Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen C. Meyer

Author:Stephen C. Meyer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2021-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Proponents of inflationary cosmology posit a specific universe-generating mechanism. According to the currently dominant “eternal chaotic inflationary model,” an outward-pushing field with vacuum energy, dubbed “an inflaton field,” causes the expansion of a wider space in which our universe and others arose. As the inflaton field expands, the energy of the field sporadically decays in isolated locations. When that happens, the inflaton field spawns other, lower-energy “bubble” universes as the original inflaton field continues to expand into the infinite future. Since new bubble universes expand more slowly than the bubbles that contain them, collisions rarely, if ever, happen. Consequently, a multiverse of causally isolated nested bubble universes results.8

Some physicists have appropriated this model to explain fine tuning, though only the fine tuning of the initial conditions, not the laws and constants of physics, since the laws of physics would be the same in all the bubbles within the larger universe.9 Even so, proponents of the inflationary multiverse argue that, since the inflaton field can produce an infinite number of other universes, every event that has occurred in our universe is bound to occur somewhere endlessly many times. It follows that events or conditions that appear extremely improbable, considering only our universe, are actually highly probable—or even inevitable. Sooner or later some universe had to acquire the finely tuned conditions necessary to sustain life. Our universe just happened to be the lucky one. According to this theory, since we only observe the bubble universe in which we live, we falsely think the conditions necessary for life are extremely improbable, when in fact, given the action of the inflaton field as a universe-generating mechanism, a life-friendly universe must inevitably arise in some universe somewhere—we just happen to be living in that lucky universe.10

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