Multiverse, Predators and Earthquakes

I recently saw an interview with The Reformer that the Reverend Polkinghorne made and I was wondering if he could clarify some points.

He commented on the Multiverse, did he mean that a multiverse would necessarily lead to a more naturalistic interpretation of Science since now it is more by necessity our Universe is so tuned?

When he discussed the example of why there need to be things like predators and earthquakes instead of a Universe designed so that beauty comes about without such things, he said that it is needed in order to get the sort of Universe we have, but doesn't that limit God's power saying it is impossible for God to make a Universe that has the sort of world we have without having things like predators and earthquakes?

When commenting on the brain, he argued emotions aren't reducable to the brain and that these are simply corolations, but isn't that an assumption since there isn't evidence that things corolate as opposed to being reducable to? 

Response:

1. One major reason why many scientists like the idea of the multiverse is that it appears to reduce, without eliminating, the fine-tuning problem.  But it has big problems of its own. Of course it is quite possible that God chose to create a multiverse, but it seems to me (and I think John) pretty implausible. And if atheists  have to posit 10^200 other un-knowable universes to avoid seeing God behind this one, their situation is pretty desperate.
2. It looks as though an evolutionary universe is essential to give creatures enough freedom to be truly free to choose to love (God and neighbour).  Predators, earthquakes and disease are clearly unfortunate but they are of incomparably less value than love.  In the end Christianity seems to me (from an intellectual PoV) to be a belief that the most fundamental and important fact about the universe is a Loving Ultimate Creator.  That God has chosen to make the universe in this way is not a limitation on his power, but an expression of his love as a true Father who wants his children to develop and think for themselves, and not be wrapped up in cotton wool.
3. This depends on where you think the “burden of proof” lies. But if “A is reducible to B” means, as I think it does, something like “Every aspect of A can be wholly and completely explained in terms of B” then this is a very strong claim and much stronger than “whenever events of type A occur then we seem to observe events of type B. The claim “all propositions are reducible to material events” seems clearly false (a material event can’t have a truth-values) from which it follows that “all thoughts are reducible…” is false and it’s hard to see what “all emotions are reducible…” should then be true.

John Adds:

1. Even an infinite multiverse would not of itself guarantee that one of its universes would have the properties necessary for carbon-based life. After all, there are an infinite number of even integers, but none has the property of oddness. It is not for us to restrict God’s creative generosity. God might create other worlds but I do not think God would create worlds that had no intrinsic fertility. The Creator does not need to experiment to find out what works!
2. Nothing restricts God from the outside, but God is internally constrained by the divine nature. The God of love will only create a world in which creatures are graciously given the freedom to be and to make themselves.
3. I think that there is an enormous gap between talk about neurons firing (important though that is in its own way), and our simplest conscious experiences such as seeing red and feeling pain. No one currently knows how that gap is bridged, but it is certainly there.

Implications of the Higgs Boson

I recently came across your site after researching the works of John Polkinghorne. It is a great site and I was even more thrilled to find out that we could contact both you and John to ask questions.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the Higgs Boson in the news. As a layman when it comes to science, I was wondering what both you and John thought about the recent Higgs Boson discoveries, what it means for the science/faith interface and what implications, if any, it might have for the Christian faith? For example, I saw a news clip featuring the physicist Michio Kaku who said something along the lines of "now we're going to be able to see before Genesis chapter 1" in light of the recent discoveries (I found it online here). I'm not sure what point he was trying to make by this, but he seemed to be overall sympathetic to many multiverse theories and attacking the notion of God, faith, etc. Is this just a matter of people, such as Kaku, interpreting the data the way they want to or does the discovery actually point at all to a multiverse?

Thanks for all the work you do in Christ,

Response: The Higgs Boson doesn’t require the multiverse at all – just as well since Higgs predicted it long before multiverse ideas were fashionable.

The only “theological” implication is that if the Standard Model is correct then there is an awful lot of fine tuning. This is why most physicists hope it isn’t.

We shall see…

How can God be everywhere if He is separate?

I agree we must separate God from His Universe. But what I want to know is this:

Despite God not being the same as "the All", does He not have to be everywhere nonetheless? If not, that would mean it would be pretty scary going to other stars and other planets. God has to be there also, does He not? If I were an Astronaut I would want God to be out there in space too.

