God, the only necessarily existing thing then existing among all the other existing things, was bored. He conjured up a contingent cloud, shaped it into the form of a foam recliner, sat back on it, extended the foot rest, and emitted a long low sigh. The contingent bourbon He had conjured up as the same time to try to quench a thirst He had given to Himself scarcely satisfied. He rested the tumbler on a small contingent table He had also conjured up and placed next to the chair. Eternity was a long time. Especially when one considered the fact that time itself had yet to be invented. God decided that he needed to take some action, of his own free will, to beguile the tedium of everlasting self-similarity. He needed to invent some conscious agents with their own free will to parlay with, to match his wits against. Consequently he conjured up a number of angels – Michael, Gabriel, Lucifer, and the Metatron among them, granting each of these contingent beings the potential to freely choose their own actions as well as the ability to talk back.
"I have an idea," he told them. "I want to create a couple of individuals, perhaps a whole species, in My own image. They shall have two legs, two arms, two eyes, and an ability to grow a beard as long and white as My own. Or at least half of them. The purpose of these creatures I shall create will be to love each other and to love Me."
"Interesting," said Michael. "I assume that they shall be lower down the pecking order than we are."
"In one sense only, that you are closer to Me than they shall be. It shall be My job, and I am delegating some of this to all of you, to arrange affairs so that whatever happens to these 'humans' shall ultimately be in their own interests. I intend to make a whole world just for them. After all, I am not only all-powerful and all-knowing but also all-loving. Everything that happens, even that which happens because of the freely-will decisions of beings such as you and those I have yet to create, will happen because I want it to happen, because I have chosen for it to happen. Even should one of you, of your own free will and out of pride, rebel against Me, I will be able to incorporate some such civil war in what I want now to call Heaven into my Masterplan."
"I'm certain none of us will ever raise up arms against you!" cried the Metatron, aghast.
"No, I'm sure none of us will," echoed Lucifer although God, who could be very perspicacious when he wanted to be, noticed that Lucifer avoided making eye-contact.
"What we need to do first," said God, "is to create the rules for the world these 'humans' shall inhabit. I suggest we require at least four dimensions, one temporal and three spatial, that shall sometimes be usefully described with a number system known as quarternions that the humans one day will invent. These four dimensions will together be known as space-time but the relationship between time and space is something I want to remain a source of confusion right up until the very end. Right. Let's get on with making these rules."
God summoned up an office space, a desk for himself, a desk for each of the angels, a mug full of biros, and a number of A4 notebooks that they could jot down ideas. God found it quite stimulating to have others to brainstorm with, to bounce ideas off.
"There shall be in this four-dimensional space-time things we can broadly describe as 'objects'. My first rule is that an object shall continue in a straight line at a constant speed unless some force acts upon it. Even if it seems sometimes to curve this will be because it is following a geodesic through curved space-time. My second rule is that if a force acts upon some object, the force will be proportional both to the acceleration of the object and to a property of the object we shall call its 'mass'. My third law is that if a force acts on one object then an equal and opposite force shall act on another. These three laws will enable us to stipulate a quantity of things in general called 'momentum' which is always conserved."
"You really do have a superb brain," exclaimed the Metatron fulsomely.
"You really are the worst kind of brownnose," Lucifer said sotto voce to the Metatron. Lucifer had taken a dislike to the Voice of God immediately upon meeting him, either five minutes or five-hundred thousands years ago, time having no meaning in Heaven.
God and the angels sometimes separately and sometimes in small working groups put pen to paper and, after some consultation and some compromises, came up with the rules for what they had tentatively decided to call 'the universe'. There would be six varieties of quarks, in three generations, six different kinds of leptons, a Higgs boson, and three charge carrying particles to mediate three of the four forces, the electro-magnetic force, the weak force, and the strong force. They couldn't decide whether gravity should be mediated by a force carrying particle or not and so decided to fudge the rules a little. Rules were written down concerning how all the particles would interact. What became apparent quickly was that the rules they were devising involved constants, such as the ratio of the the mass of an electron to its charge, that the rules didn't dictate.
