Episode 27 - The Multiverse

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[Music] i'm in out of it or something yeah so they do like they they use numbers and experiments to try to understand what's real in the world right and what works and how stuff works why it is the way it is so there's these scientists and you're never gonna believe this idea that they have okay so imagine that you had some play-doh yeah okay and imagine you could turn that play-doh into some shapes what kind of shapes could you imagine that you could turn it i could i could turn it into a heart a heart okay so say you make it into a heart and then you turn it into something else what else could you turn it into a star a star what else a circle circle could you imagine just continuing to make new things new things new things new things forever and ever imagine you could make there's this thing called infinity so what if you had an infinite amount of time you could do as much as many shapes as are possible right you could make that many shapes if you had enough time wow okay so imagine you made it enough time and you made another shape and another shape in another shape and you had made it heart already but if you were going to keep making shapes forever do you think you would eventually say oh there's another heart yeah yeah you'd think so wouldn't you okay so here's what the scientists think so remember those worlds that we talked about floating around the sun the scientists think that there are potentially way more worlds than we ever thought or that we ever have seen before and that our universe the one that we see is not the only part of all of reality that there's way way more maybe that the stuff that makes up everything our bodies and the sun and the earth and the moon everything matter they call it if there was enough of it and enough time like if there was an infinite amount of matter and an infinite amount of time that eventually there wouldn't just be one homily that there would be an infinite amount of homicides so what that would mean is that there is another omily somewhere on some other world or some other kind of existence that is also sitting in in the same room with her daddy doing a podcast what do you think about that that is weird actually because um i never thought if if like there would be the same thing happening right now do you think that's possible yes you think so you don't think the scientists are crazy what about this what about if if in an infinite amount of those worlds amelie rather than wearing that cute flower shirt today she decided to wear a blue shirt instead that's what some people think what do you think about that well if i would if it will be the same thing and she must be wearing something else because there might not be someone just like us because like everyone's different even if they have the same names don't look the same with something or well normally yes that is true but in multiverse theory the idea is that there are maybe actually an infinite amount of every configuration of matter everything that could exist does exist just like the plato so that there would be an infinite amount of other homilies just like you and an infinite amount that are a little bit different than you so some of them had cheeseburgers for dinner just like you and some of them had chicken nuggets for dinner instead that'd be crazy right yeah that's what we're talking about this week on our show do you have anything to say to the listeners about that do you think that multiverse theory is interesting or do you think it's crazy i think it's interesting well i hope they do too welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody [Music] we're talking about the multiverse today i think this podcast this episode really came out of literally me being annoyed on twitter all the time at many of the events we do people come and want to talk to me about the multiverse and when they do their assumptions are based on some flawed ideas and the first of those flawed ideas is that there is any such thing as multiple universes and there's not because that's impossible but multiverses are plausible but multiple universes are not plausible depending on how you define universe well there's only one correct way to define universe ah fundamentalist [Laughter] i might be a physics fundamentalist you just made the brain exploding side oh my gosh i'm a physics fundamentalist like i really am like i'm a physics legalist like there's only one way to interpret these laws yeah anyway the correct way to define the universe is all that exists all that exists we often say universe as a shorthand for the part of the universe that we can observe but when you're speaking cosmologically the universe refers to all that exists on an unknown observable and unobservable what i like about multiverse when people say when they put the plural on their universes there's infinite amount of potential not just unknown but unimaginable universes so it's hard to or by universes observable universes for other from other observation points right so how can we speak meaningfully even conceptually of putting what could exist within our framework of what even a universe is to be more specific when we speak of a universe we're talking about a set of temporal and spatial dimensions which follow some set of physical laws and so how do you know that there's not a universe that doesn't follow physical laws we don't so with that thing that doesn't follow physical laws be part of the universe yes [Laughter] cosmologists have had these late night discussions many times and come up with an edge case all right i'm going to trust you on this one well and here's the here's the thing like about when people say the multiverse there's no such thing as the