The New ATHEISM. and the Latter Day Saints.

[Analytics]

Providence and karma aren’t usually associated with outright miracles, but just with less likely normal events happening at convenient times. But even something like walking on water is probably technically possible.

Just specify how you want the molecules to be lined up at the start of the walking, so as to keep hitting up on the feet. Then run determinism backwards to see what initial state leads to that situation. An initial state that leads to that amazing string of lucky molecule strikes has to exist, because time evolution is a one-to-one mapping.

Chaos is still deterministic, and so in its own way is quantum mechanics.

You at least partly understand what I’m saying--we agree that it is hypothetically possible for molecules on the water to all hit up at the right moment to allow somebody to walk on water without violating the laws of physics. But if you roll that backwards, how incredibly precisely fine would the fine tuning need to be to make it happen? And given that at the lowest levels, the way matter behaves has both a stochastic element and a quanta element, could there really be a status of things an hour ago that would necessarily lead to this unlikely confluence now?

I’ll state my point another way. From memory, chaos theory was discovered by scientists who were deterministically modeling the weather. At some point they wanted to recreate a simulation, but rather than starting at the very beginning of the model, they manually typed in the statuses based on a mid-model printout. When they ran the model with the typed in data, they got something completely different than the original model, and they had no idea why. It turned out that the original model was using calculations based on numbers ran out to the 10th (or so) decimal point, while the numbers in the printout (and the manual entry) only went out to 6 (or so) decimal points. Those seemingly insignificant differences in beginning states completely changed the model income.

My assertion is that if we began with the unlikely event of Jesus walking on water without violating the laws of physics and ran the model backwards, it would be very few seconds until we got to the point where the precise starting energy levels would need to be known at a precise level that is much lower than a single quanta of energy. Likewise, the required distances between various subatomic particles would be much less than the distance between two electron orbits. Muddy that intractable situation with the fuzz created by the stochastic nature of quantum reality, could it really be possible to set something up that would result in something so ridiculously precise in aggregate? I just don’t see it.

[Analytics]

Here is a memorable quote from one of Pinker’s books that more clearly illustrates his thinking on the topic:

A failure of Bayesian reasoning among scientists themselves is a contributor to the replicability crisis that we met in chapter 4. The issue hit the fan in 2011 when the eminent social psychologist Daryl Bem published the results of nine experiments in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which claimed to show that participants successfully predicted (at a rate above chance) random events before they took place, such as which of two curtains on a computer screen hid an erotic image before the computer had selected where to place it. Not surprisingly, the effects failed to replicate, but that was a foregone conclusion given the infinitesimal prior probability that a social psychologist had disproven the laws of physics by showing some undergraduates some porn. When I raised this point to a social psychologist colleague, he shot back, “Maybe Pinker doesn’t understand the laws of physics!” But actual physicists, like Sean Carroll in his book The Big Picture, have explained why the laws of physics really do rule out precognition and other forms of ESP.

Pinker, Steven. Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (pp. 159-160). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[bill4long]

Analytics, you are the first person I have heard claim that particle physics shows there is no fate, Karma, or providence. Perhaps you could mention what line of logic is being considered. I am aware of a study where some ill people were divided between those prayed for and those not and found no statistical difference in their recovery. I guess God is happy to cure some people not prayed for. Why not? Or God often does not make special cures. Or God does not like being put to the test so did not play along. Or there is no God related to prayers. These each would be logically possible.

Pinker's position here was best articulated by Sean Carroll in his book The Big Picture. You have to read several chapters in that book regarding quantum field theory, effective field theory, and the core theory to fully understand the implications. Basically, the point is that quantum field theory is spectacularly successful at explaining reality within a well-defined domain of applicability. According to that theory, if there were some mysterious force that could impact our lives, even subtly, we know exactly how to detect such forces through something called "crossing symmetry." Using particle accelerators, scientists have done all of the possible experiments that could reveal such unknown forces. The results of those experiments are unambiguous: There is nothing there.

These implications of effective field theory is what Pinker was referring to. If you want to understand it, you should read Sean Carroll's book.