"Remember," said God, "that the purpose of the universe is to provide some kind of habitation for the 'humans' we intend to create, their purpose in life being to love each other and to love Me. We must fine-tune all of these constants to ensure that humankind has a chance and does not have its future swept away immediately after the Big Bang or finds itself in a universe with no structure to it at all. If the only value for the Fine Structure Constant that works is one over one-hundred and thirty-seven, so be it."
"Amen," replied the angels. Soon the rules were completed to their satisfaction. All it took for God to legislate the laws of nature, laws unlike judicial and governmental laws in that they could not be broken by anyone other than God, was to put His signature to the long document the angels had printed out. As He signed his name, Jehovah, God paused to remind his subordinates that, in the document, there was a clause which permitted Him and Him alone to suspend all the rules. "I reserve the right to intervene in the Universe whenever I want as much I want, sometimes to answer prayers and sometimes to enact the very opposite of what My petitioners have requested."
"Now that we have the Laws of Nature worked out," God went on, "it's time to stipulate the Initial Conditions. I would like to create a paradise for the humans to live in. It shall be called the Garden of Eden. I shall create two types of human, a man I shall call Adam and a woman I shall call Lilith. If Lilith does not work out for any reason, if she is perchance too uppitty, I shall banish her from Paradise and create another woman to be consort to Adam from one of his ribs. She shall be called Eve. In paradise, Adam and Eve shall have direct access to Me and shall have whatever they want. There shall be only one commandment. I shall instruct both Adam and Eve that they are not permitted to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. However, because both Adam and his spouse have free will, it is possible that they will disobey me, perhaps having been tempted by someone or something, and eat the forbidden fruit. We must prepare for all eventualities."
"What will happen to the poor things if they do break your one law?" cried the Metatron.
"I will expel them from the Garden of Eden and set one of you, Michael I think, to guard the sole entrance with a flaming sword. Once evicted, they will experience all the evil of the world. Not only death but also disease, misfortune, and toil, the pain of childbirth. However, after about four-thousand years, I shall send Myself to Earth to take upon Myself all the sins of the world, and, because I am sinless, in this way shall repay with My sacrifice in full the debt humanity incurred when eating the Fruit, their Original Sin. In order to do all this I shall need to beget Myself, a parthenogenetic process in which I will simultaneously be both the Father and the Son. My manifestation and death will ensure eternal life for all those who choose to believe in Us. People will either go directly to Heaven or Hell at death or they will enter a state of dormancy to be resurrected at the Day of Judgment when We return and pronounce sentence on all those then alive or then dead on something to be known as Judgement Day. I'm leaning toward the second plan but there will be many, including a Dante Alighieri for instance, who will assume the first is what I really intended."
"It all sounds a bit convoluted," observed Lucifer in a doubtful tone.
"Ahem," said someone. A young man in a tie-dyed t-shirt and with long hair like a hippie stepped out of the shadows near a filing cabinet where he had been loitering unobtrusively. "I should introduce myself. I'm Jesus Christ. I am also a necessary being. In fact I am consubstantial with God the Father."
"We didn't see you there!" cried the Metatron.
"I've been here from the beginning. I'm just keeping a low profile for a while. My starring role will come a lot later."
A dove that had been perched on Jesus's shoulder flew from Him to God the Father and then back, depositing a white dropping on the shoulder of the Metatron as it flew.
"I really don't understand this whole business of the Father and the Son being the same being," complained Lucifer peevishly. "And what's the deal with the dove?"
"It's another confusion that will only get cleared up right at the end," explained God in a jovial fashion, adding a "Ho, ho, ho." for good measure.
God paused for a moment.