multiverse it doesn't exist there is different models for looking at cosmology via a multiverse but there's not a single idea and so what most people talk about when they talk about the multiverse is the many worlds hypothesis which is derived from attempts to bring order to the standard model of physics basically in quantum mechanics you have to run thousands and thousands of equations in different configurations over and over to predict quantum phenomena and that's very inelegant and physicists and mathematicians tend to look for elegant solutions to problems assuming that the universe is in some way elegant and so if you assume that everything that could happen does it's easier to work towards reconciling the standard model of physics with relativity [Laughter] i'm back baby i'm back oh yeah by the way welcome back from your concussion it felt good but yeah that's so so that's one idea of the multiverse not only is there more than one theoretical framework for multiverses i.e observable universes that are distinct from one another there are even two competing taxonomies for how you define multiverse models well we might as well max tegmark has four levels of multiverse models the most basic is what they call level one level one so at level one it's simply beyond the cosmological horizon if we were talking about the ocean your observable universe is everything to the horizon right and as you move your observable universe changes a little bit but if you're in the middle of the atlantic and another boat's in the middle of the pacific your observable universes don't overlap at all right and if you imagine those boats can't move they would never interact now you might if you had an earthquake in one ocean waves from that earthquake may be detectable in the other universe but you would never directly know the boat or the earthquake was there through direct observation only indirect observation so if you assume our universe is spatially infinite the one we're in our observable universe has an edge but that the space itself does not a temporal edge then you could assume that every possible configuration of physicality exists somewhere and therefore if you go far enough in one direction you would find a planet where zebras were the dominant life form and you know you had a zebra accountant but why does this count as a multiverse this just sounds like an infinite universe infinite single that's what's important it's multiple observable universes so what's the distinction if in one of these observable universes you and i are exactly like we are now and in another one of the universes neither of us have eyes but it's the same moment in time everything's the same it's just you and i don't have eyes humans don't have eyeballs and by the way you and i are in slightly different observable universes right now yeah you're at the center of your observable universe and i'm at the center of my observable universe it's more it's more mathematically interesting if you talk about our sun and alpha centauri which are light years apart but it's technically true it's technically true for both your eyes your two eyes exist in different observable universes infinite matter within this one universe how would that so i assume i assume you're not satisfied with a level one multiverse i'm not satisfied can i sell you a level two let's try it okay that would be universes that have different physical constraints where the laws of physics are different now how could that happen well let's talk about one potential model and that's you have cosmic inflation cosmic inflation is the period of time following the big bang when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light and there are some mathematical models one of which is advanced by a man named lawrence krauss who is very very smart he says that once cosmic inflation started it never stopped and little bubbles of the expanding singularity begin to slow down and expand slower than the speed of light at which point they get a set of physical laws basically by a dice roll and so you can imagine this is always ever expanding permanently expanding faster than the speed of light spatially infinite universe like a like a soup like a boiling soup has bubbles in it themselves spatially infinite each with its own set of physical constraints now since this is temporarily infinite and spatially infinite it allows the same sets of laws of physics to exist over and over and over but also different laws of physics and here we start to see a multiverse in which some really bizarre things are possible a universe made entirely of antimatter but is otherwise exactly like our own such a universe time would flow backwards it would start at its temporal end and move back toward its beginning but from its perspective it moves forward and we move backward could there be a universe made of cheese i want to ask a cosmologist but i would think yeah there could be a universe wherein based on the laws of physics you're starting molecular you're starting atomic composition lead to hydrocarbons and gravity is different electromagnet and you just everything instead of producing stars you just produce infinite cottage cheese [Laughter] and because gravity is less intense that cheese doesn't collapse on itself it's just everywhere you go it's like swimming in a giant vat of cottage cheese i suppose that's plausible because we're talking about we're talking about no limits and resources if you have infinite space infinite time some weird things can happen this is the beauty of douglas adams by the way and that his literature reflects that absurdity all right i'm a fan of number two so far okay level three level three in tegmark's multiverse model is the mini world's interpretation of quantum mechanics and that's