Where God Went Wrong

Chapter 3: A Brief History of Getting It Wrong

The history of theological criticism in the galaxy is, like most histories, considerably longer and more embarrassing than any of its participants would prefer.

It begins—insofar as things that began approximately four billion years ago can be said to have a beginning—with the fundamental discovery that the universe required an explanation. This discovery was made independently by an estimated seven thousand three hundred civilizations across the known galaxy, at various points in their development, and each civilization treated it as entirely novel and somewhat alarming. This tells you less about the intelligence of the civilizations involved than about the nature of the discovery itself, which has the quality of being simultaneously obvious and unprecedented every single time someone makes it for the first time.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy addresses this subject in an entry that has been revised forty-three times and currently runs to eleven thousand words, not including the appendix, the counter-appendix, the appendix to the counter-appendix, and what the editorial notes describe as "a spirited ongoing disagreement between the current senior editor and a former senior editor who is technically dead but left very thorough margin notes." The relevant portion reads, in part:

THEOLOGICAL CRITICISM (galactic history of)

It is a well-established fact that every civilization capable of asking questions will, eventually, ask the question where did all this come from and was it anyone's fault. The question takes different forms in different cultures—some frame it cosmologically, some mythologically, some in terms of pure auditing procedures—but the underlying inquiry is structurally identical across all known civilizations, and has been for as long as civilization-level inquiry has been possible.

What happens next varies considerably.

Some civilizations answer the question with a god or gods. Some answer it with physics. Some answer it with a large snake, a cosmic egg, a dream, a sneeze, a committee, or a particularly decisive Tuesday. Some answer it with "we don't know," which is considered by many scholars to be the most sophisticated answer available and by most ordinary beings to be the least satisfying one possible, and therefore the least likely to end the conversation.

Theological criticism is what happens when a civilization that has answered the question with a god decides to review that answer in the light of subsequent experience. The subsequent experience, in most cases, raises concerns.

Making God the subject of a critical review is either the bravest intellectual act in galactic history or the most elaborate customer complaint ever filed. Both framings have merit. Neither has, as yet, produced a refund.

God, it should be noted, has never responded to a critical review. This makes God the first author in the galaxy to successfully resist all critical engagement—a record that several subsequent authors have cited as the professional ideal to which they aspire, and which none of them has come close to achieving, primarily because they, unlike God, are still around to be asked about their work at literary festivals.

The review, however, has continued without response. It has continued for a very long time.

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The Jatravartids of Viltvodle VI represent the galaxy's oldest continuous theological criticism tradition, which is notable primarily because the Jatravartids' theological tradition is also the galaxy's oldest continuous theological target. They have been critiquing the same creator for an estimated three million years. This gives their scholarship a depth and specificity of grievance that more recently theological civilizations can only aspire to, and also a certain fatigue around the eyes.

The Jatravartid cosmological tradition holds that the entire universe came into being when the Great Green Arkleseizure sneezed. This is considered, even by Jatravartids who have had time to think about it, an inherently undignified origin story, and has generated three million years of sincere theological engagement with the question of what the Arkleseizure could possibly have intended. The Great Green Arkleseizure did not, to anyone's knowledge, intend anything in particular. The sneeze was apparently involuntary. Divine intervention came, as it so often does in galactic history, with very little warning and a great deal of mucus. This has not simplified the theological situation.¹

Jatravartid theological criticism has therefore spent three million years attempting to derive meaningful design intent from an incident that, by all available evidence, lacked it. The resulting body of scholarship is approximately as long as several other planets and contains everything from the Sympathist school (which holds that God's design failures are forgivable because God was ill at the time) to the Intentionalist school (which holds that the sneeze was deliberate, making God either very clever or very committed to an implausibly long game) to the Reformist school (which holds that the proper theological question is not what God intended but what God has done about it since, and which has been waiting for God to do something about it since approximately the Precambrian).

The most significant Jatravartid controversy—the so-called Great Schism of the Thirteenth Nostril—erupted over the eschatological question: how will the universe end? Orthodox theology holds that the Great White Handkerchief will descend at the end of time and sweep everything away. The reformist position, which triggered the Schism, proposed that the Handkerchief was a metaphor. The orthodox position responded that metaphors were the thin end of a very long theological wedge and that once you started treating the Handkerchief as a metaphor you'd end up treating the sneeze as a metaphor, and then you'd have nothing at all, and what would be the point of three million years of scholarship if it turned out God was just a rhetorical device?

The debate has not been resolved. The Handkerchief question remains technically open. Both factions continue to publish. The publication rate has, if anything, accelerated.

