Category Archives: Science and God

Atheism, Intelligent Design, Science and God

Why Is the Argument from Poor Design Simply Atheism of the Gaps?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

The other day I heard an atheist say that the fact that he sees poor design in the natural world leads him to the conclusion that the Christian God does not exist. Here is the argument:

  1. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator God would create organisms that have optimal design.
  2. Organisms have features that are sub-optimal.
  3. Therefore, God either did not create these organisms or is not omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

There are several things wrong with this argument, but I want to focus on premise 2 – organisms have features that are sub-optimal.

I am an electrical engineer who has been designing integrated circuits (IC) for 20 years, either personally or through managing other engineers. I am extremely familiar with IC design. Over the years, I have often heard young engineers, who did not design a particular IC, criticize the design of that IC by saying it is sub-optimal, that they could do a better job. I have then seen these same engineers eat crow when they finally talk to the original designer and discover the constraints that original engineer was under when he designed the IC and the purposes for which he designed the IC.

It is impossible to judge a design as optimal or sub-optimal without knowing the purposes of the designer and without knowing the constraints the designer faced during the design. Young engineers just assume that they know both when they look at somebody else’s design. After being embarrassed a few times, they usually drop this approach and gain some humility.

I see the atheist who uses the argument from poor design in the same light. Biological organisms are incredibly complex and they operate in an environment that is massively complex. Our current knowledge of biological organisms and of all the earth’s diverse ecosystems is in its infancy. Every year, scientists realize how much more there is to learn. However, science marches onward and we do indeed learn more each year.

Here is the problem for the atheist. Like the young IC designer, they are in a very poor position to judge whether biological organisms are optimally designed or not. Each year, scientists discover new purposes, or functions, for biological organisms, and each year scientists discover more constraints within which biological organisms must function.

This means that every year the atheist making the argument from poor design will have to retract examples of poor design, and it will always be that way. The overall trajectory of scientific discovery is that the world we live in is more complex than we ever imagined, not less. Science is going in the wrong direction for the atheists making the argument from poor design.

Because of that, this argument is simply atheism of the gaps. Atheists fill in their biological knowledge gaps by claiming that certain organisms are designed poorly, only to have to abandon each example of alleged poor design as science advances. This argument, then, is a loser for atheists, and should be dropped. They are literally swimming against the tide of scientific progress when they make this argument. Their “poor design” gaps will continue to be filled in year after year.

Religion, Science and God

Is Science Going to End Religion?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

A common refrain among secularists is that as science advances, the need for religion continues to diminish, and eventually the need will disappear altogether. After all, the argument goes, the only reason religion exists is to answer questions for which science has yet to provide answers. Once all those questions are answered by science, religion serves no useful purpose.

The problem with this argument is that religion answers questions that science can not, in principle, ever answer. This point was brought home to me again as I was reading, of all things, a best-selling business management book called The Future of Management. The authors, Bill Breen and Gary Hamel, make this case persuasively. They begin their argument by noting that

for more than 300 years, commentators have been predicting the end of religious faith. From Auguste Comte to Richard Dawkins, they have argued that faith must inevitably crumble as scientific certitude grows. Yet faith in a divine presence continues to be one of humanity’s great common denominators. While some societies are more overtly religious than others, the majority of human beings share a belief in the transcendental.

There is no doubt about that last point. I would even say the vast majority of human beings that have ever lived shared a belief in the transcendental. So what is the mistake that Comte and Dawkins are making?

The belief that science will one day displace faith is based on a mistaken assumption that religious belief is principally a set of mystical and misguided conjectures about how the natural world works. As the sunlight of scientific discovery breaks through the black night of ignorance, so the thinking goes, these primitive superstitions will evaporate like the dew beneath the summer sun.

If religion is not primarily about explaining the laws of nature, what is it primarily about?

Religious faith is not chiefly concerned with the what, how, and when of natural phenomena. Rather, it is concerned with the why of existence. And while a few scientists may argue that the question of “why” is unanswerable and therefore not worth pursuing, they haven’t yet convinced the rest of humanity to suspend its search for significance.

