04.06.09
The multiverse and ID
The Multiverse, Intelligent Design, and Science: Much Ado about Nothing
Ross Douthat and John Schwenkler have recently pointed to an article on the “multiverse.” There was similar attention devoted an earlier (and more interesting, in my view) article in the popular science magazine Discover last fall. The basic issue at play in multiverse theory is what is often called “fine tuning” or the Anthropic Principle: the assertion that if any of a very large number of constants in fundamental physical laws were even slightly different, then intelligent life would be impossible in our universe. One philosophical solution to this is that “God made the universe.” Another is the idea of the multiverse: more or less that are there are many universes beyond the one apparent to us, and that we happen to see this universe because it’s the one we’re in, and it’s the one we’re in because it’s the one that happens to have the values for these constants that allow intelligent life to evolve. It’s “monkeys on typewriters” on a (super-)cosmic scale. This sounds like a scientific theory; but if we take “universe” to equal “all physical reality that is observable in principle by human beings,” then I’ll argue that it is not scientific at all, but pure metaphysics.