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The Philosophers of Kria represent a different approach, which is to say: they decided to settle the question definitively, which is the kind of ambition that looks better in the prospectus than it does three thousand years later.

The Kriaan tradition is structured as a series of successive proofs, each replacing the last. The first—produced by the philosopher Kreeth approximately three millennia before the galactic standard present—demonstrated, to the satisfaction of the contemporary Kriaan academic community, that God existed. Kreeth died before the counter-proof was produced. This was considered, in retrospect, fortunate for Kreeth, though the Kriaan academic community remains divided on whether this is the kind of thing you should say about a philosopher whose timing was this convenient for his legacy.²

The counter-proof arrived two hundred years later, demonstrating that Kreeth's proof relied on a definition of "existence" that was circularly dependent on its own conclusion. Once the circular definition was replaced with a coherent one, the proof collapsed. The counter-proof also demonstrated, in a supplementary paper the author clearly found more satisfying than the main text, that God did not exist. This conclusion held for approximately sixty years, at which point it was shown that the replacement definition of "existence" was itself subtly circular, and the proof collapsed in the other direction.

This pattern continued for three thousand years. At last count, thirty-seven definitive proofs of God's existence and thirty-nine definitive proofs of God's non-existence had been produced, peer-reviewed, celebrated, and subsequently dismantled. The surplus of non-existence proofs is, Kriaan philosophers note, technically significant—though they note it in the tone of people who have learned not to invest too heavily in a two-proof lead.

The terminal development arrived with the philosopher Teel, who produced a proof that proof was impossible: specifically, that any logical system sophisticated enough to address the God question would necessarily contain axioms that could not themselves be proven within that system, and that this limitation applied with particular force to questions about entities that transcended the logical system in question. Teel's proof has not been successfully dismantled in six hundred years. The Kriaan academic community considers this either a triumph or a warning sign and has not, after extensive debate, been able to determine which.

The result is that most Kriaan philosophers have gone to the pub, where they have been ever since, engaged in what they describe as "empirical inquiry into the phenomenology of thirst" and what everyone else describes as "drinking." They are, by many accounts, very interesting company. The questions they are asking have not changed. The setting is simply more honest about what is on offer.

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The Blagulon Kappans, by contrast, avoided the formal proof problem entirely by addressing their theological inquiry to an object they could examine directly.

The object was a piece of blu-tack—approximately thumb-sized, found in 1743 Kappan Reckoning behind a radiator in the municipal administration building of Blagulon's second-largest city. Its discoverer, a filing clerk named Sev Orrath, described it as "unusually present for an inanimate object," which is the kind of description that tells you considerably more about the observer than the observed, and which was subsequently adopted as the foundational theological text of what became the Kappan Presence Tradition.

The Guide's entry on the Blagulon Kappans is notably cautious in its framing:

The Blagulon Presence Tradition holds that the piece of blu-tack discovered by Orrath in 1743 is, or contains, or in some sense is adjacent to, a divine presence. The tradition is careful not to specify which of these is true, on the grounds that such specification would constitute the kind of doctrinal overreach historically responsible for most of the galaxy's religious violence, and the Kappans would prefer not to do that.

The Tradition has produced eleven thousand years of practice organized around the blu-tack without producing, or apparently needing, any statement about what the blu-tack is. Practitioners report that this is fine. The blu-tack, consulted on the matter, has not offered clarification.

The primary theological controversy concerns whether the original blu-tack—housed since 2214 in a climate-controlled case in the city's Presence Museum—is still the relevant object, or whether it has been irreversibly altered by centuries of handling and atmospheric exposure. The reformist school holds that the divine, if present, would be resilient to atmospheric conditions. The orthodox school holds that this is exactly the kind of assumption one should not make about the divine on insufficient evidence, and that the climate-controlled case is therefore not excessive caution but minimum theological competence.

What began as an idle discovery behind a municipal radiator has, over eleven thousand years, stuck around with a persistence that even the most secular observer would have to admit is impressive—and which the blu-tack itself might admire, had it opinions, which the Kappan tradition considers an open question it is in no particular hurry to resolve.³

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Eleven hundred civilizations have produced formal theological criticism traditions. Four hundred and twelve have produced anti-theological traditions—organized movements to dismantle previous frameworks—which have, in most cases, functioned structurally as theological traditions themselves, complete with canonical texts, recognized authorities, ceremonial practices, and bitter internal schisms. Twelve civilizations have produced both simultaneously, which several scholars have described as "admirably consistent" and which most participants have found exhausting.

