Fairy stories might equip the child to reject supernaturalism when the time comes … Santa Claus again could be a very valuable lesson because the child will learn that there are some things you are told that are not true. Now isn't that a valuable lesson? Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have had the desired effect in some cases, because after children learn that there is no Santa Claus, mysteriously they go on believing that there is a God.
Focusing on the final sentence in this quotation, it is rather obvious that Dawkins is equating belief in God with belief in Santa Claus. However, the point of this blogpost is not to discuss this particular claim of Dawkins. Instead, I would like to turn the tables on Professor Dawkins by suggesting that his belief in the so-called multiverse is rather akin to belief in Santa Claus.
The term multiverse refers to the idea that there exist a large number of universes, of which the universe in which we live is one. The existence of a multiverse is often posited to explain what might be called the "fine-tuning" problem. The "fine-tuning" problem arises from the observation that our universe appears to be "fine-tuned" to support the emergence of life. That is to say, physical conditions in the universe seem to be "just right" for life to exist. As Timothy Keller points out in his book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism:
For organic life to exist, the fundamental regularities and constants of physics--the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the strength of the weak and strong nuclear forces--must all have values that together fall into an extremely narrow range. The probability of this perfect calibration happening by chance is so tiny as to be statistically negligible. (p. 134)
How does Richard Dawkins (and many others) explain this amazing "coincidence"? Keller paraphrases Dawkins' argument in his book The God Delusion this way: "[there] may be trillions of universes. Given the enormous number of universes existing over enormous amounts of time and space, it is inevitable that some of them are fine-tuned to sustain our kind of life. The one we are in is one, so here we are" (p. 135).
So why do I compare Dawkins' belief in a multiverse with belief in Santa Claus.? First of all, just as we will never actually see Santa Claus emerging from someone's fireplace, we will never be able to observe the myriad of universes that supposedly make up the multiverse. As former Oxford academic Rudolf Peierls says: "...we have no means of seeing or ever communicating with the other [putative] universes..." (quoted in Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy, p. 206).
Second, although it is true that, at a certain level, Santa Claus is a possible explanation for the appearance of gifts under the Christmas tree on Christmas morning, Mom and Dad would seem to be a more likely explanation. Similarly, while the multiverse is a theoretically possible explanation of the "fine tuning" of our universe, it doesn't seem (to me at least) to be a very likely explanation. For one thing, as P. C. W. Davies and J. R. Brown point out in Ghost of the Atom, the idea of a multiverse "[introduces] a preposterous amount of 'excess metaphysical baggage' into our description of the physical world" (p. 37, quoted in The Soul of Science, p. 206). Moreover, there is the argument of Christian philosopher Alvin Plantiga, as paraphrased by Keller:
[Plantiga] imagines a man dealing himself twenty straight hands of four aces in the same game of poker. As his campanions reach for their six-shooter the poker player says, "I know this looks suspicious! But what if there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of poker hands, there is one universe in which this possibility is realized? We just happen to find ourselves in one where I always deal myself with four aces without cheating!" This argument will have no effect on the other poker players. It is technically possible that the man just happened to deal himself twenty straight hands of four aces. Though you could not prove he cheated, it would be unreasonable to conclude that he hadn't. (The Reason for God, p. 135)
It would seem that, in the same way, while it is technically possible that the multiverse explains the "fine-tuning" of our universe, it would be unreasonable to believe so.
"But, wait a moment," you might say. "We can't directly observe God either. Moreover, belief in God also entails some unlikely things. So, isn't believing in God just as absurd as believing in the multiverse?". Well, no. I don't want to rehearse the many arguments for the existence of God in this blog post, but I will point out one thing--the existence of God would explain a lot more than the existence of a multiverse would. At most, the existence of a multiverse might explain the "fine-tuning" of the universe (but why is there a multiverse in which exists a universe where life is possible?), but it would not explain such things as our notions of absolute morality and of beauty, the regularity of nature, the reliability of reason, or the origins of human consciousness and language. On the other hand, the existence of God would.
In short, I would argue that Richard Dawkins' (and others') belief in the multiverse is about as intellectually defensible as belief in Santa Claus. So, perhaps we should say that it is Dawkins' belief in the multiverse that is "mysterious," not the belief of Christians (like me) and other theists in the existence of God.
Image of Jonathan Meath as Santa Claus from Wikimedia Commons