Questions for non-Christians #8

I have a crucial question about the universe which I have never heard nor read anyone address. I used to wonder about it even as a young girl and hope that someday I’d have the answer. But in the eight or so years I’ve been studying evidences for God, among which the universe and all its qualities, constants, and quantities are primary, not to mention the many years before that, I’m no closer to an answer than I was then.

But how can anyone who has ever looked up into the clouds or the stars not have puzzled over this obvious conundrum? Here’s what has me flummoxed: Though it’s physically and logistically impossible, conceptually one could imagine launching a rocket into space on a straight trajectory aiming for the furthest reaches of the universe. Would it just keep going on forever and ever, or would it eventually make it to an edge…a barrier…a wall? And if there is a wall of some sort, what’s on the other side? If not, how can a concrete entity be infinite in size? How could “size” even be applied to it?

Do you get my quandary? Do you have an answer for me? I didn’t think so.

The universe, as I’ve always understood it anyway, is the totality of all matter, space, and time. Though the puzzle presented by the size and limits of the universe may not be solvable, surely its scope is plain enough. Imagine my befuddlement then when I first encountered the concept of multiple universes. No…it can’t be, I thought. What is this ridiculousness?

Multiple universes or “multiverse” theories suggest that the universe we are a part of and have evidence for is in fact NOT the totality of all that is. There are alternate or parallel ones that actually exist in another dimension, or something. I don’t and never will understand the science behind the theories so cannot argue against their validity, except when it comes to the likely motivation for proposing such an elaborate and unprovable concept.

The only universe that’s more than merely theoretical exhibits a feature which is so mathematically improbable as to be virtually impossible if it was not designed to be that way. Multiple, measurable values pertaining to it are so finely-tuned within an extraordinarily small range that the odds of them all resulting by chance are beyond the realm of possibility.

This short video from William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith ministry concisely yet thoroughly explains this incredible feature of our universe.

So the fine-tuning of the universe is a phenomenon well-accepted as factual among both theist and non-theist scientists. Its obvious implication of the involvement of a Designer, though, has the non-theist physicists resorting to metaphysics to account for it. They would rather put their money on a logically untenable infinite number of things to avoid having to accept the logical conclusion that this one fantastically ordered, observable universe was created by a fantastically powerful, unobservable God.

So I’ll end with this question #8 for the non-Christian:

Are you willing to believe in an infinite number of universes to account for the indescribably precise fine-tuning for the existence of life of the only universe we have evidence for?