Posted by Gremlin [12.255.181.7 - 12-255-181-7.client.attbi.com] on 12 July 2002 at 19.01.25 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: You've made a stance posted by Andy on 12 July 2002 at 15.39.59 ZuluTime:

Where physics are concerned, there's no worship involved. You can't be particularly sycophantic or humble before physics. Physics aren't an object. Physics are just a sort of categorisation system. And not in any pantheistc way.
     Throw a ball at a certain angle, and it ends up at a certain point in three-dimensional space. That point can be predicted by differential calculus, in most cases. But the calculus doesn't force the ball to land there, and it's not just an excuse for why it lands there. The calculus is just a tool for working out where the ball will go, and how it got there.
     You can't worship that. It hasn't got any intelligence.
     Strike that. You could worship physics, but it would be a pretentious waste of time. Worshipping physics would neither change the ball's destination, nor your own after death. Physics aren't deities.

As for novels: books do write themselves, after a fashion. And the characters can demand that you insert yourself into them. Kurt Vonnegut accomplished that with Breakfast of Champions. And I've done similar things with the S97S.
     When you write a book, you don't know what's going to happen. Some people try to know what's going to happen before they write it, but it never works out. You can outline a plot, and work out what the ending will be; but you can't work out what the book will be until it's written.
     The characters you create do what you want them to do. Then the situations do what you want them to do. Then you have a character which you technically control in a situation which you technically control talking to another character which you technically control; and regardless what sort of planning you had for all three, you start playing a game in your head where you have to guess wat CharacterA will say next, what CharacterB will respond with, how that will affect the situation, and what the effects of the situtation will do to the characters.
     And yes, it gets far more complex when one of your characters is a deity, or a writer, or whatever. I've written a book about a novelist writing a book about a novelist, and AmWayed all of that down by four levels or so. And I've written a different book in which over a hundred different characters--each an individual with a specific personality--were in the same place at the same time, reacting to the same situation in different ways.
     So if that's what a deity is, I can empathise.
     However: I've got two critical concerns, if that's the case.
     First of all, there's complexity. My characters are limited in that they can't actually be any smarter than I am. They can begin that way: I can have a character who knows things which I dont know. But, by the end of the book, that character will either be simply described as knowing things which I don't know, or he'll know things I didn't know when I began, but had to learn in order to finish the book. And that's fine by me, of course. I like writing and I like learning. If I can create a decent character and learn everything it has to know in order to finish the story, then great: the story gets finished, and I walk away knowing at least as much as the character does.
     Then I look at the world in general. And I realise that any deity who would create anything so remedial would be a moron. The bible again. We know the bible is fictional. No deity qualified to create anything as complex as a website would create light four days before creating stars.
     The only way this deity could be that idiotic and still have created anything would be if everything were a work in progress, and rewrites were somehow impossible. I could, I suppose, create a character named Lucifer as a protagonist, and later plottwist him into a devil. With the story already underway, it would be difficult to alter the backstory to reflect that. Instead, I'd have to come up with a clever way for it to have happened.
     Then I could suddenly decide that Lucifer was banished to hell, and that all the characters who didn't follow certain rules would end up there. Granted, I'd be the one making those rules, and changing them at will; and it would all be purely for entertainment value. But then: it would all be for entertainment value.
     I've looked at the bible as a novelist, and considered the possibility that it's a sort of deity's autobiography. It even makes a degree of sense that way. We make these people in our image, but these people will regard no other deities before me. If this deity is updating its little Book of Life for the benefit of the other deities--its audience--and if its creations regarding no other deities before itself is some strange sort of preternatural copyright measure, then it almost makes sense.
     Almost.
     It even almost allows for omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and predestination all at once: I can do whatever I like with a book, I know everything going on at any given instant, I exist through my characters in all places at all times, and I already know how the book will end. But have my characters got free will? Only inasmuch as my characters are somewhat diluted versions of myself. Only to the extent that every character's actions and reactions follow a quick what-would-I-do format: if a car slides on the ice, and I'm driving, I attempt to regain control; if I'm not driving, I react by considering what the driver is capable of; if I'm walking on the sidewalk and observe the sliding car, I find the whole event entertaining; if I hear about it on the radio, I take a different route to avoid the rubberneckers. The free will of my characters is limited to my own free will in each situation.
     And, of course, I could write about an atheist. I have, to an extent. I could have a given character be convinced that he was nothing more than a character in a novel, and another character demanding any evidence supporting that little hunch. Although, personally, if the atheistic character suddenly started believing in me, I'd be a little disappointed in him.
     I have to consider that, if there were a deity, it might not want people to suspect that it exists.
     So complexity is a factor. I've seen nothing describing any deity which suggests that it's qualified to create me. That sounds narcissistic, but it's not that simple. People think that way all the time, about lots of simple little things. People ask what idiot designed a given product, and why they didn't bother making the damned thing work correctly. Looking at the universe as a product, I have to wonder what idiot would build it this way, and why anyone would expect me to subscribe to its service.
     The deity of the bible, specifically, is an idiot. And other described deities aren't much brighter.
     Second: if this deity created the universe with the goal of entertaining other deities--which actually sounds more like Clash of the Titans or The HeavenMakers than the bible--then we have to regard this deity as nothing particularly special. The story it's written notwithstanding, this deity ends up being just another guy in another world whose job is to write stories. And, as much as people idolise writers and filmmakers and rockstars, the vocation isn't really a defining characteristic. A given writer might be smarter than a given McLoser, but not because he's a writer; he could work at McDonald's and still be the same guy. In fact, to a huge degree, a writer is nothing more than a slacker who hides it well.
     So if this deity exists, and is nothing more than a writer entertaining other deities, then I'm not particularly impressed. And, of course, I still have to wonder what story the deity is in. Beyond the bible, I mean. What deity is writing about the deity who writes about us, to entertain the other characters in the superdeity's story, and who is the superdeity's story being written for. It sounds circular at first glance, but if you give it any real thought, you see that a deital writer must by definition be a character created by its upline.
     Of course, if you want to be truly circular, imagine a deity writing about the deity who writes about you writing about a deity who writes about the deity writing about the deity who writes about you. A neat little deital loop. I won't rule that out completely either, though, as with all of this, no evidence supports any of it.
     Of course, if people are just characters in a deital novel, then souls would be nothing more than the audience's memories of them. Maybe people are resurrected or reincarnated in FanFic somewhere.