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

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… apologists are trying to explain why it is not an alternative to God.

From Jeff Miller at Apologetics Press:

7 Reasons the Multiverse Is Not a Valid Alternative to God [Part 1]

Joshua Sokol, writing in New Scientist, said concerning “neighbouring universe[s] leaking into ours,” “Sadly, if they do exist, other bubbles are nigh on impossible to learn about.”56 Amanda Gefter, also writing in New Scientist, discussed making predictions and testing them through observations in the Universe.“That’s not possible in an infinite multiverse: there are no definite predictions, only probabilities.”57 Clark and Webb discuss various difficulties with the idea that there are many Universes: “The second is how you get convincing evidence for the existence of any of them.”58 Lawson Parker, writing in National Geographic, explained that “[i]nflation theory says our universe exploded from…[a quantum energy] fluctuation—a random event that, odds are, had happened many times before. Our cosmos may be one in a sea of others just like ours—or nothing like ours. These other cosmos will very likely remain forever inaccessible to observation, their possibilities limited only by our imagination.”59 How convenient for naturalists to be able to propose a theory to explain away God, and that theory be immune to falsification since it is known from the start to be “forever inaccessible to observation.” [to be continued] More.

Yes, precisely. The purpose of the multiverse project is to put the multiverse beyond the reach of falsifiability. Grasp that and we grasp why naturalism is toxic to science.

See also: Multiverse cosmology at your fingertips

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Comments
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
April 5, 2017
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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
April 5, 2017
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Odd... it's almost like these people are clinging to incoherence like it was their religion... Andrewasauber
April 4, 2017
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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
April 4, 2017
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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
April 4, 2017
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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
April 4, 2017
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