Nautilus Magazine: Evil Triumphs in These Multiverses, and God Is Powerless

The challenge that the multiverse poses for the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God is often focused on fine-tuning. If there are infinite universes, then we don’t need a fine tuner to explain why the conditions of our universe are perfect for life, so the argument goes. But some kinds of multiverse pose a more direct threat. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physicist Hugh Everett III and the modal realism of cosmologist Max Tegmark include worlds that no sane, good God would ever tolerate. The theories are very different, but each predicts the existence of worlds filled with horror and misery. [...]

But in the 1950s, Everett proposed a bold alternative. His theory has no collapses, but instead holds that all the parts of these combined—or “superposed”—states occur as parts of equally real but relatively isolated worlds. There are some complete copies of the universe in which the coin lands heads, and in others tails. And this applies to all other physical states—not just flipping coins. There are some universes where you make the train and get to work on time, and others where you don’t, and so on. These slight differences create multiple overlapping universes, all branching off from some initial state in a great world-tree.[...]

Even if the pruning argument doesn’t work, there is another reason to think that the many-worlds interpretation doesn’t pose a serious threat to belief in God. Everett’s multiverse is just a much expanded physical world like this one, and finding we were in it would be like finding we were in a world with many more inhabited planets, some the amplified versions of the worst parts of our planet and others the amplified versions of the best parts. And so, even the worst parts of an Everettian multiverse are just particularly ugly versions of planet Earth. If an afterlife helps to explain our seemingly pointless suffering, then it would help explain the seemingly pointless suffering in even the worst of these Everett worlds, if we suppose that everyone in every branch, shows up in an afterlife.

 

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