basically when anything that can happen on the quantum scale does that every time you face it could be a or b it's both and your perception merely travels on rails through one set of quantum probability so in that mini world's hypothesis in the same basic spatial universe i both got a concussion was uninjured and died on my motorcycle accident and i just happened to be concussed oh wait so this is not another planet far away it's all it's all branching from the same the mini quantum worlds whoa but the the thing or crazy thing about this one is this produces an unfathomable amount of related worlds because it's not it's oversimplifying to bring it up to the macro level and describe a motorcycle accident there is some remote chance for example that protons disintegrate into quarks spontaneously but if it's possible in quantum mechanics in every possible instant every possible proton in our universe disintegrates at the same time you see what i mean like if many worlds is true the most probable things happen a lot but the most improbable things also happen infinitely often just a slightly smaller infinity than more probable events [Laughter] oh go science um okay i like this one but how do you is there a way to visualize how this infinite universe branches off into these possibilities is it it's within different spatial dimensions within the same they create new manifestations new momentary temporal intersectionalities but you can imagine in this idea time is a complete illusion and so what it truly is is in this many worlds model if you take a step back from a conscious observer like we are from from being bound up inside it what you actually have is a spatially infinite universe that's also dimensionally infinite wherein everything that could happen is always happening has always happened and always will happen wow that's the math but we're speaking when we say everything we're talking on the quantum level and and assuming that with everything that possible happens on the quantum level that levels up and creates pretty much so you're still there's still an infinite amount of us yes there's an infinite manifestation because we we are an emerging property of quantum phenomenon now there's one more level in tegmark's multiverse the ultimate ensemble and this is like medi multiverse effectively that the theory of everything that we're always looking for the way to unify relativity and to unify the standard model of physics and to mathematically describe everything can't be described in human terms because the theory of everything the multiverse is that everything that's possible is so that all these multiverse models apply and they're all and so the universe is everything that exists doesn't exist could exist couldn't exist can be imagined can't be imagined the universe is completely indescribable in human terms including mathematically and then i'm we're not going to do it because this podcast will be 10 hours brian green has nine models of multiverses my understanding of multiverse comes from marvel comics where they have these different universes within the marvel multiverse that are very very similar in some ways but have complete differences in others that change the course of the universe and that they allow the the storytelling to to play out that a different character is spider-man or a different character as wolverine or in one universe professor x and magneto are really good friends in another universe they're mortal enemies but an understanding of multiverse within our universe could be that in this this universe i am going to belong later this month with science mike and michael gunger and lisa gunga and in another universe in the multiverse i might be in a hip-hop group with science mike and michael gunger and lisa gungo and i'm also the king of egypt and there's no such thing as avocados so the idea of god in multiverse is something that i've thought about but i still don't understand but i guess god would transcend all of the multiverses and god would still be good in all of the universes i'd hate to think of a god that somehow is is good in this universe but in a parallel universe is evil but it's something i still don't really understand and i'm really open to exploring more it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using betterhelp that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over one million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p dot com slash liturgists so what tegmark's trying to do is providing a taximoni where any emerging multiverse idea could be defined as a level one two three or four multiverse what brian greene does it said well these are all the ones that physicists take seriously and i could do them really quick the first is the quilted multiverse and that's kind of what we talked about in level one of tegmark they're spatially connected in a vast single universal fabric you have all possible variations or a quilt of observable universes then you have the inflationary universe infinite cosmic inflation krause's model three you have one of my favorites which is the brain universe that's b-r-a-n-e as in membrane and that comes out of m theory which is itself an extension of string theory and that multiverse model is that there are an infinite number of spatial and temporal universes and they're all very close to each other centimeters apart but those centimeters of separation happen in the additional dimensions of space-time in string theory now what's interesting about the m-theory model of the multiverse is gravity passes between universes all other particles are bound to their respective universe m theory is really exciting because it elegantly describes most of physics it's just every experiment we try to do it fails every time we