I accidently over 100 pages of Philosophical crap

[TEAM_DERRICK]

Enjoy

[TEAM_DERRICK]

The rain made everything sound different—the engine of
my delivery van, the traffic as it rolled by on a film of fallen
clouds, the occasional dull honk. I didn’t have a great job,
but it wasn’t bad, either. I knew the city so well that I could
lose myself in thought and still do the work, still get paid,
still have plenty of time for myself. When you’re inside your
own head, the travel time between buildings evaporates. It’s
as if I could vanish from one stop and reappear at the next.
My story begins on a day I delivered to a place I’d never
been. That’s usually a fun challenge. There’s a certain satis-
faction when you find a new place without using the map.
Rookies use maps.
If you work in the city long enough, it begins to deal
with you on a personal level. Streets reveal their moods.
Sometimes the signal lights love you. Sometimes they fight you. When you’re hunting for a new building, you hope the
city is on your side. You have to use a little bit of thinking—
you might call it the process of elimination—and you need a
little bit of instinct, but not too much of either. If you think
too hard, you overshoot your target and end up at the Pier
or the Tenderloin. If you relax and let the city help, the des-
tination does all the work for you. It was one of those days.
It’s amazing how many times you can travel the same
route without noticing a particular sign. Then when you’re
looking for it, there it is. Universe Avenue. I would have
sworn it wasn’t there a day ago, but I knew it didn’t work
that way.
It was a scruffy package, barely up to company stan-
dards. I calculated the distance from my van to the doorway
and decided the packing material could handle the mois-
ture. On behalf of the package and myself, I surrendered to
the rain.
This delivery required a signature. Those were the best
kind. I could talk to people without any awkward lulls in the
conversation. I liked people, but I didn’t feel comfortable
chatting unless there was a reason. A delivery was a good
excuse for some shallow interaction. People were happy to
see me and I was never at a loss for words. I’d say, “Sign on
this line,” and they’d say, “Thank you.” We’d exchange
some meaningless wishes and I’d be off. That’s how it was
supposed to work.
I walked up the four steps to the ornate wooden door
and pressed the doorbell. A muffled bing-bong filled the
interior and leaked out the cracks of the doorjamb.
Delivery people don’t like to leave the little yellow note,
a confession of delivery failure. It means a do-over. I liked
to do my work once. I liked my tasks to have beginnings
and ends. As a rule of thumb, almost any customer can get
to the front door in about a minute. But I usually waited
two, in case someone was indisposed or having trouble
walking. Two minutes is an eternity when you’re standing
under a doorway on a rainy San Francisco afternoon.
Rookies wear jackets.
Two minutes passed. The company’s rules said I couldn’t
try the doorknob. They were emphatic about that.
Ah, rules.

[TEAM_DERRICK]

The oversized knob offered no resistance as it turned on its
oiled core. I was no longer surprised to find unlocked doors
in the city. Maybe at some subconscious level we don’t
believe we need protection from our own species.
I figured I would leave the package inside the door and
sign the customer’s name. I had signed for customers before;
no one had complained yet. It was a firing offense, but that
only happened if you got caught.
Inside I could see a long, dark hallway with red faux-
textured walls lined with large, illuminated paintings. At the
end was a half-opened door to a room that hosted a flicker-
ing light. Someone was home and should have heard the
doorbell. I didn’t like the look of it. Occasionally you read
about an elderly person who dies alone and no one knows
about it for weeks. My mind went there. I stepped inside

and closed the door, enjoying the warmth, deciding what to
do next.
“Hello!” I said in my professional voice, hoping it
sounded nonthreatening. I shuffled my way down the hall,
noticing that the art looked original. Someone had money.
Lots.
The source of the uneven light was a huge stone fireplace.
I entered the room, not sure why I was being quiet. Somehow
the room was both simple and overwhelming. It was half fire-
washed color, half black, brilliantly appointed with antique
wooden furniture, elaborate patterned walls, and wood floors.
My pupils enlarged to tease out the shadows.
An old man’s voice rose from the texture. “I’ve been
expecting you.”
I was startled and feeling a bit guilty about letting
myself in. It took me a minute to locate the source of the
voice. It was as if it came from the room itself. Something
moved and I noticed, on the far side of the fireplace, in a
wooden rocker, a smallish form in a red plaid blanket, look-
ing like a hastily rolled cigar. His tiny wrinkled hands held
the blanket like button clasps. Two undersized feet in cloth
slippers dangled from the wrap.
“Your door was unlocked,” I said, as if that were reason
enough to let myself in. “I have a package.”

