View source for Research:MDem/5.2/1655Br and-it-was-good

= In the beginning... =

<div class="bop academic">
In the beginning there was God. <ref name="f"/><br/>
All the universe was one. There were no objects. There were no people.<br/>
There were no atoms or molecules. There were no substances. There was no temperature.<br/>
There was no sight. There were no words. There were no observations. There was no way, truth, or life.<br/>
All the universe was one object. There was nothing but everything and God.<br/>
God was in the universe, and God was the universe.<br/>
All the timelines and narratives of the cosmos were stuck together.

Then God tried to do something. Anything.<br/>
But it was impossible to do anything without space or time in between all the everything.<br/>
God sought perfection. But by basically no standard of what is perfect can anything without the ability to move, speak, act, or be achieve such a goal. We might almost begin to think such a being was nonexistent.<br/>
God moved, taking the first step in the entire universe, and with it, accidentally birthed the Demiurge, who for the rest of time would be his nemesis. <ref name="n"/>

Matter began to move. The Demiurge was in matter and the Demiurge was matter.<br/>
The universe expanded into separate objects and the glow of separate objects from one to another brought history. Quarks came together and formed churning knots that formed atoms. Gases came together and formed disks of planets and stars. All pairs of things next to things were drawn into a mutually-shared future.<br/>
The Demiurge saw it, and it was good.

As all the systems of planets formed on separate timelines, weaving their own histories, God was not happy.<br/>
God wanted the universe to function together and share a single destiny, glued together in harmony as a single creation.<br/>
The Demiurge told him it was impossible. For separate objects to exist, there had to be relativity, with every object hurtling along on a separate trajectory of time until they collided. Otherwise it would not be possible for anyone to move or speak.<br/>
God did not like the inefficiency of there having to be thousands and thousands of galaxies which had nothing to do with each other and might produce nothing further. But, as a being of pure spirit locked out of the realm of separate interacting material objects, he had no real choice but to accept the Demiurge's words.

The earth developed for nearly 4 billion years — forty hundred thousand {{em|thousand}}.<br/>
During the second twenty hundred million, tiny green threads in the water produced so much oxygen the oceans and iron rocks couldn't hold it and all the other microbes started dying. <ref name="e"/><br/>
God was furious.<br/>
"These tiny green threads must be punished," God said.<br/>
The depths of the earth growled, and in fifteen hundred million years the world froze over, leaving the greedy green filaments desperately peeking out of ice sheets.<br/>
"I'm not sure this is actually helping," said the Demiurge.<br/>
The catastrophe came too late, and most of life on earth had already died. Worse, cyanobacteria were still getting along just fine beneath the ice.<br/>
"I can fix this," said the Demiurge. "Would you like me to?"<br/>
"Fine," God begrudgingly agreed.<br/>
The Demiurge moved. The pieces of reality shook. The tens of different new kinds of life slowly emerging in the depths took in the coldly sizzling air and formed themselves into threads, sponges, and a dizzying array of new unnecessarily-specific algae.<br/>
"This is an Apicomplexan," the Demiurge explained. "This nasty little thing has a blood filter made of four algae that ate other, and a worm around {{em|it}}. And this one, the Cryptomonad, contains a red alga that once contained a cyanobacterium."<br/>
God was bored. He was not really a fan of slow, directionless evolution. All this branching timelines stuff again. Everything the Demiurge touched was cursed by relativity. And what God really wanted was a single cohesive design.

For the next 500 million years, shellfish would swim the thawing oceans. Trilobites, weird trilobites, weirder trilobites, snails, shelled squids. And a couple of tiny worm-fish with the first spinal cords.

It would take a long time before Chordate animals would finally become able to flop across the bottom of the sea with their fins. God was champing at the bit. The imperfections of material life were infuriating. Really? Billions and billions of years into the age of the sun before anything remotely interesting was about to happen? How much heat had that wasted? Was physics good for anything?<br/>
"You don't want to rush these things," warned the Demiurge. "I told you, the universe is made of constantly-colliding timelines. It's basically impossible for any of that to keep to a schedule."<br/>
"I am not holding back any more," God said. "I have had enough of these billion years of squishy water things. All they ever do is swim around and eat each other. I hate shellfish."

God shoved aside the Demiurge, and through the earth pierced a great stone wall the size of many cities, inside of which sprouted up a vast diversity of new trees, shrubs, fungi, and other Eukaryotic ground cover. A number of floppy beach fish flung out of the sea flapped about inside. At one point a ridge of rocks would thrust through the mossy ground and throw a couple of the mud-fish onto different sides. Then another dividing ridge cropped up. Different populations developed. Strange new forms and taxonomic families began to appear. The history of animals was running at many times its previous speed.

