6. Ascending to the Ultimate Multiverse
1. Hugh Everett, “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” Review of Modern Physics 29 (1957): 454–62.
2. Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (New York: Knopf, 2011), 31.
3. This is Niels Bohr’s understanding of the uncertainty principle, to which Werner Heisenberg eventually acceded in a postscript to his original paper: “The Physical Content of Quantum Kinematics and Mechanics,” Zeitschrift für Physik 43 (1927): 172–98. According to Bohr, the indeterminacy of a quantum particle is not an epistemological failure; that is, the problem is not that we lack sufficiently precise instruments with which to measure it or that shining any light on a particle necessarily moves it from where it “was.” The problem, for Bohr, is ontological; until the moment a particle is measured, it simply does not have a determinate position. On this distinction and on Heisenberg’s eventual deference to Bohr, see Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), esp. 7–19, 115–18.
4. John Lasseter, dir., Toy Story (Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Studio, 1995); Eric Till, dir., The Christmas Toy (Henson Associates and Sony Pictures, 1986).
5. Quoted in John Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 25.
6. In David Deutsch’s version of the MWI, the universe does not split. Rather, there are a vast number of universes from the beginning, all of which start out the same and remain identical until specific quantum choices set them on different courses. See David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (New York: Penguin, 1997), and “The Structure of the Multiverse,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A 458 (2002): 2911–23.
7. Max Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” Scientific American, May 2003, 48.
8. Bryce DeWitt, “Quantum Mechanics and Reality,” Physics Today 23, no. 9 (1970): 161.
9. Deutsch, Fabric of Reality.
10. This is a very loose summary of part of the famed “double-slit experiment,” which is addressed at greater length in the final chapter. For a popular introduction to this experiment, see Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Norton, 1999), 85–116.
11. For such an argument, see Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 85.
13. Colin Bruce, Schrödinger’s Rabbits: The Many-Worlds of Quantum (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry, 2004), 69. For a serious treatment of the possibility that the universe did not “exist” until there were conscious beings to observe it, see John Wheeler, “Genesis and Observership,” in Foundational Porblems in the Special Sciences, ed. Robert E. Butts and Jaakko Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977), 3–33.
14. Bruce, Schrödinger’s Rabbits, 154.
15. Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 48.
17. See, for example, Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2006), 316; and Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 27.
18. Martin Gardner, Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? Discourses on Gödel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics (New York: Norton, 2003), 5.
19. Stephen Hawking, “Cosmology from the Top Down,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Bernard Carr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 91.
20. Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog, “Populating the Landscape: A Top-Down Approach,” Physical Review D 73 (2006): 3.
21. Hawking, “Cosmology from the Top Down,” 93.
22. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76–100.
23. Hawking and Hertog, “Populating the Landscape,” 2.
24. James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, “Wave Function of the Universe,” Physical Review D 28 (1983): 2960–75. For a popular introduction to this model, see Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Bantam, 1998). From the beginning, Hawking and Hartle have deployed the rhetorical strategy of claiming that the universe is therefore created “from nothing.” On the ironic persistence of this Christian trope, especially among physicists who are seeking to unsettle Christian explanations of creation, see Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Cosmic Singularities: On the Nothing and the Sovereign,” Journal of the American Association of Religion 80, no. 2 (2012): 485–517, and “Myth and Modern Physics: On the Power of Nothing,” in Creation Options: Rethinking Initial Creation, ed. Thomas Oord and Richard Livingston (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
25. Hawking, Brief History of Time, 141.
26. Hawking and Hertog, “Populating the Landscape,” 3.
29. Hawking, “Cosmology from the Top Down,” 95.
30. Ibid., 95, 97 (emphasis added). Hawking’s fairly squirm-inducing analogy is that “it would be like asking for the amplitude that I am Chinese. I know I am British, even though there are more Chinese [people on the earth]” (96).
31. For a treatment of the realist/antirealist debate in the history of philosophy of science, see Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
32. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010), 42.
33. Ibid., 43, 59 (emphasis in original).
34. Hawking, “Cosmology from the Top Down.”
35. Susskind, Cosmic Landscape, 316.
36. As we may recall from the earliest cosmogonists, “chaos” is a state of undifferentiation, whereas order is a state of distinction. Chaos is Thales’s water, Anaximenes’s air, Timaeus’s “traces,” the biblical tehom. Order is the distinction between land and sea, day and night, cold and heat, solid and liquid.
37. Sean M. Carroll, “The Cosmic Origins of Time’s Arrow,” Scientific American, June 2008, 50.
39. Laura Mersini-Houghton, “Birth of the Universe from the Multiverse,” September 22, 2008, 1, available only through arXiv/0809.3623.
