Stephen C. Meyer and Spencer Clavin argue the multiverse theory—rooted in inflationary cosmology and string theory—fails to explain life’s fine-tuned constants, instead shifting the problem into infinite random universes. They critique its philosophical emptiness, from Boltzmann brains to Marvel’s consequence-free storytelling, calling it a materialist dead end. The debate reveals how speculative physics now grapples with origin questions once reserved for theology, yet offers no causal answers—only deeper mysteries. Ultimately, they reject the multiverse as both scientifically hollow and culturally corrosive, reviving design arguments over blind chance. [Automatically generated summary]
The election is interesting, but what about the multiverse?
Is there some other universe in which the Republicans did better, for instance?
Actually, this is one of the biggest topics in science today, but it's also one of the biggest topics in culture.
So I want to bring on two excellent writers on this topic.
One is Stephen C. Meyer, who directs the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture in Seattle, and is the author of the USA Today bestseller Return of the God hypothesis, three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe.
And the other is mine own son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, the associate editor of the Claremont Review, who wrote a brilliant piece called Worlds Without End, Marvel Comics, Quantum Physics, and the Secrets of the Cosmos.
And Spencer has a book called How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.
It's great to see you both.
How you doing?
Very well, Andrew.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah.
Well, this topic is obviously infinite, but I think what I want to start with, I think I want to start with Stephen and ask, scientifically, why do we have the idea of the multiverse?
Where does this come from?
Well, it's a consequence of different speculative cosmological models and some basic physics.
So it's not entirely unmotivated by actual physical theories, reasonable physical theories.
And one of those is something called the inflationary cosmology.
And the idea of the inflationary cosmology is a variant on the standard Big Bang cosmology, and the idea that as the universe is expanding, in the very earliest parts, earliest time period of that expansion, it would have expanded at a very, very rapid rate so that the universe would have inflated quickly, like a balloon, very fast.
And then after a certain period of time, it would have settled down to a more sedate pace of expansion.
And part of the inflationary cosmology is that as the field that is generating that expansion reduces in intensity, then new universes would be spit off from that.
And so that's one of the cosmological models that gives the idea that perhaps there are other universes beyond our own.
And there are other considerations in physics as well, where the math that describes the universe that we live in also describes other possible universes.
And so people have suggested that, well, perhaps these mathematical possibilities exist as actual universes in reality.
Does that well, Spencer, go ahead.
This is something that's been around for forever, right?
Well, that's right.
I mean, it's intriguing to hear, of course, you know, Stephen, much more expert than I am in the scientific theories that precisely have led us up to this point.
But it's also intriguing, as I listen to him talk, to recall that in some ways, this is an attempt, a new attempt to answer one of the oldest questions in philosophy and something that we've recently, I think,
come to realize more and more, even if some of us have known this all along, is that scientists have taken up a role in our culture that has a certain level of kind of gravity and authority to speak to questions of what the ancients would have called natural philosophy, of which the first question, as it kind of gets going in Ionia and the sort of near Eastern Greek colonies and off the coast of what's now Turkey, the first question is what is the world made out of, right?
What's the stuff?
When you get down to the very bedrock of reality, obviously something exists, unless you're really going to be an extreme skeptic about it.
There is something.
And the question that people first start to ask is: okay, so what's the thing that exists out of which everything else is made?
And in the beginnings of these conversations, it seems like, evidence is pretty fragmentary, but it seems like there was one strain of thought going back to people like Anaximander and then up through maybe names that other people would have heard of, like Democritus and Leucippus, that was developing out this series of ideas that basically the world is made of stuff.
And you can cut stuff up into little pieces.
And if you keep cutting it up into little pieces, you will get down to an uncuttable part.
And the word in Greek for uncuttable is atomos.
So that's your atom, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And it's interesting to observe that that picture of the world comes along with a conclusion that, well, if these atoms are just kind of bouncing off of each other, they're interacting, they behave according to predictable rules.
There's nothing to stop them from kind of proliferating out in exactly the ways that Stephen is describing, that they'll eventually bubble up into ever new universes.
Exactly Atomos00:14:26
And this creates kind of like a universe-building machine, which seems, from what I understand, Stephen, to be what you are describing as well, like a cosmos-making procedure.
Well, in the inflationary cosmology, it is an explanation or model of the origin of the universe, but also implies that there may be new universes or bubble universes that emerge from that.
The string theory also has a version of the multiverse, and then something that's not exactly the multiverse, but it's called the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, where all the possible states that correspond to a wave that also acts like a particle are envisioned to exist in some possible world.
So there's a math, a mathematical set of a math that describes possibilities, and the possibilities are, in our imagination, at least actualized.
What has given these multiverse ideas popularity among physicists is something entirely different.
There is a kind of physical framework in which it's conceivable to think about multiverses or other universes.