"God, stop this. You're putting things far beyond their natural limit. You don't know what's going to happen," the Demiurge said.<br/>
"And who are you to tell me what I can and can't do?"<br/>
"Physics. I'm all of physics. Telling people what they can't do is most of what I do."<br/>
"Really," God scoffed. "Laws of physics — hmpf. You've never known the power of a great idea. Watch as I show you the grandeur of a reality infused with a dream."

The great enclosed park land sprouted forth more and more strange varieties of trees, in many sizes and colors, with vibrantly beautiful fruit. The animals inside became stranger and stranger. Raptor dinosaurs. Squatting whiskered things with fangs. Mammoths. Bear-dogs. Horses. Foxes. Birds of paradise. Intelligent snakes with limbs. Wolf-people. Gigantic horse-bats. Dragons. Unicorns. A badger shaped like Triceratops. Tree octopi. Sharks that live on mountains. Shrimp-mice. Lethal deer-bears. {{em|Whale}} deer-bears.<br/>
Everything was out of control. And God saw it, and it was good.

"God, you have lost your mind," the Demiurge said. "Nothing good can come of this."

God put the giant sky-piercing wolf around the borders to guard the park, and came down to each of the major regions of animals.<br/>
"Lions, my creations," he said in the form of a silky, ethereal lion.<br/>
"Dogs, my most loyal servants," he said in the form of a shining winged jackal-dog, the primordial Tengu.<br/>
"Lizard people," he announced as a glittering dragon to a varied assortment of dog- and lizard-looking kobolds.<br/>
"We can create perfection on this earth if you are willing to follow me and accept the knowledge of good and evil."

The animals were utterly uninterested. They walked past the trees of knowledge not having any idea what they had. A tiny stag walked up the side of the tree. A wyvern started chewing up its root.<br/>
The animals moved around in nature. They hunted each other. The smarter ones were cooking animals in fires.<br/>
A couple of the wide variety of animals went extinct. A few more species appeared.

God kept trying to reach the animals, and command them to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.<br/>
But the animals wouldn't budge, as they had no need for such knowledge.<br/>
Should anything try to harm them, it was enough to either snarl or run. What they couldn't run from they could maul, and what they couldn't attack they could shelter from in herds. The animals valued their lives only to the end of their days in a carnivore's jaws, and simply lived on through to the next patch of grass or pile of seeds. One day, a fenghuang flew down onto the knowledge tree and tasted the fruit, and became so horrified at the daily happenings in the garden that it flew out over the wall and never returned.

God sighed. The patterns were always the same. "This is all just cyanobacteria over and over again."<br/>
The Demiurge, straining to push back out, remained patient. "The problem is that you always try to tell the animals what to be rather than trying to understand them on their own level."<br/>
"And what would happen if I did that? All any of these living things can imagine is to eat, sleep, and fight."

God was disgusted with animals. He wanted to create the greatest thing, the most perfect thing. He wanted the world to go on. To progress. To become something better than ever before.<br/>
But animals had no interest in that. They just kept... existing, and reproducing themselves. They just did the same thing over and over. God could not understand why animals were so content with such a pointless existence. Why spend all your time doing basically nothing when you have the power to create?<br/>
The animals had more power to create anything than him. God was at a loss as to why they weren't discovering the corners of the earth and building futuristic cloud cities.

"All things in this universe operate through particular transformations," the Demiurge explained. "The three parts of aqua regia dissolve gold. In grey azoth, the two parts of aqua fortis assemble red rust." <ref name="a"/><br/>
"Oh, alchemy!" God said in excitement. "I can work with that. That's really just how you transform matter back into me."<br/>
"You really are not getting this."

God returned to the Garden of Genesis, his perfect park. Several stages of evolution had already happened, however small. There had been Eukaryotes. There had been chordates. There had been amphibians, crocodilians, dinosaurs, and mammals, as well as all the much weirder crown groups. {{em|Land narwhals that look like horses! Who ever would have thought that was possible.}}<br/>
He pondered what kind of method he could use to perfect and transform animals without simply dividing them some more and making more of them. He needed a formula that everyone could follow to transform animals into morally-relevant beings.

God came down to one of the cat-people living in the scrub biome as a silky white lion, bearing a holy sword glowing with soft white flames.<br/>
"You are a creation of the one and only God. Take this, and whenever you see another creature attack one of my creations, you will kill it and everything of its will belong to you."<br/>
God had had his eye on that pesky wyvern chewing on the truth tree for some time now. The lion-man struck the winged snake through its throat, and would soon process its thick hide into battle armor. God saw it, and it was good.

