The joke goes like this: After a lecture on the universe, an old lady approaches. “Nice lecture,” she says, “but the Earth is really sitting on the back of a large turtle.” Seeing the flaw, the lecturer asks “What is supporting the turtle?” She responds “Very clever young man, but it’s turtles all the way down.”

I’m reminded of that joke every time I read yet another supposedly “scientific” article about the so-called “multiverse.” That’s the belief that our universe – all of intergalactic space – is but an insignificant part of a much greater scheme, a collection of universes called the “multiverse.” In their attempt to evade the mystery of why anything exists (see last week’s blog), and the mystery of why our universe is exquisitely fine-tuned for the existence of life, Atheists typically believe the multiverse contains an infinite number of universes, and that those universes can somehow spin off new universes with different laws, dimensions, and constants. So they say our universe was created by a different universe, which in turn was created by a third universe, and so on and so on and so on, to infinity and beyond. You get the point. It’s turtles all the way down.

God could have created more than one universe. But Atheists are drawn to belief in an infinite multiverse. They pretend it solves the unshakeable mysteries of why anything exists and why our universe is fine-tuned for life.

Believe what you want, and I have no problem if you want to believe in the multiverse. But please be honest – admit there is no scientific evidence. And that belief in the multiverse can never be proved wrong. That’s a “deal breaker” for Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt, who helped develop the multiverse concept, and now rejects it because it can be manipulated to predict anything. This from the Washington Post two months ago:

“It makes the theory a nonscientific theory,” Steinhardt said. “For the last 400 years, most people would say the key thing that distinguishes science from non-science is that scientific ideas have to be subject to tests. Some people are nowadays thinking, no, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. That’s a mega-issue.”

There is no science supporting the multiverse, no facts whatsoever. And don’t believe articles earlier this year suggesting that patterns in the photons released after the Big Bang imply a multiverse, what those articles conveniently omit or downplay is that those photons were released 380,000 years after the Big Bang. They sure didn’t come from another universe.

If the question is whether human ingenuity can create theories about multiple universes, the answer is a definite “yes.” But if the question is whether there is a single shred of scientific evidence that can only be explained by the existence of a multiverse, or whether there is any way to test the multiverse theory, the answer to both is a resounding “no.”

And Atheists don’t want to admit the serious mathematical problems embedded in the concept of infinity. Infinity is weird. Multiply it by any finite number of incredibly small numbers and it’s still infinity, it’s not one bit smaller. If you do the math, you see that, if the multiverse exists, then everything that has ever happened in our universe has happened an infinite number of times in the multiverse. Chapter 9 of Counting To God describes this and other “Problems with the Multiverse.”

Turtles all the way down. Atheist pseudo-science #2.

Thanks for reading.

“Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could,” sings Maria in the Sound of Music. You have to agree.

Why does anything exist? Start with the concept of absolute nothingness – no space, no time, no matter, no energy – absolutely nothing. Now, again, why does anything exist? It is an unshakeable mystery. Observing and experimenting with what does exist – our universe – will never solve the mystery of why anything exists at all.

I am constantly amused by Atheist suggestions that the mystery has been solved. A typical “solution” is that the universe popped out of a “quantum fluctuation.” A recent pseudo-science article claims, based on invented theories that cannot be tested, that it was a “mathematical certainty” that our universe would arise. I say, quoting the great John McEnroe, “YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!”

What scientists call the “quantum field” is the foundation of our reality. It is a high energy field, and, as I explain in Chapter 14 of Counting To God, described by fantastically complex mathematics. It appears to consist of pure thought – ideas in the mind of God. Clearly the creation of the universe is connected to events at the quantum level – the subatomic level – of reality. But what caused the quantum field to exist? You can’t seriously just assume the existence of the quantum field. How does energy described only by mathematical patterns and equations pop out of absolute nothingness?

Yet, if your theology actually does boil down to “in the beginning was the quantum field,” I’m OK with that, and again smiling. That is a very interesting translation of the first sentence of the Book of John – “In the beginning was the word.” The original Greek for “word” here is “logos,” which can be translated as divine thought. John 1:1 claims God thought the universe into existence. The theology of “in the beginning was the quantum field” is strikingly similar to John 1:1, when you consider the overwhelming scientific evidence that the quantum field is pure thought (see again Chapter 14). You might say John 1:1 predicted quantum mechanics almost 2,000 years ago.

There is no Atheist solution to the unshakeable mystery of why anything exists. “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.” Yet here we are. Why?

As for the so-called multiverse, we’ll look at that pseudo-science next week, in “Turtles All the Way Down.”

Thanks for reading.