An interesting article dealing with how some religious believers are dealing with the idea, suggested from some of the more speculative corners of contemporary physics, that our universe is simply one part of a vast “multiverse” (via the First Things blog, I think).

Among other things, the multiverse hypothesis seems to pose a challenge for certain modern arguments for God’s existence based on the so-called anthropic principle, or the appearance that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of life. People have suggested that the fact of this apparent fine-tuning provides some kind of evidence for the existence of God (how much evidence is a matter of debate). However, if our universe is just one among many (an infinity?) of actualized universes, then the emergence of a universe fit for life would seem to be inevitalbe, or at least much more likely, without requiring an intelligent creator.

Interestingly, Arthur Peacocke addressed this issue some time ago in his Gifford Lecutres, collected in his book Theology for a Scientific Age. He argues that you can avoid the multiverse problem by simply taking the argument up a level:

Whatever the constraints and framework of meta-laws and supervening relations that operate in bringing about the range constituting any postulated ensemble of universes, they must be of such a kind as to enable in one of the universes (this one) the combination of parameters, fundamental constants, etc., to be such that living organisms, including ourselves, could come into existence in some corner of it. So, on this argument, it is as significant that the ensemble of universes should be of such a kind that persons have emerged as it would be if ours were the only universe. (p. 109)

One possible problem I see with Peacocke’s argument is that it seems to depend on whether the multiverse is supposed to contain all merely physical possibilities (i.e. those universes which are possible given the fundamental “constraints and framework” of the multiverse, whatever those are) or to exhaust all logically possible universes. If the latter, then there would be no anthropic coincidence to explain, since the actually existing multiverse would be the only one that could exist. On the other hand, I’m not sure how we could establish that whatever fundamental framework governs the multiverse was the only logically possible (i.e., self-consistent) one. I also don’t have a terribly firm grasp on what motivates the entire theory, so I’m not sure how its proponents would characterize it given these options.