It seems worth pointing out here what Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich seems to be the first to have noticed: anyone who can believe in multiple universes should have no problem believing in heaven and hell. Just think of them as alternate universes, operating outside space and time according to laws that are inoperative in our universe. Even the atheist should now be able to envision a realm in which there is no evil or suffering and where the inhabitants never grow old. These traditional concepts, which have long been dismissed as preposterous based on the rules of our world, should be quite believable and perhaps even mandatory for one who holds that there are an infinite number of universes in which all quantum possibilities are realized.
There is a principle of logic, widely accepted in science, called the principle of Occam’s razor. It means that when there are a variety of possible explanations, go with the one that requires the fewest assumptions. In other words, if you’re trying to get from point A to point B, try to avoid the zigzag route. Applying Occam’s razor, Carl Sagan urges that”when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simpler.” Biologist E. 0. Wilson writes that the difficult thing about this principle for many people is that it “grants less license for New Age dreaming … but it gets the world straight.”
Imagine if I find a coin and begin flipping it and, every single time, it comes up heads. I try this ten thousand times, and it never fails to show me heads. There are two possibilities. The first and obvious one is that the coin is rigged in some way; somebody “fixed” it to come up heads every time. There is also a second possibility. Perhaps there are an infinite number of coins in circulation, and given infinite tossing and infinite time one set of tosses was bound to show this result. Now which of these two explanations should a rational person choose? Occam’s razor says choose the first one.
It is a serious objection to all theories of multiple universes that they violate Occam’s razor. They invent a fantastically complicated set of circumstances to explain a single case when there is a much simpler, more obvious explanation right at hand. Yes, I am referring to the third possible response to the anthropic principle. It says, quite simply, that our universe is designed for life because someone designed it that way. The Designer Universe approach has this benefit: you don’t need to make up the idea of a hundred billion universes that you know nothing about in order to account for the only universe you can possibly experience. Yet this third response seems to be anathema to some people, and here we see how strongly modern atheism relies on “New Age dreaming.”
Physicist Stephen Hawking falls right into the New Age trap. As we saw in the previous chapter, Hawking recognizes that the evidence of the Big Bang and the anthropic principle point directly to a creator. However, he seems eager to have a different explanation. Recently he has advanced a proposal no less outlandish that that of an infinity of universes. Hawking’s solution begins with the mathematical concept of “imaginary time.” The distinguishing feature of imaginary time is that it requires no past, no present, and no future. Time is viewed merely as a dimension of space. In his book A Brief History of Time, Hawking uses imaginary time, together with quantum fluctuations in which literally anything can happen, to postulate multiple universes, all of which have no spatial or temporal boundaries. He envisions universes coming into being as baby universes popping out of wormholes in other universes. The reason none of this can be witnessed, as you may have surmised by now, is that it all occurs in imaginary time. Hawking triumphantly notes that because he has dispensed with a time dimension for universes he has also dispensed with the notion of a beginning, and as there is no beginning, there is no need for a creator.