The problem with Carroll's conjecture is that it assumes quantum realism, which is merely an interpretation of QM, not empirically demonstrated. If our universe is, say, a virtual reality (logically possible, but likewise not empirically demonstrated), then quantum realism is false. He has the audacity of saying, "the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known" which is utter rubbish. What is behind is quantum entanglement is not known. So far only speculation. (Superdetermism? Hidden variables, anyone?) The measurement problem has not been solved. So far only speculation. Exactly what is going on inside black holes has not been solved. So far only speculation. Unifying QM and General Relativity. So far only speculation. Carroll has some interesting ideas, but he should be taken with a grain of salt. Physicists are far from having a complete empirical understanding of physics of the universe.

[Rivendale]

Bell's theorem takes care of hidden variables.

[bill4long]

Bell's theorem takes care of hidden variables.

Only for local theories. Not for non-local theories, e.g, Bohm.

[Physics Guy]

And given that at the lowest levels, the way matter behaves has both a stochastic element and a quanta element, could there really be a status of things an hour ago that would necessarily lead to this unlikely confluence now?

I'm not sure what you mean by "a stochastic element and a quanta element". Most apparent stochasticity is not due to any fundamental randomness breaking determinism, but only due to our ignorance.

In some ways quantum mechanics does seem to involve a fundamental randomness, but the sense in which this is true is tricky, and in particular there is no way I can see to use quantum randomness to limit miracles. Apart from measurement, quantum mechanics is not only totally deterministic: it is linear, so that nothing like chaos is possible. The thing that evolves in this very simple way in quantum mechanics, however, is the state vector of the whole universe. Even representing that vector at one instant is far beyond any computer we could conceivably build.

Anyway, you've mentioned both chaos and quantum randomness, so I'll try to explain first of all how quantum mechanics and chaos actually do play together, without any randomness, and then I'll say something about the part of quantum mechanics that does seem to be random.

Quantum chaos

There is a subject of quantum chaos, which means the study of quantum versions of chaotic classical systems. So for instance if you study a quantum analog of a double pendulum, you're looking at a simple case of quantum chaos. The quantum system is necessarily not chaotic at all in the strict sense, because its time evolution is linear, but it will have some properties that are kind of reminiscent of classical chaos.

Quantum chaos is computationally demanding to study. I have students working on simple models with so-called quantum chaos and we'll be happy if we can handle a model with a few dozen particles with such extremely simplified motional possibilities that they can literally only sit at one of six points. We'll be limited by the memory we need to store the big matrices. We can solve the corresponding classical problems much more easily, even though these really are chaotic. We don't need to run them for infinite times; for any time long enough for us to see what we want to see in the classical system, we can just tell the computer to use 25-digit precision, then tell it to do it again with 30-digit precision, and keep raising the precision until it stops seeming to make any difference in our results. The calculations may have to run over a few days, but that's fine.

The point of principle remains, however, that even quantum chaos is deterministic. For that target state with water molecules lined up to kick Jesus's feet, and the whole rest of the universe doing whatever, there exists an initial state just after the Big Bang which must, with perfect certainty, evolve into exactly that target state, fourteen billion years later. The difficulty that we would face in computing that state is not a factor for typical hypothetical Gods. That state would surely be one with very many particles highly entangled, but the difficulty we would face in creating that state is likewise presumably irrelevant. If we can reliably produce states with only a few particles entangled, we publish a paper, but for God, presumably, states are states and any vector is as easy to decree as another.

Quantum measurement

Measurement does seem to introduce randomness, but this is something we definitely do not understand as well as we understand fundamental forces. For one thing, we can't really say what something has to be to count as "a measurement". Even a huge experiment like CERN that makes zillions of quantum measurements all the time is itself just a big underground tunnel and some superconducting magnets and a lot of wire chamber detectors and some grad students watching the screens late at night—that is, it's all just a big mass of atoms and fields evolving under the deterministic laws of nature. If you give me a random big quantum system, can you now tell me what aspects of its behaviour are "measurements" and which are not? If it has both measurement and non-measurement behaviour, then presumably it's going to have aspects that are on some kind of continuum between those extremes. What even are those?

There is no clear understanding of this. I began as a particle physicist and became disillusioned when I realised that for all our impressive successes, particle physics only ever studied small perturbations around the vacuum. That's not looking under the lamppost: it's looking under the laser beam. The light is really bright there but it's a narrow spot. Ironically, the detectors that are used to observe those tiny perturbations are themselves huge and complicated things. The scientists peering at the laser's bright spot employ shadowy monsters as lab assistants.

