Sunday Saunter: Why I Believe in a Multiverse

A Philosophical/Theological Case

The multiverse is hot right now, pop-culturally and scientifically. It’s big in comic books, comic book movies, Star Trek, indie films like Everything Everywhere All At Once, and more. It’s also increasingly a feature of popular physical and cosmological theories about the universe: as a means to explain, among other things, the universe’s biophoric aptitude. In its long history, the multiverse is often adduced as an alternative to God: a plurality of universes, on this view, avoids the need to invoke a Creator to explain the universe’s seeming design for life.

I take a somewhat different view. I find myself compelled by the idea of the multiverse, and I find myself compelled by it because of the sort of God I believe in.

Philosophically, “God” names for me a reality that is simple, infinite, purely actual, absolute Unity, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, generative, generated from itself, and processual from itself, through itself, back to itself, the Source and Summit of all created reality, from which all things proceed and to which all things return. One could call this “classical theism,” at least insofar as it assigns to God the role of the formal and final cause of the universe. But there is also room within this perspective for a process theism, insofar as God is the material and efficient cause of the universe, too: God empties God’s self, withdraws God’s self, so that the universe may come to be from the nothingness to which God reduces God’s self, such that the creation of the universe is also the theogony of God in and as the world. Or, as my friend Jordan Wood would put it, creation is incarnation: God’s act of creating the universe and of becoming incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth and of deifying the universe are all one, continuous activity.

This is a God, in other words, that is both our own Being and our own Becoming, and provides the infinite horizon for both. In se, God is perfect, needless, and endless, the totality and wholeness of all things; from his eternal vantage point, the vision of Paul the Apostle, that he will at the end be “all in all” (ta panta en pasin; 1 Cor 15:28) is always, already realized. This is the perspective of God “the one who is” (ho ōn; Exod 3:14). But insofar as God comes to be in and as all things—the one who says that he ehyeh asher ehyeh, “will be what he will be,” in Hebrew—that is a future still far off, as God contends with creaturely and chaotic forces for the divine plērōma to come to dwell completely in the cosmos. The Christological mystery in Jesus from this point of view is that Jesus is a man in whom and upon whom that plērōma was pleased to dwell and through whom it continues to in-fill the cosmos, while from the eternal vantage of God as Being, the creation and deification of the world are always, already pre-contained in the eternal hypostasis of the Son who identifies within time and space as Jesus. (This synthesis of hypostatic and prosopic unions first emerged for me through a conversation with David Hart, and I wrote about it in a series, “How to Think About Christ,” here, here, and here.)

From either the eternal or the temporal vantage point, though, God’s goal in creating the world is the same: to craft a universe in which he completely in-fills the world as its entirety in all of its elements, in which, in other words, the world becomes his body, his cosmic temple, and in which human beings are his divine images or idols, in and through whom in particular he can exercise his presence in an especially personal (prosopic) way. God desires nothing less than the totality of creation as that in which he may be manifest: the whole of physical reality, from the most rudimentary particles to the most complex structures in creation, and the whole of spiritual reality, from the souls of small motes to the great angels and gods of the high heavens, are all meant to be so many bodies of God.

Within our own cosmos, then, what we witness is a profligate diversity and pluralism in God’s creative energies, a multiplicity of forms across time and space that bewilders us with its numberless extent, in all of which individually and collectively God desires to be realized. There are trillions of galaxies, septillions of stars, planets, and moons, and potentially as many or more living beings spread throughout our observable universe alone. And this is just to sit for a moment with the physical world as we currently understand it, without traversing into aspects of material reality we do not yet understand or do not yet understand well, and without invoking realms of creation that are less than strictly material or physical in character. God wants to become all these things, and for all of them to become him, without mere assimilation or annihilation.

Given that this is the shape of my specifically Christian theology and cosmology, the multiverse seems to me a logical elaboration of the profligate creative powers of God that I already see in the creation I know about and live in. A God that is qualitatively infinite and utterly beyond limits of any kind could create an infinite number of worlds, in the sense of alternative physical systems of time, space, and matter; a God that is naturally generative, whose operatio appropriate to his nature is to create, that is also infinite would, logically so it seems to me, create an infinite number of worlds. To borrow a crude metaphor, implied by the Creedal language of God as poiētēs, “poet” of creation: good poets have more than one poem, just as good artists paint or sculpt more than one piece and good authors write more than one book (or one than more schtick on Substack—womp womp).

