A Brief Review of Discover Magazine's "Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator"

Reviewing Discover Magazine's Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory.
Livingstone Morford


I am subscribed to Discover magazine. It's a magazine that is quite supportive of Darwinian evolution. In its December 2008 issue an article appeared entitled Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory. The author of the article, Tim Folger, is a contributing editor at Discover magazine and the series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing.
  After looking it over, one can plainly see that the article recognizes the fine-tuning of the physical constants of the universe. For example, the article notes that,
        "Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we."
    
   So how does the article propose to explain the fine-tuning of the universe without invoking an intelligence? Simple. You have an endless series of universes. This universe we live in is one of an infinite number of universes:
  "Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life."
 
   All of that is fine and good, except for one small problem. The problem with a model of an infinite number of universes, each with constants of its own, is that such a model would blatantly render any evidence for Darwinism null and void. Consider that endogenous retrovirus (ERV) insertion sites are purported to be evidence for common descent. ERVs are viral elements that randomly insert themselves into a host genome. If the ERV is inserted in the germ cells of an organism, than that insertion site is passed on to offspring. Interestingly, human and chimpanzees have ERVs in the same chromosomal loci, implying common ancestry.
    However, if there is an infinite number of universes, then one of those universes will have a physical constant that, through its very nature, places ERVs in the exact same loci in both man and chimpanzee through just chance processes, i.e. without a common ancestor. This is the general idea of my refutation of the multiverse hypothesis:
    With an infinite number of universes, there will exist in infinite number of possibilities; and one of these possibilities will be that there is the appearance of common descent in living organisms, even though living organisms came from another source. This is why any attempt to refute the fine-tuning argument using the multiverse hypothesis is nonsense.