think it predicts this and we build a bigger particle accelerator and find nothing of course that happens to literally every multiverse model by the way only the standard model and relativity have gotten stronger with evidence even though we know they're wrong then there's the cyclic universe model so if in the quilt the multiverses are separated by space in the cyclical model they are separated by time so let's say there's only one universe and it's the size of our universe it's not even spatially infinite but that it bangs it expands and after a while runs out of energy and then collapses again and then bangs again and every time it does that it gets a new set of physical laws so then over time every possible universe exists but they don't exist simultaneously right there's the landscape model that has to do with the way that universes become nested based on higher or lower levels of quantum energy and i don't think i can do a plain english explanation of that six there's the true quantum universe the quantum multiverse you've probably heard in the news a lot the holographic universe where there's not we're not actually in a three-dimensional universe we're in a two-dimensional holograph interestingly enough of all the multiverse models that one has the most chance right now bearing out successful experimental results yeah we keep launching probe to try to test for a holographic universe hey this one's fun the simulated multiverse and the simulated multiverse says that if it's possible to simulate a universe in a computer then it's already be done because it's very unlikely we're the first universe nine and then brian green has one final multiverse model which is the ultimate multiverse model which is like level four of tegmark every possible mathematical model of the universe is correct and that's the science of the multiverse how do we know that our standard model is wrong because it ignores gravity to exist we know there's gravity but the standard model completely disregards gravity from the equation or to make useful predictions so the math works better with these multiverse yes models the way these things find plausibility the way science works the way we create new uh theories and i mean capital t theories large body of works is you build a model that describes reality and describes everything we observe today and describe something we don't and then you test to see if your predictions are right and the more you can predict the better your model is so the standard model made for example a prediction that we'd find something called a higgs boson if we build a big enough particle accelerator and about what its mass would be and when we did that when we spent hundreds of millions and billions of dollars to do that we found the higgs boson the standard model nailed it i mean think about that we predicted an elementary particle no one had observed using math and einstein the same thing the more we test general and special relativity with telescopes and look in the universe the more and not less valid it becomes even though we know that relativity works by ignoring quantum mechanics so the two best rule books we have to describe the universe aren't compatible it would be like if and sports analogies aren't a great idea for either me or michael but i think this is a good analogy it would be like playing a sport where the offense and the defense had different rules like you take out a defensive line from a football team and put them against a basketball team and blow a whistle and see what happens it's great as long as you're playing football or basketball when you try to do both your rules fall apart so essentially sherlock holmes is sitting here the science guy like can't see behind him but he's like i have a feeling there's a redheaded man with a beard who weighs about 230 pounds sitting behind me based on the dust that has flown up basically you can't see it can't test it really but some things make a lot more sense yes so basically multiverse models is mathematically informed theology [Laughter] it is equally as unproven and in many cases untestable as conflicting claims about god it's not accepted science there is no scientifically accepted multiverse model none zero they are all competing for acceptance so why you see different scientists espousing different models is they are trying to keep their model much like super symmetry and string theory have been in physics for so long in vogue so it's easier to get funding to test because if your model is right and you can't get the funding to get it tested it doesn't matter because no one will ever validate it so the reason they work so hard at driving mathematical elegance and making not only a scientific case but a pr campaign for their multiverse model is because testing any multiverse model takes an incredible amount of money just a phenomenal amount of cash and they're trying to get the cash to test their model but what what so the reason i want to do an episode on the multiverse is because people take an incorrect understanding of the multiverse and then try to apply it to christian theology and i don't just mean lay people i hear pastors and theologians do this all the time in fact in my opinion the true rarity is for a theologian or pastor to use physics in an accurate way as opposed to conveniently abuse it in a way that supports their chosen interpretation of who or what god is what are some examples of what you've seen how it's used i'll say it this way i'm sorry literally everyone i've never heard a pastor or theologian use an accurate depiction of the multiverse ever and i'm challenging you o listeners of the liturgist podcast to prove me wrong i'll see you on twitter you should follow us on twitter by the way the liturgists yeah super