Does God So Love the Multiverse?

Abstract

Monotheistic religions such as Judaism and Christianity affirm that God loves all humans and created them in His image. However, we have learned from Darwin that we were not created separately from other life on earth. Some Christians opposed Darwinian evolution because it undercut certain design arguments for the existence of God. Today there is the growing idea that the fine-tuned constants of physics might be explained by a multiverse with very many different sets of constants of physics. Some Christians oppose the multiverse for similarly undercutting other design arguments for the existence of God. However, undercutting one argument does not disprove its conclusion. Here I argue that multiverse ideas, though not automatically a solution to the problems of physics, deserve serious consideration and are not in conflict with Christian theology as I see it. Although this paper as a whole is {\it addressed} primarily to Christians in cosmology and others interested in the relation between the multiverse and theism, it should be of {\it interest} to a wider audience. Proper subsets of this paper are addressed to other Christians, to other theists, to other cosmologists, to other scientists, and to others interested in the multiverse and theism.

Comment: 26 pages, LaTeX, to be published in Melville Y. Stewart, ed., Science and Religion in Dialogue (Blackwell Publishing Inc., Oxford), from a series of lectures sponsored by the Templeton Foundation and given at Shandong University in Jinan, China, autumn 2007; see also arXiv:0801.0245 and arXiv:0801.0247