All I heard was the fire. I expected an answer. That’s
how it’s supposed to work. When one person says some-
thing, the other is supposed to say something back. The old
man wasn’t subscribing.
He stared at me and rocked, sizing me up, perhaps, or
maybe he was lost in a replay. I had already said what I
needed to say, so I stood silently for what seemed too long.
I thought I saw the wake of a smile, or maybe it was a mus-
cle tremor. He spoke in the deliberate manner of a man who
had not used his voice in days and asked a strange question.
“If you toss a coin a thousand times, how often will it
come up heads?”
The elderly are spooky when they degenerate into
reflections of their younger selves. They say things that
make sense on some grammatical level, but it’s not always
connected to reality. I remembered my grandfather in his
declining years, how he spoke in nonsequiturs. It was best
to play along.
“About fifty percent of the time,” I answered before
changing the subject. “I need a signature for this package.”
“Why?”
“Well,” I said, measuring how much information to include
in my response, “the person who sent the package wants a sig-
nature. He needs confirmation that it got delivered.”

“I meant why does the coin come up heads fifty percent
of the time?”
“I guess that’s because the coin weighs about the same
on both sides, so there’s a fifty-fifty chance it will land on
one side versus the other.” I tried to avoid sounding conde-
scending. I wasn’t sure I succeeded.
“You haven’t answered why. You simply listed some
facts.”
I saw what was going on. The old man pulls this trick
question on anyone who comes within range. There had to
be a punch line or clever answer, so I played along.
“What’s the answer?” I asked with all the artificial inter-
est I could muster.
“The answer,” he said, “is that the question has no
why.”
“You could say that about anything.”
“No,” he replied, in a manner that seemed suddenly
coherent. “Every other question has an answer to why. Only
probability is inexplicable.”
I waited a moment for the punch line, but it didn’t
come. “That’s it?” I asked.
“It’s more than it seems.”
“I still need a signature.” I approached the old man and
held out the clipboard, but he made no motion to take it. I

could see him better now. His skin was stained and wrinkled
but his eyes were strikingly clear. Some gray hair gathered
above each ear and his posture was an ongoing conversation
with gravity. He wasn’t old. He was ancient.
He gestured to the clipboard with his head. “You can
sign it.”
In the delivery business we make lots of exceptions for
the elderly, so I didn’t mind signing for him. I figured his
hands or eyes weren’t working as well as he liked and I
could save him the frustration of working the pen.
I read the name before forging.
Avatar. A–v–a–t–a–r.
“It’s for you,” he said.
“What’s for me?”
“The package.”
“I just deliver the packages,” I said. “My job is to bring
them to you. It’s your package.”
“No, it’s yours.”
“Um, okay,” I said, planning my exit strategy. I figured
I could leave the package in the hallway on the way out. The
old man’s caretaker would find it.
“What’s in the package?” I asked. I hoped to get past an
awkward moment.
“It’s the answer to your question.”

“I wasn’t expecting any answers.”
“I understand,” said the old man.
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t.
He continued, “Let me ask you a simple question: Did
you deliver the package or did the package deliver you?”
By then I was a little annoyed with his cleverness, but
admittedly engaged. I didn’t know the old man’s situation,
but he wasn’t as feeble-minded as I’d first thought. I
glanced at my watch. Almost lunchtime. I decided to see
where this was heading.
“I delivered the package,” I answered. That seemed
obvious enough.
“If the package had no address, would you have deliv-
ered it here?”
I said no.
“Then you would agree that delivering the package
required the participation of the package. The package told
you where to go.”
“I suppose that’s true, in a way. But it’s the least impor-
tant part of the delivery. I did the driving and lifting and
moving. That’s the important part.”
“How can one part be more important if each part is
completely necessary?” he asked.
“Look,” I said, “I’m holding the package and I’m walking

