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Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God

Atheist

It’s always worthwhile to remind ourselves how unhinged atheist materialism is. One of atheism’s Brighter lights is Sean M. Carroll, a Caltech physicist specializing in general relativity and cosmology. Carroll’s atheism and materialism have already loosened his grip on logic, and his endorsement of Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation in quantum mechanics shows an even looser grip on reality.

Carroll, as I mentioned here the other day, describes himself as a “poetic naturalist.” That means he finds beauty in nature but he infers no creative Mind behind it. He’s an atheist who finds nature gorgeous, for no reason, it seems.

In a video (click on the image above), he discusses the implications of various theories of the observer effect in quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation, which he does not endorse, is the theory that an observing mind (a measurement) is necessary to reduce the ensemble of potential quantum states to an actual quantum state. Carroll endorses the competing Everett Many Worlds Interpretation, which is the theory that each potential state does not cease to exist with collapse of the quantum waveform. Instead, each potential state creates a new universe and is real in that new universe. At each moment, an essentially uncountable number of new universes is being created by each particle in the universe. Carroll states that he believes that the number of alternate universes actually existing is actually infinite.

I won’t address the physics at issue in this question. I will address, rather, the psychiatry at issue, which is much more important and much easier to understand.

Carroll endorses Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. Carroll, as an atheist, is publicly asserting that the creation of infinite numbers of new universes every moment by every particle in our universe is more plausible than the existence of God.

Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? The Many Worlds Interpretation gives atheist metaphysics a boost. It helps elide the Anthropic coincidence, which is the uncanny fact that a large ensemble of physical constants in the universe are fine-tuned for the existence of life — the existence of us.  From this atheist perspective, the fact that only a universe capable of generating observers can be observed is not a problem if there are an infinite number of universes. No matter how improbable the Anthropic coincidence, if there are an infinite number of universes, it (we) will happen, by chance and without any purpose or a Mind guiding the process.

It’s sort of an extension of the Darwinian creation myth, applied to cosmology. Essentially infinite variation and survival of surviving observable universes elides the need to infer design. It’s a flawed argument (for another post), but as I noted, the issue here isn’t physics or even logic.

The issue is psychiatric. We have a highly accomplished physicist, who regards the existence of God as preposterous, asserting that the unceasing creation of infinite numbers of new universes by every atom in the cosmos at every moment is actually happening (as we speak!), and that it is a perfectly rational and sane inference.  People have been prescribed anti-psychotic drugs for less.

Now of course Carroll isn’t crazy, not in any medical way. He’s merely given his assent to a crazy ideology — atheist materialism — and hopped on the crazy bus for the ride.

The distance to which atheists will go to deny the existence of God is astonishing. Infinite universes, warm little ponds with life magically popping out, surviving survivors randomly evolving the genetic code (without a genetic code to do the evolving), spontaneously evolving molecular nanotechnology from no purpose at all, and meat thinking for itself, all seem, to an atheist, tremendously more plausible than the existence of a Mind as the ground of reality.

What can we in the reality-based community do when an ideology — the ideology that is currently dominant in science — is not merely wrong, but delusional? I guess calling it what it is is a place to start.

Image: Sean Carroll, via YouTube.