Friday, May 23, 2008

Multiverse or Multifanatical?

I posted some stuff on uncommondescent about the alleged multiverse and since not all of it got through (at least not yet, it might sometime in the future), I wanted to post it here.

Original: William J. Murray
It might be interesting to note that a subjectively-collapsing wave-function universe might be entirely indistinguishable from a universe inhabited from a personal, omnipotent God; it would also account for miraculous, transcendental phenomena, life after death, and even the actual (in any meaningful sense of the word) existence of God.

Lets apply the multiverse to the criteria required for something to be scientific: falsifiability. The criteria to falsify ID is rather straight forward, so I’m not going to go over that here (since we’ve gone over it several times in the past).

The problem with the multiverse is that, no matter what combination of evidence exists within this universe, no matter how this universe is oriented, no matter what we can and can’t observe, no matter what happens, this just happens to be a universe with this combination of evidence. In other words, no matter what combination of evidence exists within this universe, it does not falsify the multiverse.


If such predictive theories are not useful, then MWI becomes a fun bit of sophistry and nothing more; if such predictive theories are useful, as in quantum computing and other applications, then MWI is much like “a Designer” in I.D.; you might never be able to prove there are in fact other universes, but you can certainly prove that phenomena in this universe behaves as if there are.

The difference here is that we know what design looks like because we ourselves can design. We don’t know how this universe should behave or look like if there are multiple universes since we can never experimentally observe the difference in behavior between one independent universe and one universe within multiple universes. One can only speculate how this universe should behave or look like if it is within many universes. How do we know all of the observable phenomena in this universe aren’t simply a function of this universe?

Many worlds: Maybe easier to make pay than make sense? (Uncommondescent)

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