"God. What are you doing?" the Demiurge asked in fear.<br/>
"I thought about what you said," God explained, "and I think this is the only thing they're likely to listen to."<br/>
"God. No. You can't fix animals by telling them to kill things. That's what they've been doing already. Animals cluster into family units and they kill anything that threatens them. That's what animals already do."<br/>
"No, this time it's different," God argued.<br/>
"Why do you think there's anything different about this?"<br/>
"Look," God motioned.

Within a couple generations, some of the more intelligent animals had formed their families into tribes. Each was strictly nonviolent on the inside, although it would quickly kill any other tribe that broke its own rules. The tribes were now arguing about which one had the right to control the behavior of all animals.

"Well, I suppose you made a little progress," the Demiurge conceded. "But look at what you've created. The thing you actually want, you've created twice, and now it will have to destroy a perfect copy of itself and crush everything good about it in order to exist."<br/>
"You have too little faith in me," God quipped.<br/>
"In creating love, you've paired it with necessary hatred."<br/>
"You're so negative. Surely my various creations will one day learn to put aside their differences and simply be friends. Everything can be overcome by an act of will."

Time passed. More tribes emerged. The ordinary animals continued to move about and perpetuate themselves as they always had. The tribes sought out the tree of good and evil, although for the express purpose of learning how many beings they were permitted to kill and which tribes were the most deserving of power. As each group of animals became more good the same became more evil. The tribes fought nasty wars to determine who would be king and able to make laws over all the tribes. A great number of dragons were killed, as beings with no desire to follow the rules.<br/>
To test his progress, God combed through the garden for another fenghuang. The bird accepted the fruit of truth. And once again, it flew over the wall in terror.

God looked over his creation. It was horrible. The creatures he had brought into this world to all live in harmony, fox next to rabbit, wolf next to lamb, lived their days lying to each other, degrading each other, and oppressing each other. Each measure they invented to keep anyone from committing sin only seemed to hurt someone. This creation was unholy. It was not good, honest, or pure.

"I am going to have to invent a new approach to morality," God said.

God searched through the garden to find the only creature which had not yet been corrupted. There were many animals which had not developed advanced self-awareness, but few of them seemed innocent. Dogs? They were too easily distracted. Orcas? No, despite there being three species that walked on land, they were already close to living in a tribe structure, and could probably be lethal when they were that big. The fenghuang, maybe? They were definitely smart, and unlikely to commit evil acts. Would a race of fenghuang people be able to redeem this poisoned world? God thought about all the potential candidates a bit too hard, and then his attention fixed onto one wandering by — the monkey.

"Monkey, my creation," God said. "This world is corrupt because everyone has unhealthy attachments. All the animals falsely believe that whatever they have claimed or conquered they will have forever. You have to save this world by teaching them to think carefully about whether all their actions will cause harm, and to immediately abandon paths of resistance and meditate so they can come back to me."

The monkey did not entirely understand, but was more than happy to take the opportunity to investigate new things and get into trouble. On entry into the territory of lizardpeople it managed to teach them the upsides of doing nothing well enough to push the tribe of wolffolk to brand them all as traitors and attempt to slaughter them. No appeal to the wolffolk being nice would fix any of it. The wolffolk only turned on their own and spilled more blood.

Fortunately there was another distant relative of the monkey hanging around, which looked at least a bit smarter.<br/>
"Human, my creation," God said. "I must confess that I have made a mess of things. No, let's be clear, my child made a mess of things; I never intend to do any wrong."<br/>
"That is a terrible apology," the Demiurge said out of view, only to be swiftly ignored.<br/>
"Human. I have tried many things to teach animals to live in harmony. I have taught them to seek the mandate of heaven. I have taught them about unhealthy attachments. I have given them knowledge. But you must know that nothing is simple. Every way I try to teach beings to live in harmony, it always ends in blood. So I will keep my recommendations small. You must teach everybody to love each other. You must not kill. You must unite all self-aware beings into one people. You must teach everyone to take the side and the actions that would allow everyone, should they leave this world, to ascend with each other to the same realm of acceptance and forgiveness. I am the creator of this universe. I am the final idea. I am the pursuit of harmony, improvement, and perfection. I am the place you want to be."

God directed the humans to the tree of good and evil. He did not push them to gain knowledge. He was reluctantly starting to understand that forcing his will on the world would not result in any ability to work with its pieces and make change. Humans, however, were relatively big on the concepts of love and empathy, and gaining knowledge, wished to use their knowledge to follow what God proposed.