creative it's just at the liturgists but there's a lot more listeners than twitter followers that's for sure there are yeah well that's because in this in this particular configuration of the universe we never mention ways people can connect with us other than downloading the show that's true in fact we don't even tell them how to download the show so i'm not sure how anyone listens at all because we're the least professionally run podcast on the intel we just have good sound quality i think that's it like we both know about recording so people like well this show sounds pretty good i'll listen to it but so like i mean for example if you you know when people talk about um the oneness of god or the afterlife or you know what i mean like all other people say well you know we probably live on after death because in the mini world hypothesis it's possible that our consciousness could exist as a quantum fluctuation in the universe and actually frankly in making fun of it i just did a better job explaining that idea than i've ever heard it explained but it's still not like a valid idea unless you go to a level four tech mark which i'm absolute universe right which i said those are interesting ideas but my point is well actually no because then there's a lot of bad real bad stuff that's going on yes yeah it means there's not only an a hell there's an infinite number of health there's a universe wherein there's a god who something from that perspective of that universe sends all souls to hell just because in fact there's a universe where god says if you do these incredibly difficult things you get eternal reward and then renege after you die all right wait a second so in a multiverse with infinite possibilities and it all exists there's infinite gods one but isn't there also the possibility of one god that presides over all of the gods that is the god of the first of all i want to be clear we are talking specifically about level 4 tech mark or ultimate multiverse models from brian green which are indescribable and trying to describe them i just want to put all those copies out there yes because i literally get emails from scientists that tell me that i do a good job and i don't want to lose that street crap so with that set of constraints i suppose that's plausible but we're trying to describe the indescribable and i feel like that's a very sophisticated version of the question can god make a rock so big that he can't lift it because like what would one god in an ultimate multiverse look like other than the multiverse itself other than the universe itself what else could but isn't it theoretically possible for even the most cartoonish version of god yes this creates an internal paradox absolutely but isn't this part of the problem with but if it's if it's an ultimate multiverse and you have a god who's the god over all other gods it must still be possible that there's a god that's over that yeah exactly another one over that god another they got that god and yeah an ultimate multiverse is full of contradictions from our perspective for example it must also be true that there are universes where there is no god with any sway whatsoever so that's sort of the thing with ultimate multiverses they have they're more um philosophically grounded the math doesn't work the logic doesn't work and the math there's not like when you talk about other models that brian greene has that are non-ultimate there's an at least one decent physicist who's really done some math and worked out ways this could be possible when you talk about ultimate it's really just maybe it's just all of them if you're going to contemplate multiverses you're not doing a good job exploring the possibilities without also seeing if ultimate is first logically or mathematically plausible as well so we talk science we talk we have another face though let's talk about faith let's talk about faith because i think what the multiverse can inform for a person of faith is probably a sense of humility a sense of wonder and a sense of mystery because it is so easy to get in the mindset like as we sit in this room this feels it feels like i have so much control of reality right now you know like i can adjust this mic stand i can i decide what i'm gonna when we're gonna stop what i'm gonna eat tonight for dinner and it all feels like kind of the center of reality of everything and the idea that potentially there's an infinite amount of me making an infinite amount of same and different decisions the mini world's hypothesis that multiverse model really does a number on free will yeah really does a huge number on free will like it makes it there you go calvinist implausible no i i've said many times that calvinists and some physicists have very similar looks on consciousness and will they're just different dictators at the top one is a conscious being the other is an interesting mathematical set but it definitely the mini world's model means free well there's no such thing you are just one manifestation of quantum probability and every femtosecond you're a different one and you're just traveling down one branch of a universe and you're you can't do anything about it nothing now that ladders up to the subjective perception of you making decisions and having agency and what's interesting so daniel dennett and some other secular philosophers have debated about if the multiverse is true or if you know and even in just neurological context there's no such thing as free will it's a terrible idea to educate the public on that point because it could create a fatalism but then it can't because we can't choose whether we do that or not philosophy man this crazy stuff [Laughter] yeah there's no such thing as art or anything like i ought to do this or should it's just what you're