But what's given the idea a real popularity and traction is another discovery of modern physics, which is called the fine-tuning.
And that is something that pertains to our universe, which is that the fundamental parameters of physics, the expansion rate of the universe, the force that drives that, the force of gravitational attraction, the force of electromagnetic attraction, the ratio between those and other fundamental forces, the masses of the elementary particles, the speed of light, all these basic parameters turn out to fall within very narrow ranges, such that if they were a little bit different,
a little bit stronger or weaker or lighter or heavier or faster or slower, in each case, these variations would make life as we know it, or life at all, in fact, even basic chemistry impossible.
And so this has kind of set a lot of physicists' hair on fire because it suggests the fine-tuning suggests perhaps the idea of a fine-tuner, that the best explanation for why we have all these incredibly improbable and just right parameters.
In fact, physicists are talking about our universe as a Goldilocks universe or a fortunate universe or a setup job, that these fine-tuning parameters, in the most kind of intuitive common sense way of thinking, suggests a fine-tuner.
In fact, Sir Fred Hoyle, who formerly was a very staunch scientific atheist, who discovered some of these fine-tuning parameters, eventually came around to a kind of basic theism in his worldview and said that a common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect is monkeyed with physics and with chemistry.
There are no random forces in nature, and these fine-tuning parameters are necessary for life to exist.
And so he came to the idea that there must be a kind of master intellect, a master fine-tuner behind everything.
And the multiverse comes in for many physicists as a kind of counter-argument to that.
And it's the idea that, well, yeah, all these parameters are incredibly improbable and they are, you know, and corporately, they're even more improbable.
And they have these small probabilities associated with them for no underlying physical reason and no logically necessary reason.
But we could explain the fine-tuning in our universe by positing the existence of billions and billions and billions and billions of other universes, so many, in fact, that ultimately the right combination of factors must have arisen in one of the universes, and we just happen to be that universe.
And so actually, there's nothing to explain about the fine-tuning.
We're just the lucky universe that got it right.
Spencer, do you feel that that plays into the idea, the idea that this gets rid of the need for God theoretically?
Do you feel that that plays into the cultural existence of the multiverse as well?
Is that something that appeals to people like the Marvel comics guys?
Or is that just coincidental?
No, I definitely think it's not a coincidence.
I notice, especially, I mean, first of all, a lot of what Stephen is saying here, it strikes me that, and this is often the case, the appeal of the multiverse, not necessarily the possibility, the mathematical possibility of it, or even the philosophical option on the table, but the attractiveness of it as a proposition and as the one that people plunk for when plenty of other options are also available,
seems to be because it is an answer to certain questions that you wouldn't even have to raise if you were comfortable with the idea of God.
If you're comfortable with the mind monkeying with the universe, if you're comfortable with the notion of super intellect, or even if you're comfortable with the notion that actually stuff is not the first substance of which all other things are made, but there's some other logic or governing mind that has to do with the baseline of reality, then it's really a lot of these things actually aren't problems.
There's no need essentially to insist on the idea that these probabilistic equations describe not just probabilities, but actualities in every instance, right?
So I think that's the problem.
That's very well said.
And just to piggyback on that a little bit, I love the way Spencer has framed this by taking it back to the ancient Greeks, because what philosophers call the question of ontology or what more popular writers on worldview call the prime reality question is exactly what he's described.
What is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else has come?
And this question goes back to the ancient Greeks.
And there were two basic answers that were offered by the Greek philosophers.
And one was the answer of the atomists that basically matter and energy, and I don't know how much they had the concept of energy that we have today, but material stuff has been the, is eternal and self-existent, and it is the thing from which everything else comes.
And the other answer was, well, there was a mind that pre-existed the matter, and it is the thing from which everything else comes.
And these two basic answers, basically materialism or some form of theism or idealism, have been the two basic answers that Western philosophers and scientists have debated since the ancient Greeks right up to the present.
And the multiverse hypothesis is popular, especially among philosophical or scientific materialists who have Accepted it largely because it does provide a contrary or a counter to the God hypothesis.
And one of the scientists I love in this debate most, not because I agree with him, I diametrically, I'm a diametrically opposed opposite side, but I love the way he frames issues, and that's Richard Dawkins.
And he said that the universe that we observe has exactly the properties we should expect.
If at bottom, there's no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Where blind, pitiless indifference is a metaphor for purely materialistic, undirected processes that have produced everything that we see.
And the fascinating thing about the fine-tuning discovery is that it's not at all what physicists or sorry, what materialists like Dawkins would have expected.
And in virtue of that, they've had to develop these very eccentric and somewhat fanciful hypotheses about the billions of other universes out there.
And yet, and I'll stop here because I've been answering too long, but I think there's a very big problem scientifically and metaphysically with those proposals.
