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• Included in the Stephen Hawking Posts List.
• I cannot seem to let this go. I have some more thoughts after reading through the current issue of Discover that has a cover story about the Multiverse.

(Part VII)

I cannot seem to let this go. While I have not yet read all of Stephen Hawking’s final book that started all this, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, I have some more thoughts after reading through the current issue of Discover magazine that has a cover story entitled: “Mysteries of the Multiverse”.

Like time travel that is also completely outside our experience, both now and forever, the multiverse is getting to be a popular theme in science fiction films. The recent movie having an engaging multiverse storyline, Everything Everywhere All at Once, won a slew of Oscars earlier this year.

There is also the hit 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, along with two sequels coming out this year and next, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse; as well as another couple of entries from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Doctor Strange (2016) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). Other examples where alternate reality is integral to the plot include Back to the Future (1985) and its sequels; It’s a Wonderful Life (1946); and Run Lola Run (1998), a terrific German action film starring the actress who plays Jason Bourne’s girlfriend, Franka Potente.

The problem with the multiverse is that attempting to examine it scientifically omits a key part of the scientific method: Theories about the multiverse cannot be tested. That is true of several other current scientific theories, such as the inflationary theory of the Big Bang, many aspects of quantum mechanics, and string theory. As the Discover article points out, physicists worry that the speculative nature of these theories might lead the public astray into pseudo-scientific arenas even more than is already the case.

In her 2018 book Lost in Math, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder argues that scientists take their equations too seriously, believing that the math is describing reality. Even though there are several different ways to arrive at a theory of the multiverse, as quoted in Discover: “The way Hossenfelder sees it, having a basket of speculative theories is no better than having just one. In every case, we’re asked to believe in the existence of universes that we can never see or study: ‘I’m not saying it’s wrong. I’m just saying it’s no longer science.'”

And then there is Nobel laureate and physicist David Gross, who worries that using all of these unseeable universes to explain our own Universe “smells of religion and intelligent design”. I am not sure exactly what he is getting at, but it is true that intelligent design has had its own set of problems over the years. Scientists seem to be allergic to the idea of invoking God, and that has been true for a century or more. And I am okay with that I suppose – assuming that the laws of physics along with scientific investigation and arguments can lead to a satisfactory explanation of why the Universe and life and humanity are the way they are. As I see it, that is not at all the case anymore.

Noted atheist Bill Maher admitted on Real Time with Bill Maher not long ago that he doesn’t know how the Universe was created, “but at least we are not making up little stories about it”. Actually, scientists do that regularly, not just religious people – I have several examples in this article, and others that I discussed previously. Anyway, “not knowing” is not an option for scientists who want to be taken seriously.

As I remember it, in the original Cosmos series from 1980, Carl Sagan said that talking about God and Creation begs the question as to who created God; so he is just skipping a step. The notion of who created God is ridiculous – by definition, God has always been. And indeed, everything seemed so much simpler in 1980, before dark matter and dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the Universe and all of these other troubling aspects of recent scientific discoveries came along. The latest comes from the dazzling successor to the Hubble Space Telescope; as taken from a recent post on phys.org: “The first results from the James Webb Space Telescope have hinted at galaxies so early and so massive that they are in tension with our understanding of the formation of structure in the universe.”

Let me try a different tack this time. One hundred years ago, scientists believed that the Universe consisted only of the Milky Way Galaxy. The namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, renowned astronomer Edwin Hubble, concluded otherwise. Hubble examined several so-called nebulae – such as the Andromeda Nebula and Triangulum Nebula – and identified within them Cepheid variable stars, a “standard candle” that always looks the same and thus can be used to estimate distances accurately throughout the Universe, as previously discovered by astronomer Henrietta Leavitt. In other words, comparing the apparent luminosity of Cepheid variable stars to their known intrinsic luminosity gives their distance from Earth.

Edwin Hubble’s observations, made in 1924, proved conclusively that these “nebulae” were much too distant to be part of the Milky Way and were, in fact, entire galaxies outside our own. This notion was so radical to the scientific establishment of that day that years would pass before this idea was accepted.

Several years later, Edwin Hubble made a discovery just as unexpected about the relationships among the newly identified galaxies. Eventually being tagged as “Hubble’s Law”, his careful measurements of red-shifting in the light from distant galaxies showed that the greater the distance between any two galaxies, the greater their relative speed of separation. Over the years, his conclusions as to speed and distance were found to be greatly overstated; but the core of his discovery is still sound.

When I was growing up, our family had a picture book on astronomy that captivated me from an early age. Although I could not make heads or tails out of the final chapter called The Expanding Universe, I get it now, more or less. That chapter is largely a summary of Hubble’s findings about galaxies. Today, astronomers estimate that there are approximately 200 billion galaxies in the Universe, or roughly the same as the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

If the timeline of the Expanding Universe is examined in the opposite direction – akin to running a movie backwards – the galaxies grow closer and closer together, until they seem to come together at a point, known as a singularity, where space and time lose their meaning. This realization led to the established theory that the Universe began with a “Big Bang”, as I have discussed previously. Trying to identify where the Big Bang happened has no meaning, since, well, the expansion is taking place everywhere all at once. The Big Bang is compatible with the Creation by God as described in the Bible; the Vatican signed off on the Big Bang I think in the 1940’s, so long as trying to prove what preceded the Big Bang was left alone. As though that were within the realm of possibility.

Therefore, looking at Hubble’s Law and his other discoveries with fresh eyes, this is the inescapable conclusion to me: Science has proved that God created the Universe out of nothing. As far as I know, no scientist has ever looked at that way, nor has much of anyone else. But what is the alternative? The Universe popped into existence all on its own – and not just our Universe, but all of the other universes in the multiverse as well? That is really more believable than God? Seriously?