Omnipotence

So, on one of those days where nothing extraordinary happened – you know, one of those days where clocks ticked, birds chirped, software engineers did not write software, water flowed, shouters shouted, hair fell, dogs barked, butterflies flapped, tornadoes tornadoed, buffaloes buffaloed, something a little out of the ordinary happened.

So I was making toast (again) and I dropped it; while trying to answer my phone, whilst juggling three glasses of beer and a newspaper that was partially on fire (again), thanks to what in retrospect was down to poor interior design choices (there was what appeared to a giant magnifying glass in place of what I hoped would be a window, and you know, it sorta set things ablaze), but that’s not what was out of the ordinary. What was out of the ordinary was that the piece of toast I dropped did not land on the buttered side!

Oh, and in a far more trivial incident that is perhaps more correlation than causation, I found myself in conversation with God.

So, in other situations, I would have found myself asking His Munificence questions of significantly greater profundity than the set that I will momentarily Reveal to you. I apologize to you in advance for not asking the most important question you’ll ever ask – how do I ask her out? Unfortunately, it’s a well established scientific fact that any time toast fails to fall on the tastier side, the Universe must bend over backwards to smoothe over this inexplicable wrinkle that would otherwise set off a catastrophic chain of events that would end in the Universe collapsing on itself and disappearing into a glass orb that’s swallowed by an ethereal cat.

The details of this process of self-preservation escape me, but I think wormholes and paradoxes and ephemeral two dimensional aliens are involved. Righty ho, but the point of bringing up the issue of the Universe’s naughtiness is not to show you the Universe’s naughtiness (that’s as much a duh statement as saying that the other queue is always longer. Which it is.) It is to tell you that all this sneaky tomfoolery is also understood to have an effect on any human brain in the vicinity, an effect that’s best described as psychedelic.

Right, now that I’ve got that long winded exposition out of the way, so here’s how the conversation went. I must, again, make an expression of contrition, this time for that God chap – He sounds fairly snarky, and not even in a genteel way like yours truly. It must be that His Jurisprudence is not quite as comfortable with speaking to His minions as I am. I mean, I often speak to the software I write, and my armchair and my prize collection of toothbrushes; I would say I have established, over the course of many years, a fair amount of rapport, or as those of us who like to pronounce all our syllables would say – bonhomie, with my lessers.

“So, God,” I asked His Incorrigibility, jumping straight to the dullest question my cosmically altered state of consciousness could produce, “How can you be omnipotent, when it’s fairly obvious to the densest nincompoop that you’ve made such a shingle-dingled snart-a-slop of this world? You know, suffering, stupidity, cats, taxes and all that.”

God replied, in what I fancied was a well pitched operatic alto.

“O misguided one, like many a great philosopher before your time” – even the hallucinogens coursing through my blood stream (figuratively) could not stop a delighted shudder from travelling up and down my thrilled spine. I mean, here I was being called a great philosopher by His Extravagance Himself.

“.. or after your time..” He continued, only to pause at this point and gently make a sound that appeared to my suboptimally omniscient mind to be a titter. God was perhaps chuckling at His Infallibity. His Brevity was perhaps too profound for me.

“.. have asked the same question. ‘How can you be omnipotent, and yet allow evil in the world’, they thundered. ‘Are you Good, or are you a madman or a tyrant?’ they wondered. ‘Perhaps you aren’t omnipotent at all!’ they blundered.”

“O completely foolish one,” His Loquacity went on, “Here’s what I would call ze voila moment. How it actually works is - ”

Here’s where I had to butt in of course. I was no fan of those last-syllable-skipping-wine-drinking Eiffelmen, and I had to stand up for my bigotry, or be mistaken for a sissy-faced Francophile myself. The horror!

“But God, surely it’s not your phrase, it’s those French who invented tha..”

While God was until that point, and surely afterward as well, merely – I say this with the utmost deference to His Immanence – a disembodied voice; when I interrupted ze voila moment with that choice remark, I could feel a most disapproving glance, fierce in its power to shame and almost maternal in several aspects, directed towards me. I wilted of course. Besides, it had occurred to me that God must have created Frenchmen too, no matter how much of an alcohol influenced decision it might have been.

His Balefulness restricted Himself to just that glance and went on.

“How it actually works is that I’m eternal. It’s something most of you lot fail to account for. The thing with eternity is that it’s a fair bit longer than very, very, very, very long and a bit more after that. And the thing with eternity being so long, O unbelievably foolish Neanderthal, is that my omnipotence is spread a bit thin. Like that hunk of butter you’ve been rationing for years. Wait. Let me clarify that a little. I am omnipotent, but I'm perfectly good as well - omnibenevolent, if you will.
Now to use my omnipotence to exert omnibenevolence - " you may all have heard of the phrase 'a shadow passed across his face', but in this particular instance, it was more of a shadow passing across His voice. ", I need omniscience. ”

“Ask me a question?”

“I just did.”

“Another one then, O staggeringly braindead semi-hominid.”

“What’s your name, then?”

“Aaah” trilled the operatic alto. “I don’t know.”

“What?” I said. At this point, the psychedelics were fading out and I found myself looking around for my piece of toast again. It wasn’t to be found. Instead, there was a baby tadpole that was sticking its head out of the hole that the ventilationary magnifying glass had made in the newspaper.

“Aaah, you see.” His Most Smirkiness went on. “Unfortunately, I'm never perfectly omniscient at all points in time because, as you know, there's a lot of that time thing out there. Ergo, I may often emit the illusion of being insufficiently omnipotent. In fact, if the Other Guy is really to be believed, since Eternity is a bit of an Infinity, I don’t think I’ll ever be truly omnipotent. It worries me that I may never get to answer questions like why humans like to wear digital watches.”
"And smite you lot for it..."

“On the bright side, I do think my name will come to me in roughly three millennia.”

If it weren’t for the fact that I was engrossed with watching the baby tadpole trying to read the news it was sitting on, I’d have been so dumbstruck by this revelation that I’d have been, you know, struck dumb. Instead, I forged on.

“So, in effect, you’re muddling along like the rest of us. And also in effect, you’re under the impression that you’ll have all the answers at some unspecified point in the future?”

“A very terse, but not imprecise summary, I must admit.”

“I think...” I stopped because it was at that point that I found an edge of my piece of toast sticking out from underneath the newspaper-reading tadpole.

It lay buttered side down.

Just another day, you see.