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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May '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
My own favorite treatment of this- a subject that is essentially unprovable, and probably unfalsifiable as well- is Frank Tipler's Wired piece:
http://129.81.170.14/~tipler/wired.html
Aug '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
Some nice nuggets from "Science, Faith, and Society", as a follow-up, and to whet the reading appetite of those who are interested:
"Agreement with experiment will therefore always leave some conceivable doubt as to the truth of a proposition and it is for the scientist to judge whether he wants to set aside such doubts as unreasonable or not."
-- p 30
"The process of explaining away deviations is in fact quite indispensable to the daily routine of research. In my laboratory I find the laws of nature formally contradicted at every hour, but I explain this away by the assumption of experimental error. I know this may cause me one day to explain away a fundamentally new phenomenon and to miss a great discovery. Such things have often happened in the history of science. Yet I shall continue to explain away my odd results, for if every anomaly observed in my laboratory were taken at its face value, research would instantly degenerate into a wild-goose chase after imaginary fundamental novelties."
-- p 31 -- directly incorporates the quote I paraphrased in comment #37
Aug '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
Delightful analyses MFR and Andrew: pleasures to read. Your diligence, MFR, in adding the qualification regarding integration of explanatory power across models was appreciated--I would possibly add, at least for some theories--"across levels of explanation" (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology, etc.). The whole issue of chance is really at the crux of it all. What stimulated my thinking about chance--especially vis-à-vis evolution--was learning (a limited amount) about Shannon and Weaver's information theory. Randomness, I came to see, is a relational term. Things cannot be "random" in and of themselves. Randomness is a property of an observer's experience of a phenomenon. So, whereas a hydrogen atom may be said to have various intrinsic properties, randomness cannot be one of them. Randomness is a convenient term employed by observers with finite powers of sensation, perception and intellect for referring to objects and events whose order and pattern are beyond human capacity of apprehension. God, for instance, as an (the) omniscient being, sees nothing as random. Both atheistic, popularizing scientists, as well as the fundamentalist, Creationist community, get this all wrong, but they've got a cheap, mediocre, slugfest industry going together--and it pays.
Edited on Sep 6, 2010 at 3:48pmJun '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
I was pretty disappointed with the level of philosophy going on in the snippets I've read from Hawking.... essentially, he acknowledges that our universe exists from trillions upon trillions of possibilities. He takes this fact and uses it as an argument against the existence of God?... Who uses a 1 in a trillion argument to prove a point. What's more likely, a one in a trillion argument that the universe's course of existence came to be from chance, or that God exists?
Also, if the universe could evolve from the existence of scientific laws such as gravity, where did they come from?... Did they just pop into existence as well then?
The key point here is that many of these claims are unexamined and perhaps impossible to test – even if we were on the Starship Enterprise. The number of assumptions taken makes the conclusion unreliable... to say the least.
Edited on Sep 7, 2010 at 6:27amMay '10
Re: The Church of the Multiverse
I believe it was GK Chesterton who said, "When man ceases to believe in God, he believes not in nothing, but in anything."
Seems a full and complete explanation of the phenomenon.