40. Laura Mersini-Houghton, “Thoughts on Defining the Multiverse,” April 27, 2008, 3, available only through arXiv/0804.4280.
41. Mersini-Houghton, “Birth of the Universe from the Multiverse,” 1–2.
42. Laura Mersini-Houghton, “Notes on Time’s Enigma,” in The Arrows of Time: A Debate in Cosmology, ed. Laura Mersini-Houghton and Rüdiger Vaas, Fundamental Theories of Physics 172 (Berlin: Springer, 2012), 157–59, arXiv/0909.2330.
43. Laura Mersini-Houghton and Richard Holman, “‘Tilting’ the Universe with the Landscape Multiverse: The ‘Dark’ Flow,” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2009 (2009): 1, arXiv/0810.5388.
44. Mersini-Houghton, “Birth of the Universe from the Multiverse,” 7.
45. Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (New York: Knopf, 1999), 8.
46. Mersini-Houghton, “Notes on Time’s Enigma,” 4.
47. Mersini-Houghton, “Thoughts on Defining the Multiverse,” 7.
48. Mersini-Houghton, “Birth of the Universe from the Multiverse,” 9.
49. “Scientists Believe That They Have Discovered Another Universe,” December 15, 2009, Current.com.
50. Mersini-Houghton and Holman, “‘Tilting’ the Universe,” 1.
51. A. Kashlinsky, F. Atrio-Barandela, H. Ebeling, A. Edge, and D. Kocevski, “A New Measurement of the Bulk Flow of X-Ray Luminous Clusters of Galaxies,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 71 (2010): L81–L85, arXiv:astro-ph/0910.4958.
52. These two predictions are the quadrupole–octopole alignment and power suppression at low multipoles. See P. A. R. Ade, N. Aghanim, C. Armitage-Caplan, M. Arnaud, M. Ashdown, F. Atrio-Barandela, J. Aumont, et al., “Planck 2013 Results: Overview of Products and Scientific Results,” March 20, 2013, available only through arXiv:1303.5062.
53. Mersini-Houghton and Holman, “‘Tilting’ the Universe,” 2, 1.
54. On the quantum theory of entanglement, see Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 71–94; and Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Vintage, 2005), 77–123. For a historical introduction, see Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (New York: Vintage, 2009). For differing theological engagements of entanglement, see Catherine Keller, “The Cloud of the Impossible” (manuscript); and Kirk Wegter-McNelly, The Entangled God: Divine Relationality and Quantum Physics (New York: Routledge, 2011).
55. Mersini-Houghton, “Thoughts on Defining the Multiverse,” 7.
57. Mersini-Houghton and Holman, “‘Tilting’ the Universe,” 1.
58. On the dramatic development of this principle, see Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).
59. Mersini-Houghton, “Birth of the Universe from the Multiverse,” 8, 9.
60. Mersini-Houghton, “Thoughts on Defining the Multiverse,” 7.
61. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 2.2.100. See also chap. 3, sec. “End Without End.”
62. Mersini-Houghton, “Notes on Time’s Enigma,” 2.
63. Mersini-Houghton, “Thoughts on Defining the Multiverse,” 7.
64. Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, in Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought with Annotated Translation of His Work “On the Infinite Universe and Worlds,” ed. Dorothea Singer (New York: Schuman, 1950), 225–378. See also chap. 3, sec. “Infinity Unbound.” William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 325, 27. See also introduction, sec. “The One and the Many.”
65. Mersini-Houghton, “Thoughts on Defining the Multiverse,” 7.
66. James, Pluralistic Universe, 325.
67. On the femininity of liquid metaphors, see Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). On the relationship of this feminine fluidity to creation narratives, see Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003).
68. Karl Schwarzschild presented this theory in “Uber das Gravitationsfeld eineses Massenpunktes nach der Einsteinschen Theorie,” translated as “On the Gravitational Field of a Point-Mass, According to Einstein’s Theory,” trans. Larissa Borissova and Dmitri Rabounski, Abraham Zelmanov Journal 1 (2008): 10–19. See also Wheeler, “Genesis and Observership.”
69. On Hawking’s discovery of black-hole radiation, see John D. Barrow, The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless, and Endless (New York: Vintage, 2005), 108–9.
70. Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 87, 88 (subsequent references are cited in the text).
71. Lee Smolin, “Scientific Alternatives to the Anthropic Principle,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 335.
72. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard H. Popkin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 36. See also introduction, sec. “Whence the Modern Multiverse?”
73. Smolin, “Scientific Alternatives to the Anthropic Principle.”
74. Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse, 185 (emphasis in original).
75. Lee Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 17. Jacques Derrida’s infamous utterance is that “there is nothing outside the text” (Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], 158).
