TOPIC 2.13 SUMMARY—The recent Big Bang findings. CONTRIBUTORS: Ian Tomlinson, Josh Ott, Jeremy Gibbons ANALYSIS: (This weeks analysis is provided by Dr. William Lane Craig.) The recent news from the BICEP collaboration is reminiscent of the news last year concerning the discovery of the Higgs boson: the evidence confirmed what almost everyone already believed. The story is once again a wonderful illustration of the experimentalists’ discovering what the theorists had hypothesized. So there’s nothing revolutionary about this discovery (which is not to diminish in any way its significance!). But once again, that hasn’t stopped some people from making irresponsible assertions. For example, I saw Lawrence Krauss respond to the discovery by repeating his tired, oft-refuted assertion that it shows how the universe could have come naturally into existence out of “nothing.” Never mind that the universe already existed prior to inflation! As we all know, Krauss is using the word “nothing” to refer to a physical state of the early universe out of which the universe evolved. BUT WHAT ABOUT A MULTIVERSE? Inflation alone does not guarantee a multiverse. It all depends on the properties of the initial field responsible for inflation, about which we can only speculate. There may be other inflating universes, or there may not. What’s important to keep in mind is: (i) Theology has no reason to deny that God may have created a wider reality than just our universe. (ii) Inflationary models may be future-eternal (they will go on forever), but they cannot be past eternal (the multiverse itself had a beginning). Attempts to make the multiverse past-eternal (like Sean Carroll’s model) fail for a variety of reasons. (iii) Multiverse scenarios face the troublesome Boltzmann brain problem. A finely-tuned universe like ours is incomprehensibly improbable on naturalism. The more you multiply worlds within the multiverse in order to make it likely that observers will appear somewhere in the multiverse of worlds, the more probable it becomes that we should be Boltzmann brains, isolated brains which have fluctuated into existence out of the quantum vacuum. For observable worlds like that are vastly more plenteous than worlds which are fine-tuned for embodied conscious agents. So if we were just random members of a multiverse of worlds, we ought to have observations like that. But we don’t; which disconfirms the multiverse hypothesis. The key here is that naturalism cannot account for how anything could possibly come from nothing. Theism can.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 01:49:49 +0000
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