God looked back on his smoldering, miserable park. The three-humped rhinoceros had tried the truth fruit, and determined that all sapient beings were worthy of goring. Fenghuangs had a evolutionary cousin that preferred to live in miserable unjust places and eat dead bodies. Humans were having to hide out to avoid being slaughtered by the wolf emperor. Off in odd corners of the garden, the human lineage was differentiating into... elves, orcs, halflings, and giants? This had really gotten out of hand. This experiment had gone on for too long, and it was time to end it.

God took a deep breath, concentrated his energy, and teleported the Garden of Genesis off the mortal plane into the afterlife.

However, such a fast and drastic change to reality created a problem.<br/>
"God, you can't just go accelerating things faster than the speed of light. I told you, you really need to study relativity."<br/>
The air and terrain that once surrounded the garden had been violently ripped at the seams into a black hole.<br/>
"Oh," God said. "I'd better fix that."<br/>
In a matter of days, the distorted invisible horror shredding bits of air and soil into burning rings had been paved over with a bunch of new nondescript air and grass. Not that it came fast enough to stop the band of humans running away at full speed from thinking that this object was some kind of gigantic blazing messenger sent by God to possibly kill them if they did anything wrong.

A few days into the humans' journey, God came down in the form of a shining human.<br/>
"Humans! Be not afraid. That was an error in your universe created by my child, the material world. She is a false god."<br/>
"God," the Demiurge said. "None of that is true. You just performed an impossible and terrifying feat that would have taken me billions and billions of years." <ref name="bh"/><br/>
"And that is why it's better for them to abandon you and believe in me. I have the power to change this world. There is still hope."

Over the next 300 million years, humans spread to various corners of the earth. A few other creatures accidentally let out of the garden came with them, such as a handful of fenghuangs, dragons, and unicorns. The latter two would eventually be found by medieval cryptid hunters. The former would hide themselves in the far reaches of China, Persia, and Uzbekistan.

Outside the Garden of Genesis, the first evolution of life had gone much more slowly. Many of the same shapes of animals emerged again, although many did not, and there were a few new variations. The most surprising and perhaps embarrassing of these is that there was already a new batch of various hominids wandering around and God really had no reason to have already created humans.

God looked down on his last scrap of creation, a mostly godless world. The world was steppe; the world was scrub. A great variety of huge fuzzy things roamed the earth. Each small cluster of humans seemed to join not around the concept of a creator but around their own concept of the sacred character of particular earthly things. Lightning. Tides. The sun. The secret anger and mercy behind disease. This was... strange, but at least it wasn't getting people killed. God perplexedly accepted the new pagan religions, and allowed people to form together around anything that would actually join them peacefully instead of violently. God saw it, and it was mediocre; it was just okay.

The earth warmed. Many of the giant fuzzy things disappeared. Groups of farmers joined together near rivers off the Mediterranean Sea. A number of tribes started squabbling about "true commandments" and which tribes got to take each other's cities based on "belief" and "old laws". Another group of people started arguing about leaders and "prophets". People becoming aware of a god was almost more trouble than them believing in forces of nature, or not at all. God was tired.

"You created this," the Demiurge reminded him. "You told people to form civilization through morality, and I tried to tell you that different civilizations will each do it on different timelines and fight each other to be the true one. You can't play one thing at a time. It's all relativity."

The following centuries and millennia were a mess. People's already-garbled oral histories got chewed up through several different languages. The rulers of great empires seized Christianity from the people and used it to justify conquering neighboring tribes and taking slaves. Christian kings and church owners abused people. Protestants and Pilgrims emerged. A bunch of wars and conflicts raged between Protestants and Catholics such that by the time someone tried to explode the government people almost couldn't remember what side anyone was on and just started burning scarecrows of the attacker because he was a bad dude. The British empire used the wars between Protestants and Catholics as an excuse to try to expand England and exterminate Ireland. Chinese emperors who had never heard of Christianity fought for hundreds of years over the always-dividing kingdoms of China, still convinced they had cracked the cosmos and it was on their side. Africa and the expanding spectre of Britain were barely staving off wars by trading slaves.

God tried again and again to get his message through and put everything straight through the churning maelstrom of history.<br/>
"People of this world. I am love. I did not create this world to bring endless wars. Abandon your trust in earthly emperors. Powers and principalities are bad. The meek will inherit the earth!"<br/>
But it was largely futile. Almost every sacred and mythical text boiled down to being about emperors, and everyone always seemed to pin the causes of war and violence on other people-groups being corrupt and evil.

