Peeking beneath the Diary skirts

I am often asked: why the Diaries and where does the inspiration come from?

Well, to be more accurate, I am never asked, but I thought I'd attempt some kind of answer all the same.

My overarching ambition is to make sense of the universe. I know I won't, but the speculation is fun.

I think there are three big questions.

(1) Why is there anything at all? I don't think existence is inevitable, so why is it all here? And where did it come from? My own guess is that just as +1 and -1 add to nothing, so our universe has its negative mirror image which came into counterexistence just as ours did, so as to balance the books. And I suspect will both collapse back to zero together.

(2) Why is there consciousness? It is weird and not inevitable either, and not necessary for complicated life. For example, I don't really think that wasps are conscious, but they have pretty complicated lives. Nor is it confined to humans as anyone who has made eye contact with an animal will understand.

(3) Is there a God? I can answer this one at once. Of course not, at least not the God of the bible. If we can think it up, then it almost certainly does not exist. Haldane was right. The universe is not stranger than we know, it's stranger than we can know. Ergo, any God we can conceive of is plainly wrong.

I guess this is where the Diaries come from. What kind of entity might run the universe?

Well, problem the first is one that it is not of the universe. He (we'll stay with the masculine thingy) may have created the universe and everything in it, but (by all accounts) did not create himself at the same time. So he was "somewhere else" at the time the universe came into being. And when I say, came into being, I'm taking space and time too, not just matter. Now if he's not of this universe, that is, outside our spatial dimensions, and outside of our time, he's going to have a lot of problems interacting with it.

Let's get this straight; we're talking physics here. When the Red Sea parts, there's an awful lot of pressure on water molecules trying to establish their level again. If they don't then there is a counter force. Not a cosmic "Don't you dare, 'cos I say so". No, it takes the expenditure of energy, in this universe, to hold water back.

Then there's the whole problem of the consequences of intervention. I mean, you can pray that plate tectonics go on hold for a while, so you and your family don't get drowned in a tsunami. But think about the buckling of the Earth's mantle that happens elsewhere as a result, and the innocents who get killed there, so you do not.

No, there's not a sodding thing that God can do that won't have horrendous counterconsequences.

Which means that prayer must go unanswered (which, I suspect, is pretty well the experience of all of us).

Note that none of this is a disproof of God. He may well exist. I don't think so, but I'm not anti-religious. My father-in-law is a clergyman, so there. In fact, if you are determined to believe in an all-powerful entity you can't be proved wrong. The world and universe could easily have been created in the last millisecond, and we with all our memories with it (and the fossil record too etc etc).

But my goodness, why would anyone bother? And that is a good question. So we could praise Him? I think He should get a life.

The thing that always puzzles me is why people think that God is good. We might jolly well hope so, but where is the evidence? Take nature. I'm afraid the "All things bright and beautiful ..." model just doesn't hold water. The Victorian view of "Nature red in tooth and claw" has it about right. Fact is, it's pretty horrid. There is not a prey animal that dies of old age. Sooner or later it gets torn apart. There is not a predator that doesn't die of injury or starvation in it's turn.

Creationism? Intelligent design? Give me a break. For every intelligently designed butterfly there is an intelligently designed tape worm.

It is the appearance of design and order that has folk thinking about designers and, well, benign and wise fathers. Alas most people don't grasp how, with enough time, very improbable things can not only happen, but become inevitable.

Remember that thing about monkeys, typewriters, and the complete works of Shakespeare? Well, I've done the calculation. If we treat upper and lower case letters as different, we have 52 of those, plus some punctuation, let's call it 60 things for convenience.

OK, so how unlikely is it, selecting letters and punctuation at random, to come up with the four characters "The ". Well, the number is 60 raised to the power 4, which is just a whisker under 13 million to one or about the same as winning the UK National Lottery. Extend this to a five letter word plus space like "Hello " and the odds become 46 billion to one. So you can see that the complete works of Shakespeare are not going to pop out of the monkey factory overnight.

But factor in infinity. Prepare for strange things. For given infinity, not only has the complete works of Shakespeare actually been generated this way, it has been generated, wait for it, an infinite number of times.

As I understand it the universe is not actually infinite, but who knows? However, it has been around for a long time, and will be around for a long time yet. And that means that strange things can happen. For example, the dinosaurs vanished about 65 million years ago. If you had been around since then (not a long time in Earth terms) and bought a lottery ticket a week, as a lot of folk do, you would have won the lottery about 200 times by now.

Of course evolution is not random, though I'll skip the logic for that now. However, it is fed by small random mutations. That is where the argument about odds and time becomes important.

Anyway, after enough rambling to bore even me, my conclusions are these:

- We may have been created by God, but the chances are he is "hands off" and has to be.
- He is not hugely preoccupied by the thought of being praised by a bunch of naked apes who do, actually, not look at all like him.
- He is not hugely preoccupied by sin or virtue.
- Having created the universe and the laws that drive it, he just kind of lets it go, and maybe has a look now and then when bored out of his skull.
- He is more than a little paranoid, and often wonders about where the f*ck he comes from and wonders how many layers of deity exist above him and in what kind of infinite regress.

I'll leave you with this, which I think is fun, and should put us in our place:

From William Goodhart's play Generation:

The Soul of Man,
Despite his pride,
Is rather odd,
A toy balloon
Blown up by God,
Or, strictly speaking,
The air inside,
And that is leaking.