"After the Fall, should it occur, I intend to keep a low profile myself. I intend to keep myself concealed, hidden. I don't want the humans to know confidently that it's me pulling all the strings. So it will be important for the humans to develop belief systems that will be called 'religions'. Religion will involve believing in the divine without the assurance of any absolute evidence. The true story of the Garden of Eden will be entrusted to a dozen Semitic tribes making their home in a region of the Earth between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. After My son's heroic sacrifice – try not to worry too much about it at the moment, Jesus – a new religion will spread to the West and the Near East that will be named Christianity after Us. However there will be many other alternative religions that will appeal to the credulous and ignorant amongst our flock. There will, for instance, be a religion known as Hinduism and another known as Buddhism. The Buddhists will believe that the world has existed and will exist for all eternity. The Buddha shall preach that all history can be encapsulated in grand cycles known as Kalpa that last billions and sometimes trillions of years. The Buddhists shall believe in something known as dependent arising – the idea that everything that occurs depends on prior causes or conditions and that change and flux characterise the experience of existing. The Buddhists shall not believe in souls to either pass to Heaven or Hell at death or be judged at the Day of Judgment. They shall reject the doctrines of a First Cause or Unmoved Mover. The Buddhist theory of dependent arising shall later be taken up by a philosopher called Leibniz who shall argue that everything that happens must have sufficient causes but that the apparently freely willed unpredictable actions taken by people have such a large number of causes, perhaps an infinite number, that the only one who can see all the causes all at once is Me, God."
"He sounds like he's going to be a smart cookie, this Leibniz," observed Michael tentatively.
"If he wasn't so stupid! The proof that the Principle of Sufficient Reason must be false is that I decided, on a total whim, to create a universe for a species whose sole purposes in life are to love Me and to love each other. Furthermore, Adam and Eve must freely choose to rebel because otherwise we could not hold them responsible for the Fall of mankind and it would be pointless for Jesus to suffer excruciating agony on a crucifix and then die for them four thousand years later. Libertarian free will is the only way to go."
"You already seem to know that they will eat the Fruit," remarked Lucifer truculently. "It's as though you've chosen Original Sin for your children beforehand without their consent. It's seems to me that you've got the whole future history for these creatures all worked out in your head before you've even created anything at all. There's no free will whatsoever in the story you're telling."
"Well, it will make for a good story at the very least! In truth, the philosophers of religion will sweat blood trying to reconcile a God who knows everything, including the whole future, with their unassailable faith in free will, a belief indispensable as a concept to undergird concepts like 'justice' and 'responsibility'. Even the philosophers who don't believe in Me will pay lip service to the idea that determinism and free will are compatible and will describe themselves consequently as Compatibilists."
"I hate this feeling that I might be a puppet," murmured Lucifer to no one in particular. "I'm better than that. In fact I don't see why it can't be me who gets to give the orders when not loafing around on a foam recliner and drinking Bourbon all day."
"What about the poor things who have been led astray by false idols, false prophets? How shall they ever be saved?" exclaimed the Metatron to God melodramatically.
"My plan is actually even more sadistic than that," explained God cheerfully. "There will be, for instance, a people known as the Maori who will live in a number of large islands on the opposite side of the world to the Levant. The Maori will not be introduced to the Jewish idea of the Garden of Eden and the Christian idea of salvation until the nineteenth century. The Maori will have, before then, their own creation myth, not because they have deliberately rejected me, but because they knew no better. In their mythology, the sky god, Ranginui, and the god of the Earth, Papatuanuku, will be entwined in such an intimate amorous embrace, clinch, that their children, gods in their own right, will be forced to crawl around in the space between them, yearning for light. The children shall assemble to discuss a solution to this predicament with the most ferocious, Tūmatauenga, proposing that they murder Ranganui. Cooler heads prevail however and it is decided best simply to force their parents apart. A number of gods, including Tumataunga, attempt this feat but fail; it is only when Tane-Mahuta stands on his head and pushes up with his feet that the separation is achieved. Light is allowed into the world. After this, Tane, who is god of the forest and of the birds, clothes his mother in trees to hide her nakedness and throws the sun, moon, and stars into the air to similarly protect his father's modesty. The rain is Rangi's tears at his separation from Papa and the mists that sometimes hang over the forests like blankets are the result of her own grief concerning the divorce. The children each take on a function – for instance, Tangaroa becomes the god of the oceans and Tūmatauenga becomes not only god of war, as you might expect, but also god of all human activities such as fishing and cultivating crops. One god, Tāwhirimātea, bitter at his parents' separation, sides with his father and becomes the god of storms and winds, often delighting in shredding Tane's trees to splinters. The internecine warfare between the gods following the separation has never really ceased."
