Physicist Michio Kaku explains black holes as the vacuum cleaners of the universe. Like dark matter and dark energy, we cannot see them but we can see them sucking things into the void, even light, and throwing nearby planets and stars off course.
Theoretical physics views the space-time continuum like a fabric stretched over space. The heavy things in space rest on this fabric and sink into it, like I sink into my mattress. Now imagine that a golf goes rolling by while I'm sitting on my mattress. The dent in the mattress created by my weight makes the golf ball roll in or change its course as it goes by. That's gravity. OK, so my mattress gravity wouldn't allow the golfball to escape.
Now a black hole is a rip right through the mattress or in this case the space-time fabric of our universe. Black hole gravity is so strong that it spaghettifies everything that passes through the it. Kaku speculates that if you could survive a black hole, you might come out the other side into a parallel universe . This leads me to discuss the recent theory that our universe is only one universe of many that make up the multiverse.
Steven P. Meyer, author of the newly released Signature in the Cell (click on my blog title), writes that cosmologists have posited the multiverse in order to overcome the odds against evolution. Many Christians do not realize that the big bang has made atheists more than a little uncomfortable. This is because the big bang implies that our universe had a beginning. Atheists realized that something has to be eternal in order for us to exist, since nothing could only produce nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit). They correctly reasoned that if they reject God, then matter itself has to be eternal and thus uncreated. So they came up with the steady state theory of the universe, which says that matter and the universe are steady and timeless. But alas, the evidence for the big bang blew the steady state theory away! This is because the big bang did not explode in space and time, it was the explosion of space and time, and the stuff that would condense into atoms and form matter after 300,000 years. Thus matter too had a beginning at the moment of the bang and could not be timeless. That leaves God as the only other option.
Now if the universe had a beginning, like Scripture teaches, it is also going to have an end, like Scripture teaches. The big bang is either going to go on expanding and die of heat loss, as entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics teaches, or it is going to collapse and implode. So we had a beginning and we will have an end. This presents a second difficulty for atheists. Probability calculations say the chances for the exact alignment of raw materials (like amino acids) required for the evolution of life in our universe are insurmountable. But that's only true, say some physicists, if you only have one universe. Say there is an infinite number of universes like the bubbles in a bubble bath. These bubble universes are eternally bumping into each other and exploding, merging, and splitting into new universes. It's only a matter of time (pun not intended) before one of these universes overcomes the odds and life evolves.
Steven Meyer points out however, that the cell itself presents further problems for atheists. Darwin thought the cell was about as complex as a piece of jelly, but molecular biologists have discovered that its more complex that a Saturn Five rocket. In other words, it requires an engineering degree to comprehend the genetic information and processes within a cell . Since you have to be a rocket scientist to understand what's going on in a cell, it was probably designed by a higher intelligence.
It's amazing that we are only just know approaching an understanding of the cell by using models from complex technology systems. If it takes one to know one, and we like to think of ourselves as intelligent beings, then perhaps the cell had an intelligent designer. But wait! If there's an eternal multiverse then it could happen by chance, right? But Meyer argues that we have no no evidence that a multiverse exists, so our theories must operate within the known limits of the known universe. (Anyone want a shave with Ockham's razor?) This means that the design and information that we find in a cell still requires an intelligent designer. Even if all of the amino acids and raw materials beat the odds and align, they do not produce life by themselves. The law of biogenesis says that life cannot come from non-living matter.
Now on an imaginative level, I kind of like the idea of the multiverse, like C. S. Lewis' wood between the worlds in The Magician's Newphew. Just don't try to use the multiverse to make the impossible possible. God must live from all eternity in order for biological life to exist in this temporal universe or anywhere else. Only Life can beget life. With that established, I find it fascinating that there might be worlds within worlds or parallel universes that we could travel to via black-holes, worm-holes, teleporting, light speed, ridiculous speed, or ludicrous speed (Space Balls anyone?). But I guess the speed of my imagination will have to do for now. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it were something like Lewis' "wood between the worlds?"
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