76. Smolin, “Scientific Alternatives to the Anthropic Principle,” 338.
78. Having told Abraham in Genesis 15 that he would have as many descendants as there were stars in the sky, God reaffirms his promise after Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, saying, “I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore” (Genesis 22:17 [NRSV]).
79. J. Richard Gott and Li-Xin Li, “Can the Universe Create Itself?” Physical Review D 58 (1998): 37, 2.
80. Paraphrased in Greene, Hidden Reality, 227.
81. Dennis Overbye, “Gauging a Collider’s Odds of Creating a Black Hole,” New York Times, April 15, 2008.
82. Steven K. Blau, E. I. Guendelman, and Alan H. Guth, “Dynamics of False-Vacuum Bubbles,” Physical Review D 35 (1987): 1747–66.
83. Edward R. Harrison, “The Natural Selection of Universes Containing Intelligent Life,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 36, no. 3 (1995): 198.
84. Greene explains that, according to Alan Guth and Edward Farhi, you would need
a strong kick-start to get the inflationary expansion off and running. So strong that there’s only one entity that can provide it: a white hole. A white hole, the opposite of a black hole, is a hypothetical object that spews matter out rather than drawing it in. This requires conditions so extreme that known mathematical methods break down (much as is the case at the center of a black hole); suffice it to say, no one anticipates generating white holes in the laboratory. Ever. (Hidden Reality, 279)
86. Harrison, paraphrased in Barrow, Infinite Book, 201.
87. Heinz Pagels has also explored this idea, considering the baffling explicability of the universe to be a function of its having been designed by beings like us. The laws of physics, in other words, might be something like a secret code inscribed on the universe by its creator. This would mean that “scientists in discovering this code are deciphering the Demiurge’s hidden message, the tricks he used in creating the universe. No human mind could have arranged for any message so flawlessly coherent, so strangely imaginative, and sometimes downright bizarre. It must be the work of an Alien Intelligence” (The Dreams of Reason [New York: Bantam, 1989], 156). Even Andrei Linde has considered this possibility, in “Hard Art of the Universe Creation,” October 15, 1991, esp. 23–24, available only through arXiv:hep-th/9110037v1.
88. Harrison, “Natural Selection of Universes,” 199.
89. Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse, 199.
90. Harrison, “Natural Selection of Universes,” 200.
91. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 15.
92. Harrison, “Natural Selection of Universes,” 199.
93. Greene, Hidden Reality, 280 (subsequent references are in the text).
94. For these games, see Sim City, http://www.simcity.com/en_US; Second Life, http://secondlife.com/; McCurdy’s Armor, Forge FX Simulators, http://www.forgefx.com/casestudies/mccurdys/military-training-simulator.htm; and Sindome, http://www.sin dome.org/. For similar gaming communities, see Phantasy World, http://pworld.dyndns.org/index.php?page=home; and The Artemis Project, Artemis Society International, http://www.asi.org/adb/09/08/04/moo.html (all accessed June 7, 2013).
95. Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Nick Bostrom, “A Short History of Transhumanist Thought,” in Man into Superman: The Startling Potential of Human Evolution—and How to Be a Part of It, ed. Robert C. W. Ettinger (Palo Alto, Calif.: Ria University Press, 2005), 315–49; Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2006).
96. Nick Bostrom, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 255.
97. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 37.
98. Nick Bostrom, “The Simulation Argument: Some Explanations,” Analysis 69, no. 3 (2009): 458 (emphasis added).
99. Or, as Bostrom phrases the negative argument, “if we do not think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we shall have descendants who will run lots of simulations on their forebears” (“Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” 243).
100. Martin Rees, “In the Matrix,” Edge, May 19, 2003.
101. In addition to Greene, Hidden Reality, 274–306, consult the interviews with Greene and reflections on his hypotheses in Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, “DIY Universe,” Radiolab, WNYC, March 25, 2009; and Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Theoretical Physicist Brian Greene Thinks You Might Be a Hologram” [interview with Brian Greene], Wired, May 16, 2012, http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/05/geeks-guidebrian-greene/ (accessed June 7, 2013).
102. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993) (subsequent references are cited in the text).
103. Paul C. W. Davies, “A Brief History of the Multiverse,” New York Times, April 12, 2003, quoted in Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 188, 187.
104. Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 188.
106. “Let us then examine this point, and let us say: ‘Either God is or he is not.’ But to which view shall we be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us…. Yes, but you must wager…. Which will you choose then? … Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess the two cases: if you win[,] you win everything, if you lose[,] you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then; wager that he does exist” (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer [New York: Penguin, 1966], no. 418, pp. 149–53; for the original French, see Blaise Pascal, Pensées [Paris: Bookking International, 1995], nos. 233–418, pp. 89–93).
