Hi, uh, I'm marvin
I've been coming here for a while
But I haven't ever shared
I'm a, well my thing's a little different
I guess things started for me
About six months ago
My wife and I had a baby
And it's been, you know, all the clichés
It's a miracle, but it's been hell on my sleep
'Cause once I'm up, I'm up
So I started getting into late night
Comment sessions on science forums
Evolution, intelligent design, that kind of thing
Now I'm actually a neurochemist
I focus on the effects of audio stimuli
On brain chemistry
Neural plasticity and dopamine production
As they relate to music
Subpartial alpha and beta waves
Microtonal phase shifts
Lydian quark compressions
You know
I'm a real dork for this stuff
But for whatever reason
The intelligent design is what really gets me going
So, I just go trolling the boards
Though not trolling really
I mean I actually try to engage
Educate a little
But you know, these people
It's just impossible
It's like throwing your mind against a wall
And I get so heated man
It's like I'm intolerant of unintelligence
You know?
It's my fatal flaw
I might as well be getting mad at people
For not being able to do calculus
Just take the derivative, fool
But, you know, I get it
Science is suspect
I mean look at nutrition
Like the scientific evidence
For whether you should eat wheat or not is crazy
Or if acupuncture works?
You know, as layman
We mostly trust that what we hear
From our preferred media and peers is right
But skepticism is a necessary and healthy trait
In a scientist, or, at least that's what I thought
So, a couple nights ago
Cora gets up at like 3am
And it's my turn–
My wife had an early morning
So I get her down
And then go straight under my cans
Put on some binaural meditation beats
And get to it
And I'm raging away on someone
Talking about the evolution of the eye
When suddenly, in my headphones
I start hearing something, weird
There's a sort of crystal ringing
In the 22000 hertz range
Sort of a tinny electric crackle
It gets me curious
So I export the file
Isolate the frequency
Pitch shift it, slow it down–
And when I do all that
It resolves, into the sound of a hushed
New age voice, saying
Hello Marvin, I think this is God
Hello Marvin, I think this is God
Sounds like someone was having a laugh with you
Right, of course, that's what I thought
But then the voice answers that thought
No, no, I'm not having a laugh
And I thought, well that's strange
Because this was recorded audio
It's not streaming live
And then the voice says
Well, no, but I'm omnipresent
Including in time, so, it's all sort of the same thing for me
So I throw my headphones off and go to bed
Figured I was exhausted, overworked
You know
But then in the morning
I get a phone call
I thought it might be the nanny, running late
But no
I'm sorry about last night
This is probably a more normal way to talk to you
Well if you're God
A burning bush would actually be more normal
Ha, ha, ha
No, not that God
I mean, that's a version of me
But I'm the one, real God
At least I think
Huh
Yeah, so I was starting to freak out
A little at this point
But still, I was definitely not falling for it
So I play along
Well what makes you think you're God?
Can you do some kind of miracle or something?
And at that point my phone turned into a fish
Okay
No, no, not okay
What kind of fish was it?
I don't know
I don't really know kinds of fish
Like a trout maybe?
It was phone-sized
Trout are a bit bigger than that I think
Yeah trout are like this big
Like I said I don't really know fish
But honestly I'm starting to freak out here
Like I am having a mental episode
And so, I'm like, get out of the house
Get on my bike, head to the lab
But when I get there
I find out that everyone else
Has had the same experience
Susie, walt, trillian, kamala
The two jacks
They're all freaking out
Kamala says her phone turned into a kitten
And Jack 2 says
Well, why didn't we all get kittens?
Well, I knew some of you were allergic
And we all hear that
God is in all of our heads
And we are freaking out
Don't freak out, don't freak out
I'm sorry, it's never easy making first contact
Look, I'm just gonna come in now
And then through the door walks
An 11-year old girl
In a mermaid costume
What?
She says she's trying appearing
As a playful child
So she seems less threatening
But so we're all just taking it in
And then walt says
Ok, well can you do a miracle all of us can see?
And so then she rolls her eyes–
She has all these very tween affectations–
And then the coffee maker
Turns into a baby pterodactyl
What?
Yeah, Susie was really into it
Hey little buddy, aren't you a long way from home?
She goes over to it with a pencil
And tries to get it to bite it
And it's pretty cute
But then we're all just, wait
What the fuck is going on here?
I can do some things, but I'm not sure
If I'm actually God
I was hoping you could run some tests
And see if these are miracles?