going to do that's it yeah except you did both like so crime and punishment what was that even so you have to go what happens when you when you go down philosophical or faith rabbit holes like this i usually find at that moment it's very effective to take a moment and retreat to pragmatism yeah whether there is free will or not it makes sense to protect people from violent people yes whether or not there is free will or not i need to go along with my subjective manifestation of willpower and agency and decide today to eat mahi mahi instead of a cheeseburger so that i might live longer whatever that means and you just retreat to pragmatism which obviously for me is a huge part of my faith is amidst mysticism and uncertainty retreating to pragmatism and that's good because there are potentially an infinite amount of universes where there's a religion based on science mike of everything you've ever said to me that's the scariest idea because in some philosophical interpretations of the math of the multiverse the statement you just made is plausible and it is the most terrifying implication of the multiverse that i can ponder holy cow that is terrible that is terrible like you cannot imagine a person who less wants to be the center of religion than me like and the divine ones first commandment is thou shalt not worship me [Laughter] and his second commandment is thou must always follow thy data but then the third the third one in an infinite amount of universes thou shalt always wear this t-shirt that i wear that's not that bad so you you guys can't see right now but i'm wearing a t-shirt and it says the astrophys x-men like x-men like the movie but astro x so um and and instead of like x-men it has neil degrasse tyson holding a singularity like it's a superpower it's got carl sagan with a pale blue dot right over my nipple it's got albert einstein with two clocks and those clocks have different times because they're in different reference frames and then of course it has stephen hawking in a wheelchair like professor x and it is literally the most glorious shirt that's ever been made or conceived of so that's the one thing if i'd go along with that if this if there had to be one t-shirt for all of humanity i would select this one okay i'm wondering if conceptually if there's people i'm sure there are that this still sounds i mean it's absurd right it is absurd but even understanding infinity why this these crazy possibilities are possible they may not be that's the important thing remember this has no experimental support whatsoever yes multiverse models come from mathematical attempts to resolve the differences between the standard model of physics and general relativity and create a unified theory of everything but so here here's the idea it's the whole thing with the the monkeys on the typewriters typing shakespeare yes right like if you have an infinite amount of monkeys on an infinite amount of typewriters an infinite amount of shakespeare books will be written everything can be written every combination of text possible will emerge from those typewriters so this is just logic right math and logic yeah yeah the the far outer bounds of it but yes yes so that's that's where all this comes from so like if matter can be arranged in any any possible way on any level the quantum level the and spatial and time and all of it that's where this crazy stuff comes from the multiverse tells me about god's endless about his vastness about the human hopelessness to ever reach all of infinity it tells me that our human efforts at control are ultimately meaningless our small conquests and victories at the expense of others appear nothingness not even vapors in the cosmic wind the multiverse tells me that no matter what human inventions we use to subjugate categorize demonize like race and the gender and money and letter grades no matter how far our manifest destinies take us no matter how many cultures or countries or planets we colonize and bastardize and bomb our little kingdoms can only grow so much and touch so many the multiverse tells me that no matter how far we fly the mother or father has birth too much to ever know there is always more of god to know there is always more to discover and to love there was always more to worship when you think about jesus and the potential multiverse models it gets it gets weird i think the reason christian theologians tend to abuse the multiverse so much is because it threatens many of the universality claims of christ so you either have to confine christ to our observable universe or you go with the cosmic christ and you know richard rohr for example talks about cosmic christ and frankly i usually get pretty excited when i think about a cosmic christ a universal reconciling force of god that is god and that was manifested as jesus that would be what was incarnated into cro to jesus was the christ hence jesus christ and if i'm not doing a good job on the theology forgive me but i have researched that a lot i'm hoping i'm not letting down or more theologically minded listeners with that description but either way that cosmic christ in a mini world's hypothesis multiverse has some interesting implications you have to add like all these constructs to separate eternity like an afterlife eternity heaven and hell from the multiverse like you almost have to assume that heaven and hell or even if even if you're you're an annihilationist or you don't believe in hell at all if you're a loved ones christian that heaven itself is somehow exonerated from the many worlds hypothesis because if you don't i mean there's a universe where jesus wasn't crucified if that if if that's part of your theology the atonement theology or or one where he didn't die if you start trying to and this is the