I’ve been a bit busy this weekend wrapping up a design document, so I haven’t had any spare little grey cells for the blog or pretty much anything else. Sorry about that. But the following aphorism did come to mind following a random discussion with Spacebunny:
Einstein said: God “He [God] does not play dice” (with the universe).
Thus spake Vox: “The universe is God’s dice.”
Now, one could quibble with that in at least three fundamental ways, starting with the grammatical, but it nevertheless conveys the essential kernel of my religious suspicions.* “The universes are God’s dice” would be a more grammatically accurate, but less meaningful means of describing it, and in any event, an aphorism is not useful for what it states precisely but rather the mental stimulation it provides.
There is always the danger of seeing oneself in one’s view of God. But I think there have been enough visions of God as designer articulated previously that it’s not a new or self-referential one to posit Him as the ultimate game designer, or even more radically, as one of a series of not-actually-ultimate-but-might-as-well-be-as-far-as-our-perspective-is-concerned game designers. As I wrote in what I considered to be the most interesting element of the Euthyphro discussion – which, naturally, no one even noticed – it is an ironic limitation of our current thinking that we can envision a variant universe next door, and yet we consider the concept of a variant morality-defining Creator God next door to be a logical and conceptual impossibility.
How is that even possible, to say nothing of the basis of an argument against traditional Western morality?
Perhaps that should be the title of my next science fiction novel: “The God Next Door”. Fortunately, and unlike the case with Rebel Moon, this time I’ve already read the related Heinlein novel.
But if one thinks on the concept of a multitude of Game Designer Gods to go with this multitude of universes, one’s immediate thought is to pity the inhabitants of the Romero-God universe. Merely to imagine it is to hear their screams of mad terror echoing through the superstrings.
*Religious suspicions are the crazy things that you suspect to be true but generally have the good sense to keep to yourself. You don’t BELIEVE them per se, but if things turned out to actually be that way, it wouldn’t surprise you very much either.