107. Hanson, “How to Live in a Simulation.”
109. Greene often capitalizes the term simulators in Hidden Reality.
110. Barrow, Infinite Book, 210. See also Davies, “Brief History of the Multiverse.”
111. For example, see Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse; Greene, Hidden Reality; Rees, “In the Matrix.”
112. Barrow, Infinite Book, 205. Similar arguments can be found in Davies, “Brief History of the Multiverse,” and “Universes Galore: Where Will It All End?” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 487–505.
113. Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 186.
114. Paraphrased in Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse, 198.
115. Rees, “In the Matrix,” emphasis added.
116. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, ed. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), book VII; Plato, Timaeus, in Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 30a, 35a. See also chap. 1, sec. “So Let Us Begin Again …”
117. Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 49.
118. Davies makes a similar argument, saying that “most physicists working on fundamental topics” think of mathematics as prescriptive of physical laws rather than descriptive of them (Cosmic Jackpot, 12). Whether this is the case or not, most physicists do not take Tegmark’s step of ascribing physical reality to mathematical forms.
119. Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 50.
120. Plato, Timaeus, 30a, 31b.
122. Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 50.
123. Max Tegmark, “The Multiverse Hierarchy,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 118.
124. David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
125. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). See also chap. 2, sec. “Accident and Infinity.”
126. The Neoplatonist and sixth-century Christian author Pseudo-Dionysius coined the term hierarchy, by which he meant “a sacred order, a state of understanding, and an activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine” (The Celestial Hierarchy, in The Complete Works, ed. Colm Luibheid [New York: Paulist Press, 1987], 3.1.164d). See Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Dionysius, Derrida, and the Problem of Ontotheology,” Modern Theology 24, no. 2 (2008): 733.
127. Tegmark, “Multiverse Hierarchy.”
128. Helge Kragh, Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 273.
129. Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 50. Of course, this claim leaves out “inconsistent” structures; as Kragh puts it, “one can easily imagine a flat-space universe where the circumference of a circle differs from 2πr (at least I can), but no such mathematical universe exists” (Higher Speculations, 273).
130. Greene, Hidden Reality, 314, 338–39; Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 210.
131. This is Gribbin’s parody of the ekpyrotic scenario, in In Search of the Multiverse, 165. See also chap. 5, sec. “Other Answers.”
132. Greene, Hidden Reality, 297.
133. Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 49.
Unendings
1. Neil A. Manson, “Introduction,” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. Neil A. Manson (New York: Routledge, 2003), 18. With this phrase, Manson is reporting on this position, not necessarily adopting it. One of the scholars who best embodies this position is the evangelical theologian William Lane Craig, who argues that “the very fact that detractors of design have to resort to such a remarkable hypothesis underlies the point that cosmic fine-tuning is not explicable in terms of a physical necessity alone or in terms of sheer chance in the absence of a World Ensemble. The Many-Worlds Hypothesis is [therefore] a sort of backhanded compliment to the design hypothesis” (“Design and the Anthropic Fine-tuning of the Universe,” in ibid., 171).
2. Christof Schönborn, “Finding Design in Nature,” New York Times, July 7, 2005.
4. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959).
5. Most prominent and subtle among these critics are George Ellis, a cosmologist, Quaker, and self-professed “Platonist”; William Stoeger, an astronomer and staff scientist to the Vatican; Paul Davies, a physicist and chair of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Institute; and John Barrow, a cosmologist and self-identified “deist.” See their critiques of various multiverse hypotheses in G. F. R. Ellis, U. Kirchner, and W. R. Stoeger, “Multiverses and Physical Cosmology,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 347 (2004): 921–36, arXiv:astro-ph/0305292v3; William R. Stoeger, G. F. R. Ellis, and U. Kirchner, “Multiverses and Cosmology: Philosophical Issues,” January 19, 2006, available only through arXiv/0407329v2; George Ellis, “Does the Multiverse Really Exist?” Scientific American, August 2011, 38–43; Paul C. W. Davies, “A Brief History of the Multiverse,” New York Times, April 12, 2003, and Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007); and John D. Barrow, The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (New York: Norton, 2011).
6. For resonant but very different accounts of the complementary relationship between reason and revelation stemming from Roman Catholic, Anglican, and process positions, respectively, see Denys Turner, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); and John B. Cobb and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996).
7. This is a very loose paraphrase of Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (Allen, Tex.: Christian Classics, 1981), 1.2.3, repl. obj. 2.
