A Perfect Vacuum (26 page)

NAAD
persists: Perhaps God acts thus, desiring precisely to remain inscrutable to His creation—i.e., nonreconstructible by the logic with which He has provided it. He demands, in short, the supremacy of faith over logic.

ADAN
answers him: I follow you. This is, of course, possible, but even if such were the case, a faith that proves incompatible with logic presents an exceedingly unpleasant dilemma of a moral nature. For then it is necessary at some point in one's reasonings to suspend them and give precedence to an unclear supposition—in other words, to set the supposition above logical certainty. This is to be done in the name of unlimited trust; we enter, here, into a
circuius vitiosus,
because the postulated existence of that in which it behooves one now to place one's trust is the product of a line of reasoning that was, in the first place,
logically correct
; thus arises a logical contradiction, which, for some, takes on a positive value and is called the Mystery of God. Now, from the purely constructional point of view such a solution is shoddy, and from the moral point of view questionable, because Mystery may satisfactorily be founded upon infinity (infiniteness, after all, is a characteristic of our world), but the maintaining and the reinforcing of it through internal paradox is, by any architectural criterion, perfidious. The advocates of theodicy are in general not aware that this is so, because to certain parts of their theodicy they continue to apply ordinary logic and to other parts, not. What I wish to say is this, that if one believes in contradiction,
^*
one should then believe
only
in contradiction, and not at the same time still in some noncontradiction (i.e., in logic) in some other area. If, however, such a curious dualism is insisted upon (that the temporal is always subject to logic, the transcendental only fragmentarily), then one thereupon obtains a model of Creation as something that is, with regard to logical correctness, “patched,” and it is no longer possible for one to postulate its perfection. One comes inescapably to the conclusion that perfection is a thing that must be logically patched.

EDNA
asks whether the conjunction of these incoherencies might not be love.

ADAN:
And even were this to be so, it can be not any form of love but only one such as is blinding. God, if He is, if He created the world, has permitted it to govern itself as it can and wishes. For the fact that God exists, no gratitude to Him is required; such gratitude assumes the prior determination that God is able not to exist, and that this would be bad—a premise that leads to yet another kind of contradiction. And what of gratitude for the act of creation? This is not due God, either. For it assumes a compulsion to believe that to be is definitely better than not to be; I cannot conceive how that, in turn, could be proven. To one who does not exist surely it is not possible to do either a service or an injury; and if the Creating One, in His omniscience, knows beforehand that the one created will be grateful to Him and love Him or that he will be ungrateful and deny Him, He thereby produces a constraint, albeit one not accessible to the direct comprehension of the one created. For this very reason nothing is due God: neither love nor hate, nor gratitude, nor rebuke, nor the hope of reward, nor the fear of retribution. Nothing is due Him. A God who craves such feelings must first assure their feeling subject that He exists beyond all question. Love may be forced to rely on speculations as to the reciprocity it inspires; that is understandable. But a love forced to rely on speculations as to whether or not the beloved exists is nonsense. He who is almighty could have provided certainty. Since He did not provide it, if He exists, He must have deemed it unnecessary. Why unnecessary? One begins to suspect that maybe He is not almighty. A God not almighty would be deserving of feelings akin to pity, and indeed to love as well; but this, I think, none of our theodicies allow. And so we say: We serve ourselves and no one else.

We pass over the further deliberations on the topic of whether the God of the theodicy is more of a liberal or an autocrat; it is difficult to condense arguments that take up such a large part of the book. The discussions and deliberations that Dobb has recorded, sometimes in group colloquia of
ADAN
300,
NAAD,
and other personoids, and sometimes in soliloquies (an experimenter is able to take down even a purely mental sequence by means of appropriate devices hooked into the computer network), constitute practically á third of
Non Serviam.
In the text itself we find no commentary on them. In Dobb's Afterword, however, we find this statement:

