multiversal God
IMAGE COURTESY WMAP/NASA
This lightweight National Geographic article about a multiverse (scroll down, it's short and fun reading) is intriguing all over again for one inclined to theological musing. "All over again" because our one universe itself already makes for fascinating theological contemplation: whether The One, an Intellect, Will, Logos, Word - - that, commanding "yehHI" to ignite into being a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies like our own vast Milky Way, all speeding outward and apart in incomprehensibly distant space, the universe expanding its size as it presses its borders, continuously growing outward into nothingness, like a giant inflating balloon - - whether The One is concerned about creatures on planets in solar systems of various galaxies, who evolve into self-awareness, that they live, how they live, what they do, are they naughty.
To narrow it: can it be that The One, Whoever, Whatever brought the universe, now multiverse, into existence is concerned about my sins? Church of England evangelist Bryan Green used to preach "God loves you, even you, speck on a speck". Can it be? Loves? Cares? Is distressed at my sins? Has willed a concept of life in which after death I continue as a spiritual soul into reward or punishment depending on how I lived as monitored by Whoever, and how forgiven or retained my sins were? Is inextricably bound up in an irrevocable, immovable system of absolute mores, law, justice, debt, sin-guilt, righteousness that cannot simply forgive human sin-debt but requires payment that only divine blood sacrifice can absolve? Is all powerful and all loving yet whose willed creation includes evil and suffering for its creatures?
Over my decades of life, peering into my own telescopes has stirred incessant musing. Hubble pictures, and now images from the new Webb Space Telescope that seem to press against the outer walls of our universe, wondering what's beyond, a multiverse of countless other universes, all, like ours, expanding like drifting balloons in the imagination of God? Something I read sixty years ago quoted Einstein saying nothing is outside the Universe, not even space.
Puzzled I am. Working it out for myself, I am. Respecting brilliant minds, both scientific and theological, over human history who have answered the ultimate questions within the limits of the knowledge, belief, and superstitions of their own Time. Tribal storytellers around campfires under the stars in the Wilderness with Moses. Flat-earther apostles, evangelists, and fathers of the Church. Giordano Bruno, scientist and philosopher who in 1600 the Roman Catholic Church took from his cell in the early hours of the morning to the Piazza dei Fiori in Rome, tied his tongue so he could not speak to onlookers, and burned alive at the stake for the heresy of maintaining that the earth revolves around the sun. Galileo, astronomer, mathematician, scientist, tried, condemned and muted by Roman Catholic authorities for the same sin. Albert Einstein. Stephen Hawking, scientist, author. Hubble scientists. NASA and international teams now working with Webb to approach the Big Bang.
To one who, despises and contemns religious Certainty, respects astronomy, as scientific knowledge advances by progressive research including Hubble and the new Webb space telescope, the notion of The One Creator God focused on a human's sin calls to mind Phillips Brooks, "Your God Is Too Small". Mindful of the line, "my religion is a very real and a very precious thing to me" spoken by C S Lewis' character the Ghost in Gaiters ("The Great Divorce"), with whom I share ordination and religion, I'll not put down peoples' faith; though my faith is not in dogma, creeds, doctrine of sin-guilt before a just God, but revelation, astronomy, scientific notions about a created universe, even a multiverse, spoken, if one chooses unprovable faith, which can be as credible as unprovable unfaith, into being by The One Intellect beyond human imagining. Picking up the terms in university economics classes, I'm more inclined toward macro-religion where worship involves gazing out into the heavens with awe and spontaneously breaking into the Venite Exultemus, than micro-religion with God keeping an eye on the sins of each earthling so as to punish or reward.
God, The One who is very real to me does not monitor and punish human sin. Progressive Christianity, pantheism, panentheism, IDK. I see The One incarnational God entering Time like a meteorite piercing the atmosphere, to show and tell divine values and godly life; I cannot see a watchful deity threatening to punish, or God immutable with human values of justice, debt and balance. I like God to Moses, "I AM what I AM, I will be what I will be." God mysterious, not angry. God not bound by human imagining. Me, a speck on a speck, a transitional being, reabsorbed into universal or multiversal Being after all this is done for me.
IDK, but I do know that the theodicy question evaporates.
+++++++++++++
What is the multiverse—and is there any evidence it really exists?
Scientists can only see so far before they run into the edge of the universe. Will we ever know if anything lies beyond?
What lies beyond the edges of the observable universe? Is it possible that our universe is just one of many in a much larger multiverse?
Movies can’t get enough of exploring these questions. From superhero blockbusters like Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to indie darling Everything Everywhere All at Once, science fiction stories are full of creative interactions between alternate realities. And depending on which cosmologist you ask, the concept of a multiverse is more than pure fantasy or a handy storytelling device.
Humanity’s ideas about alternate realities are ancient and varied—in 1848 Edgar Allan Poe even wrote a prose poem in which he fancied the existence of “a limitless succession of Universes.” But the multiverse concept really took off when modern scientific theories attempting to explain the properties of our universe predicted the existence of other universes where events take place outside our reality.
“Our understanding of reality is not complete, by far,” says Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde. “Reality exists independently of us.”
If they exist, those universes are separated from ours, unreachable and undetectable by any direct measurement (at least so far). And that makes some experts question whether the search for a multiverse can ever be truly scientific.
