The New Scientist article has Don Page pointing out that this [the many worlds interpretation]
explains the problem of evil. God likes the idea of everything possible
happening all the time so much he’d rather not be bothered to stop bad things
from happening:
“God has values,” he says. “He wants us to enjoy life, but he also
wants to create an elegant universe.” To God the importance of elegance comes
before that of suffering, which, Page infers, is why bad things happen. “God
won’t collapse the wave function to cure people of cancer, or prevent
earthquakes or whatever, because that would make the universe much more inelegant.”
Remarkably,
this is very close to the truth. The glaring problem with it, however, is
Page’s attribution of human-like qualities to God. As we saw here, God is the atemporal aspect
of existence. It is a thought thinking itself. It simply is. It doesn’t like or
want. In observing itself it sees one world of the many possible worlds, and it
sees everything in that world that is possible, thereby creating it. This is
not because it wants to create this kind of world, but simply because it is
existence, the creator of everything possible. We see some things as evil and
some as good, but to God everything simply is. A fundamental tenet of quantum
mechanics is that if something is possible, there is a nonzero probability that
it will be observed. That’s exactly what you’d expect in a universe that
consists of existence observing itself.