"I'm sure that our creation story is much superior." There was uncertainty in Michael's voice as he said it.
"Interestingly there shall be trees in this country, a country known as Aotearoa or the Land of The Long White Cloud, known as kauri trees that will be the largest by bulk if not by height of all the trees on earth. The largest known kauri in Aotearoa, to be found in Northland, shall be named Tane-Mahuta after the god of forests."
"With all these different religions and disparate myths concerning gods and the different ways the world might have been created, how will humans ever find their way to You and to love You as You intended?"
"Well, it gets even more sadistic than I have so far implied," went on God mercilessly. "Starting in the nineteenth century, there will be inaugurated a new quasi-religion I shall call 'scientism'. In the twentieth and twenty-first century people everywhere will suddenly start becoming very sciency. It will be proposed and accepted that the universe began with a bang about 13.8 billion years before then and that life first emerged about seven or eight billion years later. At the beginning living things were simply self-replicating molecules to be found near volcanic vents in the ocean floor. There will be a theory known as Neo-Darwinism that shall presume that the physical and often mental characteristics of living things are coded into sequences of DNA to be found in the nuclei of the cells of living organisms. Advantageous traits shall be selected for by nature itself and deleterious traits weeded out but, because of continual mutations in the genome, there shall always be enough variety among members of any particular species for Natural Selection to continue to act upon. Variation will always be replenished by continual random mutations. In this way, the peoples of the twenty-first century will be able to explain human and animal life without resorting to any loose talk about a Creator or Designer. It will become fashionable among many, including many Youtubers, to insist that I don't exist at all. It will even be proposed that the world was once ruled for millions of years by feathered reptiles known as dinosaurs although the faithful will maintain that dinosaur fossils are all hoaxes planted in the ground by the Adversary to test people's faith."
"You don't say," said Lucifer, jotting a note down on a small piece of paper and then surreptitiously pocketing it.
"I'm surprised that you would want to create a species so irredeemably obtuse!" said the Metatron.
"Indeed. There shall in truth be a woman, whose name is Sophia, who will wander from mental health unit to mental health unit in New Zealand. She too will be very sciency. She shall brandish a ballpoint pen when trying to get her views across to psychiatrists, saying, 'What is this pen made of? Plastic. And where does plastic come from? From petroleum. And what is petroleum made of? Dinosaur bones.'"
"If I am to understand your prophecy correctly," said Lucifer slowly, "this Neo-Darwinism is predicated on a world of death and suffering, on the survival of only the fittest."
"We don't need Neo-Darwinism to explain this fact about the world I intend to create. To survive the people will need to kill and eat other living beings. This will be true even if Neo-Darwinism is proven false. There will be a philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who will say pithily, and this will be an exact quote, 'Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.'”
"It doesn't seem to me that You can satisfactorily reconcile your omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent nature with a world in which to survive living creatures must kill and ingest other living creatures," complained Lucifer.
"That is why I shall sanctify the killing of animals through rituals of animal sacrifice. The children of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, shall each make offerings to me. Cain shall proffer up vegetables and Abel shall sacrifice a sheep. My preference for the latter will shut up all those libtard vegetarians as well as provoking Cain into murdering Abel, thus proving beyond doubt that all vegans are inexcusably evil. I shall order Abraham, latter on, to kill his son Isaac and then, omni-benevolently, replace Isaac with a sheep in the nick of time. In this way, the humans shall know that I want and require them to kill and eat other animals. After each sacrifice, the animal will be mostly eaten by the community and the remainder burnt. When, on rare occasions, the whole animal is burnt as an offering to Me, this shall be known by the word 'holocaust'".
