Reasonable Faith Podcast Question of the Week #944: Biological Evolution in an Infinite Multiverse
Jun 19, 2025
Dive into the intriguing debate on abiogenesis and the origins of life. Explore how necessitism and contingentism shape our understanding of existence in an infinite universe. Discover the implications of multiverse theories on life's emergence. The role of Darwinian evolution unfolds against this complex backdrop, making for a thought-provoking discussion on the nature of life itself.
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Camps in Abiogenesis Debate
- The origin of life debates split into two camps: necessitists who see life as causally necessary and contingentists who see it as highly improbable.
- Both camps look to outer space to bolster their theories by locating life elsewhere or spreading it to Earth.
Multiverse Challenges Evolution
- The multiverse hypothesis claims infinite universes where everything physically possible occurs infinitely.
- This leads to the radical idea that fully formed organisms could appear by chance, making biological evolution seemingly unnecessary.
Multiverse is Self-Defeating for Evolution
- The multiverse undermines confidence in evolutionary biology because it renders evolutionary processes irrelevant.
- Without a way to measure likelihoods between infinite possibilities, we risk being like "Boltzmann brains" with illusory observations.