Egnor Fails On The Multiverse, Accidentally Takes The Kalam Down With Him
The multiverse is perfectly coherent
The harshest criticisms of the new atheists would seem to apply to Egnor. He is both incredibly condescending and so thoroughly wrong, it would put Kant to shame. I recently read an article that was so bad, it nearly caused me to fall out of my chair (as seems to be common with his articles).
He claims in the article that we can’t believe in the multiverse, showing decisively that he neither understands Goff nor the multiverse. Let’s correct some of those errors.
First, he misrepresents Goff. Goff explicitly argues that fine tuning is not evidence for the multiverse, claiming that commits the reverse gambler’s fallacy. While Egnor doesn’t flat out say that Goff believes in a multiverse, he goes as far as one can while not outright lying, saying
“But for atheists, it’s a real conundrum. As a result, at Neurologica blog, neurologist Steven Novella (pictured) and philosopher Philip Goff have been discussing the most popular atheist explanation for fine-tuning, the “multiverse.””
And also
“Novella and Goff’s sojourn in the “multiverse” fantasyland is atheist desperation. Fine-tuning is obvious evidence for God, and the whole “multiverse” project is a hand-waving gamble to evade the truth.”
However, unlike Egnor, Goff actually has real objections to the multiverse. I don’t think they’re successful, but that’s another story.
But now we get to Egnor’s egregious error. His primary objection to the multiverse is equivocation. I’m not kidding. Egnor says
Comment: The proposition that “our universe existing is unaffected by the presence or absence of other universes” is unintelligible. “Universe” means everything, so “other universes” makes no sense. If Novella and Goff mean “other locales in the universe that have different laws of physics,” they should say so. The proposition as it stands is senseless. Ironically, Novella and Goff (pictured) both agree with it.
Comment: Again, “multiple universes” is senseless. It means “multiple everything.” It’s gibberish. Novella and Goff seem to think that the concept of “probability” has meaning when applied to “multiple everything.” Probability necessarily refers to a range of possible states and presupposes an observer capable of surveying the states. In that case, the observer is in the (only) universe and “multiple universes” is meaningless.
This is just equivocation. By universe, Goff and Novella mean the limited spacetime region bound by our laws of physics. They do not mean everything. If this is what universe means then oopsies, there goes the Kalam. After all, if the universe is everything then everything has to have had a cause, but god had not cause, so god couldn’t exist.
Egnor in fact basically admits this, saying
Comment: One cannot infer a “multiverse” from the observation of our universe because inferring “multiple everythings” from “everything” is unintelligible. If Novella and Goff mean that the observation of our universe reveals regions that have different laws of physics, they should say so. Their argument to explain fine-tuning would then be: If the universe had a sufficient number of localities with different laws of physics, apparent fine-tuning in one locality could realistically occur by chance. I think that this is in fact what they are claiming. The problem is, to make their claim credible, they must show that there actually are localities in the universe in which the laws of physics differ in a way that would make fine tuning likely by chance.
They have not shown this, because there is no evidence for it. Their rhetorical sleight of hand here is innovative. Novella and Goff use “multiverse” to expand the probability range while at the same time using “multiverse” to exempt themselves from any requirement to produce actual scientific evidence that this probability range — these “multiverses” (i.e. localities) — actually exist. They are saying in effect that the localities that they need to prove their theory exist but they can’t find them because they are in other universes.
Egnor is evidently either unaware or ignores (egnores) a reasonable conception of evidence. B is evidence for A if the probability of B given A is greater than the probability of B given not A. Fine tuning is more likely if there’s a multiverse (in the sense in which people actually use it, rather than the bizarre way Egnore defines it) so it’s evidence for a multiverse. Even if we had no other evidence for a multiverse, if it explains fine tuning, then fine tuning gives us no reason to prefer the god hypothesis to it. However, if we do holistic theory comparisons of the multiverse to god, the god hypothesis gets blown out of the water. A multiverse explains evil, divine hiddenness, biblical contradictions, biblical absurdities, inconsistent revelation, an inhospitable universe, and numerous other things better than god. It also does better in terms of theoretical virtues, so it’s just overall a much better theory.
If you think that
A) A multiverse explains fine tuning
B) Fine tuning is evidence for god because god explains fine tuning
then you’d have to accept
C) Fine tuning is evidence for a multiverse.
We obviously can’t observe a multiverse, but we can’t observe god either, so that’s not a relevant symmetry breaker. Additionally, physicists have seen the need to invoke a multiverse many times, and it’s a key component of many theories in physics like superstring theory, the many worlds interpretation, Vilenkin’s theories, and numerous others.
The science is straightforward: The universe is fine-tuned for our existence because God created it that way.
What science shows that? Egnor never says. He just asserts it repeatedly and claims that atheists are desperate. It’s bizarre.
Egnor’s article had so little to say that my response to it only took about15 minutes to write and was one of my shortest articles ever. If this is Egnor’s best objection to the multiverse, he should stop talking about the fine tuning argument.