An interview with God

(The God the Indiana politician Richard Mourdock knows is so different from mine. I am nearing completion of a novel in which physicists at the huge CERN collider near Geneva discover a particle, created by God at the Big Bang, whose sole purpose in God's design, is to, upon its discovery, reverse the universe. What follows is a chapter from that book, whose working title is "Bookends." Russell Hartnett, a newspaperman, is a principal character in the novel.)

By RUSSELL HARTNETT
Special to The Houston Chronicle
Attn: Op-Ed Editor

On  Day Three of Earth's new existence, it is time that somebody interviewed God.

The interview will commence in a moment, but first, some background.

Yesterday, on global television, the learned Dr. Reyes Hernandez of Cal Tech by way of Fort Worth, Texas, said his latest wise thing. He remembered how Albert Einstein was famous for inventing thought experiments, which helped him visualize the dense physical systems he was trying to understand, and which enabled his 1905 breakthrough that resulted in the Special Theory of Relativity. To help see our present situation, even if only a teeny bit better, Dr. Hernandez said he was undertaking his own thought experiments.

Thus: my own thought experiment – an interview with a chief executive whose cat is out of the bag, who has nothing left to lose – takes me to the office of God, which is, of course, the universe. I could not see him, nor did he speak, but when I said, "Good morning, God," inside my head I sensed his reply: "Hello." It did not echo, and it did not have Biblical heft; it was an everyday baritone, on the businesslike side.

"God," I asked. "What is going on here?"

"It's very simple," God said.

"So daVinci was right," I said, "when in the 16th century he said, 'Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication' . . . "

"Yes," said God. "Many bright individuals have remarked on the essence of simplicity in the universal design. Albert Einstein said, 'When the solution is simple, God is answering.' I appreciated that, but . . . "

God sighed. "Einstein was among the first to show that men were starting to know too much. After that, it has all gone very quickly."

"So you can tell me what has happened," I said.

"Yes and no," said God. "We must go back to the beginning."

God described the beginning, "what you call the Big Bang," he said. He described the incredible instant, in which the universe and all the elementary particles of physics were created. But I got the feeling that he was telling me only what we already knew, as if he were reading out of a high school science textbook.

"Can you go into greater depth?" I asked.

"You wouldn't understand it," he said casually, providing journalism with the greatest headline of all time:

" 'You Wouldn't Understand It' – God"

There was a brief silence, in which I sensed God was enjoying the headline he had made. Full disclosure: before the interview, I had developed evidence to believe that God was a playful deity. And now to find he had a journalism streak. But then, it made sense. If all of us were created in his image, then he must be a little bit like all of us.

"There is, however," he said, "one heretofore undisclosed detail you need to know. Actually, I should not say, 'undisclosed.' It has been disclosed to you in its own way. You will recognize it the instant I say it."

"How could I?" I said.

"It is in your nature," God said.

He said he had assembled all the elements necessary to create the Big Bang, with the exception of one element without which the project could not move forward. That element, he said, was the controversial Higgs boson, the vital element that physicists believe imbued all the other particles with mass.

"But at the time," he said, "I did not call it the Higgs boson. I called it the Beelzebub boson."

"Beelzebub," I repeated, slowly. "Like Satan. Or the Devil."

"That is correct," God replied.

"Well, wouldn't you just know it," I said. "You are saying that this element was in the hands of Beelzebub, It was his property."

"That is correct," God said.

"And he would not let you have it."

"Not without something in return," said God, his voice steady.

"So you had to bargain for it," I said. "My God! "You made a deal with the Devil."

"That is the case," said God, unapologetically.

"Of course! The Devil has always been with us!"

"Thus you have known all along, because – "

"Because it is – he is – in my nature. He is as old a story as you." I tried to see God, but I could only see green fields, people, mountain ridges, sky, clouds. And something else. I could see Earth as the entire heavenly body. Heavenly by God. Body by Beelzebub. And as I watched, I saw clouds of numbers, in bright metallic colors, swirling and streaming and streaking around and between all objects in view. I could not discern if they were real, or only in my thoughts.

"The Devil, Beelzebub, he is the monster that Cuilly saw," I said. "He is in me. He is in us all. And if we are in your image, then he is in you."

God did not reply.

"But," I said, amazed, "if he were not, then we would not be here. He gave you the mass particle in return for a ticket to ride."

For a full minute, we did not speak. The morning was calm and quiet, with no more hint of an Apocalypse than a cool breeze on my neck. Then I said, "You are telling me this because the deal has something to do with what is going on now."

"I permitted Beelzebub into the universe because I had no choice," God said. "But I did not reveal to him the terms. He did not press me, since he knew that I would walk away. True, he is Beelzebub. But I am God."

God said he made a design in which the Beelzebub boson would be paired with another particle that would not block the mass effect, but otherwise neutralize the boson's physical properties.

