God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos

God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos

Victor J. Stenger

Language: English

Pages: 447

ISBN: 1616149701

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Cosmologists have reasons to believe that the vast universe in which we live is just one of an endless number of other universes within a multiverse—a mind-boggling array that may extend indefinitely in space and endlessly in both the past and the future. Victor Stenger reviews the key developments in the history of science that led to the current consensus view of astrophysicists, taking pains to explain essential concepts and discoveries in accessible terminology. The author shows that science’s emerging understanding of the multiverse—consisting of trillions upon trillions of galaxies—is fully explicable in naturalistic terms with no need for supernatural forces to explain its origin or ongoing existence. 

How can conceptions of God, traditional or otherwise, be squared with this new worldview? The author shows how long-held beliefs will need to undergo major revision or otherwise face eventual extinction.

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than macroscopic thermodynamics, which preceded it and which can be completely derived from atomic theory. Similarly, since current science based on observations implies multiple universes, to postulate that only a single universe exists requires an additional hypothesis not required by the data. That is, the single universe hypothesis is the one that violates Ockham's razor. In another objection, many nonbelieving scientists have joined theists in arguing that that the multiverse is

Critical History with a Selection of Texts. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Kirshner, Robert P. “Hubble's Diagram and Cosmic Expansion.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 1 (2004): 8–13. Klauber, Robert D. “Mechanism for Vanishing Zero Point Energy.” 2007. http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0309679v3. Accessed August 5, 2010. Kolb, Edward W., and Michael S. Turner. The Early Universe. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990. Komatsu, E., et al. “WMAP

cosmology. FILLING IN MORE DETAILS Let us review the status of cosmology in the mid-twentieth century. By the early 1930s, the great discovery that we live in a vast, expanding universe composed of galaxies of stars hurtling away from one another at great speeds was well confirmed and astronomers busied themselves with filling in more details. The most powerful telescope in the world remained the 100-inch reflector on Mount Wilson, which had gone into operation in 1908. It retained that

described the motions of apples and planets in terms of a single law of gravity. In the nineteenth century, electricity and magnetism were thought to be separate forces until Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell unified them in a single force called electromagnetism. However, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force hardly looked like the same force at the accelerator energies that were available until just recently. The electromagnetic force reaches across the universe, as evidenced by

13.1, “A moment's silence hung in the air as the projection illuminated the screen. Then the audience rose and burst into loud applause.”2 The blackbody nature of the CMB had been conclusively confirmed.3 At this point it seemed that the big bang could no longer be held in doubt. No other proposed alternative could explain this result without ad hoc assumptions. However, inflation was still not out of the woods. Bitter opponents such as the prominent astronomers Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey

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