Several atheists have made that point on the blog. They say that the “why” questions are uninteresting or are never going to be answered, so why worry about them? But as Breen and Hamel explain, the “rest of humanity” does care about these answers, and religion attempts to provide them. As Breen and Hamel explain, religion’s message is that

you are more than protoplasm, more than artfully yet unintentionally arranged stardust. There is a purpose to your existence. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, two sociologists who’ve studied the human foundations of faith, put it simply: “… religious explanations specify the fundamental meaning of life: how we got here and where we are going (if anywhere).” In other words, they provide answers to the eternal question of “why?”

Has religion proved successful? Yes it has.

History provides countless examples of individuals whose quiet, life-affirming faith elicited virtue, spurred charity, and restored broken lives. Scholars have repeatedly found that religious faith enhances self-esteem, improves physical health, and enlarges the capacity of individuals to cope with the traumas of life. Faith has something to teach us about resilience—not because faith itself has survived, but because faith, to the extent it provides individuals with a sense of meaning, helps make people more resilient. . . . Without a narrative that creates drama and meaning, we are listless and rudderless.

I would go on to add that Christianity, specifically, has done more to give meaning to people’s lives than any other religion. It is a force for good unparalleled in the history of the world. As great as science is, it is not even worthy to hold Christianity’s sandals.

Philosophy, Science and God

Are Scientists Superhuman?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Those who identify “good science” with the current mainstream practitioners of institutional science seem to think so. Professor of biology Austin L. Hughes, however, sees serious problems with the adulation of scientists in his essay, “The Folly of Scientism.” Hughes points to the core issue with this line of thinking:

The fundamental problem raised by the identification of “good science” with “institutional science” is that it assumes the practitioners of science to be inherently exempt, at least in the long term, from the corrupting influences that affect all other human practices and institutions. Ladyman, Ross, and Spurrett explicitly state that most human institutions, including “governments, political parties, churches, firms, NGOs, ethnic associations, families…are hardly epistemically reliable at all.” However, “our grounding assumption is that the specific institutional processes of science have inductively established peculiar epistemic reliability.”

Is this correct, that scientific institutions have escaped the weaknesses of humankind that plague other human institutions? Hughes strongly disagrees:

This assumption is at best naïve and at worst dangerous. If any human institution is held to be exempt from the petty, self-serving, and corrupting motivations that plague us all, the result will almost inevitably be the creation of a priestly caste demanding adulation and required to answer to no one but itself.

Hughes moves on to accuse philosophers who have indulged in scientist worship:

It is something approaching this adulation that seems to underlie the abdication of the philosophers and the rise of the scientists as the authorities of our age on all intellectual questions. Reading the work of Quine, Rudolf Carnap, and other philosophers of the positivist tradition, as well as their more recent successors, one is struck by the aura of hero-worship accorded to science and scientists.

In spite of their idealization of science, the philosophers of this school show surprisingly little interest in science itself — that is, in the results of scientific inquiry and their potential philosophical implications. As a biologist, I must admit to finding Quine’s constant invocation of “nerve-endings” as an all-purpose explanation of human behavior to be embarrassingly simplistic. Especially given Quine’s intellectual commitment to behaviorism, it is surprising yet characteristic that he had little apparent interest in the actual mechanisms by which the nervous system functions.

Does Hughes not believe that the scientific method is reliable? Is he anti-science? Not at all. Read on.

Ross, Ladyman, and Spurrett may be right to assume that science possesses a “peculiar epistemic reliability” that is lacking in other forms of inquiry. But they have taken the strange step of identifying that reliability with the institutions and practitioners of science, rather than with any particular rational, empirical, or methodological criterion that scientists are bound (but often fail) to uphold.

Thus a (largely justifiable) admiration for the work of scientists has led to a peculiar, unjustified role for scientists themselves — so that, increasingly, what is believed by scientists and the public to be “scientific” is simply any claim that is upheld by many scientists, or that is based on language and ideas that sound sufficiently similar to scientific theories.

Hughes is a keen observer of our current culture. Listen to what he is saying: scientists have become the new priests of our time. Whatever comes out of their mouths, we swallow without question. Most of us don’t really understand what they are saying, or whether what they are saying makes any sense. We just parrot what we hear, because, after all, they are scientists, and they must be right.