Thus, willy nilly, does this not mean that God  permeates nature someway? Cannot the Divine Presence that Christianity calls "the Holy Ghost" be everywhere present and thus inside Nature? (Like God inside the Burning Bush.)

To put it another way how can God be everywhere if He is separate?

My next question is: Does current physics point to the possibility that other dimensions may exist and that life after death may exist in one, or several of these other planes of existence?

And have you ever thought that perhaps space travel actually happens after death and that perhaps in this way we people other planets with our race and perhaps also progress to other less warlike levels?

Also, could it be that physics might eventually prove the existence of God (or the Divine Power)? In your opinion has physics already proved the existence of God? (It sounded to me as if you almost said that tonight.)

I don't quite understand your point about going from experience to find God instead of starting with a hypothesis?

Pragmatism would say "If it works, it's true." —Is that not a scientific way to find religion, at least for oneself? (And thus is this not a case of going from experience to faith instead of the other way around?)

Response: Thank you very much for these kind remarks.

God in Creator so space and time are His creation. He is beyond them, rather as Shakespeare is beyond the characters in one of his plays.  So He is always present in the Universe, but never limited by it except to the extent that He chooses to be: for example in the incarnation (a bit like Shakespeare also appearing on the stage as one of his characters, as he surely would have done during his acting career)

Current ideas in physics about “string theory” certainly point to other dimensions existing. But we must remember that these are ingenious mathematical speculations which as yet have no experimental support, and that nature usually turns out to have some surprises in store as we go to higher and higher energy levels.  There is however very strong experimental evidence that ordinary matter accounts for only about 3% of the total matter/energy of the universe.  Thus true scientists should display considerable humility before ruling things out as impossible.  However John and I think that life after death/resurrection is underpinned by the love of God.  What physical processes if any God uses to accomplish this are up to him, and don’t really matter.

The existence of God must always be beyond full scientific proof because God is not an object on which we can do experiments.  Also any set of scientific laws and initial conditions could conceivably have been created by God, thus whatever scientific law and initial conditions are found to exist can never disprove the existence of God.  We think that the currently understood laws are strongly suggestive of God’s existence, but at present this is a minority view amongst scientists.

If God exists, he exists necessarily

John said something to the effect that if God exists, He exists necessarily, but that doesn't prove He exists. I didn't take time to ask John about that statement at the conference, but I am wondering what it meant. I would have thought that if we know that any entity exists necessarily, that is proof that the entity exists. How can a being that exists necessarily, fail to exist?

I would have thought that we don't know that God exists necessarily. In fact, although I do believe in the actual existence of God, I don't see any way in which it would be incoherent or logically inconsistent if God did not exist, so for me it seems very hard to imagine that God necessarily exists.

Maybe the idea is that even though there are, I think, almost certainly logically possible worlds in which God does not exist, there is a narrower subcategory of possible worlds, in all of which God exists, and then one can define some sort of `necessity' in a weaker sense than logical necessity as applying to all those logically possible worlds in the subcategory, so that with this restricted meaning God `necessarily' exists. This would be rather in the same way as we can define a subcategory of possible worlds in which all physical universes within each such world would obey Maxwell's equations. Then within all such restricted worlds, charge is `necessarily' conserved, even though there are other logically possible worlds with charge, but without Maxwell's equations or some other equations implying the conservation of charge, in which charge is not conserved, so that relative to all logically possible worlds, charge is not necessarily conserved. But these stronger meanings of necessity, restricted to smaller subcategories of worlds than the entire set of logically possible worlds and yet to broader subcategories than just the one actual existing world (all that actually exists, so that it is just one world even if it includes God, a multiverse, and other existing entities), seem to me rather ad hoc. I can understand statements applying to our actual world, such as `God exists,' and I can understand statements applying to all logically possible worlds, such as `Given the axioms of arithmetic, 1+1=2,' but I find it hard to understand statements about vague classes of worlds larger than the one actual world but smaller than all logically possible worlds.
 
John's Response: In saying that God exists 'necessarily', theologians do not mean because of some external logical necessity but because of the internal divine fact that God who has being in himself does not depend for existence on any other entity. The medieval theologians called this property 'aseity'. So if there is a God, his existence required no further explanation, but it does not follow that there has to be a God possessing aseity.