Omnimpotence

Oh, crap, not again, I thought, as the unwitting construction worker sprouted feathers about his balding head.

It is not as fun as you would think, being omnipotent. It sounds nice on the surface, naturally, but I've come to realize that the problem is one of value. When everything you think becomes a reality, everything is equally… well, worthless.

I wasn’t always like this.  I wasn’t even like this last Tuesday. And I'm not even sure what changed. This strange turn of events has given me, however, some insights that would never have occurred to me before. For example, the scriptures say that on the seventh day God rested. Very doubtful.  More likely, they simply didn’t have the word “retired” back then.

Here is what I suspect really happened. The first few days were a mess. Total confusion. Things happening seemingly at random, with no explanations or logic forthcoming. Then God (or whatever He called Himself) caught on to the pattern.  Just like I did. “I'm doing this,” he realized. “My thoughts are taking form.”  He probably chuckled then. And again. And then laughed aloud, whatever ‘aloud’ means before there is air and sound. He tried it out deliberately a few times, giving us wonders like the giraffe and the platypus.

Then it got boring, and eventually disturbing. Until it happens to you, you can’t really appreciate it. No boundaries, no challenges, no needs. It makes you wonder whether you are really alive, or simply a figment of your own imagination. That is not a conundrum, you know. “Cognito ergo sum” and all that, but just because you are does not mean you are alive.

So this is my guess. God spent the first few days making stuff – light, the world, artichokes, whatever. Then he realized what I now realize, that the stuff of the universe is just putty. It takes whatever form you want, so any chunk of it is basically indistinguishable from any other. You don’t like the balding construction worker with feathers sprouting out of his head?  Fine - he becomes a scantily-clad supermodel. Or a sunset. Or an ironic allegory.  It doesn't matter without any rules.

The funny thing is that normal people talk about this all the time. “We are all connected,” they say. “There is a one-ness to the universe.” “Life is what you make of it.” “It is all relative.” “Expectation forms reality.” Yeah, sure, it sounds deep when you don’t take it to an extreme, but the truth is unsettling.

So what then?  God comes to realize that nothing is really any different than anything else, so he decides to play a game. This is a sad attempt to establish meaning in a fundamentally meaningless universe.  But it's not like He has anything else to do, right? The game is kind of like stacking up dominoes in a particular pattern, and then tapping the first one to see how they all fall. Except in this case, the dominoes think and feel, and can right themselves to fall again. The dominoes love, cry, and desperately seek higher meaning. They want to know their place in the universe. I wonder, do individual molecules of clay wonder about their place in the bigger blob?

As for the pattern, He lays them out as simple things, but with His best guess as to what will produce a respectable higher culture, an enlightened species acting as responsible stewards for a given environment - a species that might even awaken someday to the true nature of the meaningless universe. If it were me, I would have laid out lots of patterns, different starting arrangements in different environments to see which ones work out the best. It's not like there is a shortage of planets, after all.

And then He sits back and watches. Sure, He can change the fate of individual dominoes by picking them up and shaking them around, but why pick out some instead of others? They are all made of the same clay. The point is what happens to the whole picture, not an individual domino. If you have to keep rearranging the game pieces midstream, it means you didn’t set it up right in the first place. In the rules of the game, it’s a loss. So on the seventh day - you retire. Let the universe unfold as it will. That is as meaningful as anything else you might come up with – which is to say, not at all.

Not to change the subject, but here is an interesting side note: I can hear people thinking. It took me by surprise the other day, and I felt rather guilty about it. At first, anyway. I had been wondered what was going through someone’s mind, and, well, there it was. Unintended voyeurism. But then I also realized that it hardly made a difference. What is privacy to a piece of clay?

But what really convinced me that it was okay was when I began to hear actions. The funny thing about hearing actions is that you don’t need to be omnipotent to do it; you just have to pay attention. So my reasoning went like this: if actions are the true measure of person, and they are – for lack of a better description – in the public domain, then listening to thoughts, which are only gossamer figments of potential futures, is not really a big deal.

Then I heard someone praying. I had thought it would sound different than other thoughts, feel different, but it doesn’t. It’s ironic, really, that every thought is a prayer.  So if God were inclined to respond to prayers (which, from my perspective, would defeat the whole point of setting up the dominoes in the first place), how would He decide which ‘prayers’ to answer? Would it be the artfully crafted, premeditated, I-am-thinking-on-my-best-behavior-now-O-Lord prayers, or would he be more responsive to the spontaneous, uncensored, this-is-what-I-am-at-the-core-of-my-being thoughts? Or would He simply listen to people’s actions to decide what they really thought was important?

But I digress.

The big question is this: what do I do now? And this is my conjecture. Well, not so much conjecture as desperate hope. Here are the circumstances.

One of the little lumps of clay does something funny. It changes water into wine, perhaps. God doesn’t care at first, any more than I do when the fire hydrant blinks and quotes Shakespeare. After all, I can’t control my thoughts all the time either. But then He realizes that it never would have occurred to Him to do that, nor was it part of the original rule set.  So if not Him, then who?

And so God starts to pay closer attention. Yes, indeed. Something else, someone else, is changing the rules of the game.

What happens then? I have no idea. Will something come around and remove all the extraneous feathers from that poor construction worker’s forehead? That would make for a happy ending, for the alternatives are rather depressing. Am I God, reawakened into uselessness? Am I an emergent Consciousness, come unaware into a vacated universe? Am I simply a dreamer, taking a momentary break from my rules of self-constraint? How… lonely.

Oh, look. Another construction worker. Or is that the same one?