Philosophy, Science and God

Is Science Defined By What Scientists Do?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Frustrated by an inability to rule out certain “unscientific” ideas (e.g., intelligent design) by using epistemological criteria, some scientists and philosophers simply make the claim that science is what scientists do. Or put another way, science is defined by the institutions that practice science.

Professor of biology Austin L. Hughes, however, believes this way of defining science is fraught with problems. In his essay, “The Folly of Scientism,” he argues the following:

By this criterion, we would differentiate good science from bad science simply by asking which proposals agencies like the National Science Foundation deem worthy of funding, or which papers peer-review committees deem worthy of publication.

So what is the harm in this approach to defining science? Hughes explains:

The problems with this definition of science are myriad. First, it is essentially circular: science simply is what scientists do.

Second, the high confidence in funding and peer-review panels should seem misplaced to anyone who has served on these panels and witnessed the extent to which preconceived notions, personal vendettas, and the like can torpedo even the best proposals. Moreover, simplistically defining science by its institutions is complicated by the ample history of scientific institutions that have been notoriously unreliable.

Can Hughes provide an example of an unreliable scientific institution?

Consider the decades during which Soviet biology was dominated by the ideologically motivated theories of the geneticist Trofim Lysenko, who rejected Mendelian genetics as inconsistent with Marxism and insisted that acquired characteristics could be inherited. An observer who distinguishes good science from bad science “by reference to institutional factors” alone would have difficulty seeing the difference between the unproductive and corrupt genetics in the Soviet Union and the fruitful research of Watson and Crick in 1950s Cambridge.

Can we be certain that there are not sub-disciplines of science in which even today most scientists accept without question theories that will in the future be shown to be as preposterous as Lysenkoism? Many working scientists can surely think of at least one candidate — that is, a theory widely accepted in their field that is almost certainly false, even preposterous.

Yes, Soviet biology was screwed up for a while, but the beauty of science is that it is self-correcting, right? Scientists may get something wrong for a few years, but eventually they get it right, don’t they? Hughes anticipates this objection:

Confronted with such examples, defenders of the institutional approach will often point to the supposedly self-correcting nature of science. Ladyman, Ross, and Spurrett assert that “although scientific progress is far from smooth and linear, it never simply oscillates or goes backwards. Every scientific development influences future science, and it never repeats itself.”

Alas, in the thirty or so years I have been watching, I have observed quite a few scientific sub-fields (such as behavioral ecology) oscillating happily and showing every sign of continuing to do so for the foreseeable future. The history of science provides examples of the eventual discarding of erroneous theories. But we should not be overly confident that such self-correction will inevitably occur, nor that the institutional mechanisms of science will be so robust as to preclude the occurrence of long dark ages in which false theories hold sway.

Hughes is dead on target. I might add that origin of life research also seems to have gone nowhere fast over the last hundred years. Scientists still have no natural explanation for how first life appeared on earth. The dark ages persist for origin of life researchers. As grand as science is, it still has spectacular failures, like any other human undertaking. As long as the institutions of science include human beings, there will continue to be misadventures.

Philosophy, Science and God

Has the Multiverse Killed Metaphysics (and God)?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If you believe a handful of famous physicists (e.g., Hawking, Mlodinow, and Smolin), the answer is yes. Multiverse theorists, like the three aforementioned physicists, posit a multiverse which contains numerous universes with different physical laws. According to Austin L. Hughes, in his article “The Folly of Scientism,”  these theorists hold that “if there are enough universes, one or more whose laws are suitable for the evolution of intelligent life is more or less bound to occur.”

While any universe with a particular set of laws may be very improbable, with enough universes out there it becomes highly probable. This is the same principle behind the fact that, when I toss a coin, even though there is some probability that I will get heads and some probability that I will get tails, it is certain that I will get heads or tails. Similarly, modern theorists imply, the multiverse has necessary being even though any given universe does not.

Our contingent universe, a universe which did not have to necessarily exist, came into being because of the multiverse. But where did the multiverse come from? Hughes suggests that the

problem with this argument is that certainty in the sense of probability is not the same thing as necessary being: If I toss a coin, it is certain that I will get heads or tails, but that outcome depends on my tossing the coin, which I may not necessarily do. Likewise, any particular universe may follow from the existence of a multiverse, but the existence of the multiverse remains to be explained.

