Have you ever run into the view that new universes kept popping into existence until one occurred in which intelligent life could (and did) develop because finally the multiverse had happened upon a way through which to understand itself? I’d heard it before, but lately I’ve encountered it being offered as a reason that humans should spread to the stars: we are the means through which the universe can come to understand itself, and thus we are obligated to spread into as many places and circumstances as possible. If Christianity didn’t exist I think I would find that very attractive.
Because it fails to resolve the root dilemma: no matter what else is true, the fact that we exist demonstrates beyond doubt that something has always existed, and that the choice is between raw materialism and Mind. Multiply entities as much as one may wish, but the choice always comes down to mindless matter or divine Designer.
No – the idea is that universes can “spawn” other universes, in which case the Big Bang was not an ultimate beginning, just a beginning for this universe.
But in multiverse land it’s universes all the way down, kind of like a candle lighting a torch lighting other candles and torches in an unending chain.
It’s an interesting notion that might be called elegant if there was the least bit of data in its favor. Several ways have been proposed to learn if one of the multiverse models is true, but it’s not somthing we can set up, just something we can watch for.
No, that’s derived. What scripture tells us that comes close is that “His understanding is beyond measure”, but that’s in a Psalm so by your measure it doesn’t count. Jeremiah comes closer, though:
“Can a man hide himself in hiding places
So I do not see him?” declares the Lord.
“Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?” declares the Lord.
If the universe is infinite, then this makes for a fair argument that God is, though that requires that God have a property equivalent to extent.
I see no reason to believe in a multiverse. I don’t think the fine tuning argument is convincing. And I don’t believe in God because of any arguments like this. I think this bye bye argument is even less convincing. Same goes for the strong anthropic principle. I even have reason to doubt the truth of inflation. I like the ideas of Neil Turok which suggests that the Standard model is all you need without inflation (which does away with the need for dark energy) and neutrinos are sufficient to answer the dark matter problem. This is definitely not as exciting as string theory and a multiverse but science should be about what the evidence shows. right?
Here is a link to one explanation. You are right that the dark energy problem is not just a matter of inflation. I oversimplified that too much. As I understand it, his idea boils down to a boundary condition at the big bang singularity.
The point for me as with Neil Turok is that too many highly theoretical constructs like inflation and string theory became scientific dogma when there just wasn’t any evidence to support them. So Neil Turok has been looking into alternative ideas which do not need them.
That is an awesome read! About halfway through I remembered a sci-fi story where an entire massive yet mobile Bishop Ring sort of structure was in an emergency from which a brilliant science team extracted it by generating a “total inversion field” which flipped all its matter – people included – into its mirror form, which since that form cannot exist in this universe translated the whole thing into the mirror universe (and of course one pursuing ship got caught with them). They admitted they were really going out on a limb with the theory, but when destruction is threatening anyway . . . . Then of course they had to repair all the systems that had blown due to jerry-rigged components (and of course to make the repairs they had to have the help of their pursuer) in order to get home again . . . only to find that the time they spent in the mirror universe was something they’d overlooked: when they arrived back in the normal universe they found they had moved back in time the same amount they had spent in the mirror universe.
It was a fun way to illustrate some of the ideas.
I read a book a couple of years ago that spent a large portion of the book presenting explanations for how inflation could have been the result of the condition of the universe being a metastable state where every “direction” it could take was “downhill”, in a manner that accounted for the entropy problem and require inflation at the same time. There was a chapter about string theory, too, but mostly what I remember of that was the point/concession that while the concepts the book was arguing for were mathematical speculation, string theory was just “metaphysical masturbation”.