God: The Interview

by Howard Ayno

continue to make your free-will choices.

  ME: This is much too tough for me to understand.

  GOD: Your perfect free-will is my perfect sovereignty. There is no contradiction: they don’t even chafe. Thus the marriage of God’s authentic sovereignty and man’s authentic free-will. There is no conflict, none at all.

  ME: Still, God’s sovereignty is clearly the greater. If he wished, he could have changed all our history by making our average intelligence say 10% greater, or 10% less, both of which would have created vastly different histories—

  GOD: But I foresaw that neither of those would be the best possible future—

  ME: If seas and continents had varied in their content or structure just a little, or climates been different, or if we had circled—not circled—orbited around some lesser or greater sun or suns...if our moon had been smaller or closer...

  GOD: that would have given an inferior future—

  ME: If human nature had been differently consituted, mixed, or balanced—if—

  GOD: These are some of the vastly numbered permutations I had to run through my imagination and choose what my perfect judgment told me was the best—

  ME: So—

  GOD: The multifaceted combinations of choices leading to just one single time-sequenced pathway that became one choice.

  ME: With his choice to press Enter and move it from imagination to actuality, all our free-will acts became God’s sovereign choice. Seems logical. I guess. If there is a God.

  GOD: We thought so too.

  ME: Thus we are able to say of a certainty that we know the best of all possible worlds. This is it.

  GOD: This is it.

  ME: This world and its history are the outcome of God’s only ever infinitely perfect choices and our so often bad ones, all of which he foresaw, yet created us, as we are, anyway.

  GOD: Which makes this world’s history the best possible foreseen by infinite perfection.

  ME: Which is pretty sobering, so far is it from the perfection that must be God if only there WAS a God. What on Earth happened? What do you say we have done with the perfection we must have begun with? How did we somehow wreck things?

  GOD: Do you sometimes choose less than perfection?

  ME: Of course.

  GOD: Then there’s your answer. And you have just sketched the first chapters of Genesis.

  ME: But that’s a myth, isn’t it?

  GOD THROWS BACK HIS HEAD AND LAUGHS.

  ME: Let’s take a break. Interviewing God is hard work!

  00.59.52

  ME: Welcome back. This is God and I’m interviewing him. Another question has been handed to me: “Couldn’t God have made a mistake and been less than perfect at some careless moment in his massively long life?” Doesn’t he sometimes get tired and dozy and...lapse a little? Even once? Wouldn’t that explain this imperfect world?

  GOD: No, and to prove that you are still here.

  ME: Come again?

  GOD: If we had slipped up even once, even for a micro-second, we would no longer be God. Perfect. There would be no point in keeping the human race alive or the Universe running. I would have failed. Ceased to be.

  ME: Oh, what would happen if God ceased to be God? Not that there IS a God. I hope there’s a God. There SHOULD be a God. But there isn’t, that’s obvious—

  GOD: I am God.

  ME: Oh yes, you. If there really were a God and he ceased to exist I guess everything would black out to a vacuum? Awaiting a fluctuation in the quantum vacuum in vain then, because the creator of the principles of quantum mechanics wouldn’t be there to create them, implement them. Because he wouldn’t exist. Therefore neither would we. And you viewers wouldn’t be watching this interview. What would you be doing instead? Oh, what a fun interview this is!

  GOD: Actually it’s impossible for me to make a mistake.

  ME: That’s a relief!

  GOD: In fact, it’s temporally impossible for me to make an eternal mistake, even a minute one. After all, living in eternity, I am the prototype time-traveller—

  ME: Of the type that “if you could travel backwards in time and killed your grandparents, would you then no longer exist therefore be unable to travel back in time to kill your grandparents...?”

  GOD: Not really—

  ME: You should realise that the most eminent scientists of our age are absorbed in pondering such points. Stephen Hawking, for instance, believes some kind of cosmic policeman would prevent any historic alteration. Do you believe that?

  GOD: Yes—me.

