Flaws in This Theory
One way that secular cosmologists try to evade the problem of design is to imagine that our universe is only one of countless universes in existence. They imagine that new universes are continually being produced by a blind process that sets physical constants and characteristics in a willy-nilly fashion. As a result, most universes are unworkable monstrosities that quickly expire. But just through random variation, a universe like ours occasionally appears with properties allowing it to survive and even give birth to life. In other words, our ordered universe is an outcome differing only by accident from a myriad other outcomes that are more disordered.
The idea of multiple universes must still, however, reckon with the problem of design. The structural characteristics of our universe are so precise and perfect that to obtain such a result by building many universes with characteristics set at random would be essentially impossible. To get it right even once would require more tries than we could calculate.
We will limit our discussion mainly to the form of modern thought which views the source of universes as a monstrous mechanical generator. Immediately, some will object. They will hold out the possibility that the universe did not come from any generator, but from nothing. But to claim nothing as the source of anything strains plausibility to the breaking point, for several reasons:
- If nothing can be the cause of anything, then surely it can be the cause of anything at all. It would be meaningless to impose restrictions on nothing. Therefore, if we admit nothing to causal status, it is entirely possible that the whole universe just five minutes ago, including all memory banks pointing to times that never existed, sprang into being from nothing. Indeed, all things might have suddenly originated at any moment in history. Why then do scientists bother to construct causal chains reaching millions and billions of years into an unimaginably distant past? Since they invest nothing with creative power only as a last resort when backward tracing of orderly processes has hit a brick wall of unknowns, they obviously have a great deal of confidence in the law of causality. A procedure more consistent as well as more supportive of this confidence would be to look for a first cause other than nothing. They should posit an original generator rather than enter realms of fancy where nothing is the highest creative genius. We have only touched on the outcomes this genius might achieve if he truly held sway over reality. Among them would be countless universes identical to our own, even furnished with replicas of you and me. The possibilities are as high and broad as imagination, yet just as imagination cannot produce anything real, neither can nothing.
- If nothing has the power to create, surely it also has the power to extinguish. To extinguish is just another way to generate a difference between now and the next moment. If the mysterious workman Mr. Nothing was able long ago to escape the law of causality when he built the universe, it seems likely that he is able not only to flip on the switch that turns possibility into fact, but also to switch it off. Therefore, the same nothing that made everything appear could make everything disappear. Our universe could blink off at noon tomorrow. Yet this possibility gives no pause to scientists who toil to see the future. Like scientists who toil to see the past, they are voting decisively against nothing as a cause.
- Because they are uncomfortable with portraying nothing as an active creator of real things, many today introduce another agency at the beginning. They still regard nothingness as the womb of our universe, but they see worlds of mass-energy emerging only when chance—an agency seen as an Olympian figure with an aura of strength—intruded upon a quiet and reluctant nothing and, contrary to the laws of science, managed to build everything. But what we call chance is simply a flow of events without purpose or pattern. In nothingness there is no flow of events. Thus, there is also no chance. Nothing is simply nothing and contains nothing that could serve as a mechanism to generate something.
We will now return to the theory that the source of this universe is a generator of many universes. To grant this theory as much credibility as we can, we will concede that the generator has unlimited time to operate. Thus, if imbued with sufficient power, it might eventually make a universe like ours. But as we have said, the exquisite design of our universe forces us to recognize that the probability of such an outcome is essentially zero. The theory also has other glaring faults.
- What is the source of the generator itself? In other words, what generated the generator? To imagine such a generator does not, therefore, resolve the mystery of origins. It merely carries the mystery back one step earlier. To imagine that the generator is self-existent and eternal like God creates a bizarre scenario indeed, for then the foundation of all the amazing worlds everywhere is only a stupid but tireless machine.
- How could such a generator fashion whole universes and make them conform to certain specifications? A theory of origins so devoid of details concerning the manufacturing process merits no serious consideration. It is so vague that, although wrong, it could not be falsified.
- Why should such a generator operate at random and not according to some system setting restrictions on possible outcomes? Familiar generators are more focused. If truly haphazard, a generator of universes would be blind to the workability of its products. Yet this kind of generator might easily get on an infinite track of variations that forever yielded products that were unworkable. In order to favor workable products, a generator would have to be guided by this objective, and purpose points to a mind rather than to a mindless machine.