“
ADAN
's reasoning seems incontrovertible, at least insofar as it pertains to me: it was I, after all, who created him. In his theodicy I am the Creator. In point of fact, I produced that world (serial No. 47) with the aid of the
ADONAI
IX program and created the personoid gemmae with a modification of the program
JAHVE
VI. These initial entities gave rise to three hundred subsequent generations. In point of fact, I have not communicated to them—in the form of an axiom—either these data or my existence beyond the limits of their world. In point of fact, they arrived at the possibility of my existence only by inference, on the basis of conjecture and hypothesis. In point of fact, when I create intelligent beings, I do not feel myself entitled to demand of them any sort of privileges—love, gratitude, or even services of some kind or other. I can enlarge their world or reduce it, speed up its time or slow it down, alter the mode and means of their perception; I can liquidate them, divide them, multiply them, transform the very ontological foundation of their existence. I am thus omnipotent with respect to them, but, indeed, from this it does not follow that they owe me anything. As far as I am concerned, they are in no way beholden to me. It is true that I do not love them. Love does not enter into it at all, though I suppose some other experimenter might possibly entertain that feeling for his personoids. As I see it, this does not in the least change the situation—not in the least. Imagine for a moment that I attach to my BIX 310 092 an enormous auxiliary unit, which will be a ‘hereafter.' One by one I let pass through the connecting channel and into the unit the ‘souls' of my personoids, and there I reward those who believed in me, who rendered homage unto me, who showed me gratitude and trust, while all the others, the ‘ungodlies,' to use the personoid vocabulary, I punish—e.g., by annihilation or else by torture. (Of eternal punishment I dare not even think—that much of a monster I am not!) My deed would undoubtedly be regarded as a piece of fantastically shameless egotism, as a low act of irrational vengeance—in sum, as the final villainy in a situation of total dominion over innocents. And these innocents will have against me the irrefutable evidence of
logic,
which is the aegis of their conduct. Everyone has the right, obviously, to draw from the personetic experiments such conclusions as he considers fitting. Dr. Ian Combay once said to me, in a private conversation, that I could, after all, assure the society of personoids of my existence. Now, this I most certainly shall not do. For it would have all the appearance to me of soliciting a sequel—that is, a reaction on their part. But what exactly could they do or say to me, that I would not feel the profound embarrassment, the painful sting of my position as their unfortunate Creator? The bills for the electricity consumed have to be paid quarterly, and the moment is going to come when my university superiors demand the ‘wrapping up' of the experiment—that is, the disconnecting of the machine, or, in other words, the end of the world. That moment I intend to put off as long as humanly possible. It is the only thing of which I am capable, but it is not anything I consider praiseworthy. It is, rather, what in common parlance is generally called ‘dirty work.' Saying this, I hope that no one will get any ideas. But if he does, well, that is his business.”

(This is the text of the address delivered by Professor Alfred Testa on the occasion of the presentation to him of the Nobel Prize, taken from the commemorative volume
From the Einsteinian to the Testan Universe;
we reprint it here with the permission of the publisher, Academic Press, Inc.)

 

Your Highness. Ladies and gentlemen. I would like to take this opportunity—use this privileged podium—to tell you about the circumstances that led to the rise of a new model of the Universe and marked out, in the process, a cosmic position for humanity radically different from the historical. With these portentous words I refer not to my own research but to the memory of a man no longer among us, the one to whom we owe this bit of news. I speak of him because that has happened which I most hoped would not: my research has eclipsed—in the eyes of my contemporaries—the work of Aristides Acheropoulos, to such an extent that a historian of science, Professor Bernard Weydenthal, therefore an authority whom one would have thought qualified, recently wrote in his book,
Die Welt als Spiel und Verschwörung,
that the magnum opus of Acheropoulos,
A New Cosmogony,
was no scientific hypothesis but a literary fantasy in whose reality the author himself did not believe. By the same token, Professor Harlan Stymington, in
The New Universe of the Game Theory,
expressed the opinion that in the absence of Alfred Testa's work the idea of Acheropoulos would have remained only a loose philosophical concept, on the order of the Leibnizian world of pre-established harmony—a model that the precise sciences have of course never treated seriously.

So, then, according to some I took seriously what the creator of the idea himself did not; according to others I placed on a sound scientific footing an idea that was entangled in the murky speculativeness of nonempirical philosophizing. Such erroneous views necessitate an explanation, one which I am in a position to provide. It is true that Acheropoulos was a philosopher of nature and no physicist or cosmogonist, and that he expounded his ideas without mathematics. It is true, too, that between the intuitive image of his cosmogony and my formalized theory there are not a few differences. But above all it is true that Acheropoulos could have managed very nicely without Testa, whereas Testa owes everything to Acheropoulos. This difference is far from trivial. To explain it, I must ask your patience and attention.

