Genesis
(The Prequel)
In the Beginning, God was bored.
It was not a boredom of a lazy Sunday afternoon, just after one finishes cutting the grass and it's another three hours until dinner and there's nothing good to watch on TV.
It was rather the boredom of being locked in solitary confinement for ten years in a dark cell with nothing to do and no one to talk to and no sounds to listen to and nothing to see but the dim outlines of a bed and a toilet bowl.
Only, for God, it was several orders of magnitude worse.
He existed. Not much else could be said. There was not even a universe around for Him to exist in, let alone a toilet bowl for Him to contemplate.
Being all-powerful was great, wonderful, fantastic, and all that, but, there being nothing around to be all-powerful with, He was seriously pressed for something to do.
By definition, being all-knowing meant that He already knew everything (duh!), so He really didn't have anything to think about, except the obvious, and the obvious thing most pressing on His mind was that He was bored.
He had existed an infinite amount of time before (non-time, really, as time had yet to be invented), and it looked as though He was going to exist an infinite amount of non-time to come.
Given the past history of the nonexistence He existed in, nothing looked too promising for an exciting future.
Being all-wise, He knew that His current state of boredom was emotionally unhealthy. But having already lived an infinite period of non-time as He did, He occasionally experimented with unhealthy emotional states.
What else, after all, was there to do?
He had whiled away a great deal His nonexistent time twiddling his great, majestic, Godly thumbs, waiting for something great to happen, which, of course, He knew to be silly, because (being the only thing existing), He knew that, if anything great were going to happen, He would have to be the one to do it.
For a while, He contemplated creating something large, perhaps on a galaxy-like scale, but had a lot of difficulty seeing the point of doing so. Since he would know it perfectly anyway, and know its every action and complete history even before He created it, why bother? What difference would it make, philosophically speaking, in the long run?
And, for God, all He really had was the long run.
He became discouraged after this. Out of sheer boredom, just for the ducks of it, He briefly caused His own nonexistence. This failed to satisfy Him much either, so He brought Himself back shortly thereafter.
"Enough of this!" He finally said to Himself. "What I need," He thought, "is a challenge. Something I won't know the outcome of in advance. I need companionship, yes. But what I really need is, a surprise!"
Being omniscient, He knew that to do this would involve creating a paradox, but, being all-wise as well, He decided that He could live with this without any deep emotional traumas.
All He had to do was come up with a good way of surprising Himself.
To achieve true companionship, He would need to create something just as, if not more, unpredictable than Himself. Better yet if it had to have His level of omniscience and omnipotence. An exact duplicate of Himself would never do, of course. That would just result in two of himself being just as bored as one. No point in talking to Someone when You already knew everything they would ever have to say.
To not be bored with this new omniscient being (or beings), God decided that it or they would have to evolve independently of Himself, with minimal guidance.
And -- He would have to not be able to predict exactly how this evolution would take place.
Tricky to do, being omniscient and all, but, being all-wise and all-powerful, He thought of a way to do it.
He would create and extremely large thing, something He would call a Universe. It would be so complicated that the tiniest change in any portion of it could affect the actions of the whole. Being omniscient, he could of course figure out all the changes that would occur from the initial change. Because this new Universe thing would be so large, however, it would take Him just as long to figure it out as it would take to happen in real life.
So, God manipulated the laws of reality just so. The resulting laws would be capable of evolving another all-powerful being. He just set up the rules, though. He could never guarantee that an all-powerful being would evolve. He could never even guarantee that life would even be created.
But, it was the best He could do, given His objective.
God looked at the new laws of reality, and saw that they were good. With a snap of his great, majestic, Godly fingers, he set the Universe and the rules of existence into motion with a bang!
And He hoped to Himself that He wouldn't regret it.
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