We can tell how far our culture has bought into the multiverse when…

I am increasingly convinced that 'multiverse' is merely a convenient label when one doesn't want to use the 'G' word yet needs the same sort of attributes and explanatory power He brings to the table. The one who believes in a multiverse typically believes in an eternal ground of all being with the power to produce everything that exists in our universe and much, much more. That's getting pretty darn close to theism, isn't it? Most (non-theological) objections to God appear to be just as applicable to a multiverse. Phinehas

Forgive my explanatory reductionism, but we can propose a "minimal Almighty" as a structure sitting outside of the universe, with the ability to manipulate any element of it outside of the timestep as observable as an element or aggregate of elements within the simulation(between frames). A simple example would be the simulation hypothesis with the simulation being driven by an AI with unlimited editing capability operating in whatever "uberspace" you care to define. Such a structure can be modeled mathematically as far as we're able to model the universe ourselves mathematically; which is, of course, the limit of any honest form of naturalism. So, being at least as consistent a structure as any unfalsifiable flavor of multiverse, for naturalism to be consistent it must be inclusive of God, or exclusive to multiverses that we can't poke into. LocalMinimum

Odd... it's almost like these people are clinging to incoherence like it was their religion... Andrew asauber

The possibility that the Deity chose to build several separate "universes" has no particular effect on the existence of the Deity. It's like Chrysler/Dodge or GMC: the product lines are nominally independent, but still all report to the same General Manager. One of the explanations from people who have met Aliens is that they aren't from a great DISTANCE away but from a DIMENSION away. So travel between Earth and their home is a matter of going "sideways", not "forward". Their spacecraft therefore do not require any great expenditure of power because they don't travel 100 light years to get here. But a Being who can create (literally from nothing) our version of a universe and then spend several billion years lining up incredibly improbable "accidents" can clearly do whatever amuses that Being this afternoon. There is an episode of "Red Dwarf", a truly wondrous SciFi show, in which Lister needs to eliminate an unstable star for reasons I don't remember. And the method he chooses to cause that elimination uses a pool cue as the "aiming device" to knock one planet into a second. The second planet is then driven into the naughty star, causing it to explode earlier than expected. I keep thinking of this whenever I read about the collision of a now deceased planet with proto-Earth, causing the creation of the Moon. Of course in our case, lining up the shot took a billion years or so. mahuna

The multiverse is "cosmology of the gaps" - the inability of cosmology to explain our universe's origins and parameters is presumed to be evidence of an infinite number of universes all of which are equally engimatic and unproven, yet one of them looks like ours. Charles

On the other hand, Don Page (Christian cosmologist, student of Stephen Hawking) has proposed a A Theological Argument for an Everett Multiverse, so from his perspective, the multiverse is definitely not (merely) an alternative to God. Outside of mainstream theism, no doubt. Edit: I see his work has been discussed here before. daveS