8. In addition to Jeffrey Zweernick, Who’s Afraid of the Multiverse? (Pasadena, Calif.: Reasons to Believe, 2008), works by Christian (or “Neoplatonic”) physicists and philosophers who affirm of the multiverse include John Leslie, Universes (New York: Routledge, 1996); Don N. Page, “Does God So Love the Multiverse?” in Science and Religion in Dialogue, ed. Melville Y. Stewart (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 1:380–95, arXiv/0801.0246, and “Predictions and Tests of Multiverse Theories,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Bernard Carr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 411–29; Stephen Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2003); and Robin Collins, “The Multiverse Hypothesis: A Theistic Perspective,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 459–80.
9. Zweernick, Who’s Afraid of the Multiverse? 53. Craig sees this point as an argument against the multiverse and in favor of the “simpler” single universe, in “Design and the Anthropic Fine-tuning of the Universe,” 172. Compare Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 204.
10. This line of thinking seems to rely on the work of Collins, who argues that
the multiverse-generator itself, whether of the inflationary variety or some other type, seems to need to be “well designed” in order to produce life-sustaining universes. After all, even a mundane item like a bread machine, which only produces loaves of bread instead of universes, must be well designed as an appliance and must have the right ingredients (flour, water and yeast) to produce decent loaves of bread. If this is right, then invoking some sort of multiverse-generator as an explanation of the fine-tuning serves to kick the issue of design up one level, to the question of who designed the multiverse-generator. (“Multiverse Hypothesis,” 464)
It should be said that this is not the most apt of analogies; unless something goes wrong, a bread machine makes a “good” loaf of bread every time it runs. Inflation, by contrast, produces mostly empty space and failed universes. The reason it can spit out a functioning universe from time to time is that it has an infinite amount of materials with which to work. If a bread machine were able to rely on an infinite supply of flour, water, and yeast, it might be terribly designed or just haphazardly thrown together and still produce a decent loaf of bread once in a while anyway.
11. See introduction, sec. “Whence the Modern Multiverse?” For an explanation of the difference between modern and traditional arguments from design, see Manson, “Introduction,” 5–8. Although Manson says that the form of these arguments delivers them from Philo’s critiques, he does not engage Hume’s text in order to demonstrate as much. I tend to be of the opinion that design arguments in their modern form are little more than, as Robert O’Connor has argued, “old wine in new wineskins” (“The Design Inference: Old Wine in New Wineskins,” in God and Design, ed. Manson, 66–87). Several of Philo’s critiques (especially his battery of questions beginning “Have worlds ever formed before your eyes”) are reframed and leveled against modern arguments from design in Timothy McGrew, Lydia McGrew, and Eric Vestrup, “Probabilities and the Fine-tuning Argument: A Skeptical View,” in ibid., 200–208.
12. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1966), no. 913, p. 309.
13. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Isabel Best, Lisa E. Dahill, Reinhard Krauss, Nancy Lukens, Barbara Rumscheidt, and Martin Rumscheidt, vol. 8 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, ed. Eberhard Bethge, Ernst Feil, Christian Gremmels, Wolfgang Huber, Hans Pfeifer, Albrecht Schönherr, Heinz Eduard Tödt, and Ilse Tödt (Minneapolis: Augburg Fortress Press, 2010), letter 137 (April 30, 1944), 366.
16. Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” in ibid., 42.
17. It is doubtless his overexposure to Oxbridgian teleological arguments that prompts Martin Rees to confess in a recent lecture that “as far as the practice of religion is concerned, I appreciate and participate in it … but I doubt … that theological insights can help me with my physics” (“In the Matrix,” Edge, May 19, 2003). Rees concludes this same lecture with a series of reflections on global warming, nuclear proliferation, and biological warfare—ethical considerations to which he claims cosmologists are particularly sensitive because they are aware of how rare our “pale blue dot” is—even if it is situated in an infinite multiverse. I would suggest that such ethical crises, which occupy the center of a number of theologies with which Rees is probably far less familiar, would be a much more productive space for the “dialogue” between cosmology and theology than the question of whether an eternal Being got the thing going in the first place. For an introduction to modern ecologically minded theologies, see Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller, eds., Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
18. George Ellis makes this connection in “Physics Ain’t What It Used to Be: Review of The Cosmic Landscape, by Leonard Susskind,” Nature, December 8, 2005, 739–40.
19. Brian Greene calls this model the “Pac-Man model” of the universe, in The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (New York: Knopf, 2011), 22.
20. Jean-Pierre Luminet, Glenn D. Starkman, and Jeffrey R. Weeks, “Is Space Finite?” Scientific American, October 2002, 63. See also M. Lachieze-ray and Jean-Pierre Luminet, “Cosmic Topology,” Physics Reports 254 (1995): 135–214, arXiv:gr-qc/9605010 (updated version).