"Making it invisible," I said. "Undetectable."

"Or 'theoretical,' in the language of your physicists," God said.

"So since that instant in the Big Bang, your masking particle has been able to do its job," I said.

"Yes," said God. "For the most part."

"But the Beelzebub boson has fought incessantly and violently to escape."

"It is his nature to present himself as a constant threat," God agreed.

"What would happen if it did escape?" I asked.

"Evil would no longer be newsworthy," he said. "Evil would be the commonplace."

"And then humans created the LHC to actually free the boson," I said.

God said he could never let that happen. He said that his system "had sent a message" with the 2008 Collider failure, causing events to move back in time, and then creating an explosion, before the Collider could free the boson. The skeptical scientists, I realized, had been right.

"Time was permitted to move forward once more, and the Collider resumed operations as before. I saw that the warning had not been seriously heeded. At that time, I feared the final event was near. Then the moment arrived, the instant that Cuilly Burdette glimpsed the monster breaking loose into his screen."

"And so you reversed the universe," I said.

"No. Please remember who I am," he said, with some Biblical heft creeping in. "Intervention is beneath me. The 2008 warning was programmed, and research could have been voluntarily halted."

"But they resumed," I said, picking up the history, "and in summer 2012 announced some results that appeared Higgs-like."

God snorted. I swear. Divine disdain.

"Operating at half-power," he said, a small rumble of thunder rolling in his throat. "Do they think the Big Bang was the result of half-power?"

"But now you are saying they should have left it alone, in 2012," I said.

"I am conflicted," God said. "Those who would know God would have the respect to approach me at full power. Yet when, finally, they did, three days ago, the Collider reversed the universe. The original design provided that, the instant the boson was freed, by any event, time would no longer go from past toward future, but stop, and then proceed from future toward past, rendering it impossible for eternity that the boson could be freed. The Collider brought forth that instant. The result was automatic. I was sipping tea at the time."

"I believe you are saying, God, that we on Earth and in the universe have entered a field in your design that has been there all along," I said. "You knew that our past might someday become our future, and you planned for it."

"Yes," God said. "On the first day, I drew the line at Beelzebub."

"A minute ago, you said that after Einstein, you thought that men were starting to know too much. Was that in the design, or did it surprise you?"

"I only created the universe, the heavens and the Earth," God said. "But I did not create the universe to be bored. Within the creation, its elements have always been governed by chance, and its inhabitants have always had free will. So, yes, the first time I was surprised that it happened so soon."

I was startled. "The first time?" I said. "Have there been other times?"

God was silent.

"God?" I said.

Finally he spoke: "Ask Einstein." Then he was gone. I looked at my notes. My next question would have been about the dead people coming to life. I tried to call out again. But my mind was blank.

I had heard enough. It was only a thought experiment, whose effect was to affirm my core belief, that anything is possible. After it was completed, I read the interview again. Twice. Here is the important thing: I believed it.

God is already on record, in this planet's archives, as the creator of the universe. That story is told in the Bible, which remains the No. 1 best-selling non-fiction book of all time. His story as told in this interview is no less plausible. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Same-same.

The Biblical version then started forward, and God's vision was completed in six days. The Big Bang version took longer and now is in roughly its thirteen-point-seven-billionth year. In the Genesis version, a wily serpent living in the Tree of Good and Evil was the original source of evil. In the Big Bang view, God identifies that source as the so-called "Beelzebub boson," without which matter could not exist. Either way, evil has always been with us, as a literal condition of life.

But the stories differ in the end – maybe. The Beelzebub story describes the boson as part of the universe's design from the first instant, which, if ever freed, would trigger an Event such as we encountered on May 29. No such universal mechanism is mentioned in the Bible with regard to the serpent.

However, it may not be because God didn't try. I must admit that I am an evolutionist when it comes to comparing creation theories, favoring the Big Bang's long haul over what I came to think of as "the scenic route" found in Genesis.

Again, anything is possible, and probably always was. God has always had freedom with the universe, not intervening, which was beneath him, but tinkering, which appears to be in his character. The Genesis reporters obviously got the serpent story from somewhere. God, being as open with them as he has been with me, may have tried to describe the boson as the source of evil. But physics would not be introduced for another five thousand years, and the humans at that time had no chance of understanding such a theory.

So God devised the serpent story, an evil with which those writers would have been familiar. And of course he couldn't speak to them of particle colliders, so he just left that part off. In the present day, humans do have physics, a science that eventually led them to a theory about a "Higgs boson," that they became hell-bent to find.

Three days ago, they became successful, and they reversed the universe. Is that the evidence, that they finally found the boson? God says yes. But the physicists have no way to return to the scene to collect proof. They are left – all of us are left – only with a true eternity, a universe book-ended by theories: the Big Bang, that started the universe, and the Higgs boson, that reversed it. God is such an awful tease.

Copyright Michael Grant 2012