with it. That’s delivering. I’m delivering the package. That’s
what I do. I’m a package-delivery guy.”
“That’s one way to look at it. Another way is that both
you and the package got here at the same time. And that
both of you were necessary. I say the package delivered
you.”
There was a twisted logic to that interpretation, but I
wasn’t willing to give in. “The difference is intention. If I
leave this package here and go on my way, I think that set-
tles the question of who delivered who.”
“Perhaps it would,” he said as he turned toward the
warmth. “Would you mind throwing another log on the fire?”
I picked out a big one. The retiring embers celebrated
its arrival. I had the brief impression that the log was glad to
help, to do its part keeping the old man warm. It was a silly
thought. I brushed off my hands and turned to leave.
“That chair is yours,” he said, gesturing to a wooden
rocker next to his. I hadn’t noticed the second chair.
The old man’s face revealed a life of useful endeavor. I
had a sense that he deserved companionship and I was happy
to give some. My other choice involved a bag lunch and the
back of my truck. Maybe there wasn’t any choice at all.
I settled into the rocking chair, letting its rhythm unwind
me. It was profoundly relaxing. The room seemed more
vivid now and vibrated with the personality of its master. The
furniture was obviously designed for comfort. Everything in
the room was made of stone or wood or plant, mostly
autumn colors. It was as if the room had sprung directly
from the earth into the middle of San Francisco.

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
Do you believe in God?” the old man asked, as if we had
known each other forever but had somehow neglected to
discuss that one topic. I assumed he wanted reassurance that
his departure from this life would be the beginning of some-
thing better. I gave a kind answer.
“There has to be a God,” I said. “Otherwise, none of us
would be here.” It wasn’t much of a reason, but I figured
he didn’t need more.
“Do you believe God is omnipotent and that people
have free will?” he asked.
“That’s standard stuff for God. So, yeah.”
“If God is omnipotent, wouldn’t he know the future?”
“Sure.”
“If God knows what the future holds, then all our choices
are already made, aren’t they? Free will must be an illusion.”

He was clever, but I wasn’t going to fall for that trap.
“God lets us determine the future ourselves, using our free
will,” I explained.
“Then you believe God doesn’t know the future?”
“I guess not,” I admitted. “But he must prefer not
knowing.”
“So you agree that it would be impossible for God to
know the future and grant humans free will?”
“I hadn’t thought about it before, but I guess that’s
right. He must want us to find our own way, so he inten-
tionally tries not to see the future.”
“For whose benefit does God withhold his power to
determine the future?” he asked.
“Well, it must be for his own benefit, and ours, too,” I
reasoned. “He wouldn’t have to settle for less.”
The old man pressed on. “Couldn’t God give humans the
illusion of free will? We’d be just as happy as if we had actual
free will, and God would retain his ability to see the future. Isn’t
that a better solution for God than the one you suggested?”
“Why would God want to mislead us?”
“If God exists, his motives are certainly unfathomable.
No one knows why he grants free will, or why he cares
about human souls, or why pain and suffering are necessary
parts of life.”

“The one thing I know about God’s motives is that he
must love us, right?” I wasn’t convinced of this myself,
given all the problems in the world, but I was curious about
how he would respond.
“Love? Do you mean love in the way you understand it
as a human?”
“Well, not exactly, but basically the same thing. I mean,
love is love.”
“A brain surgeon would tell you that a specific part of
the brain controls the ability to love. If it’s damaged, people
are incapable of love, incapable of caring about others.”
“So?”
“So, isn’t it arrogant to think that the love generated by
our little brains is the same thing that an omnipotent being
experiences? If you were omnipotent, why would you limit
yourself to something that could be reproduced by a little
clump of neurons?”
I shifted my opinion to better defend it. “We must feel
something similar to God’s type of love, but not the same
way God feels it.”
“What does it mean to feel something similar to the way
God feels? Is that like saying a pebble is similar to the sun
because both are round?” he responded.
“Maybe God designed our brains to feel love the same

way he feels it. He could do that if he wanted to.”
“So you believe God wants things. And he loves things,
similar to the way humans do. Do you also believe God
experiences anger and forgiveness?”
“That’s part of the package,” I said, committing further
to my side of the debate.
“So God has a personality, according to you, and it is
similar to what humans experience?”
“I guess so.”
“What sort of arrogance assumes God is like people?”
he asked.
“Okay, I can accept the idea that God doesn’t have a
personality exactly like people. Maybe we just assume God
has a personality because it’s easier to talk about it that way.
But the important point is that something had to create real-
ity. It’s too well-designed to be an accident.”
“Are you saying you believe in God because there are no
other explanations?” he asked.
“That’s a big part of it.”
“If a stage magician makes a tiger disappear and you
don’t know how the trick could be done without real magic,
does that make it real magic?”
“That’s different. The magician knows how it’s done and
other magicians know how it’s done. Even the magician’s