21. According to Aristotle, “That which is finite moves in a circle” (On the Heavens [De caelo ], trans. J. L. Stocks, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971], 1:271b26). See also chap. 1, sec. “Reflecting Singularity,” and chap. 3, sec. “Infinity Unbound.”
22. John D. Barrow, The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless, and Endless (New York: Vintage, 2005), 149.
23. Ellis, “Does the Multiverse Really Exist?” For a response to this charge and a defense of well-grounded extrapolation in inflationary scenarios, see Joshua Knobe, Ken D. Olum, and Alexander Vilenkin, “Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology,” British Journal for the Philosopy of Science 57, no. 1 (2006): 55.
24. For the evidence gathered so far in favor of inflation, see N. Jarosik and C. L. Bennett, “Seven-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anistrophy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Sky Maps, Systematic Errors, and Basic Results,” Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series 192 (2011): 1–47, arXiv/1001.4744.
25. “We are assuming quantum field theory remains valid far beyond the domain where it has been tested…. [W]e have faith in that extreme extrapolation despite all the unsolved problems at the foundation of quantum theory, the divergences of quantum field theory, and the failure of that theory to provide a satisfactory resolution of the cosmological constant problem” (Stoeger, Ellis, and Kirchner, “Multiverses and Cosmology,” 30).
26. Even a theorist sympathetic to string theory such as Greene writes that “remarkable as string theory may be, rich as its mathematical structure may have become, the dearth of testable predictions, and the concomitant absence of contact with observations or experiments, relegates [sic] it to the realm of scientific speculation” (Hidden Reality, 171). For a polemical articulation of this critique, see Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (New York: First Mariner, 2007).
27. Davies, “Brief History of the Multiverse.”
28. Alan P. Lightman, “The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith,” Harper’s Magazine, December 22, 2011.
29. Paul J. Steinhardt, “The Inflation Debate,” Scientific American, April 2011, 36–43. See also chap. 5, sec. “Other Answers.”
30. D. H. Mellor argues that it makes no sense to talk about the parameters being “improbable” because this universe is the only one we have. The solution, then, is to stop asking why the universe is the way it is and instead “accept” it (“Too Many Universes,” in God and Design, ed. Manson, 227). Davies similarly suggests that the very question “How come existence?” is a remnant of an age we ought to outgrow. Once information technology expands our understanding of the universe, “those age-old questions of existence may evaporate away, exposed as nothing more than the befuddled musings of biological beings trapped in a mental straitjacket” (Cosmic Jackpot, 259).
31. Martin Gardner, Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? Discourses on Gödel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics (New York: Norton, 2003), 9.
32. For example, Craig, “Design and the Anthropic Fine-Tuning of the Universe,” 171; Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
33. Richard Dawkins, “The Improbability of God,” Free Inquiry 18, no. 3 (1998): 6, quoted in Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 219.
34. For a preliminary exploration of the theological implications of ekpyrosis, see Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “The Fire Each Time: Dark Energy and the Breath of Creation,” in Cosmology, Ecology, and the Energy of God, ed. Donna Bowman and Clayton Crockett (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 26–41. See also chap. 5, sec. “Other Answers.”
35. Lee Smolin, “Scientific Alternatives to the Anthropic Principle,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 323–65, and Life of the Cosmos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also chap. 6, sec. “Black Holes and Baby Universes.”
36. William Dembski, “The Chance of the Gaps,” in God and Design, ed. Manson, 260.
38. Max Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” Scientific American, May 2003, 48.
39. Greene, Hidden Reality, 212.
40. Paraphrased in Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 287.
41. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Cognitive Repression in Contemporary Physics,” in Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 139–49.
42. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 46.
43. Bruce, Schrödinger’s Rabbits, 154.
44. John Wheeler, “Genesis and Observership,” in Foundational Porblems in the Special Sciences, ed. Robert E. Butts and Jaakko Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977), 8. See also Tim Folger, “Does the Universe Exist If We’re Not Looking?” Discover, June 1, 2002.
45. For an explanation of this configuration and its implications, see Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 242–49.
46. Folger, “Does the Universe Exist If We’re Not Looking?” (emphasis in original).
47. Wheeler, “Genesis and Observership,” 27.
48. Departing somewhat from Wheeler and the Copenhagen Interpretation, and routing his thought experiment through David Deutsch’s vision of infinite computation, Davies imagines the universe eventually becoming “saturated by mind,” so that “the entire universe would be brought within the scope of observer-participancy.” The idea, he admits, remains rather half-baked, but he finds it an attractive alternative to all other explanations of the fine-tuning of the universe: (1) dumb luck, (2) an intelligent designer, and (3) infinite worlds (Cosmic Jackpot, 249–50, 67). As I suggest in this chapter, however, it would seem to me important to think of consciousness itself as a product of the intra-actions that compose the universe.
50. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 337, 341 (emphasis added).
51. Differently from Barad, Wheeler writes that the observer has an “indispensable role in genesis” and that “the architecture of existence [is] such that only through ‘observership’ does the universe have a way to come into being” (“Genesis and Observership,” 7). In the spirit of a more nuanced, less anthropocentric reading of the Copenhagen Interpretation, I have borrowed Barad’s term intra-action. If “interaction” presumes the self-constitution of entities that subsequently enter into relation, “intra-action” signals that the relation constitutes the entities as such. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 46.
52. Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 50.
53. Ellis, “Does the Multiverse Really Exist?” 42; Marcelo Gleiser, A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe (New York: Free Press, 2010), 220; Stoeger, Ellis, and Kirchner, “Multiverses and Cosmology,” 26.
54. Greene, Hidden Reality, 314.
57. Walter Chalmers Smith, “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” in The English Hymnal (Second Edition), with Tunes, ed. J. H. Arnold (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/i/i225.html (accessed April 15, 2013).
58. Helge Kragh, Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2.
59. Bruno Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame; or, How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate,” in Science, Religion, and the Human Experience, ed. James D. Proctor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 36.
60. Max Tegmark, “The Multiverse Hierarchy,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 100; compare Steven Weinberg, “Living in the Multiverse,” in ibid., 39.
61. Quoted in Tim Folger, “Science’s Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: The Multiverse Theory” [interview with Andrei Linde], Discover, November 10, 2008.
62. Tegmark, “Multiverse Hierarchy,” 122; compare Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 51.
63. Paul C. W. Davies, “Universes Galore: Where Will It All End?” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 497; Gross, quoted in Weinberg, “Living in the Multiverse,” 39; Steinhardt, quoted in Nathan Schneider, “The Multiverse Problem,” Seed Magazine, April 14, 2009. One of the sections in Davies’s book Cosmic Jackpot is simply titled “Many Scientists Hate the Multiverse Idea” (170).
64. On the Augustinian “God forbid,” see chap. 2, sec. “Once More, with Feeling.” Giordano Bruno’s speaker is Burchio, who expresses this contrary opinion in On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, in Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought with Annotated Translation of His Work “On the Infinite Universe and Worlds,” ed. Dorothea Singer (New York: Schuman, 1950), 250.
65. Quoted in Folger, “Science’s Alternative.” A similar position can be found in Rees, “In the Matrix”; and Tegmark, “Multiverse Hierarchy.”
66. Bernard Carr and George Ellis, “Universe or Multiverse?” Astronomy and Geophysics 49 (2008): 2.33.
67. Davies, “Universes Galore,” 494.
68. Andrei Linde, “The Inflationary Multiverse,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 145.
69. Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2006), 196. Susskind is fond of calling those scientists who do adhere to this philosopher’s dictum “the Popperazi.”
70. Alan H. Guth, “Eternal Inflation and Its Implications,” Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical 40 (2007): 6811–26, arXiv:hep-th/0702178; Weinberg, “Living in the Multiverse,” 40. Weinberg tells the story of finding a popular article on the multiverse in which “Martin Rees said that he was sufficiently confident about the multiverse to bet his dog’s life on it, while Andrei Linde said he would bet his own life. As for me,” Weinberg writes, “I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees’s dog” (40).
71. Guth, “Eternal Inflation and Its Implications,” 6819; Steven Weinberg, “The Cosmological Constant Problems” (lecture given at Dark Matter 2000 Conference, Marina del Ray, Calif., February 22–24, 2000), 4, arXiv:astro-ph/0005265v1.
72. Weinberg, “Cosmological Constant Problems,” 4.
73. Quoted in Lightman, “Accidental Universe.”
74. Kepler had offered one such deduction, imagining, as Davies explains it, the planets as “attached to spheres inside perfect polyhedra nested inside one another. Following the mystical tradition of the Pythagoreans” (Cosmic Jackpot, 153).
75. Rees, “In the Matrix.”
76. Quoted in Carr and Ellis, “Universe or Multiverse?” 2.33.
77. Kragh, Higher Speculations, 279.
78. Greene, Hidden Reality, 9.
79. “Vocatus atque nonvocatus, Deus aderit.” Jung had this sentence inscribed over the front doorway of his house, having found it in the works of Desiderius Erasmus. It is also inscribed on the border of his gravestone in Zurich. See Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 2003), 126.