I don't think they actually work.
I think there is every reason to prefer the mind-first view rather than the matter-first view when we start thinking about that fine-tuning problem.
Well, so this is, you know, when you ask that about the artistic question, right?
I think that what Stephen is saying goes a long way to explain why these two things are connected, why the Marvel, the creators of the Marvel universe, there were always in comic books alternate storylines and plot lines in the background that kind of didn't really happen, quote unquote.
But the reason why the Marvel multiverse has become the governing concept behind our biggest movie franchise does connect very closely to what Stephen's saying about the sort of philosophical preferences of the scientists, because what we have to understand is when we're asking these really first principle questions, right?
These things that philosophers have been puzzling over since literally the dawn of philosophy, these are not the exclusive property of experts or of people that happen to think about these things very deeply, gotten used to supposing that there are certain people who not only have the right answers on this question, but have the sole authority to speak about it.
And that's one of the kinds of authority I think that scientists have wrongly accrued to themselves lately.
I want to get back to Stephen's point about the scientific problems.
But before I do, I just want to get a point from Spencer about the storytelling problems of the multiverse, which I think actually reflect some of the scientific problems.
If you're telling a story in a multiverse, there are no consequences.
So nothing actually matters.
Right.
Anything can happen for any reason somewhere, indeed will an infinite number of times in some other possible world.
So is that, I mean, does that, in your mind, does that damage actually actual storytelling, Spencer?
It certainly does, or at least it suggests that these answers to the fundamental questions fail in the storytelling realm in a lot of the same ways that Stephen's suggesting they fail also in the philosophical and the scientific realm.
They have a lot of problems because they're motivated by the same attempt, by the effort to preserve a world that makes sense and that generally allows us to think well of ourselves as human beings and to operate with justice and so forth, to all these principles that underlie these superhero movies, right?
That's what you want out of your superhero movie is for justice to triumph and the good guy to win and for deaths to mean something and actions to mean something and the story to be exciting.
And yet you want to be able to do that without a kind of governing principle behind the whole universe, without some first and final cause, without something besides matter.
And it turns out that those are two puzzle pieces that just don't actually go together.
And the effort at kind of shoving them together with the multiverse is one that has been tried to the tune of many, many millions of dollars, but fails singularly for the reason that you just said.
Stories rely on cause and effect.
Our lives fail.
Oh, sorry to interrupt.
And also drama.
I hesitate to even make a comment on that with an Edgar Award-winning writer who knows how to set a hook with a plot.
But every good dramatic story is dramatic because we don't know how it's going to turn out.
And if it turns out one way, there are negative consequences.
And if it turns out another way, there's a happy ending.
And without that, there's no good storytelling.
And a consequence and an implication of the multiverse is that it turns out both ways an infinite number of times in an infinite number of universes and that there are no consequences to anything because there's no if-then.
It's just everything.
Everything will happen somewhere.
And so it really destroys the drama, I think, in those films.
Is there a scientific objection to the multiverse?
Well, there's two things.
And let me give you the prosaic one, which is a straightforward critique of this as a causal explanation for the origin of the universe and of the fine-tuning specifically.
And then I want to come back to something that's exactly analogous to the problems that Spencer has highlighted in his excellent essay in the Claremont Review of Books about how it destroys the dramatic element in storytelling.
Just the prosaic physics critique first.
In order for the multiverse to provide an adequate explanation for the fine-tuning, there has to be some kind of universe generating mechanism.
If we just have all these other universes out there and they're causally disconnected from our own, then anything that happens in these other universes will have no effect on our universe because they're separate from each other, including those other universes will have no effect on the probabilities of whatever process it was that set the fine-tuning.
It provides no help in explaining how we got the fine-tuning in the first place.
So for the multiverse to provide a causal explanation, there has to be some sort of underlying common cause, some universe generating mechanism that spits out universes kind of like options in a lottery, so that our universe can be portrayed as the lucky winner in a great cosmic lottery that's a consequence of some underlying causal process.
So there's a principle of connection back to that common cause.
Now, the physicists have recognized this, and the advocates of the multiverse who are trying to explain the fine-tuning have therefore proposed various universe-generating mechanisms, some based on this inflationary cosmology I mentioned at the outset of the interview, and others based on something called string theory.
And in both cases, it turns out that these speculative cosmological models that are the basis of these universe-generating mechanisms invoke universe-generating mechanisms that presuppose prior unexplained fine-tuning.
You don't, in theory, even get the generation of multiple universes unless a whole lot of parameters are set exactly right in the universe generating mechanisms.
So they don't actually explain the ultimate origin of fine-tuning.
Speculative Cosmological Models00:03:39
They simply presuppose it and push it back out of view.