- Fabricating the substance of universes would not be the generator's only task. Its capability would have to be so tremendously broad as to allow production of a universe like ours, where on a vast scale there is perfect uniformity of composition and perfect compliance with laws governing interactions. To sidestep the obvious need for an intelligent planner and creator to accomplish such amazing work, advocates of the multiple-universe theory insist that a mindless generator was skillful enough. Eventually in its train of products, it succeeded in churning out a universe possessing all the attributes and subject to all the laws necessary to assure its coherence and stability. But here we raise two objections.
- Any process bestowing orderly characteristics upon a universe would require an a priori conception of workable design. In other words, the generator would need to be programmed with certain information: for example, that a universe is a bounded entity on a very large scale. Otherwise, a mere generator of mass-energy packets might turn out endless cupcakes. Also required would be the information that a universe should contain elementary particles subject to mutual attractions or repulsions. Otherwise, the generator might make hardly anything except huge kaleidoscopes of formless mass-energy. Among the rare exceptions might be some containing solid masses, but likely no prettier than gigantic blobs. If information was required to build a universe, the only conceivable supplier would be an intelligent planner. But if such a planner existed, why should he have bothered with awkward universes that burst like bubbles? Why should he not have aimed for one good product?
- In order to build any universe within the acceptable range of outcomes, the generator could not be a fumbling sort of mechanical busybody. It would have to meet the stringent requirements of success in its task. To assemble a good product, it would need to run smoothly and error-free through all necessary operations. Thus, the only useful generator would be an exemplar of sophisticated design and construction. Just to plan and build the generator itself would be a marvelous feat. The engineer and craftsman? Another mindless generator? Hardly. The only possible maker of such a machine would be God, yet for Him it would not serve any purpose. He can make universes simply by the word of His power.
- The generator would somehow have to impose upon the substance of a universe like ours both initial and perpetual compliance with the original pattern. It is hard to imagine how a generator could achieve such compliance unless it had both initial and continuing power on a divine scale.
- The laws governing our universe exist only in the realm of ideas. How did a generator transmit them to a massive assemblage of mere stuff, and how, if they were transmitted, did they maintain any presence or influence?
- As an attempt to explain our universe, the theory fails in yet another way. It is hard to imagine how a mindless machine could create a universe where there is not only matter in motion, but also thinking minds. Theorists who deny thoughtfulness in the original creator are depriving themselves of any decent explanation for our own thoughtfulness.
Besides the difficulty in conceptualizing an adequate generator, the idea of multiple universes raises another difficulty. Either they originate in the same generator, or they arise independently, from generators unrelated to each other. But if a cosmologist concedes that our universe came from a generator without other offspring, he loses his leverage against design, for whatever that generator was, it led unerringly to an outcome marked by great beauty of interlocking regularities. Could chance operating upon nothing be the father of such a child?
But if a cosmologist insists that multiple universes come from the same generator, he can no longer treat them as different universes. He cannot regard them as lacking any common point. At their origin they must have been in the same space-time as the generator, and there they must have remained. Where are they now? Modern theory supposes that many disappeared long ago, perhaps even before our universe came into being. Yet it does not deny that multitudes exist even at the present moment. It is hard to imagine that these could have strayed into wholly nonintersecting realms. Whether they lie nestled in the matrix of our universe or float afar off, there is no reason to suppose that they are sealed against detection. So, until we find them, there is no reason to believe they exist.
One current theory that promotes the idea of multiple universes claims that the nothingness we came from has no time or space. Yet the originator of the theory seems to contradict himself. He said, "Our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time." On what time scale? Evidently, since it embraces the origin of every universe, on the time scale of the parent nothingness. The statement is not just a slip of the tongue. It is impossible to look at it any other way. If the same nothingness produces multiple universes, they must exist within the same space-time coordinate system, and therefore we can view them as distinct only by thinking of them as appearing at different times or places. Yet their common framework makes it impossible to view them as truly isolated. They are all branches of the same tree and therefore potentially within sight of each other.
In summary, the theory of multiple universes is a desperate attempt to escape the obvious. When we understand that the Creator of our universe could have owned no less sophistication than necessary for producing the intricate design displayed everywhere around us, and no less power than necessary for implementing and sustaining that design forever, we come to the conclusion that the worlds were made by God.
© 2007, 2012, 2018, 2021 Stanley Edgar Rickard (Ed Rickard, the author). All rights reserved.