When Physics Blurs into Religion!

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

I just read an interesting interview with German Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder about physics and religion over at The Guardian.

On the one hand, Hossenfelder is not herself religious:

The first question you ask the physicists you interview in the book is: “Are you religious?” How about you?
I tried to be religious when I was a teenager. I was not Christianised because my parents were both atheists, but all of my friends were Christian, so I went to church with them. And I kind of liked it – the singing, the social events. I considered joining, but I just couldn’t get myself to believe that God exists.

Yet Hossenfelder doesn’t eliminate the possibility of God, she just doesn’t think of it as a mathematical or scientific hypothesis:

Is it just as reasonable to say that God or some other higher power created the universe?
That’s a tough question. There is a difference between them in the sense that the theories that physicists work with are mathematical in nature, whereas the God hypothesis is not a maths thing.

What I found very interesting is the way that she regards the “multiverse” as a religious concept, not a scientific one! Now I’ve always been baffled why atheists tell me that belief in God is non-evidential and absurd while belief in a multiverse is a better explanation for the origin of the universe even though it has zero evidence. Listen to Hossenfelder on the multiverse.

You don’t have much time for the multiverse either. Why not?
It’s another one of those ideas that I’d call ascientific. If you want to believe that there are infinite copies of you with small alterations – one of them maybe won the Nobel prize, another became a rock star – you can believe this if you want to, it’s not in conflict with anything we know. But from a scientific perspective, if you want to make progress in our understanding of natural law, I’d say it’s a waste of time exactly for that reason, because you can’t test it.

Interesting stuff! Science and Religion is not my primary expertise, but I found this fascinating!