Not only the existence of the multiverse needs to be explained, but the universe-generating process. Hughes continues:

In particular, the universe-generating process assumed by some multiverse theories is itself contingent because it depends on the action of laws assumed by the theory. The latter might be called meta-laws, since they form the basis for the origin of the individual universes, each with its own individual set of laws.

So what determines the meta-laws? Either we must introduce meta-meta-laws, and so on in infinite regression, or we must hold that the meta-laws themselves are necessary — and so we have in effect just changed our understanding of what the fundamental universe is to one that contains many universes. In that case, we are still left without ultimate explanations as to why that universe exists or has the characteristics it does.

Put another way, multiverse theorists have merely backed the problem up one step. They have failed to answer the fundamental metaphysical question of why anything exists at all. What is the source of the multiverse, or is it self-existent, uncaused, and necessary? If it is self-existent, uncaused, and necessary, then it sounds a lot like the theistic God that they so like to ridicule.

Existence of God, Science and God, Top Ten Posts of 2012

Does Science Disprove the Existence of God? #1 Post of 2012

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

As I’ve read comments on the blog over the years, I’ve often read a version of the following: “science disproves the existence of God.”  Even prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and Victor Stenger say something similar.  Edgar Andrews, in his book Who Made God?, points out that this argument can be circular.

Andrews explains:

The assertion is based on the claim that science presents no evidence for the existence of supernatural forces or phenomena. It sounds plausible until you look a little more closely. The argument can be expressed as a syllogism as follows:

1. Science is the study of the physical universe.

2. Science produces no evidence for the existence of non-physical entities.

3. Therefore non-physical entities such as God do not exist.

Why is this a circular argument?  What is the fallacy?

Again the fallacy is clear.  In point (1) ‘science’ is defined as the study of the physical or material world.  This statement thereby excludes by definition any consideration by science of non-physical causes or events.  The proposition then argues from the silence of science concerning non-material realities that such realities do not exist.  By the same logic, if you define birds as ‘feathered creatures that fly’, there’s no such thing as an ostrich.  It’s fairly obvious in this example whose head is in the sand.  The correct conclusion, of course, is not that ostriches are mythical but that (on your restrictive definition of ‘bird’) they are not birds.  In the same way, to define science as the study of the material universe simply prohibits science from making statements about a non-material entity like God.  If the remit of science is deliberately restricted to the physical realm, the fact that science (so defined) tells us nothing about God has no bearing whatever on his existence or non-existence, as most scientists recognize.

Science can actually give us evidence of God’s existence, as Andrews argues throughout his book, and as I’ve argued elsewhere.  Science examines effects in the natural world that lead us back to God as the cause of those effects.

Philosophy, Science and God

Why Is Scientism Self-Refuting?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

More times than I can count we have skeptics comment on the blog who insist that science is the only means of attaining knowledge.  If you don’t believe me, just read the comments underneath last week’s blog posts.  I have covered this topic numerous times, but it seems to surface over and over again, which tells me that we are touching upon a fundamental disagreement between two worldviews.  In other words, this is a pivotal issue for everyone to understand.

So, I call back to the stand again Professor Edward Feser and his book, The Last Superstition.  When confronted with the assertion that only scientific reasoning gives knowledge (justified true belief), how shall we respond?

There are two problems with this view (which is known as “scientism” or “positivism”).  First, if they want to take this position, they will need to defend it and not simply assert it; otherwise they’ll be begging the question against their opponents and indulging in just the sort of dogmatism they claim to oppose. 

Feser makes an important point here.  It is not enough to merely say, as skeptics sometimes do, that scientific reasoning is the only way to know things, and then just leave it at that.  This viewpoint may be fashionable among atheists and skeptics, but among the rest of the populace, it just doesn’t fly.  The vast majority of thinkers from pre-Socratic Greece to today reject the assertion that scientific reasoning is the only way to know anything.  Given that fact, we expect an argument to be made.

Second, the moment they attempt to defend it, they will have effectively refuted it, for scientism or positivism is itself a metaphysical position that could only be justified by using metaphysical arguments. 

How so?  Why can’t science argue for science without employing metaphysical arguments?