However it really works, quantum measurement does seem as though it's a random choice. As Einstein put it, in mockery of a quantum theory that he couldn't accept even though he helped make it, God rolls dice. It's like that, the world is like a big role-playing game where every so often the game-master has to make a roll to see exactly what happens. The choices seem to be random. Far from limiting the ability of a God to determine things, though, this would seem to give God a big loophole.

Perhaps the choices aren't really random, but are rather deliberately chosen by God according to some optimised algorithm so complex that it seems random to us. Or perhaps instead of rolling each time, God has a long list of pre-rolled random numbers. Perhaps most of the time God just takes the next one from the list, but if somebody prays, then God looks down the list and uses the next lucky roll a bit early, so that on average it will all still look random, but that particular time, something unlikely comes through when it matters. Depending on how they were used, such a pre-rolled list of numbers might perhaps amount to a set of hidden variables, but as bill4long rightly points out, non-local hidden variables are perfectly consistent with quantum mechanics. That just means that the hidden variables may have to affect things simultaneously at separate places, so that for instance the same single die roll determines that Alice sees an up result while Bob sees a down, instead of the other way around, in measurements made far apart. Shouldn't be a problem for God.

Ruling out a straw man

Carroll is right, I and most physicists would agree, that we have indeed as good as ruled out the existence of supernatural forces and substances that are counterparts to the forces and particles that we know in physics. This is a bit like saying that we have determined conclusively that books consist only of paper and ink. That doesn't mean we understand literature. Books and brains are lumps of atoms, so it's not a category mistake to think of trying to understand literature as a physical phenomenon, but it's too hard. Our great understanding of how ink adheres to paper doesn't go far with fiction.

To say that ruling out extra forces means ruling out karma, providence, and prayer is a straw man fallacy. Most people who believe in those things aren't specific about exactly what they mean, but very few of them would nail their colours to a mast about non-physical forces. They're not really believing that story is a third slippery substance that has to go into the book between the pages to make the story work. They're believing that a story needs a protagonist who first fails and then triumphs—that there are rules for stories besides the rules that stick ink to paper.

History of the theory of chaos

From memory, chaos theory was discovered by scientists who were deterministically modeling the weather. At some point they wanted to recreate a simulation, but rather than starting at the very beginning of the model, they manually typed in the statuses based on a mid-model printout. When they ran the model with the typed in data, they got something completely different than the original model, and they had no idea why. It turned out that the original model was using calculations based on numbers ran out to the 10th (or so) decimal point, while the numbers in the printout (and the manual entry) only went out to 6 (or so) decimal points. Those seemingly insignificant differences in beginning states completely changed the model income.

As I've mentioned in another thread here recently, chaos goes back to the 19th century. Extreme sensitivity to initial conditions was understood long before electronic computers. Every physics paper about chaos still has to show at least one Poincaré section, because it's the only intelligible kind of pretty picture you can show; the definition of chaos is still a positive Lyapunov exponent. Poincaré died in 1912, Lyapunov in 1918.

The first surprise we got from using electronic computers to solve complicated dynamical problems explicitly was actually the unexpected absence of chaos, in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem. Chaos turned out not to be as ubiquitous as we had always assumed.

Computers have enabled a lot more to be learned about chaos than we ever could learn without them, but the things we've learned have been technical details. The basic issues of instability, "butterfly effects" and so on, were understood long before.

[Analytics]

The problem with Carroll's conjecture is that it assumes quantum realism...

That isn’t true. First of all, Carroll doesn’t believe in quantum realism--he thinks the multi-world interpretation is the better explanation.

More to the point though, dealing with your more general objection is why the term effective quantum field theory enters into the argument.

In the words of Carroll:

"The strength of effective field theory is what allows us to assert “This time is different” when we make our audacious claim that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known. When Newton and Laplace contemplated the glory of classical mechanics, they may very well have considered the possibility that it would someday have to be superseded by more comprehensive theories.

And eventually it was—by special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Newtonian theory is a good approximation in a certain domain of applicability, but ultimately it breaks down and we need a better description of reality.

