Many Worlds in One: The Books I've Read, Am Reading, & Intend to Read

I'd guess that most of us have heard some variation of the Multiple Universes theory. Certainly anybody who reads DC comic books, right? So it's not that it was anything new per se, but when I read a reference to the theory in one of the essays in Teenagers From the Future: Essays on the Legion of Super-Heroes edited by Timothy Callahan (a most excellent book, by the way) and saw a footnote which referenced Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes by Alex Vilenkin, I decided to see if the Louisville Free Public Library had a copy of that tome. It did. So I did. And, as is often the case, that book then sat on my book table for several weeks. But then this morning I read a bit in Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Earth (the sixth book in the Foundation Trilogy) which talked about multiple worlds, it turned my mind back to Alex Vilenkin's book. Asimov's version had an interesting twist to it that I hadn't heard before, by the way. After postulating that there could be a nigh-infinite number of worlds, each one based on variations of acts (in THIS one I got up at 4:00 am because my cat was meowing and batting the door, while in THAT one I slept until 7:00 because my cat was visiting family in New Orleans), one of the characters in the book talked about how there were some beings (The Eternals...no relation to Jack Kirby's / Marvel's group) who could move from one "world" (really a universe, right?) to another, and apparently they searched through a bunch of them to find the world which best suited human beings. Well. That's kind of interesting, isn't it?

It also got me to thinking (again) about the problem of suffering vis-à-vis a religious / spiritual cosmology. The whole How Can A Kind God Permit Needless Suffering? thing. The only answer I've ever heard religion provide is "Some things are beyond our understanding" (aka You Gotta Have Faith a-Faith a-Faith), which is just unforgivable laziness in my opinion. But if there are an infinite (or nigh infinite, per Asimov) number of worlds (universes), and they are based on all of the possible variations (how can that NOT be just straight up Infinite?), then suffering is just one of the variations, isn't it? In this world (universe), my daughter is autistic. In the next world over, she has a Ph.D. in Mathematical and Computer Modeling. And in the next one over, she is the greatest pop singer that Iceland has ever known. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. 

I don't know that it's an explanation that brings any solace with it, since we're still hip deep in the big muddy of THIS universe (so far as I know, anyway), but at least it makes sense, doesn't it? And that ought to be worth something. It's better than "I don't know why God allowed that baby to die of cancer, but I have Faith that...."

Must ponder more. 

And I guess it's time to crack that Alex Vilenkin book.  The universe has been pestering me to get to it, after all.