Of  its very nature, scientific investigation takes for granted such assumptions as that: there is a physical world existing independently of our minds; this world is characterized by various objective patterns and regularities; our senses are at least partially reliable sources of information about this world; there are objective laws of logic and mathematics that apply to the objective world outside our minds; our cognitive powers – of concept-formation, reasoning from premises to a conclusion, and so forth – afford us a grasp of these laws and can reliably take us from evidence derived from the senses to conclusions about the physical world; the language we use can adequately express truths about these laws and about the external world; and so on and so on.

Notice that none of these are claims of science, are they?  As Feser explains, “Every one of these claims embodies a metaphysical assumption, and science, since its very method presupposes them, could not possibly defend them without arguing in a circle.  Their defense is instead a task for metaphysics, and for philosophy more generally; and scientism is shown thereby to be incoherent.”

Feser ends this section with a brilliant quote of philosopher E. A. Burtt:

Even the attempt to escape metaphysics is no sooner put in the form of a proposition than it is seen to involve highly significant metaphysical postulates.  For this reason there is an exceedingly subtle and insidious danger in positivism.  If you cannot avoid metaphysics, what kind of metaphysics are you likely to cherish when you sturdily suppose yourself to be free from the abomination?  Of course it goes without saying that in this case your metaphysics will be held uncritically because it is unconscious; moreover, it will be passed on to others far more readily than your other notions inasmuch as it will be propagated by insinuation rather than by direct argument. . . . Now the history of mind reveals pretty clearly that the thinker who decries metaphysics . . . if he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful. . . . But inasmuch as the positivist mind has failed to school itself in careful metaphysical thinking, its ventures as such points will be apt to appear pitiful, inadequate, or even fantastic.

Philosophy, Science and God

Is There a War Between Religion and Science?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

This canard has been repeated so often that it is now part of 21st century folklore.  Contrary to this popular myth, philosopher Edward Feser, in his book  The Last Superstition, correctly points out that the “so-called ‘war between science and religion’ is really a war between two rival philosophical worldviews, and not at bottom a scientific or theological dispute at all” (emphasis in original).

On one side is the worldview derived from the “classical philosophical vision of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.”  The other side, that of materialistic secularism, derives its premises from the likes of Hobbes, Hume, Descartes, Locke, and Kant.

Feser presents candid comments from several modern scientists and philosophers who admit as much.

The physicist Paul Davies tells us that “science takes as its starting point the assumption that life wasn’t made by a god or a supernatural being.”  Feser further quotes Davies as saying that partially out of fear of  “open[ing] the door to religious fundamentalists . . . many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled.”

Feser continues by quoting prominent contemporary philosophers.

Tyler Burge opines that “materialism is not established, or even clearly supported, by science” and that its hold over his peers is analogous to that of a “political or religious ideology”; John Searle tells us that “materialism is the religion of our time,” that “like more traditional religions, it is accepted without question and . . . provides the framework within which other questions can be posed, addressed, and answered,” and that “materialists are convinced, with a quasi-religious faith, that their view must be right”; and William Lycan admits, in what he himself calls “an uncharacteristic exercise in intellectual honesty,” that the arguments for materialism are no better than the arguments against it, that his “own faith in materialism is based on science-worship,” and that “we also always hold our opponents to higher standards of argumentation than we obey ourselves.”

One of the most famous admissions from a scientist about the war of worldviews comes from the materialist biologist Richard Lewontin.  Writing in a book review, Lewontin admits:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

All of this points to the need for the public conversation to include philosophy and worldviews.  The secularist who claims that science, in and of itself, disproves God has merely smuggled in atheism from the start.  Science, in and of itself, does not disprove God.  Only when it is built on a foundation of materialism can it do that kind of work.

Existence of God, Science and God

Is the Multiverse Hypothesis Scientific Or Not? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this series, we learned that there are two versions of the multiverse hypothesis, level 1 and level 2.  The level 1 multiverse is non-controversial as it is basically an extension of our current universe in space.  The level 2 multiverse, however, makes much grander claims and is fraught with problems.  We pick up with cosmologist George F. R. Ellis’s Scientific American article from August 2011.

So what is wrong with the level 2 multiverse hypothesis? Ellis explains:

What is new is the assertion that the multiverse is a scientific theory, with all that implies about being mathematically rigorous and experimentally testable. I am skeptical about this claim. I do not believe the existence of those other universes has been proved—or ever could be. Proponents of the multiverse, as well as greatly enlarging our conception of physical reality, are implicitly redefining what is meant by “science.”