What’s new is that Newton and Laplace, even if they had thought of their ideas as only accurate in a certain regime, had no way of knowing how far that regime extended. Newtonian gravity works very well for the Earth or Venus; it eventually starts breaking down when we consider the orbit of Mercury, whose tiny precession became some of the strongest evidence in favor of Einstein’s general relativity. But Newton would have had no idea how far his theory might be accurate.

With effective field theory, however, that’s exactly what we have. An effective field theory describes everything that happens to a certain set of fields, as long as the energies are lower than a certain cutoff, and distances are larger than a certain lower limit (as set by experiment). Once we have the parameters of the effective theory pinned down, we know what will happen to our fields in any experiment we can imagine within its domain of applicability, even if we haven’t done that experiment yet.

It’s this special feature of quantum field theory that gives us the confidence to make such audacious claims about the scope of our knowledge."

Carroll, Sean M. . The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (p. 191). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

What is behind is quantum entanglement is not known. So far only speculation. (Superdetermism? Hidden variables, anyone?) The measurement problem has not been solved. So far only speculation. Exactly what is going on inside black holes has not been solved. So far only speculation. Unifying QM and General Relativity. So far only speculation. Carroll has some interesting ideas, but he should be taken with a grain of salt. Physicists are far from having a complete empirical understanding of physics of the universe.

Sean Carroll has done research on these topics at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Cal Tech, and John Hopkins. According to Google Scholar, his academic work has been cited 33,673 which I’m guessing is about 33,673 more citations than you’ve received. He doesn’t claim physicists have “a complete empirical understanding of physics of the universe.” In his own words:

There are a million ways to misinterpret “The laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known.” While it’s an undeniably bold claim, it would be easy to mistake it for something even more grandiose than it actually is, and then dismiss that exaggerated claim. It certainly does not imply that we know all of physics.

Nor does it, by any wild stretch of the imagination, imply that we know how everything works at the level of the everyday. Nobody in their right mind thinks that we have, or are close to having, complete theories of biology or neuroscience or the weather, or for that matter of the flow of electricity through ordinary materials. Those phenomena need to be compatible with the Core Theory, but the phenomena themselves are emergent. As we discussed in chapter 12, understanding emergent phenomena is a matter of discovering new knowledge—finding those patterns (where they exist) that allow us to describe simple behaviors out of many underlying moving parts. Sometimes the simple demand of compatibility with an underlying theory tells us a great deal, as in the case of planets moving around the sun. Conservation of momentum immediately tells us that the Earth won’t go careening off in a random direction; the absence of long-range forces other than gravity and electromagnetism tells us that you can’t bend spoons with your mind. But for the most part, there is a wide gap between knowing a theory at one level and knowing the emergent theories that are related to it by coarse-graining.

The success of the Core Theory, and our understanding of its domain of applicability, thanks to the principles of effective field theory, implies that there is an enormous presumption (a high Bayesian credence) in favor of understanding macroscopic phenomena in terms that are compatible with the underlying laws of physics. There can always be exceptions. But as David Hume would have said, if you believe that any one particular case is a true example of the Core Theory being violated, your evidence in favor of it needs to be strong enough to overcome the enormous amounts of evidence to the contrary.

Carroll, Sean M. . The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (pp. 191-192). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Although not a physicist, Steven Pinker is an elite scientist and a member of the National Academy of Scientists. Pinker fully accepts Carroll’s point here. If Carroll is somehow wrong, I take solace in knowing I’m in good company.

[Gadianton]

My criticism of some of the new atheism here is that it implies the old atheism wasn't good enough. Now we know enough to definitively rule out the hand of God -- doesn't that mean that a couple hundred of years ago, atheists were presumptuous?

[Analytics]

Physics Guy,

Thanks for the long post. I’m reading and rereading it carefully. Before I respond, I want to acknowledge that my perspectives are based on reading a few layman-level books about these topics, while yours is the perspective of a bona fide expert. I acknowledge that and appreciate you helping disabuse me of my misconceptions here.

For purposes of time and space, I’m replying to only a few things you said. But I appreciate everything you shared.

That said...