"Will animal sacrifices continue right up into age of sciencyness?"
"No, because Jesus will be the last sacrifice I will require. His crucifixion and death will be entirely analogous to an animal sacrifice and this why He will be known as the Lamb of God – not because he is small, white, cute, and fluffy, but because he will be the last in a long line of ovine sacrifices. Before his arrest, Jesus will tell his twelve disciples over supper that the wine they are drinking is really his blood and the bread his flesh. The Christians who will follow him until that ominous moment when the balance tilts irreversibly in favour of scientism will remember his sacrifice every Sunday by partaking in a ritual known as Communion in which they drink wine that has been transubstantiated into Christ's blood and wafers of bread that have been transubstantiated into His flesh. In this way, by partial reenactment of the sacrifice of Jesus every week, they shall ensure no further sacrifices are needed. There will be a paradox associated with Communion because Christ's death will be seen at once as something terrible to be lamented and something wonderful to be celebrated because His death, Our death, has ensured that all his followers will have eternal life."
"Hold on," said Lucifer. "You told us that you are creating this world so that a particular species to be found within it will both love each other and love You. But it seems You want to keep Yourself hidden from most of them and allow a whole lot of evil to exist in the world. I do get the idea that the world requires a First Cause and that maybe, if everything else is contingent, a necessary being must exist. I get that, in the future, even some sciency humans may think that the world is too finely-tuned to not be explained by You or someone like You. But how can You expect the humans to know You if You provide them with no sense-data at all confirming your existence?'
"I shall plant in the minds of many of them a concept of Myself," responded God pompously. "There shall be in the eleventh century after My death and rebirth a monk called Anselm who shall say that he can conceive in his mind a Perfect Being, a being greater than which none can be conceived, and that, because such perfection entails existence, I must therefore exist. There shall be a later philosopher, Rene Descartes, who shall make a similar argument to be called the Trademark argument. He shall argue that I placed within his mind a conception of Myself as a kind of stamp to reassure him that I am real and created him. There shall be many who lack a conception of God but sometimes a person may undergo a spiritual reevaluation, reconstruction, and come out the other end with a conception of God that he or she lacked beforehand. For instance, such a person may like to conceive of Me wearing a sky-blue kaftan and lounging back on a recliner, with My long white beard plaited and a tumbler of bourbon near at hand, listening to The Best of the Smiths on a Sony walkman."
"It seems to me as though He's working this all out on the fly," said Lucifer to himself. "I'm sure I'd do a much better job if I was in charge. For one thing, I'd create a universe which made at least a modicum of sense.."
A little later there was a kerfuffle in Heaven that we don't have to describe here. After the contretemps had been sorted out, God decided to get down to the serious business of world-building. He changed into His overalls, rolled up His sleeves, and set about the task of creating the universe. On Monday, He said, "Let there be light." On Tuesday, He hurled the sky up into the air. On Wednesday, He filled the hollows of the earth with water, thus making the rivers, lakes, and seas. On Thursday, He flung the sun and the moon up into the sky to orbit or be orbited by the Earth forever after. On Friday, it was the turn of all the animals of the air and sea. On Saturday He introduced the first land animals to the world and sculpted Adam and Lileth from clay. On Sunday, God decided He needed a well deserved break from all this artistic endeavour and so rested. He conjured up a Pacific Island beach, two coconut trees, and a hammock slung between them. Dozing in the hammock with a White Russian in a contingent tumbler close at hand and Kid A by Radiohead playing on his Walkman, God was able to reflect upon the fact that, in Heaven, everything is fine. The Dude Abides.
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