problem with faith and science dancing is when you try to force the physics to obey your theological constraints things get pretty messed up pretty fast hence why i'm such a mystic and hence why i tend to always say that you can always substitute the words fan fiction for theology which really makes some people mad but most of you laugh and i appreciate that because you get the spirit with which i'm doing it it's difficult to reconcile this sort of speculation which is ultimately grounded in empiricism and mathematics from philosophical or theological exploration where you don't have the same set of constraints i don't know if this episode is super boring but i'm really enjoying it i'm enjoying it as well easily one of my favorites well this kind of really this cuts to the heart of a lot of people's deconstruction of faith probably in reality when you start getting into science into the depth of the belly and you see how reality has the potential of being so different than the models that we were handed the model i grew up with of the universe and a lot of us did was six thousand years ago god said let there be light and the center of that attention was on this earth and yeah there happens to be all these stars in the sky and that was made for me to enjoy and and see how big god was by looking how far away and beautiful those stars were and but he'll be coming back soon so it's like this that's a very different universe than than the 10 or the 9 of brian greene so when you get into this stuff it it does it can freak you out and it just it tears apart your confidence and what reality is when you start seeing oh i could be i lit not just not just maybe like a lot of days i think we probably are in a simulation [Laughter] he's like an insane person but like i don't know if this is real no i'm with you so what what do i you know what do i do with that and what do i do with anything and then when you try to have these concrete doctrines dogmas it all starts seeming kind of silly to a lot of people so i would even say that in a simulation it is a safe assumption that god is in some way flawed and therefore the flaws in our creation are less troubling and i'm not espousing that as fact yeah saying sort of our gig on this show is we'll we'll take any idea off the shelf and turn around and look at it and when i look at a simulation model of reality where our creator is someone who worked on some code i've written some code that did some amazing things and also had some flaws and eventually even as you develop code crashed and you find these bugs and you reboot and you start over and sometimes with an existing data set sometimes you start a new data set from scratch either way it's a progressive process of fixing flaws and i have sometimes thought and i'm getting way in the weeds here this is not the kind of stuff i usually talk about are published this is usually science mike thinking alone but that perhaps my soterology my idea of what salvation is is god working out the bugs in the universe [Laughter] that's the most science mic theology i've ever heard i want to be really clear even with our cool listeners that's not what i believe that's something i sometimes ponder this is why pragmatism for those that are deconstructing or have deconstructed or think about stuff like this is kind of the only option there's two options depression no yeah well that was my first one but on the other side of that i found two things in faith which endure not just the multiverse but anything science can throw at me mysticism and pragmatism my faith is the marriage of mysticism and pragmatism mysticism is the idea in faith that god is ultimately unexplainable beyond not only human language but human constructs so when i look at the initial singularity or when i look at multiverse models the further down the rabbit hole we go in physics the farther we get away from not only human intuition but human language and we ultimately get to ideas which we understand are beyond our comprehension and expression that sounds like mysticism what science informs me is that our ultimate origins are currently unknown and very possibly unknowable to us that which caused us to be is beyond our knowing and i can't see how that is any different than the god of mysticism that science in my opinion absolutely supports mystical faith directly that the difference between me and an atheist who admits uh we don't know where we came from is semantics they just refuse to use the term god and i love to use the term god and that's the difference the other thing i know pragmatically is employing mysticism allows me to achieve subjective brain states and experiences that are not possible if i force myself into analytical accept only the evidence thinking all the time by naming the mystery god it lets me contemplate reality in another way which also through observation positively impacts my outlooks and actions and so that's where i look at pragmatism in this absence of knowing i can use moral pragmatism to examine my states and my actions and see is it better or is it worse and in my case not only is calling the mystery god beneficial but accepting an unfounded scientific idea that somehow this man jesus represented this mystical cosmic christ for me works so i go with it i hold and if someone says it's ridiculous i can never accept that god was somehow specially incarnated in this historical figure and i certainly can't accept that that historical figure was resurrection from the dead i go cool it's pretty ridiculous i get it i would never try to convince you to believe that but will you accept that when i believe that my life is in some way better and that i am also not in any way doing you harm so that kind of gives us a science look and a faith look but then