And given that at the lowest levels, the way matter behaves has both a stochastic element and a quanta element, could there really be a status of things an hour ago that would necessarily lead to this unlikely confluence now?

I'm not sure what you mean by "a stochastic element and a quanta element". Most apparent stochasticity is not due to any fundamental randomness breaking determinism, but only due to our ignorance.

My understanding is that our ignorance is based on the underlying nature of reality and not a function of not having precise-enough and subtle-enough instruments to detect things without disturbing them. Isn’t the real point of the uncertainty principle that to the extent that a particle’s position is known, it’s speed is fundamentally unknowable? This unknowableness is intrinsic to the math and isn’t really talking about our ignorance per se, isn’t it?

The Wikipedia article on Quantum indeterminacy says:

Quantum indeterminacy is the apparent necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system, that has become one of the characteristics of the standard description of quantum physics. Prior to quantum physics, it was thought that a physical system had a determinate state which uniquely determined all the values of its measurable properties, and conversely, the values of its measurable properties uniquely determined the state.

Quantum indeterminacy can be quantitatively characterized by a probability distribution on the set of outcomes of measurements of an observable. The distribution is uniquely determined by the system state, and moreover quantum mechanics provides a recipe for calculating this probability distribution.

Indeterminacy in measurement was not an innovation of quantum mechanics, since it had been established early on by experimentalists that errors in measurement may lead to indeterminate outcomes. By the later half of the 18th century, measurement errors were well understood, and it was known that they could either be reduced by better equipment or accounted for by statistical error models. In quantum mechanics, however, indeterminacy is of a much more fundamental nature, having nothing to do with errors or disturbance.

In some ways quantum mechanics does seem to involve a fundamental randomness, but the sense in which this is true is tricky, and in particular there is no way I can see to use quantum randomness to limit miracles.

To clarify, I’m not trying to “limit miracles” in a general sense. Rather, I’m trying to explain why I’m skeptical of your proposition that an omnipotent and omniscient God could fine-tune the universe so that a large basket of specific miracles would eventually emerge at the right time and right place.

Apart from measurement, quantum mechanics is not only totally deterministic: it is linear, so that nothing like chaos is possible. The thing that evolves in this very simple way in quantum mechanics, however, is the state vector of the whole universe. Even representing that vector at one instant is far beyond any computer we could conceivably build.

Anyway, you've mentioned both chaos and quantum randomness, so I'll try to explain first of all how quantum mechanics and chaos actually do play together, without any randomness, and then I'll say something about the part of quantum mechanics that does seem to be random.

Quantum chaos

There is a subject of quantum chaos, which means the study of quantum versions of chaotic classical systems. So for instance if you study a quantum analog of a double pendulum, you're looking at a simple case of quantum chaos. The quantum system is necessarily not chaotic at all in the strict sense, because its time evolution is linear, but it will have some properties that are kind of reminiscent of classical chaos.

Quantum chaos is computationally demanding to study. I have students working on simple models with so-called quantum chaos and we'll be happy if we can handle a model with a few dozen particles with such extremely simplified motional possibilities that they can literally only sit at one of six points. We'll be limited by the memory we need to store the big matrices. We can solve the corresponding classical problems much more easily, even though these really are chaotic. We don't need to run them for infinite times; for any time long enough for us to see what we want to see in the classical system, we can just tell the computer to use 25-digit precision, then tell it to do it again with 30-digit precision, and keep raising the precision until it stops seeming to make any difference in our results. The calculations may have to run over a few days, but that's fine.

The point of principle remains, however, that even quantum chaos is deterministic. For that target state with water molecules lined up to kick Jesus's feet, and the whole rest of the universe doing whatever, there exists an initial state just after the Big Bang which must, with perfect certainty, evolve into exactly that target state, fourteen billion years later....

I think I’m following your point, but my question is whether this hypothetical initial state can exist in the real world, given that at the lowest levels, energy and positions are fundamentally discrete. If underlying reality was completely analog, I can see how we could come up with the desired walk-on-water state now and then just roll the movie backwards. But how far could we roll it before we got to issues like “electron #7 of molecule xyz needs to increase by 1.254373 quanta’s of energy. However, that isn’t attainable--the energy level can increase by either 1 or 2, not by anything in-between.

