Christ of the Klingons
If God did create multiple universes, Collins and Cleaver claim, he likely populated more than one.
"I've always had problems perceiving the infinite God that we believe in [as] creating life in just one spot," Cleaver says. "Over the entire past and future of humankind, there'll probably be no more than a few hundred billion humans to interact with God on this earth. That is a finite number that does not make consistent theological sense to me."
Collins is intrigued by the possibility of a Messiah with two or more—even a million—faces. Since the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451, orthodox Christian theology has drawn a distinction between the divine nature and the human nature in the single person of Christ. There is no reason, Collins believes, that Christ's divine nature could not unite with other incarnational forms.
"Who's going to redeem the Klingons? And they're very much in need of redemption, as we know from various Star Trek series," Collins quips. "God the Son, being infinite as he is, could take on the Klingon nature, human nature—you know, a Klingon version of Jesus.… So the traditional formula, which is the standard orthodoxy, is actually very compatible with the multiverse idea."
Whether or not we discover a multiverse, Cleaver wants to see the church address the idea of life elsewhere.
"The Catholic Church is far ahead of the Protestant churches on this," Cleaver says. "The Catholic Church had a conference on the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe within the past few years and invited both leading theologians and scientists. The Protestant churches should be doing the same thing."
When the Universes Sang
Theoretical physicists like Cleaver spend time in the land of possibly and potentially. Experiments are in the works at places like Europe's Large Hadron Collider that might possibly determine the truth of M-Theory. A large number of scientists doubt that M-Theory is anything more than a collection of fascinating but fictional equations. And even if M-Theory is correct, that doesn't guarantee a multiverse.
Collins and Cleaver remind us that we serve a God who is easily capable of holding 10500 universes in the palm of his hand.
"The beauty of it suggests that this is the true picture of reality," Cleaver says. "The beauty of a theory is extremely important."
That's not just Cleaver the Christian talking. It's also Cleaver the physicist: "The aesthetics of the mathematics helps us to choose what we think is the more correct theory. The more unifying a theory is, the more beautiful the mathematics are, the more likely that it is true. That is a universal concept among scientists."
"The universe is structured for beauty and elegance," Collins says, noting Paul Dirac, a famously nonreligious physicist, who said in 1963, "It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit [an] experiment… . If one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress."
"To me, that is showing the beauty and the order in the creative nature of God," Cleaver says. "It allows us to expect science to reveal physical truth to us, that the universe—or the multiverse—is not just some random existence that happens to be."
Star Trek Into Darkness
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Carlos Ramirez Trevino
Knox is right on Heb10:14. What is missing from the Collins / Cleaver equation is guidance from a sound Biblical perspective. What Christians haven't fully understood is the reason for creation. The universe was not created as an artistic expression of God's creativity, it was created to sustain human life so that God could have a body, an instrument through which to abolish the actuality and potentiality of corruption in the entire universe for all eternity (Heb10:5). That's why God created heaven and earth. All of creation, including the angels, and that is pretty much all-inclusive, is waiting for the redemption of mankind (Rom8:19). The eradication of sin, decay and corruption (Dan9:24) is played out on earth once and for all (1Cor15:50). Heb4 is the clue that there can be no extraterrestrials; God rested from creation until He creates the new heaven and earth. Finally, it is not about numbers. It is about what is needed to implement God's eternal plan. We are eternity's spectacle.
Wesley Mcgranor
Nonsence is this sermon from the postmodern church. Your attempt to upset Natural Law and Order fails, as God subdues the vain imaginings of Satanic chaos.
Galen Smith
As brilliant as Hawkings may be, I do not see why the potential existence of many universes eliminates the need for a Creator God. To my pea-brain, it seems to increase the requirement for an omniscient Creator. My understanding of science (and my BS is in the sciences) suggests to me that nothing comes from nothing. The greater the universe (or multiverse), the greater its Creator must be. Chuck's question, "who designed the designer?" also seems to me to miss the mark. Everything that was created must have had a beginning. Something or Someone must have existed before all created things in order to create them. This suggests that the Creator of all else must be eternal, with no beginning. That is precisely what I understand the Bible to teach. The eternal God, who had no beginning and no designer, created all else. To argue, as the Mormons do, that the image of God in man requires that God possess a corporeal body, is contradicted by Scripture. I'm out of room to go on.