The theory of multiverses helps materialism to get around the problem of why our universe certainly looks like it is designed to form amazingly complex structures. Matter and natural law combine to produce stars of hydrogen which create helium and explode to create more complex elements which produce planets around new stars and eventually carbon based life forms arranged in complex DNA patterns which evolve to create consciousness, intelligence and emotion.
If there are a near infinity of vast universes with a near infinity of combinations of matter and natural law then somewhere in the vastness of these universes stable life might be expected to arise randomly without any final goal in mind.
Interestingly, this theory carries with it the assumption of levels of existence beyond our ability to measure or interact with. It doesn’t explain what is creating these universes and why a variety of laws are assigned to each universe. It does strongly allow for the likelihood that there is other life or intelligence beyond our physical existence as life is assumed to have arisen randomly in other universes but it cannot be made from our own physical matter and space.
Because we cannot travel to these universes physically, nor measure, interact or even detect the substance of these other universes, it cannot be said to be made of physical matter of the same kind that we are familiar with. It may act similarly to what we measure as protons, electrons, neutrons et cetera but it cannot be said to be matter as we know it. It also suggests that matter as we know it, is not the ultimate building block of nature but only secondary creations that are created from an unexplained immaterial universe generating process.
What allows these secondary creations to exist, and what we are forbidden to measure or detect is much more important to fundamental reality than what we can measure. So the answer of Materialism plus Multiverses argues for a reality that cannot be observed or investigated or explained in full but assumes life and realms beyond our universe that we don’t fully understand now nor can ever fully understand even in principle.
In many ways Western materialism plus Multiverses has ended up arguing for a system of reality with all of the weaknesses it originally claimed of Christianity.
It is a fair question to ask that if a Multiverse is part of the answer to reality, then
if we are going to admit intelligence and realms beyond our ability to detect and
there is some transcendent process which involves another undetectable realm giving rise to our universe and
physical reality is a secondary by-product of this ultimate reality;
is it really a further stretch to think this is an intelligent process rather than an unintelligent process? For materialism to explain natural reality in this way it has to give up many cherished assumptions and it ends up being in a position it claimed was a weakness of Christianity. Otherwise it needs to explain the incredible precise interplay of natural forces and matter which lead to our coherent universe without the theory of Multiverses. As yet materialism does not have another explanation and so this is a shortfall of the materialist position.
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