assistant knows how it’s done. As long as someone knows
how it’s done, I can feel confident that it isn’t real magic. I
don’t personally need to know how it’s done,” I said.
“If someone very wise knew how the world was designed
without God’s hand, could that person convince you that
God wasn’t involved?”
“In theory, yes. But a person with that much knowledge
doesn’t exist.”
“To be fair, you can only be sure that you don’t know
whether that person exists or not.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
Does God have free will?” he asked.
“Obviously he does,” I said. It was the most confidence
I had felt so far in this conversation. “I’ll admit there’s some
ambiguity about whether human beings have free will, but
God is omnipotent. Being omnipotent means you can do
anything you want. If God didn’t have free will, he wouldn’t
be very omnipotent.”
“Indeed. And being omnipotent, God must be able to
peer into his own future, to view it in all its perfect detail.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re going to say that if he sees his
own future, then his choices are predetermined. Or, if he
can’t see the future, then he’s not omnipotent.”
“Omnipotence is trickier than it seems,” he said.

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
I see where you’re going with this,” I said. “You’re an
atheist. You think science has the answers and you think reli-
gious people are all delusional.”
“Let’s talk about science for a moment,” he replied.
I was relieved. I liked science. It was my favorite subject
in school. Religion made me uncomfortable. It’s better not
to think too much about religion, but science was made for
thinking. It was based on facts.
“Do you know a lot about science?” I asked.
“Almost nothing,” he said.
I figured this would be a short conversation, and it was
just as well because my lunch hour was running out.
“Consider magnets,” the old man said. “If you hold two
magnets near each other, they are attracted. Yet there is
nothing material connecting them.”

“Yes there is,” I corrected. “There’s a magnetic field.
You can see it when you do that experiment with the metal
shavings on a piece of paper. You hold a magnet under the
paper and the shavings all organize along magnetic lines.
That’s the magnetic field.”
“So you have a word for it. It’s a ‘field,’ you say. But you
can’t get a handful of this thing for which you have a name.
You can’t fill a container with a magnetic field and take it with
you. You can’t cut it in pieces. You can’t block its power.”
“You can’t block it? I didn’t know that.”
“You can alter a magnetic field by adding other mag-
netic material, but there is no non-magnetic material you
can put between two magnets to block them. This ‘field’ of
yours is strange stuff. We can see its effect, and we can
invent a name for it, but it doesn’t exist in any physical
form. How can something that doesn’t exist in physical
form have influence over the things that do?”
“Maybe it has physical form but it’s small and we can’t
see it. That’s possible. Maybe there are tiny magnetrons or
something,” I said, making up a word.
“Consider gravity,” the old man continued, oblivious to
my creative answer. “Gravity is also an unseen force that can-
not be blocked by any object. It reaches across the entire uni-
verse and connects all things, yet it has no physical form.”

“I think Einstein said it was the warping of space-time
by massive objects,” I said, dredging up a memory of a mag-
azine article I read years ago.
“Indeed, Einstein did say that. And what does that
mean?”
“It means that space is bent, so when objects seem to be
attracted to each other, it’s just that they’re traveling in the
shortest direction through bent space.”
“Can you imagine bent space?” he asked.
“No, but just because I can’t imagine it doesn’t mean
it’s not true. You can’t argue with Einstein.”
He looked away. I figured he was either annoyed at my
answer or just resting. It turned out he was pausing to gather
energy. He drew a breath into his tiny lungs and began.
“Scientists often invent words to fill the holes in their
understanding. These words are meant as conveniences until
real understanding can be found. Sometimes understanding
comes and the temporary words can be replaced with words
that have more meaning. More often, however, the patch
words will take on a life of their own and no one will remem-
ber that they were only intended to be placeholders.
“For example, some physicists describe gravity in terms
of ten dimensions all curled up. But those aren’t real
words—just placeholders, used to refer to parts of abstract

