But Vilenkin’s reflective question suggests two basic options, neither of which support Krauss’s atheistic or materialistic viewpoint. Either the laws that he and Vilenkin invoke to explain the origin of space (and energy) are mathematical descriptions that exist only in the minds of physicists—in which case they have no power to generate anything in the natural world external to our minds, let alone the whole universe. Or the mathematical ideas and expressions, including those describing possible universes, exist independently of the human mind. In other words, quantum cosmology suggests
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