And here's where we start going down the rabbit hole
Now I am a devout atheist
But I've always believed that if I was confronted
With irrefutable evidence of God
As a good scientist I would change my mind
And here was my chance to test that
To test my atheism and devotion to rationalism
And I gotta say
We took care of the pterodactyl pretty quick
I mean, we had hypotheses
First off there's the jurassic park amber thing
Other ways DNA could be preserved
Or time travel, spacetime wormholes
Which aren't even that controversial
In scientific communities
Or there's molecular printing
Just reorganizing the molecules
From the coffee maker into the form of a pterodactyl
Which is also pretty non-controversial
Speculative science
Like 30, 40 years from now
We can probably do this
So you're saying you guys did not take the pterodactyl to be a miracle
Right
We just postulated that there could be explanations
Beyond our technological capabilities
But not supernatural or holy
So then we're like, okay, what next
And I gotta say
Little God was great
She did whatever we asked
What else did you ask her to do?
First we asked for a bunch of
Basically telekinetic and transformational stuff
All the big bible clichés
Walking on water, water into wine
Splitting the red sea
You did that?
Oh, yeah, we went to the beach
Plus little God is really into historical accuracy
So we actually did it in Egypt circa 1400 bce
You time traveled?
Yeah, wormhole, no big
And then the water too, no big
Because if we're postulating future technologies
Space time distortions, gravity flux–
That any kind of stuff
Quickly becomes just not that impressive
I mean sure, impressive, but not miraculous
It sounds like maybe this is just some very evolutionarily advanced intelligence, right?
Where does the God stuff come from?
Well first, she claims to have created the universe
So we carbon date her
And her age is infinite in both directions
Suggesting that she's immortal
But then that actually gets pretty dark
Because Jack 1 says
Well, can we kill her?
And we're all like no
We're not going to try to kill an 11-year old child
But then little God just gets up, real calm
And breaks into a full suicide sprint
Right across the break room
Smashing her fucking head right into the fucking metal door, bam
Oh my God
And she hits the door hard
And there is this awful, awful
Wet cracking sound
And we see her skull get completely smashed in
And there's blood dripping down the door
And bits of brain everywhere
And she is dead
And we're gonna have nightmares
For the rest of our lives
And then we hear the other door open behind us
And there she is, little God
She saunters back in, all cool and casual
And is all
See? I'm fine
Wait and her body is still on the ground?
Yeah
So there's two of her?
Yeah, so there's two of her
Bwuh–
But even this, she helps us explain
By postulating a whole mess of
Super advanced tech
I mean we already know it's easy
To form any old heap of molecules
Into an 11-year old body
And with DNA printing and cerebral uploading
We had an explanation for any kind of lazarus stuff
She pulled
And as for her soul
Soul is a matterless, infinite substance
That exists outside of time and is constantly
Separating and reforming
So I don't know, that one kind of
Turned into semantics
But honestly at this point
We're starting to doubt everything
Like kamala starts in on the uncertainty principle
Are our observations affecting the data?
Or, is little God manipulating the data?
She could be deceiving us by changing the microchips
Or moving the ink on the whiteboard
She could be corrupting our actual brain waves
None of us could prove that this wasn't
Just a simple multi-player vr
Matrix
But when you get to that level of skepticism
I mean of course you know that's a possibility
In the back of your head
But you don't live like that
It's paralyzing
No, I know, I know
But if we're being scientific
Scientific about the existence of God
Then we can't discount those possibilities
I mean evolutionarily
We are still infants
Technologically and mentally
We haven't even hit singularity yet
Our little 21st century human minds
Can't even begin to conceptualize
Some of the actual laws of physics
And if we accept that there may be
Explanations that are simply beyond our own intelligence
Then what evidence could she possibly come up with?
Clarke's third law
Any sufficiently advanced technology
Is indistinguishable from magic
If I can explain away something
That by all criteria satisfies
Any definition of God
Then I can explain away anything
Any miracle, any wonder
Any feeling, any sense of love
Or responsibility, or moral
Or just sense of meaning
I look into my daughter's eyes
My wife, what does it mean?
We tried so hard to shatter our skepticism
But it was like throwing our minds against a wall
We traveled into black holes
Into quarks
We slipped through time backwards and sideways
We created new life forms, living suns
We watched the universe multiply, invert, spiral, disappear
We beheld an infinity of wonders–
And yet we sat at our desks
In stoic calculation
Stripped of awe
Paralyzed by the unforgiving relentlessness
Of our intellect