The Church of the Multiverse
Cosmologist Steven Hawking and physicist Leonard Mlodinow publish an excerpt from their upcoming atheist apologetic “The Grand Design” in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world. But eventually, people turned to philosophy, that is, to the use of reason—with a good dose of intuition—to decipher their universe. Today we use reason, mathematics and experimental test—in other words, modern science.
So, using “reason, mathematics and experimental test” we get all the benefits of modern life, including proof that the order we see around us arose spontaneously due to random chance. A problem with this argument, highlighted in recent years by sophisticated computer simulations, is that our universe seems custom-tuned for our existence, making chance evolution highly improbable. The slightest variation of one of many fundamental physical laws would make impossible, in Douglas Adams’ words, “life, the universe and everything." But there’s no need to consider agnosticism. Our intrepid cosmologists ride to the rescue:
That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many.
What happened to the “experimental test” part of modern science cited earlier in the piece? Consider that the authors’ argument for atheism in the face of contrary science invokes an infinite array of unobservable universes. This is different from heaven how, exactly?
An experimental physicist friend of mine once explained how the multiverse thing works in practice: Theoretical physicists squeeze an atheist-friendly cosmology into the four corners of experimental observations and hit the New York Times and lecture circuit at a run. Experimentalists then extend the limits of detection in one or two crucial areas, proving the theory faulty. The theoreticians head back indoors, reworking the math to escape the new experimental limits, and are once again on your television screen for a few years while the experimentalists scrabble to fund the next round of debunking.
Think I’m overstating the alternative faith system feel among some "scientists"? Check out the book review by a physicist at the Washington Post.
The conclusions that follow are groundbreaking. Of all the possible universes, some must have laws that allow the appearance of life. The fact that we are here already tells us that we are in that corner of the multiverse. In this way, all origin questions are answered by pointing to the huge number of possible universes and saying that some of them have the properties that allow the existence of life, just by chance.
I've waited a long time for this book. It gets into the deepest questions of modern cosmology without a single equation. The reader will be able to get through it without bogging down in a lot of technical detail and will, I hope, have his or her appetite whetted for books with a deeper technical content. And who knows? Maybe in the end the whole multiverse idea will actually turn out to be right!
Wow. Imagine vindicated at last! I can’t wait for the sermon.
I’m a hard-core science fiction fan, so this is all good speculative fun at some level. But how is any of this less fantastic on its face than the Book of Revelation or a Star Trek episode chosen more or less at random?
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Aug '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
OK, and what if God made the multiverse?
There is no way to prove that He didn't...
Edited on Sep. 4 at 10:48amJul '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
Scientism has to have a god to worship -- why not outlandish theory? Would you deny them that comfort?
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
We all believe in something. You can't bemoan religious primitives for believing what cannot be experimentally validated while simultaneously affirming atheism -- the WSJ headline reads "Why God Did Not Create the Universe" -- on the basis of a theory that is impossible to test.
I suppose there could be a multiverse. Why can't there also be a God? Maybe He arose by chance, too. Would he be in one corner of the multiverse or the whole danged thing?
Jun '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
If the universe ordered itself spontaneously out of nothing, then why can't my sock drawer do the same? Indeed, why can't socks just weave themselves out of the wool available from any random flock of sheep? And what's with extension cords and garden hoses always getting tangled? Why does it take a mind and a will to impose order on chaos?
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
George, thanks for highlighting this. I'll take Hawking and his colleagues a lot more seriously the minute they can build a perpetual motion machine, or create a planet ex nihilo, or do any of the other things that they contend are perfectly consistent with scientific laws.
And then, as MFR says, I'd love to hear them prove why God did not create the multiverse.
Aug '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
Chance and God is one of those peculiar alliances...
Chance is to us, as physical beings -- creatures of our universe -- radically uncontrollable and subservient to no-one. That's why it's chance. But if God is all-powerful, even chance is His creature and servant.
How can we, bound to creaturely physical existence, really know what chance looks like to God?
It always bugs me when people say a procedure that depends on chance leaves no room for God. (Chance doesn't bend to our will, but it's presumptuous to assume that it therefore doesn't bend to God's will -- that's presuming God must be a creature like us, rather than transcendent.)
