Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Other universes: Why the materialist needs an infinite number of them

Geoff Robinson of "Faith, Beer, and other things that interest Geoff blog" is not impressed with multiverse theories. He comments,
I've been thinking two things about multiverses. Irreducible complexity stands in the way of multiverses working with biology even if it explains the physics. Also, part of the transcendental argument for God (TAG) includes the problem of induction. In other words, laws of physics need a law-giver otherwise you have laws hanging in mid-air. Multiverses do not solve this.
I'm not sure about the irreducible complexity part, Geoff. I suppose if there were infinite numbers of universes, some would contain irreducible complexity, and our current set of laws would be one of infinite possibilities. There might be infinite universes just like ours that do not contain life and infinite numbers that do.

In other words, many universes can solve the fine-tuning problem (why is our universe apparently exquisitely fine-tuned for life to come into existence?) only if there is an arbitrarily large number of universes and all but a few of them have flopped.

Millions of fine-tuned universes with different laws from ours would imply a cosmic creator of universes who never fails. A few flopped universes would imply a less-perfect creator who produced a few flops before producing the blockbuster.

So to rule out God, the materialist needs infinite universes, most of which have flopped, and a few of which accidentally succeeded. A tall order, considering that we only know about one universe now.