Genesis in the multiverse

I just had very interesting exchange with an eminent physicist (Don Page. For the record, he rejects Gen 1-2 as literally true. He believes in theistic evolution.

Before quoting him I’ll briefly set the stage. He subscribes to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. And that’s the favored interpretation in quantum cosmology.

As David Deutsch put it,

I suppose the first reason [we should believe it] is that the theory which predicts them is the simplest interpretation of quantum theory, and we believe quantum theory because of its enormous experimental success: it really has been the most successful physical theory in history. The Ghost in the Atom, P. Davis & J. Brown, eds. (Cambridge 1993), 84.

So the evidence for this interpretation is inferential or nested: there’s the primary evidence for quantum mechanics, combined with the fact that this is by far the simplest interpretation of quantum mechanics. The evidence for this interpretation piggybacks on the evidence for the underlying theory.

Here’s a basic overview:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/

Now my point is not to personally vouch for this interpretation. But it’s a scientifically respectable and widely respected interpretation.

In my correspondence with the physicist, I began by quoting something he said:

As a further rebuttal of the accusation of extravagance, a theist can say that since God can do anything that is logically possible and that fits with His nature and purposes, then there is apparently no difficulty for Him to create as many universes as He pleases.

    

The vast size of the entire multiverse makes it seem likely that almost all possible human experiences would occur somewhere.

I then asked:

    

But doesn’t this suggest that there’s at least one universe somewhere in the far-flung multiverse where Gen 1-2 is literally true?

    

Put another way, even if you don’t think Gen 1-2 is literally true in our particular universe, there’s nothing logically impossible about God creating a universe with that particular world history. Given the multiverse, or at least one version of the multiverse, wouldn’t we expect that alternate history to in fact be realized in a subset of the multiverse? To some extent this piggybacks on my first question.

To which he replied:

I suppose there might be somewhere where something like Gen. 1-2 is in some sense literally true (though if one takes it too literally, one part contradicts another part, so just internally there is evidence that it should not be taken too literally).  But if the multiverse is highly ordered, I would expect that the part where something like Gen. 1-2 is literally true would be a very tiny part of the multiverse, so that it would be extremely improbable for us to experience that part.

It poses an intriguing dilemma for critics of Gen 1-2. They don’t think Gen 1-2 is unscientific merely in the factual sense that that’s contrary to actual earth history. Rather, they think it’s intrinsically unscientific. That it’s literally absurd. Unscientific in principle as well a fact.

Yet here we have a distinguished theoretical physicist who’s giving a scientific argument for something that really corresponds to Gen 1-2, only it takes place in a parallel universe. Quite a conundrum!