And why should we assume that God is dependent on chance rather than the other way around?
There's no way to prove any of this, but we all believe in unprovable things in order to make sense of the world.
May '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
This is all, of course, based purely on the a priori assumption elected by the writers. They can have theirs (chance arising from infinite universes) and I'll take mine (God).
Again, read chapters 5 and 6 (The Reason and A Put Up Job) of Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.
To quote Prof. Johnson, "When something just has to be true, just about any evidence will do."
Jul '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
But, but, Stephen...
Who created puppies?
Aug '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
And it should be noted that the string theory, the theory that underpins the mutliverse concept, has not been experimentally verified. To my knowledge no one has even used string theory to make a testable prediction. So we have unobservable universes predicted by an untested theory.
On a side note, when I was a real life physicist 15 years ago (before I was unceremoniously shown the door for being, ok, not very good) I found my colleagues to be shockingly one dimensional--intellectual race horses. All of their thoughts and energy were dedicated to physics alone. If you could get them talk about anything else, their ideas were adolescent at best probably reflecting the last time they were made to read a book about something other than science. Asking Hawking about religion is about like asking the Pope about string theory.
Edited on Sep. 4 at 1:42pmAug '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
Yep.
I admire Hawking for a number of reasons. He brings real imagination to his physics, and imaginative ideas, even if they're eventually proven false, are necessary to advance scientific understanding. And the fact that he has advanced science at all given his disabilities is a real human accomplishment.
But when it comes to religion, he is singularly unimaginative. Pedestrian, even. I used to find this strange, but now I see it's a natural result of specialization.
Jun '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
If I had 10^100 hydrogen atoms, 15 billion years, and one hell of a heat shield, I'd be happy to test the atheism model of creation. Of course I might have to try it a few million times to get it right. On second thought, too much waiting. Nevermind.
Aug '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
Even Betrand Russell had to admit that, when push comes to shove, he was really an agnostic -- he knew there was no way to prove God didn't exist. He just preferred the label "atheist" for moral and social clarity.
And even Russell couldn't coherently argue against God, though he sure gave it the ol' college try. For example, I was once forced to read an essay by Russell on how the human mind, not God, what what imposed order on the universe, and how the purpose of evolving civilization was to increase the order of the universe. This, of course, in the strictly materialistic sense, violates the second law of thermodynamics, and I was amazed that a man as familiar with science as Russell wouldn't anticipate this weakness in his own argument.
Russell was, however, apparently not a strict materialist, and the possible decoupling of order in the human mind and order in the physical world could have provided him with an escape hatch here. However, it's a little odd for a mathematician to not believe that order in the human mind reflects order in the physical world, even though mathematics doesn't actually require this.
Edited on Sep. 4 at 1:37pmMay '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
Andrew Alain: And it should be noted that the string theory, the theory that underpins the mutliverse concept, has not been experimentally verified. To my knowledge no one has even used string theory to make a testable prediction. So we have unobservable universes predicted by an untested theory.
An untested theory. I've often wondered about that: Why on earth is it then called a theory? My understanding of the scientific method is that a theory is a hypothesis that has proven effective again and again through experimentation at yielding the predicted result. If string "theory" has not yet done this, then regarding it as a theory, and not just a mere hypothesis, is arrogant in the extreme. No?
Also, once these folks start explaining the instigationof creation--and not just details that begin at the.0000000001 second mark after creation--then I'll be impressed. Until then, they offer no competition to the supernatural.
Aug '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
Scott Reusser
An untested theory. I've often wondered about that: Why on earth is it then called a theory? My understanding of the scientific method is that a theory is a hypothesis that has proven effective again and again through experimentation at yielding the predicted result. If string "theory" has not yet done this, then regarding it as a theory, and not just a mere hypothesis, is arrogant in the extreme. No?
Well, in the realm of mathematical physics, which is half math, half physical science, it's possible that a theory may be a theory in the mathematical sense, which merely requires logical self-consistency and not physical data. So calling String Theory theory may not be abusive terminology -- it's just not physical science yet.
But yeah, usually you want physical data. Still, relativity convinced many scientists on logical self-consistency alone long before instruments were sensitive enough to detect the data needed to prove it physically.