When, in the middle of the twentieth century, a handful of astronomers took to considering the problem of so-called cosmic civilizations, their undertaking was something completely marginal to astronomy. The academic community looked upon it as the hobby of a few dozen eccentrics, which are to be found everywhere, therefore in science, too. That community did not actively oppose the search for signals coming from such civilizations; at the same time it did not admit the possibility that the existence of those civilizations could in any way influence the observable Cosmos. If, then, this or that astrophysicist ventured to declare that the emission spectrum of pulsars or the energetics of quasars or a certain phenomenon exhibited by galactic nuclei was evidence of purposeful activity of inhabitants of the Universum, not one of the respected authorities in the field considered such a declaration a scientific hypothesis meriting investigation. Astrophysics and cosmology remained deaf to the whole issue; this indifference obtained to an even greater degree in theoretical physics. The sciences of the time held, more or less, to the following schema: if we wish to know the mechanism of a clock, the fact of whether or not there are bacteria on its cogs and counterweights has not the least significance, either for the structure or for the kinematics of its works. Bacteria certainly cannot influence the movement of a clock! In precisely the same way it was considered that intelligent beings could not interfere in the movement of the cosmic mechanism, and hence that that mechanism should be studied with complete disregard for the conceivable presence of beings in it.

Even were a luminary of the physics of that day to have countenanced the possibility of a great upheaval in cosmology and physics, an upheaval, moreover, involving the existence in the Universe of intelligent beings, it would have been only under the following condition: provided cosmic civilizations are discovered, provided their signals are received and from these is gained entirely new information about the laws of nature, then, yes, in such a way—but only in such a way!—might there come about fundamental modifications in Earth's science. That an astrophysical revolution could take place in the
absence
of such contacts—more, that the very
lack
of such contacts, signals, manifestations of “astroengineering,” could initiate the greatest revolution in physics and radically change our views of the Universe—this certainly never entered the head of any of the authorities back then.

And yet it was in the lifetime of more than one of those eminent scholars that Aristides Acheropoulos published his
New Cosmogony.
His book fell into my hands when I was a doctoral candidate in the Mathematics Department at the University of Switzerland, the very place where Albert Einstein once worked as a clerk for the patent office, in his spare time engaged in laying the foundations of the theory of relativity. I was able to read this little book because it had been put out in an English translation—an abominable translation, I might add. Moreover, it was a title in a science-fiction series whose publisher printed only such literature and no other. The original text, as I learned much later, had been subjected to an abridgment practically by half. Undoubtedly, the circumstances of this edition (over which Acheropoulos had no control) gave rise to the opinion that although he had written
A New Cosmogony
he himself did not take seriously the theses contained in it.

I fear that now, in these days of haste and ephemeral fashion, none but a science historian or a bibliographer will open the pages of
A New Cosmogony.
An educated man knows the title of the work and has heard of the author; that is all. Such a man robs himself of a unique experience. It is not only the substance of
A New Cosmogony
that has remained as fresh in my memory as when I read it twenty-one years ago, but all the emotions that accompanied the reading. It was a moment like no other. Once he has grasped the scope of the author's conception, and in his mind there takes shape, for the first time, the idea of the palimpsest Cosmos-Game with its unseen Players who are perpetually alien to one another, the impression will never leave the reader that he is in communication with something sensationally, staggeringly new—and at the same time, that here is a plagiaristic repetition, translated into the language of natural science, of the oldest myths, those myths that make up the impenetrable bedrock of human history. This unpleasant, even vexing impression derives, I think, from our regarding any synthesis of physics and the will to be inadmissible—I would even say, indecent—to the rational mind. For myths are a projection of the will. The ancient cosmogonic myths, in solemn tones, and with a simple-hearted innocence that is the lost paradise of humanity, tell how Being sprang from the conflict of demiurgic elements, elements clothed by legend in various forms and incarnations, how the world was born of the love-hate embrace of god-beasts, god-spirits, or supermen; and the suspicion that precisely this clash, being the purest projection of anthropomorphism onto the blank space of the cosmic enigma, that this reducing of Physics to Desires was the prototype the author made use of—such a suspicion can never be altogether overcome.