Forty-three civilizations have independently arrived at the position that the universe is best understood as an administrative error, generated the paperwork to formally lodge a complaint, and then been unable to determine where to send it.

Seven civilizations concluded that the question of God's existence was a category error—that "God" was not the kind of thing to which "exist" applied—and spent several thousand years producing increasingly sophisticated frameworks for articulating this, before eventually acknowledging that they had produced, in attempting to describe the non-existence of the divine, some of the most elaborate theological literature in galactic history, and taking a few years off.

Every one of these traditions asked the same question. Dressed in different costumes. Conducted in different buildings. Written down in different scripts on materials ranging from pressed bark to quantum-encoded light. All the same question.

Who is responsible for this?

Not in the legal sense, though theology and law have historically kept offices in the same building and occasionally borrowed each other's methodology without attribution. In the deeper sense: was this made, and if so by whom, and if so why, and were they available to discuss it. The Jatravartids asked it of a sneeze. The Kriaans asked it of formal logic and then of logic's limits. The Kappans asked it of blu-tack. Others asked it of fire, of mathematics, of the space between stars, of the empty center of an atom, of the moment between sleeping and waking when the self seems briefly negotiable.

All the same question. All the same need.

All, without exception.

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With one exception.

The Soluun of what is now designated Outer Western Reaches Sector 7 developed, in the years corresponding roughly to 40,000 BCE by Maximegalon reckoning, a remarkable civilization. They were efficient. They were organized. They had solved, in sequence, every material challenge their world presented—resource allocation, social harmony, long-distance communication, the reliable prediction of weather, the elimination of preventable disease, the optimization of agricultural yields, the equitable distribution of goods, the management of conflict through mediation structures of impressive sophistication. By every measurable standard, the Soluun civilization was not merely functional but excellent.

They never asked the question.

Not because they lacked the cognitive capacity—their records indicate an intelligence that compares favorably with any civilization that did ask it. Not because they lacked the leisure—their optimized systems generated more unstructured time than most civilizations in galactic history. Not because they lacked the discomfort that usually drives the question—their civilization appears, by all available evidence, to have been genuinely comfortable.

They simply never got around to it. They had other things to organize.

Their records run for approximately forty thousand years and then stop. Not dramatically. Not with the signature of catastrophe, invasion, plague, or war. No final entry describing a crisis. No evidence of external cause. The last item in the Soluun administrative archive, translated approximately, reads: Quarterly resource allocation complete. All systems nominal. No outstanding items. The entry is time-stamped in a way that suggests it was followed by another entry that was never made.

The Guide's entry on the Soluun is one of its shorter ones, and its brevity has itself become a subject of scholarly discussion:

SOLUUN (THE)

A now-extinct civilization of the Outer Western Reaches, notable for having achieved the highest recorded material optimization of any known civilization, and for having, apparently, nothing to say about it.

The cause of the Soluun's disappearance is unknown. Their records contain no account of it. The last word in their archive is, depending on the translation, either "complete" or "finished"—in a language that had no word for "incomplete," and apparently saw no need for one.

Expeditions to the Soluun's cities—which are entirely intact, perfectly maintained by automated systems that continue to function without instruction, and entirely empty—report a consistent quality to the experience that several researchers have independently attempted to describe and none has described to their own satisfaction. Not horror. Not pity, exactly. Something in the vicinity of recognizing the shape of a question that was never asked, visible only in its outline—a kind of pressure in the space where something would have been.

The automated systems keep running. The quarterly resource allocation continues, on schedule. All systems, as far as the systems can determine, remain nominal. There are no outstanding items.

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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy closes its entry on the history of theological criticism with the following observation, which the editorial board has voted twice to remove and twice failed to remove because no one could agree on a replacement:

The history of theological criticism is, at bottom, the history of beings attempting to have a conversation with something that may or may not be listening, in a language that may or may not be adequate for the purpose, about a question that may or may not have an answer.

What is remarkable is not that so many civilizations have failed to resolve this conversation. What is remarkable is that none of them—with one exception, and the exception has its own lesson—have stopped trying.

Even the ones who went to the pub are still there. You can find them. The question will be on the table.

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The question does not care how sophisticated its framing is. It does not require formal logic or divine sneezing or climate-controlled cases. It surfaces, eventually, in everyone who has ever looked at the available situation and felt, with the unreasonable confidence of the deeply puzzled, that the situation must have a reason—and that the reason, somewhere, is listening.

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At the time of publication, the author had not yet realized what he was actually writing about.