Will scientists ever know whether our universe is the only one? We break down the different theories about a possible multiverse—including other universes with their own laws of physics—and whether many versions of you could exist out there.
What is a multiverse?
The multiverse is a term that scientists use to describe the idea that beyond the observable universe, other universes may exist as well. Multiverses are predicted by several scientific theories that describe different possible scenarios—from regions of space in different planes than our universe, to separate bubble universes that are constantly springing into existence.
The one thing all these theories have in common is that they suggest the space and time we can observe is not the only reality.
Okay … but why do scientists think there could be more than one universe?
“We cannot explain all the features of our universe if there’s only one of them,” says science journalist Tom Siegfried, whose book The Number of the Heavens investigates how conceptions of the multiverse have evolved over millennia.
“Why are the fundamental constants of nature what they are?” Siegfried wonders. “Why is there enough time in our universe to make stars and planets? Why do stars shine the way they do, with just the right amount of energy? All of those things are questions we don’t have answers for in our physical theories.”
Siegfried says two possible explanations exist: First, that we need newer, better theories to explain the properties of our universe. Or, he says, it’s possible that “we’re just one of many universes that are different, and we live in the one that’s nice and comfortable.”
What are some of the more popular multiverse theories?
Perhaps the most scientifically accepted idea comes from what’s known as inflationary cosmology, which is the idea that in the minuscule moments after the big bang, the universe rapidly and exponentially expanded. Cosmic inflation explains a lot of the observed properties of the universe, such as its structure and the distribution of galaxies.
“This theory at first looked like a piece of science fiction, although a very imaginative one,” says Linde, one of the architects of cosmic inflationary theory. “But it explained so many interesting features of our world that people started taking it seriously.”
One of the theory’s predictions is that inflation could happen over and over again, perhaps infinitely, creating a constellation of bubble universes. Not all of those bubbles will have the same properties as our own—they might be spaces where physics behaves differently. Some of them might be similar to our universe, but they all exist beyond the realm we can directly observe.
What are some other ideas?
Another compelling type of multiverse is called the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the theory that mathematically describes how matter behaves. Proposed by physicist Hugh Everett in 1957, the many-worlds interpretation predicts the presence of branching timelines, or alternate realities in which our decisions play out differently, sometimes producing wildly different outcomes.
“Hugh Everett says, Look, there’s actually an infinite number of parallel Earths, and when you do an experiment and you get the probabilities, basically all that proves is that you live on the Earth where that was the outcome of that experiment,” says physicist James Kakalios of the University of Minnesota, who has written about the physics (or not) of superheroes. “But on other Earths, there’s a different outcome.”
According to this interpretation, versions of you could be off living the many different possible lives you could have led if you’d made different decisions. However, the only reality that’s perceptible to you is the one you inhabit.
So where do all of those other Earths exist?
They’re all overlapping in dimensions we can’t access. MIT’s Max Tegmark refers to this type of multiverse as a Level III multiverse, where multiple scenarios are playing out in branching realities.
“In the many-worlds interpretation, you still have an atomic bomb, you just don’t know exactly when it’s going to go off,” Linde says. And maybe in some of those realities, it won’t.
By contrast, the multiple universes predicted by some theories of cosmic inflation are what Tegmark calls a Level II multiverse, where fundamental physics can be different across the different universes. In an inflationary multiverse, Linde says, “you do not even know if, in some parts of the universe, atomic bombs are even possible in principle.”
So if I want to meet myself, how do I get there? Can we travel between multiverses?
Unfortunately, no. Scientists don’t think it’s possible to travel between universes, at least not yet.
“Unless a whole lot of physics we know that’s pretty solidly established is wrong, you can’t travel to these multiverses,” Siegfried says. “But who knows? A thousand years from now, I’m not saying somebody can’t figure out something that you would never have imagined.”
Is there any direct evidence suggesting multiverses exist?
Even though certain features of the universe seem to require the existence of a multiverse, nothing has been directly observed that suggests it actually exists. So far, the evidence supporting the idea of a multiverse is purely theoretical, and in some cases, philosophical.
Some experts argue that it may be a grand cosmic coincidence that the big bang forged a perfectly balanced universe that is just right for our existence. Other scientists think it is more likely that any number of physical universes exist, and that we simply inhabit the one that has the right characteristics for our survival.
An infinite number of alternate little pocket universes, or bubbles universes, some of which have different physics or different fundamental constants, is an attractive idea, Kakalios says. “That’s why some people take these ideas kind of seriously, because it helps address certain philosophical issues,” he says.
Scientists argue about whether the multiverse is even an empirically testable theory; some would say no, given that by definition a multiverse is independent from our own universe and impossible to access. But perhaps we just haven’t figured out the right test.
Will we ever know if our universe is just one of many?
We might not. But multiverses are among the predictions of various theories that can be tested in other ways, and if those theories pass all of their tests, then maybe the multiverse holds up as well. Or perhaps some new discovery will help scientists figure out if there really is something beyond our observable universe.
“The universe is not constrained by what some blobs of protoplasm on a tiny little planet can figure out, or test,” Siegfried says. “We can say, This is not testable, therefore it can’t be real—but that just means we don’t know how to test it. And maybe someday we’ll figure out how to test it, and maybe we won’t. But the universe can do whatever it wants.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/what-is-the-multiverse