Now that I said that, maybe your point is making sense to me. If we define the state of the universe at time t as the molecules coming together to cause Jesus to float for that instant, then there must be a state at time t − 1 that leads to that state at t. And if that state exists, there must be another state at t − 2 that leads to that state at t − 1, etc.

Is that your point? If that’s the case, I see a potential hole. Because we’re not merely asking the universe to provide a state where Jesus walks on water at time t. We are also asking for that state to lead to another state at t + 1 where he is walking on water again. And that needs to be true again and again and again for billions of different nanoseconds so that the feat of walking on water persists for a few seconds.

While I can see how a deterministic system could be set up to cause x to happen at t, could it also be set up so that a long chain of interrelated events all happen at every moment between time t and time t +Δ?

The difficulty that we would face in computing that state is not a factor for typical hypothetical Gods. That state would surely be one with very many particles highly entangled, but the difficulty we would face in creating that state is likewise presumably irrelevant. If we can reliably produce states with only a few particles entangled, we publish a paper, but for God, presumably, states are states and any vector is as easy to decree as another.

I get that. Let's define “state x” as plausible but extraordinarily unlikely sate of the universe that causes Jesus to walk on water at the instant of time t. My original thought was that there couldn't exist an early state of the universe that necessarily leads to that. This state not existing was driven by my sensibilities regarding the granular and stochastic nature of reality, chaos theory, and the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

Putting those arguments aside, if we define states x through z as the states where Jesus walks on water for the time interval t through t +Δ, can we be certain that an initial state of the universe exists that results in that long series of unlikely events all happening?

Perhaps the choices aren't really random, but are rather deliberately chosen by God according to some optimised algorithm so complex that it seems random to us. Or perhaps instead of rolling each time, God has a long list of pre-rolled random numbers. Perhaps most of the time God just takes the next one from the list, but if somebody prays, then God looks down the list and uses the next lucky roll a bit early, so that on average it will all still look random, but that particular time, something unlikely comes through when it matters. Depending on how they were used, such a pre-rolled list of numbers might perhaps amount to a set of hidden variables, but as bill4long rightly points out, non-local hidden variables are perfectly consistent with quantum mechanics. That just means that the hidden variables may have to affect things simultaneously at separate places, so that for instance the same single die roll determines that Alice sees an up result while Bob sees a down, instead of the other way around, in measurements made far apart. Shouldn't be a problem for God.

Carroll does go through every possible loophole to his claim that he could think of, and something like this is one of them. It does paint a disturbing picture for me, though. It makes me think of a supernatural meddler in reality who is making extreme measures to create the illusion that the world works according to natural law and takes extreme measures to be unknown and unknowable, when the underlying reality is the exact opposite. It’s a disturbing thought.

To say that ruling out extra forces means ruling out karma, providence, and prayer is a straw man fallacy. Most people who believe in those things aren't specific about exactly what they mean, but very few of them would nail their colours to a mast about non-physical forces....

I’m confident that Pinker’s point was that the supernatural doesn’t exist, as defined by Carroll.

[Gadianton]

I don't want to impose too much on A vs. PG, but just a couple of things:

Quantum indeterminacy is the apparent necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system, that has become one of the characteristics of the standard description of quantum physics.

Superfluous to the discussion, but wiki needs to edit that out. Totally unwarranted Godel mysticism. As if QM isn't bad enough already on its own.

To clarify, I’m not trying to “limit miracles” in a general sense. Rather, I’m trying to explain why I’m skeptical of your proposition that an omnipotent and omniscient God could fine-tune the universe so that a large basket of specific miracles would eventually emerge at the right time and right place.

I'll bow to the correction, but my understanding is that to get the specific miracles of the New Testament baked in with QM requires the position of superdeterminism, overruling Bell's theorem by postulating super hidden variables. The real possibility of superdeterminism shows that the wiki statement about "necessary" incompleteness is way off, and obviously guilt by association with Godel. But superdeterminism is a super minority theory -- I think.

Why not use something more germane to Carroll against him? There are an infinite number of universes where Jesus walked on water. If not this one, there is one where he did and Sean Carroll is wrong, and there is no way to distinguish which of those is ours. Given C's explanations of what's allowed in a multiverse, then I feel confident that point stands.