More to the point, because God is immutable, and does not change in se, God’s proper operatio in the creative act does not fulfill his own nature, but is rather a perfect union of freedom and necessity, gracious overflow and natural activity, and so never reaches a point where it can be said to be “complete” in the sense of numeric sufficiency. There is no point at which God’s creative possibilities will have been exhausted, nor any point at which God’s in-filling of creation will be “satisfied.” From eternity, of course, God has always, already realized all such possibilities; but that very eternal plenitude implies a temporal, spatial, and material infinity in which those possibilities are endlessly realized.

This is why, philosophically/theologically, I’m inclined to believe in the multiverse. There are, of course, different kinds of multiverse: using the Tegmarck Scale, one begins with a multiverse where all temporal possibilities of a specific universe are realized, and then progresses all the way to the ultimate multiverse, in which all conceptually possible realities are realized somewhere. I’m a kitchen sink kind of guy about this: I think it’s all true.

Another theological reason that I buy the multiverse is that it offers a certain soteriological advantage, especially for the universalist. If one believes, as I do, that every creature will be saved and reconciled to God in reality’s final dénouement, then one faces certain questions about providence, freedom, and choice. Specifically: why was I born as this person, into this life, with this set of proclivities, circumstances, advantages, disadvantages, and so on, when I could have been born as that person, or that one? While it is equally true for everyone that no one is born into a perfect life situation, it is also equally true that everyone is born unequally to one another in terms of relative opportunities in life, and those opportunities also bear certain emotional, moral, and spiritual costs. Then, beyond how we start, there’s also the fact that in this life every choice I make, whether under duress or not, is not perfectly free, but is affected by certain factors of fortune and fate, too, and that they both close off certain possibilities to me and open others; and so on and on it goes until, at the end of my life, I am the product not only of all my choices but also of situational circumstances of which I was for the most part the patient rather than the agent.

Now, this person I end up being may well end up being a pretty good person, or, conversely, a pretty bad person. But in either respect, they will be an incomplete person: they will not be all that I might have been, nor all that I could still yet be. That person will have certain sins in need of redress—perhaps some profound evils in need of retribution, and also some minor vices in need of rehabilitation—and certain wounds in need of healing, certain lacks in need of provision, certain weariness in need of rest. But then, once all this is done, it will still be the case that there will be more for this person that I have been to become: first, by recovering and integrating many lost versions of myself from within my own life, lost to time but never lost to God’s memory; and, second, by continual expansion of my being. If, as St. Gregory Nyssen puts it, the eschaton is really an epektasis, a continual journey ever “further up and further in!” into God, an eternal dynamism of return and never a stagnant stasis, then this is where such a journey would logically begin, with the making whole of the meaning and contours of my human identity and life.

One does not per se need the multiverse as a mechanism in order to make epektasis make sense. But the multiverse does offer something to an epektatic eschatology, in that the mechanism of a plurality of timelines and universes across which my individual hypostasis is spread out can explain how this person that I am in this life, crucified within history, rises into the age to come. Perhaps, that is to say, that the final, ultimate version of myself which God saves from the Hades of this world is that best possible version of myself constructed from across my variants, the wheat saved and gathered into the storehouse of the eternal body and the chaff burned off in the fire: perhaps it is that man, and only that man, made of the pneuma of God and not of flesh and blood, can inherit the kingdom and take the journey upwards.

Of course, all these things are too marvelous for me (Ps 131). But if I have to elect between a God whose vistas of creation and activity are vastly beyond me, an endless art gallery of masterpieces, or a God who creates a single world as though a bauble to gaze at, I know which one I prefer.

One last note: there is a lineage of religious traditions that has never had a problem imagining a multiverse, and that is the family of religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism—which radiates out of South Asia. Particularly texts composed in the Common Era in all three traditions imagine dizzyingly vast arrays of kosmoi as either spontaneously emerging and/or as being the dappled manifestation of brahman, under whatever personal face God is worshiped bhaktically by the individual. Where conversation about a multiverse in Western religions has often been a touchy subject, Eastern religions perhaps provide models for how to embrace the infinite.

Reading Guide

Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Halpern, Paul. The Allure of the Multiverse: Extra Dimensions, Other Worlds, and Parallel Universes. New York: Basic Books, 2024.