An Infinity of Universes?

 Excerpted from The Creator and the Cosmos, 3d ed. (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001), 171-72.

The weight of evidence for a divinely designed universe is now so overwhelming that it has forced astronomers and philosophers who reject the God of the Bible as the Author of the cosmos to propose the existence of an infinite number of universes. These scholars readily concede that dozens of different characteristics of the universe must be exquisitely fine-tuned for any kind of conceivable physical life to be possible. They also concede that the degree of fine-tuning observed is many, many orders of magnitude greater than any degree of fine-tuning that we humans can manifest when we attempt to create. However, rather than conceding that a God who is trillions of trillions of trillions of times more intelligent, knowledgeable, powerful, caring, and loving than [we] humans must have designed the universe for our benefit, they instead choose to speculate that an infinite number of universes must exist, each [one] different in its characteristics from all the others. An infinite number of different universes would imply that no matter how unlikely or fine-tuned a set of cosmic characteristics might be, in at least one of the infinity of universes those characteristics would be found. Thus, the God of the Bible is replaced by Chance, or, in the language of non-Christian cosmologists, by an infinite number of random fluctuations in some kind of primeval field.

The first thing to note in the above commentary is that [chance is] purposely capitalized. Where do the infinite number of universes come from? If one says, from some kind of primeval field, then where does the primeval field come from? If one says that “nothing” is unstable and, therefore, that “nothing” must produce something, then how is it that we never observe anything arising from “nothing”? [The] point is that if you ask enough questions, ultimately you will be confronted with an all-powerful, transcendent, uncaused Creator.