My daughter was around six years old. She sat in front of the TV watching one of her favorite cartoons. It was Pokémon, or SpongeBob, or something like that. We got to talking and I told her, “You know, what you are watching isn’t real. It’s just a cartoon.”
“What do you mean, daddy?” she asked.
“It’s not real,” I told her. “People had to draw these things to tell their stories. But it’s not real.”
She got screwy-faced for a moment and protested, “It is too real, daddy.” At that stage in her life she wasn’t always able to discern the difference between fantasy and reality. Thankfully, I don’t suffer from that. But the Flying Spaghetti Monster is real. I can prove it. Come to think of it, SpongeBob is real too.
According to some scientists, like Steven Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson and others, we do not live in a single universe. Rather, we live in a multiverse made up of many other universes. Just as there is more than one solar system and more than one galaxy, so too there are many universes. Scientists call this concept the multiverse. How many universes are there in the multiverse? If some scientists are right, there could be such a large number as to approach infinity. Think for a moment what this implies.
Scientists estimate that there are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is small, compared to many others. It is believed that most stars have a number of worlds (planets, dwarf-planets, and moons) encircling them. How many planets? If estimates are correct, there may be as many as 11 billion planets similar to earth in our galaxy. Extrapolate that number out to the number of known galaxies. There are more than 100 billion galaxies we can observe. So how many possible planets like ours does that make? Try 1.1 sextillion. That’s a 1.1 with 20 zeroes behind it.
The multiverse theory posits that anything that can happen, does happen, in another universe. This means that there could be an enormous number of other universes. Certainly a number larger than the number of earth-like planets in our universe. Times that number of planets and we’re working with numbers so large as to actually approach infinity. In other words, there are so many possibilities that whatever we might imagine to be true in one or more universes or planets must end up as being actually true. So, if you are an evolutionist who subscribes to the alternate worlds theory, then anything that can be imagined as possible is not only probable, but actual. Thus, under this philosophy, The Flying Spaghetti Monster actually exists. And so does Darth Vader. And Batman. And SpongeBob.
Of course, this is all ludicrous. Just because something is possible does not mean it is probable or actual. If one is willing to accept evolution and the multiverse theory, then one must, by definition, accept the possibility of a designer for the universe because there cannot be a formulation of a universe, or many universes, without a God possible or present. Thus, even in this, naturalism falls under the weight of its own absurdity.
However, if there really is a designer of the universe, then what we can imagine falls apart and must give way to the actual—that which has been revealed. And what, exactly, has been revealed? Namely, this, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…”
