In recent decades, it has become clear that our universe shows much evidence of design. Many physicists are uncomfortable with that idea.

They prefer multiverse theory: our universe is just a blip in a vast sea of universes. It happens to appear designed but most of the others — if we ever had a chance to observe them — do not.

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, first author of The Immortal Mind (2025), was talking about that the other day; here are some snatches of his conversation with co-author Denyse O’Leary:

O’Leary: So, ultimately, to show that design is purely random, the materialist has to lean on many universes theory…?  

Egnor: But that doesn’t get them out of it. What they are doing is called the pleonastic fallacy —trying to explain a difference in kind by a difference in number. They account for the laws of nature in our universe by simply hypothesizing that there are 25 trillion trillion universes that all have different laws. And we just happen to be stuck in one of them.

But they haven’t explained the main issue — why are there any laws at all?

O’Leary: Even one set of laws requires an explanation…

Incoherence

Egnor: Plus, the whole idea of a multiverse is incoherent. The word “universe” means everything. So the multiverse theorists are claiming that everything that exists is an infinite ensemble of everythings. And that is not a coherent statement.

O’Leary: An “infinite ensemble of everythings”… I am glad my old grammar teacher did not live to hear you say this. Her head would explode.

Egnor: The multiverse, if it exists, is just a universe that has different pockets, regions that have different physical laws. And there is no evidence whatsoever for that.

O’Leary: I assume the multiverse idea was thought up because of the problem that the fine-tuning of the universe presents to materialism. Are there other attractions?

Basically, that’s what the Kaluza-Klein theory did. It tried to unify relativity and quantum mechanics using a higher dimensions in mathematics. And people have played with those ideas for a century.

But the other motive, obviously, is to elide the fine-tuning of our universe. If you wanted to sum up one of the fundamental discoveries of modern cosmology, which not necessarily what one would have expected, it is that our universe has no compartments. You point your telescopes at the Andromeda Galaxy, why would you assume that the Andromeda Galaxy has the same laws of physics that the Milky Way Galaxy does?

Why aren’t the laws of physics different in different places?

All sorts of other things are different in various places. The strength of gravity is different, the temperature is different, there’s all kinds of differences. So why are the laws of physics the same everywhere you look? The one exception would be the singularities of black holes, because no one knows what the laws there are, if there are any laws.

O’Leary: But if a multiverse were shown to exist, so that the next universe over has different laws of physics, and the next one has different ones again, they would just be like cars on a railway train. One is a dining car, one a sleeping car — and the next one is two-seater passenger rail. But you’d still be left with the problem: How did all this get started?

Egnor: One of the strengths, I think, of the Aristotelian/Thomistic way of looking at cosmology is that multiverse reasoning has no effect on that. You’re still asking, how did anything happen? It doesn’t matter whether it is our universe or some other universe.

Yet the very same people who argue for the multiverse theory will invoke Occam’s Razor — a preference for the simplest explanation — to eliminate any discussion of God from science. So they invoke the existence of innumerable universes, but they won’t allow the existence of God.

Occam’s Razor is never raised as a critique of the multiverse that I’m aware of. But multiverse claims are an obvious contradiction of the Razor’s minimalist approach.