Sean Carroll

That is completely possible.

And Neil will raise us in here and say, how do we observationally test that hypothesis?

But look, for the last 500 years, as science has done more and more to explain why the universe is the way it is, the role for God as an explanatory move has gone away, has diminished, right?

And so you are... It continues to do so, yes.

And so you're left with, if you want to believe in God, and there's plenty of very, very smart people who do, they tend not to rely on God to account for the

things that we observe in the natural world.

Gotcha.

Wow.

This is a great question, but there's a lot going on here.

I'm going to try to keep it brief here.

You know, there's something called the cosmological principle.

that says that if you squint and look at the universe on very large scales, everything looks the same everywhere, right?

The same number of galaxies and whatever.

It's a dopey thing to call a principle because it's not a principle.

It's just a fact that you see about the universe.

It could easily have been otherwise, especially because it's not exactly true.

And that's what the question is getting at.

There are places in the universe where matter is very dense.

There's places where it's very empty and so forth.

The way that modern cosmologists think about this question is to say that