Edited on Sep. 4 at 1:55pmAug '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
Our hubris is laughable, except the real-world consequences of such conceit are very serious.
Our minds are miraculous, and have allowed us to do remarkable things; but the truth is this, a common insect is a miracle of engineering we may never duplicate, much less create. Much of our seeming understanding is illusory. We name things and believe we've explained them.
"Oh, yes, lightning. That's just electricity."
"The sun? That's fusion."
"The brain's thoughts are just an electro-chemical reaction."
From Suite 101, entitled 'Einstein's Biggest Blunder':
"Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity predicted that the universe is expanding. Einstein did not believe this implication of his own theory, so he added a term in his equations that he called "the cosmological constant."
This cosmological constant was basically a fudge designed and inserted into the theory for the sole purpose of keeping the theory from predicting that the universe is expanding. About a decade later Edwin Hubble observed the red shifts of distant galaxies and discovered that the universe is indeed expanding.
Einstein, to his credit, visited Hubble, examined the data, and admitted to it..."
Our minds have filters and biases, sometimes fatal.
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
That's my understanding, too: No experimental validation. Plausibility exists, in a mathematical sense, from time to time. My friend the experimentalist takes great delight in punching holes in this framework with another observation in our universe that forces the theorists back to the mathematical equivalent of creative writing class.
Unfortunately for the state of popular culture, a good brain is all you need for theory, while the disqualifying experiments take years and gobs of money to conduct, competing for space at one of a very few high-energy labs around the world. So theoreticians playing at theology get most of the press most of the time.
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
Our minds are miraculous, and have allowed us to do remarkable things; but the truth is this, a common insect is a miracle of engineering we may never duplicate, much less create. Much of our seeming understanding is illusory. We name things and believe we've explained them.
"Oh, yes, lightning. That's just electricity."
"The sun? That's fusion."
"The brain's thoughts are just an electro-chemical reaction."· Sep 4 at 1:52pm
For an example of how right you are, ask someone, as generally only a child can, a nested series of whys. You can start with why the sun is hot, objects fall or any other question and within a few replies even the most well-informed says, "that's just the way it is."
The more I learn the more convinced I am of how little I really know.
Jul '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
Well said, all.
Theoretical physics strikes me as a dangerous game. It lets a scietnist dispense with all that experimentation and proof stuff. All it requires is a couple of equations that seem to make sense, and - Bingo! - you are on the lecture circuit.
I'm pretty sure Einstein is responsible. The difference is, his intuitive leaps were borne out by experiment.
I agree that these guys have oodles of a priori concepts in place, and they don't really seem to understand that they do. That's kind of scary. The biggest a priori concept is that reason and science can explain all aspects of life and our environment. That's just nuts. And it is arrogant. These guys carve out the little corner of reality that they can define through the scientific method, and they call that everything. They try to expand the size of that "everything" through theory. They may as well be reading goat entrails.
Aug '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
To add a bit more confusion to the tension between experiment and theory:
All facts are theory-laden to some extent, and all physical data, no matter how sophisticated the machines used to gather it, takes some human judgement to be meaningful. Michael Polanyi wrote some great reads on these topics: he was a philosopher and a chemist with lots of lab experience.
I also want to correct something I said earlier. Though a purely mathematical theory need only be self-consistent, even most mathematical theories are only useful if they're also consistent with other established theories or physical data. In mathematical physics, then, you want more than self-consistency, you want consistency with "everything else". Of course, quantum mechanics and relativity still aren't consistent with each other, no matter the data that backs each up, so that's already asking the impossible - for now, at least.
Edited on Sep. 4 at 10:56pmAug '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
It should also be noted that Hawking tends to present his own pet theories as accepted fact. If I recall correctly in "A Brief History of Time" Hawking discussed the idea of extending relativity into the complex plane to remove from it the singularity that occurs at the Big Bang. Hawking wanted a universe that would oscillate between bangs and crunches for all time so there wouldn't be that annoying act of creation. As I was working on my PhD in cosmology at the time I knew for a fact that this was not a generally accepted idea and not a subject of any significant research. Hawking had no business including it in a popular book where it might be confused with theory that was well accepted and has long since been forgotten. I doubt much has changed in his latest work, though I haven't read it.