80. Weinberg, “Living in the Multiverse,” 33. See also Anthony Aguirre, “Making Predictions in a Multiverse: Conundrums, Dangers, Coincidences,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 367–86. Similar efforts are under way with respect to the probabilities of eternally inflating multiverses. See Jaume Garriga and Alexander Vilenkin, “Testable Anthropic Predictions for Dark Energy,” Physical Review D 67 (2003): 1–11; and Andrei D. Linde, Dmitri Linde, and Arthur Mezhlumian, “Do We Live in the Center of the World?” Physics Letters B 345 (1995): 203–10.
81. Weinberg, “Living in the Multiverse,” 33.
82. Quoted in Greene, Hidden Reality, 280.
83. Bernard Carr, “The Anthropic Principle Revisited,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 84.
84. Quoted in Greene, Hidden Reality, 280.
85. Stephen Feeney, Matthew C. Johnson, Daniel J. Mortlock, and Hiranya V. Peiris, “First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation: Analysis Methods and WMAP 7-Year Results,” Physical Review D 84 (2011): 1–36.
87. V. G. Gurzadyan and Roger Penrose, “Concentric Circles in WMAP Data May Provide Evidence of Violent Pre–Big Bang Activity,” November 16, 2010, arXiv/1011.3706v1. However, physicists who are not partial to Penrose’s model interpret the same circles as quantum fluctuations within our own universe at early stages of its development (see chap. 5, sec. “Other Answers”).
88. Laura Mersini-Houghton, “Birth of the Universe from the Multiverse,” September 22, 2008, available only through arXiv/0809.3623; Laura Mersini-Houghton and Richard Holman, “‘Tilting’ the Universe with the Landscape Multiverse: The ‘Dark’ Flow,” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2009 (2009): 1–12, arXiv/0810.5388; A. Kashlinsky, F. Atrio-Barandela, H. Ebeling, A. Edge, and D. Kocevski, “A New Measurement of the Bulk Flow of X-Ray Luminous Clusters of Galaxies,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 71 (2010): L81–L85, arXiv:astro-ph/0910.4958.
89. Mersini-Houghton and Holman, “‘Tilting’ the Universe.”
90. Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 41.
91. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000). See also Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 17–19, 25–33.
92. Plato, Timaeus, in Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin, 1977), 31a.
93. Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 112. See also chap. 1, sec. “So Let Us Begin Again …”
94. Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (New York: Penguin, 1998), 1074a. See also chap. 1, sec. “Reflecting Singularity.”
95. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1.47.3; René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2.22. See also chap. 3, sec. “Ending the Endless,” and chap. 4, sec. “From Infinity to Pluralism.”
96. Bruno, On the Infinite Universe, 229 (translation altered slightly). See also chap. 3, sec. “Infinity Unbound.”
97. Serres, Genesis, 111.
98. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 325.
99. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin, 1978), 323.
100. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), third essay (subsequent references are cited in the text).
101. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. J. B. Schneewind (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 9.1, p. 73.
102. Nietzsche hinges this allegation almost entirely on the first few verses of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:3–12 [NRSV])
103. Nietzsche names priests after philosophers in the third essay, but he has already spent the first two essays lambasting them, saying, for example, that “the truly great haters in world history have always been priests” (On the Genealogy of Morals, 1.7), so his audience most likely has them in mind by the time we reach the third essay.
104. Gleiser, Tear at the Edge of Creation, 7.
105. Davies mentions that
[a]ccording to Cambridge University folklore, the nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford is said to have issued an edict to his subordinates against fanciful and grandiose speculation. “Don’t let me catch anyone talking about the universe in my department!” he warned. That was in the 1930s, and, to be fair to Rutherford, cosmology didn’t then exist as a proper science. Even when I was a student in London in the 1960s, cynics quipped that there is speculation, speculation squared—and [then] cosmology. (Cosmic Jackpot, 18)
106. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard H. Popkin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 22.
107. For a detailed account of this story, see Robert P. Kirshner, The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 7, “A Hot Day in Holmdel.”
109. Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 18.
110. “Comme je lui parlais de mes idées sur l’origine des rayons cosmiques, il réagissait vivement … mais lorseque je lui parlais de l’atome primitif, il m’arrêtait; ‘Non, pas cela, cela suggère trop la création’” (Georges Lemaître, “Rencontre avec A. Einstein,” Revue des questions scientifiques 129 [1958]: 130, my translation, emphasis added).
111. I have borrowed the last pair from Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, whose subtitle is Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.
112. Søren Kierkegaard [Johannes Climacus, pseud.], Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 7.
113. For a scathing, very funny critique of the category of “belief” by means of a parodic appeal to hunches, see Russell McCutcheon, “I Have a Hunch,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 24, no. 1 (2012): 81–92.