“Many worlds” multiverse now explains problem of evil?

_{Denyse O'Leary

October 4, 2014

Intelligent Design}

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Does anyone know why the Many Universes interpretation of the multiverse (every sneeze creates a new universe) has suddenly gained new traction?

At Columbia mathematician Peter Woit’s blog, Not Even Wrong, we learn:

… getting lots of media attention while not saying anything substantive, there’s the multiverse of the Many Worlds interpretation. The media campaign to promote this is still in high gear. Recent examples include Brian Cox: ‘Multiverse’ makes sense at BBC News, this week’s New Scientist, which has a bunch of things including Multiverse me: Should I care about my other selves?, and an upcoming program here in New York that tells us that:
We may live in a multiverse in which every possibility happens and with each new possibility the universe branches off into another of many worlds.

The New Scientist article has Don Page pointing out that this explains the problem of evil. God likes the idea of everything possible happening all the time so much he’d rather not be bothered to stop bad things from happening:

You’d have to pay/sign up/get mail forever to read what Don Page says in New Scientist, so we better not draw any conclusions.

Brian Cox. Don Page.

Will this thesis fly at BioLogos?

See also: As if the multiverse wasn’t bizarre enough …meet Many Worlds

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Comments

Hi Jon, I am currently working my way through God without Parts
It should be observed that the univocal concept of being in which God and creatures are simply different beings within one great ontological order is at the heart of "possible worlds" semantics...
Mung_{October 4, 2014
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Believe it or not, "many worlds" fits with a trend in philosophical theology that lasted quite a few centuries, as I explained on my blog recently. They called it the principle of plenitude. The logic was that God would be unjust ("envious") to deny anything existence if he is perfectly good and rational, so he must have created everything possible. But in fact it went back to Greek rather than Christian ideas, enthusiastically revived at the Renaissance. The explanation for gaps in, say, species was explained (according to the historical period) by putting them in undiscovered lands, or on undiscovered worlds (after Copernicus), or in undiscovered times (gradualist evolution). Few people seemed to twig that it flew in the face of God's freedom to create, or not, according to his wisdom. But the only alternative they could think of to the argument that God was constrained by the necessity of doing all possible good or be less than God, was that he'd have to create arbitrarily and capriciously, which would never do. In fact it was the same cleft stick of determinism or randomness that plagues discussions on evolution and free will now. People never tire of telling God how he has to do his job. Maybe the fact that many worlds is now used by materialists to deny both moral accountability and the unexpectedness of the world is a good reason to realise that "free choice" (God's or ours or even teleological agents in nature, as in Dewmbski's new book) doesn't have to flip between "determined" and "random".Jon Garvey_{October 4, 2014
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