Summary
William Lane Craig on the weaknesses of the multiverse hypothesis to explain the fine-tuning of the universe.
Simon Smart talks to William Lane Craig, a philosopher and Christian apologist who has authored more than thirty books, about the weaknesses of the multiverse theory.
This is a short segment from a longer interview. To watch the full interview, click here.
Transcript
SIMON SMART: In response to the fine tuning of the universe as a possible pointer towards God, we’re sometimes told that a multiverse does away with this need for this appearance of design. We just happen to be in one of billions of universes in which the properties required for life to exist as we know it are in place. This multiverse gets a bit of a run – what’s your response to it?
WILLIAM LANE CRAIG: I would say that even if a multiverse exists, it does not explain the fine-tuning. This point has been made very forcefully by Roger Penrose of Oxford University. What Penrose points out is that it is incomprehensibly more probable that our solar system would just instantaneously form through the random collision of particles than that a finely tuned universe would exist. What that means is that there are far more universes in this multiverse in which observers form just by the random collision of particles than finely-tuned worlds. If we were just a random member of a multiverse, we ought to be observing an island of order no bigger than our solar system because that’s incomprehensibly more probable than a finely-tuned universe. In fact, the most probable observable universe would be a universe in which a single brain fluctuates into existence out of the quantum vacuum and observes its otherwise empty world. So if we were just a random member of a multiverse, we ought to be having observations like that, and since we don’t, that strongly disconfirms the multiverse hypothesis.