Society raged on. Civilizations smashed into each other and grew over each other. All the kingdoms and republics of Europe scrambled to take their own piece of Africa, and covered the continent in imperial borders. The tribes and halves and sister colonial powers of North America were smashing into each other. European royalty and remaining nobles were smashing into each other. All the human empires were crashing and imploding and colliding into a single disastrous war.

"This is terrible," said God. "We really need to find some way to punish them."<br/>
But it seemed like nothing was as horrifying as any of the things humans created themselves.

Except.<br/>
"There is only one way to punish them," the Demiurge said.

God looked down on the fringes of China and Korea and he saw a strange new sect of people mobilizing everyone to fight off the empire of Japan. And in Vietnam. And in that weird cluster of thirteen border Russias around Russia that shouldn't have made any sense. They had taken out the earthly emperors and the evil hand of the Russian Orthodox church, unifying all the people once held under the boot of the Russian empire while leaving the church leadership chopped up into isolated chunks.

Seeing the power of the three red armies of southeast Asia to protect their people from the invading forces of Japan, God allowed the Demiurge to come down to Mao and convey the new covenant.

"I am the Demiurge," said the sum of all patterns in the universe. "It is time for the age of moral kingdoms to end. You must purge the world of all empires and religions."<br/>
"I don't know," said Mao. "Isn't that a bit extreme? Our current agenda is just to overcome the nationalist party and expel the imperialists. Whatever angry voices you leave out of the discussion are bound to come back to bite you."<br/>
"Of course," the Demiurge said. "Take all the time you need. We {{em|are}} talking about repairing the countries of the world, not gratuitously destroying things."<br/>
"I guess we're in agreement," said Mao. "But I see just one problem in all this. Nobody is going to believe you're real. People believe all kinds of things now, but in the future? If everything fits together through its internal parts and interactions, then where exactly would you being conscious fit in?"<br/>
"Don't think about it too hard," said the Demiurge. "As long as someone actually understands all my patterns, they will have my power. You have nothing to worry about as long as the math works out."

The Demiurge returned to God.<br/>
"So, we're locking into this now. You've ceded control, and humanity will be at the reins of its own destiny. How do you feel about that? Do you think you can handle it?"<br/>
God was unexpectedly calm. "They {{em|were}} quoting Hegel, who's one of my favorite philosophers."<br/>
"Let me guess, because everything he says is basically about you?"<br/>
"Right on the mark. But also, it's his optimism about everything growing and changing, every day becoming better than it was yesterday."<br/>
"So you aren't the same constant thing you've been for eons, and you admit you aren't perfect."<br/>
God thought for a moment, hesitant. "No. I am the last thing at the end of all things, but whenever anything else great comes before me, I have another lesson to learn."

The creator and the world-god watched as the people of the Second World built republics, hammered together industries from nothing, put everyone in houses, gave crumbling rural areas education, produced a bunch of engineers, drew out plans for their futures, and stayed standing against external empires even under great pressure and strain. The final fenghuangs and homa birds hidden deep in the mountains of China and Uzbekistan saw light in the world, and ascended through the world-barrier back to heaven.

And God saw it, and it was good.
</div>

== Footnotes ==

<references>
<ref name="f">This is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to real-world historical events and anecdotes are coincidental. I wrote Bible fanfiction to prove a point. You're welcome.</ref>

<ref name="n">In the original context of the word, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis Nemesis] embodied the concept of fortune or consequences, potentially the kind that would befall an overly proud hero. There's hardly a more appropriate word to aim at God here.</ref>

<ref name="a">Alchemists used many symbolic names or images to refer to chemical substances, varying from text to text. Azoth was a cosmic idea thought to exist in or [https://periodic-table.rsc.org/alchemy/80/mercury  used to represent] mercury. Aqua fortis was a name for nitric acid. Aqua regia was a name for a mixture of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid. In this mythical story, of course, the two gods that constitute parts of the world know exactly what elements exist in each substance; they choose to speak poetically because it sounds stylistically better.</ref>

<ref name="bh">There is a particular, somewhat complex formula used for calculating the evaporation time of black holes. For [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Primordial_black_holes_infographic.jpg primordial black holes], that takes a very long time, on the order of many billions of years once the black hole is any bigger than a drop of water. I am not sure if that applies in the same way to stellar black holes that would be closer to what I described.</ref>

<ref name="e">"All the other microbes were dying" is not much of an exaggeration. Approximately 80% of all species on earth died in this period.</ref>
</references>

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[[Category:MDem v5.3 entries]]