It occurs to me that scientists continue to mock the notion of a Heaven or Hell but are continually warming up to the idea that there could be all sorts of extra dimensions or other universes parallel to our own.
So which is it? Is the physical universe all there is, or are there realms of reality that are beyond our experience?
It’s not either/or for the scientists. The theories that predict extra dimensions predict physical dimensions, not spiritual ones that are inhabited by angels and ghosts. Good backgrounders on these are Brian Greene’s Elegant Universe or Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages.
I hold the belief that there probably are universes parallel to ours, perhaps an infinite number of them. Whether there is a a God who created them, I do not know. Perhaps. I lean in that direction. God would certainly not be limited to creating just one universe. As to the extra dimensions, I am totally agnostic on that … we’ll just have to see where the experiments continue to take us.
As a Christian who completed a biology degree I feel comfortable saying: way to make a gross and sweeping generalisation. I’ve never heard any scientist mock heaven or hell. Some might think religion in general is stupid, just as a good chunk of the non-scientist population does. Even those that do advocate loudly for science and against Christianity spend more time saying that the resurrection is silly (just as 1 Cor predicts they will, or at least says they will think Christ’s death was silly) than they do talking about any spiritual realm.
As for your question itself, I think Bruce has given a good pointer, that any scientist who believed in a multiverse might say that it’s physical so spiritual realms don’t necessarily come into it.
I think a scientist, if they wanted to be sensible, would not try to analyse “realms of reality that are beyond our experience” with science, because science by essence investigates that which we experience. Anyone who says that such realms don’t exist because they can’t be investigated by science would seem as foolish to me as a religious person who claimed that higher life forms can’t exist on other planets, or the multiverse can’t exist because their holy book doesn’t mention them.
Saying we can’t experience a black hole is sorta like saying we can’t experience having a building dropped on us; we’ll be dead for both. (Although we’ll be dead long before we ever hit the black hole due to spaghettification; we’ll actually survive the building crush for [comparatively] much longer, at least up until the building hits us.)
And I understand that the “extra” dimensions are all physical. It’s like the book Flatland. The squares could only experience a tiny bit of the cubes; lines could experience even less still. Also as I understand it, the extra dimensions are as-of-yet still theoretical — accepted only to “make the math work,” so to speak, which is why depending on which theory you choose to believe there could be anywhere from 10 to an infinite amount of dimensions.
A lot of what is coming from quantum research — at least that which makes it into popular works such as those of Lawrence Krauss — does nothing but confirm what the bible teaches regarding reality… and that’s why have spent way too much money on science book clubs. :P
The idea of more dimensions (thus additional “other universes”) based on string theory is that those are physical dimensions. Just because we don’t see something with our eyes does not mean it is not physical. We don’t see microbes (with our bare eyes) they are still physical.
I think most scientists agree there is much more to the universe than we have physically experienced. And their may well be realms of reality we can’t experience. A human cannot experience what it is like to travel into a black hole (our physical bodies just can’t survive that).
String theory (and theoretical physics in general) is mislabeled. A theory is a hypothesis that has been expanded, backed up by enough data to be accepted by the scientific community. Common principles for which the word “theory” is applied correctly include, but not limited to: heliocentrism, evolution, gravity, cellular biology, organic chemistry, western medicine (in general), sexual and asexual reproduction, genetics, etc.
Theoretical physics produces hypotheses. These are ideas that could potentially work but have not been studied well enough and not enough evidence has been collected to produce a theory. A hypothesis is an idea that can be studied with evidence, and generally has a little evidence to back it up as is.
So, the “theories” in String Theory are actually not theories at all. They are hypotheses generated by mathematics. One may even go so far as to say that it is even less than hypothesis and that they’re only producing ideas. So, these scientists, are not “having their cake and eating it too”. They’re coming up with ideas that fit math. Nobody is saying that one of the possible universes isn’t Heaven or Hell. They’re just saying that, if another universe exists, it is a physical place and we might one day be able to describe it scientifically.