Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

20 J.J.C. Smart
Some readers will react adversely to the moral drawn from the firing squad
story and so also to the supposed explanatory value of Carter’s many universes
hypothesis. Why should your surprise at surviving the firing squad be allayed
by the story of a billion other firing squads? Certainly with the real world it
would not be: we know that there could not be a billion other firing squads
on this small planet. My answer is that if we rule out the hypothesis that
the firing squad had some reason for trying not to kill you, the question ‘Why
me?’ is not a proper metaphysical question. Indeed I hold that all indexicals,
such as ‘you’, ‘I’ and also tenses of verbs, should be expunged from metaphysical
theory. 32 Compare Quine’s ‘canonical notation’. 33 We should try to
see the world as much as possible sub specie aeternitatis, to use Spinoza’s
metaphor. Metaphysically ‘Why me?’ is not an appropriate question. It could
in some cases be a sensible, but not metaphysical, question. The story assumed
that the firing squads were hard-hearted and incorruptible. If the story is
changed ‘Why me?’ might indeed have an answer, such as ‘The captain of the
firing squad is your wife’s cousin’. Now the analogy with Carter’s idea is quite
lost. It is nearer to the design hypothesis: ‘God arranged the fine tuning so
that conscious life could evolve’.
Carter’s many universes were supposed to be completely separate from
one another. However, Carter’s type of argument would work equally well
if all the ‘universes’ were vast parts of one single space–time universe as in
a theory proposed by Andrei Linde. 34 Linde’s cosmological theory is like a
theory suggested by A.H. Guth in 1980 in proposing an inflationary scenario.
35 Linde supposes that the universe expanded exponentially by a factor
of something like 10 1,000,000 from an almost point-like beginning to a size
comparable to that of a football. In Linde’s version of the inflationary story
the inflation occurs before the hot big bang in standard cosmology. His theory
solves certain problems to do with the flatness and smoothness of space
in the early universe. So the motivation was not that of Carter’s multiple
universes theory, and so there is some independent justification for believing
in many universes or sub-universes with random variations in the constants
that relate the fundamental forces, which arose from a single proto-force by
symmetry breaking. (For symmetry breaking, consider the analogy of a needle
in classical mechanics, balanced in a vertical position on its point. There
is symmetry about its axis, but the symmetry will be broken by the smallest
perturbation, whereby the needle will fall so as to lie in some particular
horizontal direction.)
According to Linde’s theory what we think of as the universe is only one
sub-universe among a huge number of them, like a crystal in a randomly
oriented array of such things (as, say, in a metal). Our particular ‘crystal’, vast
as it is, extending beyond the reach of the best telescopes, clearly has values of
fundamental constants that are suitable for the evolution of galaxies, stars,