thejediknighthusezni said:
Atheists use multiverse arguments to escape from a creator God over this particular cosmos. I wonder whether it instead supports theism much more readily. Might not one among these infinite realms have formed in such a way that matter and energy could self organize into a fantastically powerful single entity? All that remains would be a means to communicate and influence the other realms.
"Atheists" don't have to use multiverse arguments to "escape" from a creator God.
I feel like this argument, which I have heard from many theists in one form or another, is a bit of a step back. Initially they argue that the universe happening by random chance is so insanely improbable, you have to be really putting on the blinders in order to ignore the fact that it just couldn't happen without an all powerful designer and creator. Then when you ask them where this all powerful designer and creator might have come from, they make the argument that if atheists believe the universe could have happened by random chance, then surely it is a possibility that God happened by random chance... It is rather circular.
I feel like the probability of a single celled organism happening by random chance is a lot more probable than a omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent entity with the power to create anything it wants happening by random chance.
Creationist have a hard time with the concept of construction from the bottom up, and tend to make their arguments from the top down. The watch in the shoe box analogy is a good example of this. The analogy goes that a universe by random chance is as likely as taking a shoe box, tossing all the random disconnected pieces of a fob watch in it, vigorously shaking it up, and opening the box to find a fully functioning watch telling the correct time down to the second. Only the argument goes that this is much more likely than a universe from nothing, since all the parts for the watch were already present and in the box.
This way of thinking is looking at the end product, marveling at it, and disregarding the process that went into making it what it is now. The watch also evolved over time. Someone didn't just come up with the idea, cut some gears, and throw the thing together overnight. The clockwork developed over a period of time, and someone eventually figured out they could shrink it down to a pocket size unit. And even before clockwork was thought of, the development process spanned and even greater period of time, we had to develop our concept of time, of days, hours, minutes, and seconds, we had to discover we could extract minerals and melt down and shape metals, and we had to discover how to make glass and how we could blow it into different shapes.
We have a really complex and intricate world today, but it wasn't always that way, it took a very long period of time, growing from something very simple into things more complex, developing through trial and error into what worked, with the rejects and things that didn't work failing and perishing, and the things that worked surviving and developing further.
You get a very different perspective when you look at a magnificent skyscraper from the top down (as a whole), this amazing complex and intricate structure; than you do when you look at it from the bottom up, considering all the development and discovery it took to make every single piece of material, from the simple to the advanced, including ideas, that were used in its construction.