equations. Even if the equations someday prove useful, it
would say nothing about the existence of other dimensions.
Words such as dimension and field and infinity are nothing
more than conveniences for mathematicians and scientists.
They are not descriptions of reality, yet we accept them as
such because everyone is sure someone else knows what the
words mean.”
I listened. Rocking, mildly stunned.
“Have you heard of string theory?” he asked.
“Sort of.”
“String theory says that all of physical reality—from grav-
ity to magnetism to light—can be explained in one grand the-
ory that involves tiny, string-shaped, vibrating objects. String
theory has produced no useful results. It has never been
proven by experiment, yet thousands of physicists are dedi-
cating their careers to it on the faith that it smells right.”
“Maybe it is right.” It seemed like my turn to say some-
thing.
“Every generation of humans believed it had all the
answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed
would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their
ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds
that you are the first generation of humans who will under-
stand reality?”

“I don’t think the odds are bad. Everything has to hap-
pen for a first time. You were around to see computers
invented and to see space travel. Maybe we’ll be the first for
this string theory.”
“Computers and rocket ships are examples of inven-
tions, not of understanding,” he said. “All that is needed to
build machines is the knowledge that when one thing hap-
pens, another thing happens as a result. It’s an accumulation
of simple patterns. A dog can learn patterns. There is no
‘why’ in those examples. We don’t understand why electric-
ity travels. We don’t know why light travels at a constant
speed forever. All we can do is observe and record patterns.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
Where is your free will?” the old man asked. “Is it part
of your brain, or does it emanate from someplace outside
your body and somehow control your actions?”
“A few minutes ago I would have said I knew the
answer to that question. But you’re making me doubt some
of my assumptions.”
“Doubting is good,” he said. “But tell me where you
think free will comes from.”
“I’ll say it comes from my brain. I mean, it’s a function
of my brain. I don’t have a better answer.”
“Your brain is like a machine in many ways, isn’t it?” he
asked.
It sounded like a trick question, so I gave myself some
wiggle room. “The brain isn’t exactly like a machine.”

“The brain is composed of cells and neurons and chem-
icals and pathways and electrical activity that all conform to
physical laws. When part of your brain is stimulated in one
specific way, could it respond any way it wants, or would it
always respond in one specific way?”
“There’s no way to test that. No one knows.”
“Then you believe we can only know things that have
been tested?” he asked.
“I’m not saying that.”
“Then you’re not saying anything, are you?”
It felt that way.
“So where is free will?” he asked again.
“It must involve the soul.” I didn’t have a better
answer.
“Soul? Where is the soul located?”
“It’s not located anywhere. It just is.”
“Then the soul is not physical in nature, according to
you,” he said.
“I guess not. Otherwise someone probably would have
found physical evidence of it,” I said.
“So you believe that the soul, which is not physical, can
influence the brain, which is physical?”
“I’ve never thought about it in those terms, but I guess
I do believe that.”

“Do you believe the soul can influence other physical
things, like a car or a watch?”
“No, I think souls only affect brains.” I was crawling
out on a limb with lead weights strapped to my belt.
“Can your soul influence other people’s brains, or does
it know which brain is yours?”
“My soul must know which brain is mine, otherwise I’d
be influenced by other souls and I wouldn’t have free will.”
He paused. “Your soul, according to you, knows the dif-
ference between your brain and everything else that is not
your brain. And it never makes a mistake in that regard. That
means your soul has structure and rules, like a machine.”
“It must,” I agreed.
“If the soul is the source of free will, then it must be
weighing alternatives and making decisions.”
“That’s its job.”
“But that’s what brains do. Why would you need a soul
to do what a brain can do?” he asked.
“Maybe the soul has free will and the brain doesn’t,” I
said. “Or the soul causes your brain to have free will. Or the
soul is smarter or more moral than the brain. I don’t know.”
I tried to put my fingers in as many holes as possible.
“If the soul’s actions are not controlled by rules, that
can only mean the soul acts randomly. On the other hand,

if your soul is guided by rules, which in turn guide you, then
you have no free will. You are programmed. There is no in
between; your life is either random or predetermined.
Which is it?”
I wasn’t prepared to believe I had no control over my
own life. “Maybe God is guiding my soul,” I said.
“If God is guiding your soul and your soul is guiding
your brain, then you are nothing more than a puppet of
God. You don’t really have free will in that case, do you?”
I tried again. “Maybe God is guiding my soul in a sort
of directional way, but it’s up to me to figure out the exact
steps to take.”
“That sounds as if God is giving you some sort of an
intelligence test. If you make the right choices, good things
happen to your soul. Is that what you’re saying?”
“It’s not about intelligence, it’s about morality,” I said.
“Morality?”
“Yes, morality.” I felt I was making a good point even
though I didn’t know what it was.
“Is your brain involved in making moral decisions or do
those decisions get made someplace outside your body?” he
asked.
I groaned.

