Recently, we had an enlightening conversation with a rising philosopher-metaphysicist, named Aristotle Singh Debruyne. As you may have guessed from the name, the ‘personage’ is a hybrid national, whose father is an Indian Sikh (thus the middle name Singh), and the mother is a Belgian national. At his birth, his parents, who have been together since before his birth and in fact passionately love each other, decided to give him the mother’s last name, as they considered it would be easier for the whole family. But we will leave Aristotle’s personal details (such as why his first name is Aristotle) for another occasion.
Our first encounter with him was at a Pataphysics conference in 2022 at Yerevan, Armenia, which took place on the sidelines of the Starmus Festival. We maintained contact since, and recently had lunch with him when he visited Cambridge. He was particularly interested in the notion of Intelligent Design or otherwise labeled by physicists as Fine-Tuned Universe (FTU).
In a nutshell, as Wikipedia suggests, the existence of life as we know it, and in fact the very existence of the universe as we observe, is very sensitive to the values of certain fundamental physical constants. If the values of any of these constants had differed only slightly from those observed, none of it would have come about. For some people, this finely tuned (through physical constants) universe suggests an Intelligent Design, which in turn brings about the question of God and creation, be it the one that our common religions talk about, or any other supreme knowledgeable creator force.
In our exchanges with Aristotle on this topic, we considered the relationship between the multiverse and God concepts. The notion is that it is obvious that we observe this finely tuned universe, because we live in it. But it does not exclude a multitude, and possibly an infinitude, of other universes which came about and never gave rise to stars, galaxies, planets, and life. A second notion we analyzed during our lunch session, was the concept of a single supra-multiverse God vs multiple universe-specific Gods.
Combining the two notions above, we realized that the subject matter could address the dual singularity of Big Bang and Life as well. Was there a single Big Bang that created all the universes at once, or were there multiple Big Bangs (which may still be going on)? In the former case, Big Bang singularity is a multi-universal, all encompassing singularity, whereas in the latter case, there are multiple, maybe infinitely countable or uncountable, Big Bang singularities. The Life singularity, however, could only be a universe-specific singularity, for life came about after the Big Bang, and thus it is universe-specific.
We will discuss this point at a later date, but at the end of the lunch, we concluded that the existence of multiverse is fundamental to refuting the Intelligent Design belief, whereas, the universe-specific God could be consistent with the Life singularity. Furthermore, these concepts are compatible with Pataphysics, if we seek to comfort ourselves of the existence of a God as holy books have been instructing us to believe in.
January 12, 2024, Cambridge,
Berta Seintan, PhD & Charlene Wardin, PhD