And yet, in our experience, we know that systems that we describe as finely tuned, where what we mean by that is an ensemble of parameters that are an ensemble of very improbable parameters that collectively work to accomplish some function or discernible end.
Systems that have that property of fine-tuning, French recipes, internal combustion engines, software interacting with hardware, these finely tuned systems are all the product of intelligent agents.
So, because the multiverse has not explained the ultimate origin of fine-tuning, but we do know of a cause in our uniform and repeated experience that does, I've argued that some kind of design hypothesis, and indeed I think a theistic design hypothesis, provides a much better explanation for the origin of the fine-tuning than does the multiverse hypothesis itself.
It is a metaphysical hypothesis, and I think it fails.
It's not causally adequate to explain what needs to be explained.
You know, Spencer, one thing that was occurred to me as Stephen was talking about this is that in storytelling, having a deus ex machina is also incredibly unsatisfying.
And I'm wondering, you know, there's almost like a balance between this idea that nothing has any consequences and this idea that somehow God is going to save the day.
I mean, I always criticize C.S. Lewis' books, the minute the lion comes on you, you know everything is over and is settled.
What does that say?
What does this stuff about storytelling say about our lives in relation to this scientific hypothesis?
Well, what's interesting about your observation with C.S. Lewis and Aslan, which I share that problem with a lot of those stories.
And people love them and don't, you know, I don't want to knock them, but there is that issue.
And I think that that tells you something about what happens when God becomes a character in the story.
And actually, we have the same problem.
The Greeks have the same problem.
This is why Deus Ex Machina comes to us through Latin, right, via the classical world, is that once you actually suggest that deity or the ultimate power is like on the human level in that way, that there's something kind of outside of him and he operates in the system, then yeah, the whole story kind of falls apart.
If God is the author of the story and we're the characters, right, then you have the entire tradition of Western literature, essentially, that this governing logic that dictates cause and effect, that dictates good drama, that tells you, you know, what happens if I do this, what will he do or that?
That is the thing that operates kind of behind the scenes.
It's like the premise behind which or the sun that shines and then the light kind of allows us to see all the other stuff.
I mean, I think that there is a way in which the moral superheroes, right, who are almost explicitly gods or at least demi-gods and kind of heroic figures do represent a kind of pagan gesture, rhetorical gesture, right?
That we are, you know, the physical strength, speed, ability, like these are the highest things.
And so there exists, you know, beings among us that have those powers, which is actually not the, it's not the philosophical attitude that has generated the best storytelling, just as a kind of fact about like literary history, right?
Once you start to either kick the gods out or tell stories about the gods as if they were effectively people, as if they were vulnerable, as if perhaps they could die on a cross, right?
Multiverse Doubts Science00:02:39
Then suddenly you start to enter into that world where things matter and there are stakes.
I've only got a minute left here, Steven.
I want to let you end it and ask this one question.
Isn't there some way in which the multiverse, not only as Spencer has pointed out, makes storytelling meaningless, but makes science meaningless?
Absolutely.
That's one of the big problems with it.
If true, it destroys all practical reason.
If anything at any moment can happen for any reason, we can't make any scientific predictions.
All of our ideas about the laws of nature become completely up for grabs.
And similarly, we use our past experience to explain things.
But if our past experience is no guide to what will happen in the next moment, or if any event in the past might have been explained equally well by a random quantum fluctuation as opposed to the action of an actor or of a natural cause, then we can neither explain nor predict.
And then there's a third problem.
I know you're short on time, so I'll be quick on this, but there's this thing called Boltzmann brains.
And for anyone who gets into the philosophy of this, but it's basically the idea that when you run the math, it turns out that it's more probable on the multiverse to think that our minds were created five minutes ago with false memories than it is that we actually have real memories of the history of our own lives and the universe and so forth.
And so that means that we're essentially the multiverse, if true, casts doubt on the reliability of our own thinking, which is the basis of scientific reasoning.
So we can't trust our own thinking.
We don't know that we're real, that we are real minds as opposed to fictional minds that have false memories.
And we can't make scientific explanations or predictions.
And this is actually a problem that philosophers of science and some physicists have wrestled with, and there doesn't seem to be any good solution to it within the framework of the multiverse.
So it's the way I like to put it is that in the attempt to get around the God hypothesis as the explanation for the fine-tuning, you can adopt this multiverse idea.
It's not as good an explanation, and it also destroys science.
So you can get around the God argument, but only at the cost of losing science and losing a good explanation for fine-tuning.
All right, I have to stop here.
There's too much intelligence on the show.
It will ruin our reputation.
Stephen Meyer, the author of the excellent book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, which I highly recommend.
Spencer Clavin at the Claremont Review wrote Worlds Without End, which I also highly recommend.
Fantastic essay.
It's a great essay.
And his new book in New Year's, How to Save the West.