how in the hell can we talk about art and which helps the colloquial um what i like about thinking about this like unfathomable reality and art is art is sort of what helps us form our world into what it is and this universe this observable universe that i experience art is how i sort of decide or dream towards and start walking towards which universe i want to inhabit so when i'm create when i'm writing a song to me that feels the same as when i'm telling amelia a story or a song on some level on some like foundational level or uh deciding what house we're gonna get here in los angeles so like making the world what so what are we gonna do with that land what are we gonna do with the what am i gonna do with this guitar in my hand what am i gonna you know and it's it's forming it it's playing with it it's molding the play-doh into one of the infinite amount of possible variations based on any number of things and that to me is art so when we're telling you have people telling stories bringing stuff into the world making making the world what they're making it through their work and through their imagination that's that's the observable universe that we end up living in if all of us you know became nihilists and believed that it's not worth you know like living in california uh for the first time we have with my five-year-old daughter i was like we've gotta this is the time if we can ever like do a disney pass i wonder while she actually believes it's magic so we've like made it a priority we made we did the disney pass you go to disney if there wasn't a bunch of people and starting from walt disney whatever that believed a certain thing about the world that fireworks display that happens every night wouldn't happen that comes from a heart thing that comes from like a i want to live in a world where we can show these amazing fireworks to people every night before they go to bed it's like a you know these people that come to the park so i don't know it comes from like deep beliefs and deep deeply held passions and what sort of world we want to live in so that when you think about art that way and it crafts my observable universe it crafts all of our world and determines what what universe we end up living in here we're recording this in late october in 2015 and just a couple of days ago was back to the future day yeah and they dared imagine a possible world where on october the 21st 2015 hoverboards will exist now that one failed but who doesn't yearn for a hoverboard right i know that's really trivial except the fact that i really do want a hoverboard wait they exist though that not like in the movie not like a mattel works on any surface what we have now is very impressive electromagnetic systems yeah but that appeared to be based on some kind of anti-graviton technology hoverboards aside here's my point this can have more than technological implications if you don't believe that the oration skills of dr martin luther king jr were art you don't understand art and what dr king did is describe a universe that we don't live in that most of us yearn for that universe does not yet exist i would be very hard-pressed to talk to anyone who could find a significant number of people of color in america who would report that they believe dr king's vision of the world of the universe exists today and yet the difference between his vision and what exists creates a story gap that encourages generation after generation of person of dreamer of hopeful soul to desire a world like dr king dreamed of to exist and so interestingly enough talking about science and talking about faith perhaps it is the artistic manifestations of the multiverse that have the most power to substantively change the observable universe we actually live in i mean when you think of it like that faith becomes a sort of art form like even the stories that we tell all these these practices that we have it's a way of like forming our imaginations forming our hearts towards the universe that we would say that the kingdom of god the beautiful reality that is possible that we all have hope for in our deepest hearts the practice of faith [Music] when you when you think of how it connects with art and science the whole thing it becomes sort of this yeah we don't we don't have the data we don't have the proof of any cosmological model but we do have what is right in our hands and right in front of us and we do have dreams in our heads and in our hearts and we do have our neighbor and we do have bread and wine and we do have all sorts of stuff we've got enough to take the next step towards the universe that we want to live in that's enough for today so that does it for the multiverse over if you donate to the liturgist podcast here's what you actually get one or gratitude and two we've actually designed some reward tiers where based on the amount people give you get different perks they're just perks they're literally just our way of saying thanks but there are ways you might be able to participate in the program and some examples of that would be like private access to a discussion area where 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we'd love to just hear uh what you think about this episode and if you want to help the show and don't want to donate the best thing you can do is go to itunes and rate us by far if you do that more people find the show and even if you don't donate if someone finds the show and they donate you you've certainly helped us so in addition to finding us on the web and in social media you can see us in person we're getting together with 130 friends in london who belong so if you go to liturgist.com that's all we've got for this week i'm science mike i'm michael gunger thanks for listening everybody [Applause] [Music] you