[TEAM_DERRICK]

needed reinforcements. “Look,” I said, “four billion peo-
ple believe in some sort of God and free will. They can’t all
be wrong.”
“Very few people believe in God,” he replied.
I didn’t see how he could deny the obvious. “Of course
they do. Billions of people believe in God.”
The old man leaned toward me, resting a blanketed
elbow on the arm of his rocker.
“Four billion people say they believe in God, but few
genuinely believe. If people believed in God, they would
live every minute of their lives in support of that belief. Rich
people would give their wealth to the needy. Everyone
would be frantic to determine which religion was the true
one. No one could be comfortable in the thought that they
might have picked the wrong religion and blundered into

eternal damnation, or bad reincarnation, or some other
unthinkable consequence. People would dedicate their lives
to converting others to their religions.
“A belief in God would demand one hundred percent
obsessive devotion, influencing every waking moment of
this brief life on earth. But your four billion so-called believ-
ers do not live their lives in that fashion, except for a few.
The majority believe in the usefulness of their beliefs—an
earthly and practical utility—but they do not believe in the
underlying reality.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “If you asked
them, they’d say they believe.”
“They say that they believe because pretending to
believe is necessary to get the benefits of religion. They tell
other people that they believe and they do believer-like
things, like praying and reading holy books. But they don’t
do the things that a true believer would do, the things a true
believer would have to do.
“If you believe a truck is coming toward you, you will
jump out of the way. That is belief in the reality of the truck.
If you tell people you fear the truck but do nothing to get
out of the way, that is not belief in the truck. Likewise, it is
not belief to say God exists and then continue sinning and
hoarding your wealth while innocent people die of starvation. When belief does not control your most important
decisions, it is not belief in the underlying reality, it is belief
in the usefulness of believing.”
“Are you saying God doesn’t exist?” I asked, trying to
get to the point.
“I’m saying that people claim to believe in God, but most
don’t literally believe. They only act as though they believe
because there are earthly benefits in doing so. They create a
delusion for themselves because it makes them happy.”
“So you think only the atheists believe their own
belief?” I asked.
“No. Atheists also prefer delusions,” he said.
“So according to you, no one believes anything that
they say they believe.”
“The best any human can do is to pick a delusion that
helps him get through the day. This is why people of differ-
ent religions can generally live in peace. At some level, we
all suspect that other people don’t believe their own religion
any more than we believe ours.”
I couldn’t accept that. “Maybe the reason we respect
other religions is that they all have a core set of beliefs in
common. They only differ in the details.”
“Jews and Muslims believe that Christ isn’t the Son of
God,” he countered. “If they are right, then Christians are
mistaken about the core of their religion. And if the Jews or
the Christians or the Muslims have the right religion, then
the Hindus and Buddhists who believe in reincarnation are
wrong. Would you call those details?”
“I guess not,” I confessed.
“At some level of consciousness, everyone knows that
the odds of picking the true religion—if such a thing
exists—are nil.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

I felt like a one-legged man balanced on a high fence. I
could keep hopping along looking for an easy way down, or
I could just jump now and take my bruises. I decided to
jump.
“What’s your belief, Mr. Avatar?”
The old man rocked a few times before responding.
“Let’s say that you and I decide to travel separately to the
same place. You have a map that is blue and I have a map that
is green. Neither map shows all the possible routes, but both
maps show an acceptable—yet different—route to the desti-
nation. If we both take our trips and return safely, we would
spread the word of our successful maps to others. I would
say, with complete conviction, that my green map was per-
fect, and I might warn people to avoid any other sort of map.
You would feel the same conviction about your blue map.

