At his blog, Thoughts about God, Truth, and Beauty, scientist and clergyman Kirk Durston offered some thoughts last spring on how science fiction creeps into science:

Our observations of the universe, as well as our knowledge of theoretical physics, reveal that the universe appears to be fantastically fine-tuned to support life. Sir Roger Penrose, for example, has estimated that the probability of obtaining any kind of universe at all capable of supporting life is roughly 1 chance in 10^(10^123). The odds of your neighbour down the street winning all the lotteries in North America this week, and every week for the next ten years are far better.

A friend of mine works for a lotteries commission and has entertained me with accounts of how they track down lottery fraud. Their primary operating principle is that the more improbable the winnings, the more likely there has been intelligent interference in the lottery system. The implications for the universe, therefore, are intuitively obvious — there is an intelligent mind behind the universe that designed its parameters to support life.

“Faith and Science: Part III – Fantasy in modern science,” April 23

Where does the fantasy come in?

Modern science, however, is heavily influenced by scientism, the philosophical belief that science explains everything.(2) It is atheism dressed up in a lab coat. Consequently, the idea of a mind behind the universe is simply not an option, no matter how powerful the scientific evidence. There is only one other way events with such mind-boggling low probabilities could occur … a near-infinite number of universes. Fantastically improbable events would be commonplace in a multiverse containing a near-infinite number of possibilities. As cosmologist Bernard Carr states, “If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.”(3)

The multiverse is a handy thing, for it enables us to explain anything no matter how wildly improbable it might be. A 300 pound pig could spontaneously come together from molecules floating around in the atmosphere two thousand feet above the ground, hurtle down to earth, destroy your spanking-new Tesla, and we could simply invoke the multiverse.

Evolutionary biologist Eugene Koonin, for example, notes that the probability of evolving RNA replication for the origin of life is so small that it is unlikely to occur anywhere in the universe, over its history to date. His solution is similar …. an infinite number of universes. That way, even something so mind-bendingly improbable as RNA replication will be “inevitable”.

The multiverse, it seems, is modern science’s “god of the gaps” … if it is too wildly improbable … if we have no natural explanation — especially if it points to God, then the multiverse must have done it. The interesting thing is this … an infinite number of unseen, untestable entities are proposed to avoid just One Unseen Mind behind the universe which scientism must deny at all costs. One might be reminded of Ockham’s Razor at this point.

Fantasy in modern science”

Ockham’s Razor means that a simple explanation that addresses all the issues is to be preferred to a more complex one:

But if the multiverse feels less frightening and more rewarding than the existence of God, we can be sure that some people will insist that it has more scientific merit. Durston notes, “As mathematician George Ellis points out, however, the ‘multiverse argument is a well-founded philosophical proposal but, as it cannot be tested, it does not belong fully in the scientific fold.’”

Durston adds, “The point of all this is not to argue that multiverse theories are false, but that they do not qualify as science. Mathematical science fiction, yes. Logical possibility, maybe, provided they do not form a countable infinite number of universes, which is not possible, as I have shown in another article.”

The multiverse is not incompatible with the existence of God, of course. God might choose the create many universes. But we have no evidence that he has done so. And using the idea of a multiverse that just somehow exists on its own as a way to get around the existence of God may be good or bad science fiction but it is not good reasoning.