This is precisely what Olaf Stapledon was driving at when he crafted his own story, envisioning what such a universe and such a god might be like. In Star Maker, we see a creator at work through the eyes of the narrator, a human swept up by forces he cannot comprehend so that he, and other finite beings like him from other planets, may observe the rise and fall of great galactic civilizations, the shaping of the universe itself, and its ultimate destruction. And in a blazing vision, he realizes that the Star Maker makes many such universes, both before and after fashioning ours, and does so precisely in the manner of an artist—a bit more symmetry here, a bit more complexity there.
I was indeed confronted by the Star Maker, but the Star Maker was now revealed as more than the creative and therefore finite spirit. He now appeared as the eternal and perfect spirit which comprises all things and all times, and contemplates timelessly the infinitely diverse host which it comprises. The illumination which flooded in on me and struck me down to blind worship was a glimmer, so it seemed to me, of the eternal spirit’s all-penetrating experience.
It was with anguish and horror, and yet with acquiescence, even with praise, that I felt or seemed to feel something of the eternal spirit’s temper as it apprehended in one intuitive and timeless vision all our lives. Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy. Our broken lives, our loves, our follies, our betrayals, our forlorn and gallant defences, were one and all calmly anatomized, assessed, and placed. True, they were one and all lived through with complete understanding, with insight and full sympathy, even with passion. But sympathy was not ultimate in the temper of the eternal spirit; contemplation was. Love was not absolute, contemplation was. And though there was love, there was also hate comprised within the spirit’s temper, for there was cruel delight in the contemplation of every horror, and glee in the downfall of the virtuous. All passion, it seemed, were comprised within the spirit’s temper, but mastered, icily gripped within the cold, clear, crystal ecstasy of contemplation.
In contrast to the believer’s mental image of the Christian God who loves and cares for His creation and the beings within it, the Star Maker considers the universe to be merely the artful arrangement of spacetime, a celestial block of wood or painted canvas fashioned into discrete chunks of spacetime made up of events that are worthy of contemplation. There is no relationship, no story, no learning, no triumph, no transcendence. There can’t be in a Scripted Universe; it must merely exist. The excruciating theological problem that Christians must face is that this quality of Scriptedness must be exactly the same in a universe fashioned by the Christian God. Such a universe must forever remain closed off from the possibility of anything genuinely new. No unique thought or action, no novel idea, no emergent property, nothing can be allowed in that had not been conceived of beforehand by the deity.
It is clear from Clarke’s and Stapledon’s thought experiments that we humans have serious trouble constructing appropriate models of the universe, models that convincingly describe and explain the existence of the universe and our own existence, especially our ability to think and feel and dream, and our sense of freedom in an open-ended future, without creating unmanageable theoretical and emotional contradictions. We crawl out onto metaphysical tree limbs and saw them off out from under ourselves as we attempt to make explicable the inexplicable universe in which we live.
Sources
Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, “The Star,” was originally published in 1955, and was republished in his collection, The Other Side of the Sky, (pp. 114-119) in 1959 by Signet in New York.
Olaf Stapledon’s novel, Star Maker, was originally published in 1937, and was republished as a 50th anniversary edition in 1987 by Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc. in Los Angeles.