  ME: Why grandparents, by the way? You would unpleasantly have to commit twice the number of murders than if your parents. Even easier, Why not your parents when babies in their respective cots? And wouldn’t minussing one of them be sufficient to make you cease to be? Or if one parent grew up and married, would you be half you and the other half...a stranger? Frankly, to all such scenarios let’s say “Perish the thought!”

  GOD: Can we move on. The crowd is gathering and time is short—

  ME: Which brings us to the question “Who made God?”

  GOD: I’ve already answered this—

  ME: But for new viewers—

  GOD: Who made me? I made myself. Surely that’s obvious. I exist from all eternity. I AM WHAT I AM AND I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE. I created myself. I always was. I always will be.

  ME: So there was no one before you?

  GOD: There can’t be. I am all there ever was. Before time was, I AM. I can’t say it plainer than that. No, for me time is like a hall I can walk up or down any time I like. Suppose you are painting a hall and you notice you have accidentally left a bare spot two paces back: how difficult is it to take two steps back and paint over that bare spot? No trouble. Happens all the time. That’s what God can do if He suddenly noticed He had made a mistake say two centuries back. He takes two steps back down Time’s hall till 200 years ago is again present tense and flashes His whitewash brush.

  ME: Simple as that.

  GOD: Well, simple as that for human understanding. Actually, much more complicated in that I am so big that I inhabit all of Time’s hall. I don’t need to step back down because I’m always already there. But now I’ve confused you with a mind-picture of a massive giant crammed back-bent filling a narrow hall with a paintbrush dripping all over the floor as he

  contorts—

  ME: Probably wiping more paint on himself than the walls!

  GOD: Messy God—! No, wipe away that thought— (AND YET AGAIN GOD LAUGHS) Mind you, as cramped omnipotence inevitably flexes his back, the hall’s walls would split and splinter outwards in divergent directions away from each other just like an expanding Universe...(LAUGHTER)

  ME: Then is God anything like HG Wells’ invisible man? If I remember the story aright, all around him people seemed almost motionless as statues while he walked in and out among them, wondering. Then he smelt burning and realised his clothes were scorching with friction because time had enormously slowed down for him and he was moving so fast that no one could see him—

  GOD: Oh, God can move even faster than that! Faster than an infinity of speeding bullets. Faster than the millionth multiple of the speed of light. So infinitely fast that even if he is a rather thin man (which he isn’t), he couldn’t help but be everywhere, all at once, in every inch of Time’s hall.

  ME: And think how easy it would have been for Wells’ invisible man to pick up a brush, dip it in a pot, step two paces down the hall...slosh. No one would even see him do it. Too fast for time, too fast for the human eye.

  GOD: Much too fast—

  ME: God simply can’t make a mistake because he can go back in time and unmake it. What a shame there is no God!

  GOD: Not even go back. I’m always already there. Slosh. No mistake ever happened.

  ME:  Which means that in your entire life God never made a mistake in his treatment of you, dear viewers! Everything he did or allowed in your life was absolute perfection. Not just yours, in everyone’s life. Now that�
�s sure takes some believing. But that must be a corollary of this thesis unless this thesis is as hopelessly wrong as it obviously is.

  GOD: You’ve put it round the wrong way. I have acted toward everyone in accord with my infinite perfection. I did the best I could—the best you humans permitted me. If you had prayed more, had been more holy and liked my values more than Satan’s, I could have done much more for you—much more. But you kept betraying yourselves by rejecting what my Bible says and doing your own will, which is what Satan wants you to do. For a few minutes of the pleasures of sin you have reaped so much terrible distress and pain as you put Satan in charge of your lives, of your world—

  ME: So if we had all been super good and prayed a lot God could have saved that murdered girl?

  GOD: Not just her. All the murders in the world. All I needed was the moral right to act.

  ME: So we by our sinfulness tie up your hands. What a shame we are all so bad! What a shame there is no God! And on that sombre note let’s take another break. My head is still reeling! You’re sure making my brain work overtime!

  As the music fades in God smiles and leans towards me. “You are not far from the Kingdom of God,” he says. I laugh. “Coming from a phony like you, that’s