If you’ve ever heard the term “pretzel logic” (not the Steely Dan album), you’ll get the oxymoronic logic: logic shouldn’t look like a pretzel! Those who believe in a God-less universe increasingly have to turn themselves into pretzels to try to explain a universe that sure seems to point to something beyond matter to explain its existence. Thus the multiverse. I thought of the title of the Steely Dan album when I saw this piece in Forbes insisting that the “multiverse” must exist. What exactly is this multiverse, and why must it exist? Well, you can read Mr. Siegel’s argument and see if you agree, but I couldn’t understand about, oh, 90 percent of it. No doubt, that’s a great way to persuade people! I think it’s a lot easier, and more plausible, to say God created the universe, and if there are others, he created those too!
If you’re not familiar with this concept of a multiverse, it’s something very intelligent people came up with (like the writer of the Forbes piece) to deal with the implications of the Big Bang. Until Einstein came along and turned the Newtonian world of physics upside down with his general theory of relativity, most people who didn’t accept the biblical account of creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) thought that the universe was eternal; it always existed, and it always will. This is known as the steady state theory, and the Big Bang blew it up! As technology improved, and astronomers we able to look deeper and deeper into the universe, they found something very strange. No matter which way they looked, the universe was expanding uniformly, and the further away from us, the faster it was going. When they did all the physics and math, it pointed to the universe, this one, having a beginning at a point in time. That’s a little too close for comfort to Genesis 1: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
In his 1978 book, God and the Astronomers, Robert Jastrow pointed out the disappointment, and in some cases outright hostility, some scientists had to the discovery that the universe isn’t eternal:
Theologians generally are delighted with the proof that the Universe had a beginning, but astronomers are curiously upset. Their reactions provide an interesting demonstration of the response of the scientific mind—supposedly a very objective mind—when evidence uncovered by science itself leads to a conflict with the articles of faith in our profession. It turns out that the scientist behaves the way the rest of us do when our beliefs are in conflict with the evidence. We become irritated, we pretend the conflict does not exist, or we paper it over with meaningless phrases.
Or we come up with concepts like the multiverse. It goes something like this (and grab some pretzels while you read). The universe, the one we inhabit, is so exquisitely fine-tuned that a planet like ours can support carbon-based life forms like us. The fine-tuning, the materialists (all that exists is matter) insist, is really only a cosmic coincidence (or only has the appearance of design, as Richard Dawkins assures us). But as scientific knowledge increases, the fine-tuning is discovered to be so insanely fine-tuned, that it is increasingly difficult to reject the good old “God hypothesis.” To think that matter plus time plus . . . chance (i.e., nothing) is a plausible explanation for the insanity is pretty much impossible to sustain, unless you have a multiverse!
So how does this supposed multiverse make a fine-tuned to the zillionth degree universe without God possible? Well, you could read the Forbes article and try to comprehend the inscrutable, or you can simplify it with some straight ahead pretzel logic. You see, it’s simple. If you posit an unlimited number of universes, the more the merrier, then with an infinite amount of time (not sure where time came from, but we’ll let that go) a universe like ours so finely-tuned for life is bound to eventually exist. And here we are! No God needed. Don’t laugh. A lot of very smart place their God-less universe hope in such theoretical balderdash. I call it desperation. The silliness of it only goes to show you the lengths sinful human beings will go to deny the obvious. Read Genesis 3 and it will not surprise you at all.
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