Hi Vanni, sorry to have taken so long to answer your post. There've been a lot of demands on my time lately. (I do have a life) I see the rest of you have been busy during my absence.
Your theory of mulitple universes doesn't reguire a creator?
Well, let’s see. Until the Big Bang theory came along, conventional wisdom (in the science community) held that the universe was infinite. (They should have known better, there was plenty of evidence that indicated it was not, but they chose to ignore it). When the Big Bang came along the main thrust was to try to disprove it, and they felt confident that they would soon enough. The reason they wanted it disproved was expressed by Sir Arthur Eddington who said, “We must give evolution time to get started.” He well recognized that 13.7 billion years was insufficient time for that, the alternative being that absolute no-no, creation. As test after test verified the big bang, there were increasing efforts to get around it, or again in the words of Eddington, “find a loophole” by proposing such things as steady state theory, a rebounding universe, cyclic universe, quantum fluctuations and, chaotic inflation theory (the latest, and only multi-universes theory that has any chance of credibility, however slight).
The whole idea of multiple universes was first hypothesized as a solution to a quantum measurement problem in physics, but more recently it has become popular as a metaphysical escape hatch from the theistic implications of the incredible fine tuning of our universe, as some scientists have openly admitted. The idea is usually presented as purely scientific but goes well beyond what science can honestly endorse.
But let’s suppose this highly speculative idea was possible. I’ll use a simple example to illustrate the problems with it. For Christmas I bought my wife a bread making machine. For it to generate bread, we first need the well designed machine, with the right circuitry, heating element, timer etc. Then we need to put in all the right ingredients in the right proportions in the right order in order to get the bread we want. Bread is far less complex than the universe but it requires a lot of specific conditions to make. Otherwise you get something, but not an edible loaf of bread. Likewise, any mechanism that could produce functioning universes would require the right structure, the right mechanism, and the right ingredients to work, and in spite of coming out of nothing, there still is a requirement for input.
First it would require a mechanism to supply the energy required for the bubble universes (an inflaton field that acts as a reservoir of unlimited energy). Second, a mechanism to form the bubbles (general relativity). Third, a mechanism to convert the energy of the inflaton field to normal mass/energy, and fourth, a way to vary the constants of physics so that by random chance it could produce some universes that have the right fine tuning to sustain life (superstring theory). And it would have to make trillions of trillions of uncountable trillions of universes just to get one component such as the cosmological constant to have the right value in order to produce a life sustaining universe. And that’s just one of a whole host of incomprehensibly fine tuned components that are required. For example, according to Roger Penrose, the “original phase-space volume” required fine tuning to an accuracy of one part in 10 billion multiplied by itself 123 times, a number so huge that to write it would require more zeros than the number of elementary particles in the whole universe. Or how about the expansion rate of the universe, tuned to one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. The cosmological constant is tuned to at least 1 part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion billion. There are more than 30 such parameters that need such precise calibration in order to produce a life sustaining universe. When all of them are combined the possibility, as Hawking said, vanishes.
Which means, if it is true, a creator is required.
But, you’ll say, as long as there is a possibility even in a number that big, it could happen without a creator. Talk about faith! If I were to wager with you that I could flip a coin and get heads 50 times in a row, and then was able to do it, you would insist that the game was rigged. Yet that’s possible to do. In fact the odds are 1 chance in a million billion, but there’s no way you would believe it wasn’t rigged. Yet, with odds so small the number can’t even be written within the confines of the universe, you think it hasn’t been rigged. Now THAT is faith.
