It's February, which means I'm a bit late in posting about the January 2013 podcast edition. (Listen and (hopefully) enjoy here.)
This has been one of most popular editions yet -- so thank you to everyone downloading it, and thank you to everyone who contributed. As Brendan has noted elsewhere on the site, the forum threads that are dedicated to each podcast edition seem to be hidden from view. So, I'm just going to open up a couple of threads on the blog, in case people want to discuss, for instance, the not-at-all controversial subject of God and Physics from January's edition.
There are a few points to discuss in the "Is God a Good Theory" item. The first is a paper that came out last year, written by FQXi member Don Page, a physicist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, outlining a "Theological Argument for the Everettian Multiverse." We've discussed Everett's Many World's Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics many times before, including the question of how believing (crudely) that everything that can happen will happen in some quantum parallel world should or should not affect your sense of morality and your behavior. Journalist Peter Byrne, an Everett biographer, has spoken to us in the past about how strange it is that Everett himself could work on nuclear weapons, calculating the effectiveness of bombs in terms of potential lives taken in various scenarios, and at the same time argue that each of these scenarios will play out, somewhere. (Though whether or not Everett really believed that such parallel universes literally come to be is also up for debate, as Byrne also discussed in that podcast item.)
For those of you that do believe that the Many World's interpretation is correct, does it affect the way you live your life? Are you more careful not to engage in high-risk sports, for instance, out of concern for the future parallel versions of yourself you are dooming to die in some versions of reality because of your thrill-seeking choice? Do you feel morally bound to protect your future parallel selves?
I have also wondered whether deeply religious people, at least those who adhere to the notion that the choices you make about the life you lead will affect where you go in the afterlife (heaven or hell) can coherently believe in parallel universes. It seems to (again at a crude level) disable your agency and your ability to make moral choices. OK, the "you" reading this post today may have been tempted to steal a $10 note from your friend, and refrained -- but does the very fact that you even entertained the possibility mean that you set off a quantum flick of the switch in the brain that created a parallel you who did steal it? Are just having bad thoughts enough to consign some of your future selves to hell?
Don Page's paper was refreshing in that it puts forward an argument that not only is belief in God compatible with believing in the Everettian multiverse, but it may be possible that God would *choose* to create such a multiverse -- if the laws physics demand it -- because it is more mathematically beautiful. Page then uses this to try and tackle the problem of evil and human suffering in the world, arguing that perhaps God chooses to maximize happiness and good across the multiverse, even if that means that within each individual universe some suffering is inevitable.
I'm not completely convinced by this argument. The problem of why a benevolent God does not choose to intervene more often to alleviate suffering is obviously a long-standing and difficult issue for believers to address. For me, personally, I don't think the answer that my suffering is counter-balanced, or even outweighed, by the happiness and goodness of other parallel versions of myself is very comforting. It's already tough enough to deal with envious thoughts when you look at other people around you. Having to handle envy of the lives of the happier parallel versions of "me", who fared better in the various "What If?" scenarios that have played out in my life, is a step too far. Nonetheless, I commend Page for seriously questioning the standard cry that the multiverse (either Everettian or cosmological) has to stand in opposition to a belief in God.
I discussed Page's paper with FQXi member and Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll, at the recent "Is God Explanatory" meeting in Oxford. Carroll has other reasons for remaining unconvinced by Page's arguments, which you can hear on the podcast -- along with Carroll's arguments for why God does not stand up as a good scientific theory. I am not sure that God should be judged purely as a theory of physics, but I think Carroll's main argument is aimed at people who invoke God as an alternative to scientific explanation, which is fair enough.
Oh and the "cat" reference in the title of this post? Just to clarify that the strange noise in the middle of the introduction to the God item was not -- as we may have implied -- God intervening in the podcast, but an intervention by Brendan's cat, Puffy, probably driven wild in anticipation of the "Quantum Birds" feature that was about to follow!