Richard Dawkins, in his recent book The God Delusion ultimately relies on the concept of a multiverse as the answer to the argument for the existence of God which is drawn from the fact that the universe is structured according to fundamental laws which apply across the whole universe.The Templeton Foundation (incidentally, a pet hate of Richard Dawkins) sponsors research and discussion on the relationship of science and religion. Each month, the Foundation hosts and online exchange on some important question related to its mission. This month, the question is "Do we live in a multiverse". The dedicated page for the question has an interview with Paul Davies and links to several related articles.
5 comments:
CS Lewis' "Wood between the Worlds" is always what I imagined hearing "multiverse". It's an image I like... but I fail to understand how it might be an "answer" to undo theistic belief.
I might be missing something somewhere, though.
The multiverse theory is that there is a very large number of universes, most of which are uninteresting but one, or a few or which are interesting like ours.
As I understand it no-one has discovered another universe - so I suppose one would need "a leap of faith" in order to believe that they actually exist. Not a thought that would please Richard Dawkins!
fr paul harrison
Right... but that disproves God how?
At the philosophical level I think this is just a matter of semantics. A collection of multiverses is still a universe. It's been accepted for years that the laws of physics don't apply uniformly across the cosmos (black holes, quasars etc) so I don't see this as problematic. as Paul Davies says, this theory (along with 11-dimensional universes etc) is really just a mathematical projection to allow certain assumptions to be made when formulating equations that describe physical phenomena.
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