God: The Interview Read online

infinite omniscience—I know everything. The angels do not. If we want to keep Heaven perfect, then all decisions have to be referred to me for my approval. Only my will can be done in Heaven if we wish to keep Heaven perfect.

  ME: That must be stifling for all the angels. I presume you made them with freewill—?

  GOD: I did—

  ME: Then they have freewill but they can’t exercise it! No wonder Lucifer revolted! I would too!

  GOD: Yes, you would. It takes a very disciplined person to submit their will perpetually to another’s, even if it is to an intellect infinitely greater than their own. Soon a third of the angels agreed with Satan and followed him into rebellion—

  ME: Only a third? I’m surprised they ALL didn’t go!

  GOD: Two thirds have remained wonderfully loyal. I am so grateful for their continuing loyalty—

  ME: As you should be! So you threw the dissidents into Hell. That was kind of you!

  GOD: On the contrary, they made Hell for themselves. At first they wanted to stay in Heaven but the faithful angels wouldn’t have them and threw them out.

  ME: I am talking to God who is stressing what a hard job being God is, how badly misunderstood he is by us humans. He is outlining the problems he faces. It seems that thousands of new viewers are joining us all the time! God is very popular! So let’s particularise God’s dilemma for new viewers: God has infinitely perfect knowedge and an infinite imagination. You, as God, ran through your infinitely perfect imagination every possible aspect of all possible futures.

  GOD: True.

  ME: You especially re-ran the ones that result if you choose to implement only the infinitely best possible action at every possible moment.

  GOD: I did.

  ME: You discover what you always knew, that there is only one possible future resulting from your only best-possible actions. But here is a question from a viewer. Let’s say your best-possible future includes—your infinite imagination tells you—a beautiful little girl being tortured to death by her crazy mother on 4 July 1999.

  GOD: Ah. I could give you actual instances, thousands—

  ME: Let’s keep it hypothetical. Now you have a terrible dilemma. Shouldn’t you save that child’s life at the expense of your own integrity? Your infinite imagination shows you in graphic detail every moment of that torture. That child’s screams and pleadings re-echo through your mind. Surely you must do something? Surely an infinitely perfect God would save that child?

  GOD: But I found that would only be possible by intervening in a way that contradicts the free-will acts of all previous generations of all autonomous agents. To intervene unilaterally, against the collective will of the freely autonomous beings I had created, can never be the action of a perfect being.

  ME: But we all want you to fling the door open and rescue that girl!

  GOD: So do I. But you won’t let me do it! You won’t let me rule the human race. You prefer Satan—

  ME: No we don’t! We just want to be left alone—

  GOD: That’s what he wants too! For me to leave the human race alone. So what he wants prevails. He loves watching children die—

  ME: But we don’t!

  GOD: Yes you do. You don’t want me to rule over you. That’s why I am walking to Jerusalem. I’m going there to be tortured to death by you, just like that little girl. You would rather she died than to give up your freedom to choose to love and enjoy evil.

  ME: You must let the child suffer and die?

  GOD: Not me—YOU must! If the whole world submitted to MY rule there would never be a murder—no not one.

  ME: But the woman is crazy. How did you let her get that way?

  GOD:  The causes will be traced back in an unbroken line to the beginning of creation. I could only undo them if I created differently—

  ME: Do it then. Nothing is yet created. That child lives only in imagination. If You vary the causes then the mother can be sane and the child saved.

  GOD: Yes, but that alteration of creation restricts the beings so created.

  ME: So?

  GOD: Well, that wouldn’t be creating to the maximum of my infinitely perfect ability. My creations would to some extent be puppets—restricted when they could have been free.

  ME: But You save that child.

  GOD: But at what cost? I would have created beings with less freewill choice than they could have had and therefore should have had. I am no longer perfect. I have chosen to create something less than my best—

  ME: But you save that child—

  GOD: And in doing so declare that second-best can be better than best. What kind of universe have you ended up with? It is self-evident that God can never choose to do anything less than best. You must let the child die—

  ME: That is intolerable—

  GOD: It is. I know. And the same terrible conflict occurs with every inevitable future horror my imagination showed me—and there are millions of them, millions upon millions!

  ME: But you can’t allow otherwise?

  GOD: I can’t allow otherwise—

  ME: You are the prisoner of your own perfection.

  GOD: I have to be, or the future has no hope. An imperfect God who not only tolerates but creates imperfection is unbridled omnipotence without the stability of an infinitely perfect objective morality. Such could go whimsically in any direction without good reason.

  ME: Yes, God does have a problem—

  GOD: We therefore have to bridle our own omnipotence with the objectivity of infinitely perfect morality. Only the best. The only motto We can act under—

  ME: Even if it leads to this beautiful child’s agonising death.

  GOD: Regrettably, yes.

  ME: Then I think you should resign and let someone with a far better answer run the world—

  GOD: There isn’t a better answer. If someone had one I WOULD resign and let them be God instead of me.

  ME: You would? Truly? Resign and let someone else—

  GOD: But there is no better answer. I am always God.

  ME: Then why create at all? To create is your freewill choice. You are all-powerful. No one can make you create. It is your decision to implement only the best. Think what this means. You and you alone will be ultimately responsible for the entire future you will set in train.

  GOD: Before I created anything I had to take exactly that into consideration—

  ME: Because you did decide to create a world that would become as it now is, you must therefore be responsible for everything that happens in it. Who other than you will therefore be responsible for that little girl’s horrible death. At any point you could have intervened and you didn’t. You bear the full responsibility because you created the original circumstances that followed the course you and you alone set in train that produced that mother and that child and that day—

  GOD: I know, I know. Terrible, the burden I bear—

  ME: You must accept the ultimate responsibility for every rape, every murder, every crime ever committed if you created what your imagination has shown you must come to pass, if you continue to stick unrelentingly to perfection—

  GOD: As I must, I must—

  ME: In fact, how can you call it perfection when it produces such enormous imperfection?

  GOD: The answer is so obvious. It was my responsibility to create the initial perfection, but if other free-will agents choose, unlike me, to act with less than the perfection I created them with, then THEY must bear the responsibility for the outcome of their imperfect actions. Humans cannot blame God for what their actions have produced against God’s will.

  ME: They will not be able to shrug off their responsibility for the murder of that little girl?

  GOD: They are responsible for their own choices—

  ME: Yet, though that has to be true, the fact is, you foresaw their every action. You foresaw every rape, every murder. And You could have created differently so that none of them would happen.

  GOD: But if I did, I wouldn’t be allowing you free-
will so you wouldn’t be perfect and I wouldn’t have created up to the best of my perfection, so I wouldn’t be perfect, so I wouldn’t be God.

  ME: Not that you are. There is no God. Here is a second question: God’s sovereignty and man’s freewill—

  GOD: There has never been a conflict between them. Except in man’s mind. I foresaw every single freewill action of man in my infinitely perfect imagination long before I created man and his free-will.

  ME: So it is not that we think we are acting with free-will what God has actually sovereignly willed?

  GOD: It is that we foresaw in imagination all your future free-will actions. And I knew what I had to choose, what my own perfection dictated, the one single combination that has produced each of your utterly free-will lives.

  ME: I guess it’s not possible for God NOT to know every detail of our yet-to-be-lived out lives?

  GOD: He can’t help it, being everywhere, including the future, we just know everything. Yet we have chosen to let you live. So in my sovereignty, all your previously-known actions become my will. Or else we would cease to let you live. This of course doesn’t mean we approve of all you do, only that our best possible choice (as prisoner of our own perfection) is to allow you to live and