on, much as a single unicellular organism can continue to divide and divide ad infinitum, as long as it does not exhaust its food supply and other constraining factors, such as space and oxygen, or the production of toxic wastes that would eventually limit its reproduction. Whether it was the science that inspired the fiction, or the fiction that inspired this pseudoscientific speculation, the notion of an infinite number of quantum multiverses is one of the most ridiculous ideas that has ever been entertained by the brain of an educated person. This example illustrates the fact that even educated and otherwise intelligent persons can believe in things that are complete nonsense. Without realizing it, all of these very silly people are committing the Conception Fallacy: the mere fact that you can conceive of this outlandish possibility does not mean that it exists in reality.
Those who believe in this speculative nonsense have turned God into an indecisive quantum hoarder who, unable to decide which of all these many different possible universes is best, preserves all of them in order to see how they all turn out. This conception of God is extremely petty and makes God seem like an incredibly indecisive being. Although this idea may make for an interesting fictional story or movie, as a number of stories, books, movies, and plays based on the premise of the existence of parallel universes have been written or made, it is important not to confuse what is merely an interesting idea for truth or reality.
It is truly remarkable the confusion, intellectual contortions, and outlandish hypotheses that have been advanced and adopted simply because so many physicists, astrophysicists, and others dogmatically refuse to admit the fact that God exists, and that it is God who created the Universe and all the things that are contained within it. It is time for all these many scientific simpletons, whose ability to understand the workings of the Universe in the precise mathematical detail that they can is manifest proof of God’s existence, since this is a result that very obviously could not have resulted from the fortuitous random changes postulated by the theory of evolution, to allow God back into our understanding of how the Universe began and developed, and into their considerations of other aspects of the Universe in which we are privileged to live, by the grace and the great ingenuity of God the Creator.
[1] “Ockham’s Razor.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, CD-ROM version, 2004.
[2] “Quantum mechanics: Basic concepts and methods: Heisenberg uncertainty principle.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, CD-ROM version, 2004.
Homo Stupidus 