Why is the level 2 multiverse not scientific?

The key step in justifying a multiverse is extrapolation from the known to the unknown, from the testable to the untestable. You get different answers depending on what you choose to extrapolate.  Because theories involving a multiverse can explain almost anything whatsoever, any observation can be accommodated by some multiverse variant. The various “proofs,” in effect, propose that we should accept a theoretical explanation instead of insisting on observational testing. But such testing has, up until now, been the central requirement of the scientific endeavor, and we abandon it at our peril. If we weaken the requirement of solid data, we weaken the core reason for the success of science over the past centuries.

Ellis sympathizes with those scientists who posit the level 2 multiverse as a “way of resolving deep issues about the nature of existence,” but he argues they are misguided. 

All the same issues that arise in relation to the universe arise again in relation to the multiverse.  If the multiverse exists, did it come into existence through necessity, chance or purpose?  That is a metaphysical question that no physical theory can answer for either the universe or the multiverse.

The level 2 multiverse, then, is not a scientific explanation, but is philosophical speculation.  It is an alternative metaphysical idea that is simply meant to replace the metaphysical idea of a supernatural Designer.  Those skeptics who constantly chastise Christians for doing metaphysics, and who then turn around and posit the level 2 multiverse as the cause of the fine tuning of the universe, find themselves also doing metaphysics. 

It seems that skeptics come to a fork in the road here.  Either admit that metaphysics is unavoidable and climb onboard with theists, or stop offering the multiverse as an explanation to anything.  What skeptics may not do is claim that they are only offering scientific explanations while at the same time arguing for the multiverse.  That door is closed.

Existence of God, Science and God

Is the Multiverse Hypothesis Scientific Or Not? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the most powerful arguments for God’s existence is the fine tuning argument.  Rather than rehearse it here, please read Wintery Knight’s presentation of the argument.  Many atheist scholars acknowledge the persuasiveness of this argument (e.g., philosopher Peter Millican did as much in his recent debate with William Lane Craig), although not granting its conclusion.

The most common escape hatch that atheists scurry through when confronted with this argument is to offer the multiverse hypothesis.  This hypothesis, some of them argue, is much more plausible than the God hypothesis because it is a scientific explanation for the fine tuning of the universe for life.  What is this hypothesis and is it scientific?

In the August 2011 issue of Scientific American the world-renowned cosmologist George F. R. Ellis weighs in to explain exactly what the multiverse is.  First, Ellis clarifies what cosmologists mean by the term “multiverse.”

The word “multiverse” has different meanings. Astronomers are able to see out to a distance of about 42 billion light-years, our cosmic visual horizon. We have no reason to suspect the universe stops there. Beyond it could be many—even infinitely many—domains much like the one we see. Each has a different initial distribution of matter, but the same laws of physics operate in all. Nearly all cosmologists today (including me) accept this type of multiverse, which Max Tegmark calls “level 1.”

The level 1 multiverse refers to what lies outside our visual horizon.  This “multiverse” contains the same laws of physics as the universe we can observe, and it is really just an extension of our universe.  I find the term “multiverse” to be misleading in this case, but I don’t get to choose the names for scientific theories.  As Ellis says, the level 1 multiverse is not controversial.  But this is not the notion of the multiverse that atheists invoke to avoid the conclusion of the fine tuning argument. 

Ellis continues:

Yet some go further. They suggest completely different kinds of universes, with different physics, different histories, maybe different numbers of spatial dimensions. Most will be sterile, although some will be teeming with life.  A chief proponent of this “level 2” multiverse is Alexander Vilenkin, who paints a dramatic picture of an infinite set of universes with an infinite number of galaxies, an infinite number of planets and an infinite number of people with your name who are reading this article.

If there truly are an infinite set of universes, argue some atheists, then it seems that at least one would have the life-permitting fine tuning of our universe.  Therefore, there is no need to posit a Designer of our universe at all.  The level 2 multiverse virtually guarantees that our universe would exist, as it guarantees that every other kind of conceivable universe exists.

In part 2 of this series, we will look at what is wrong with the level 2 multiverse hypothesis.