Before discarding as completely useless a belief you don’t believe in, consider its worth as entertainment. Unproveable yet deeply held convictions, and variations on them, can represent fertile ground for quality daydreaming.

Consider the premise of an all-knowing god who orchestrates everything, from people’s decisions to where on the ground a falling leaf will land. One implication is that diseases and natural disasters are similarly willed. When good people are subjected to suffering and untimely death, accusations that God is a fucked up bastard sit restlessly at the tip of the tongue, kept from being spoken by the fear of an eternal, hellish retribution.

Given Earth’s large population, the intricacies of biology, and the plethora of activities that constitute modern living, each new day brings with it a nearly countless number of misfortune-yielding options from which this twisted fuck of a god can choose. The celebrated, centuries-old paintings rendering the god in human form give a green light to its personification and make it easy to imagine Him reclining in an easy chair considering an array of screens.

Let each screen display in real-time the current happenings in one person’s life, such that the number of screens equals Earth’s population. Powerful note that irrefutably and completely addresses a potential point of contention regarding this unlikely scenario: since He is God, He can process the continually evolving information on all of the screens simultaneously in a way that leaves supercomputers speechless. Also, let it be known that He, and all references to Him, receive a capital H (or G, if referred to by name), even in mid-sentence, because He is special (He rides the short bus to Sunday school).

Now then, back to the screens. It’s natural to question how He decides which misfortune-yielding options to choose and which to pass up, but I don’t think speculating on an answer adds anything to this daydream, so I’m ignoring it. As for why not all options are chosen, which would unleash maximum misfortune, well, “you have to build them up to tear them down.”

What I find interesting is what must happen when He considers screens which display fast-paced activities like highway driving. For simplicity, consider just two screens: in one, God has the option of sending a deer running onto the road to be hit by a car, and in the other He has the option of willing a drunk driver to swerve into the oncoming lane at an unfortunate time. There are options within these options. For example, exact location of deer on road and whether or not it kicks up its hind legs to meet the windshield; call these 2nd order options, as opposed to 1st order.

Choosing one 1st order option (drunk swerve or deer run) over the other necessitates that each option’s misfortune potential be evaluated at the same timestamp. Choosing to set in motion option A at time t=5 when option B’s misfortune potential was evaluated at time t=6 is like comparing apples and running (thanks, wikipedia). To summarize, in this example there are two cars simultaneously traveling down highways at different locations on earth. In order to choose one unfortunate accident over the other, God must evaluate each 1st order’s 2nd order options sequentially and beginning at the same timestamp each time.

Two notes:

1. Depending on the level of detail required, it’s entirely possible to consider nth order options.
2. The option ultimately selected by God may not necessarily be the option with greatest misfortune potential, for reasons similar to those responsible for “you have to build them up to tear them down.”

I thought I had come across a discrepancy. On one hand I’m saying God is capable of processing all incoming information from an array of screens equal in number to Earth’s human population. On the other hand, I claim God must decide on a time in the future for initiating an option in order to allow ample time to evaluate each option’s misfortune potential. At first, it seems that if God is capable of the former, the time required to evaluate each option’s misfortune potential should be so small as to allow options to be chosen or discarded as soon as they are discovered. However, I no longer think there’s a discrepancy. The information processing and option evaluation tasks must take place concurrently. The possibility that if all God’s resources were moved from the former to the latter it might result in options being chosen/discarded upon discovery is irrelevant because option evaluation is occurring in addition to, not instead of, information processing.

Whether there is or isn’t a discrepancy is not the point. The point is to daydream. Practically-minded individuals may want to link their daydreams with the “real” world. The above is relevant to closed systems. Feedback and feed-forward mechanisms require information processing and option evaluation.