“Religions are like different maps whose routes all lead
to the collective good of society. Some maps take their fol-
lowers over rugged terrain. Other maps have easier paths.
Some of the travelers of each route will be assigned the job
of being the protectors and interpreters of the map. They
will teach the young to respect it and be suspicious of other
maps.”
“Okay,” I said, “but who made the maps in the first
place?”
“The maps were made by the people who went first and
didn’t die. The maps that survive are the ones that work,”
he said.
At last, he had presented a target for me to attack. “Are
you saying that all the religions work? What about all the
people who have been killed in religious wars?”
“You can’t judge the value of a thing by looking only at
costs. In many countries, more people die from hospital
errors than religious wars, but no one accuses hospitals of
being evil. Religious people are happier, they live longer, have
fewer accidents, and stay out of trouble compared to nonre-
ligious people. From society’s viewpoint, religion works.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

As my lunch hour blurred into afternoon, I had technically
abandoned my job. I didn’t care. The time spent with this
old man was worth it. I didn’t agree with everything he was
saying, but my mind was more alive than it had been since
I was a child. I felt like I had wakened on a strange planet
where everything looked familiar but all the rules were dif-
ferent. He was a mystery, but by now I was getting used to
his questions that came out of nowhere.
“Has anyone ever advised you to ‘be yourself’?”
I said I’d heard that a lot.
“What does it mean to be yourself?” he asked. “If it
means to do what you think you ought to do, then you’re
doing that already. If it means to act like you’re exempt
from society’s influence, that’s the worst advice in the

world; you would probably stop bathing and wearing clothes.
The advice to ‘be yourself’ is obviously nonsense. But our
brains accept this tripe as wisdom because it is more com-
fortable to believe we have a strategy for life than to believe
we have no idea how to behave.”
“You make it sound as though our brains are designed
to trick us,” I said.
“There is more information in one thimble of reality
than can be understood by a galaxy of human brains. It is
beyond the human brain to understand the world and its
environment, so the brain compensates by creating simpli-
fied illusions that act as a replacement for understanding.
When the illusions work well and the human who subscribes
to the illusion survives, those illusions are passed to new
generations.
“The human brain is a delusion generator. The delusions
are fueled by arrogance—the arrogance that humans are the
center of the world, that we alone are endowed with the mag-
ical properties of souls and morality and free will and love. We
presume that an omnipotent God has a unique interest in our
progress and activities while providing all the rest of creation
for our playground. We believe that God—because he thinks
the same way we do—must be more interested in our lives
than in the rocks and trees and plants and animals.”

Well, I don’t think rocks would be very interesting to
God,” I said. “They just sit on the ground and erode.”
“You think that way because you are unable to see the
storm of activity at the rock’s molecular level or the level
beneath that, and so on. And you are limited by your per-
ception of time. If you watched a rock your entire life it
would never look different. But if you were God and could
observe the rock over fifteen billion years as though only a
second had passed, the rock would be frantic with activity.
It would be shrinking and growing and trading matter with
its environment. Its molecules would travel the universe and
become a partner to amazing things that we could never
imagine. By contrast, the odd collection of molecules that
make a human being will stay in that arrangement for less
time than it takes the universe to blink. Our arrogance
causes us to imagine special value in this temporary collec-
tion of molecules. Why do we perceive more spiritual value
in the sum of our body parts than on any individual cell in
our body? Why don’t we hold funerals when skin cells die?”
“That wouldn’t be practical,” I said. I wasn’t sure it was
a question meant to be answered, but I wanted to show I
was listening.
“Exactly,” he agreed. “Practicality rules our perceptions.
To survive, our tiny brains need to tame the blizzard of

information that threatens to overwhelm us. Our percep-
tions are wondrously flexible, transforming our worldview
automatically and continuously until we find safe harbor in
a comfortable delusion.
“To a God not bound by the limits of human practical-
ity, every tiny part of your body would be as action-packed
and meaningful as the parts of any rock or tree or bug. And
the sum of your parts that form the personality and life we
find so special and amazing would seem neither special nor
amazing to an omnipotent being.
“It is absurd to define God as omnipotent and then bur-
den him with our own myopic view of the significance of
human beings. What could possibly be interesting or impor-
tant to a God that knows everything, can create anything,
can destroy anything. The concept of ‘importance’ is a
human one born out of our need to make choices for sur-
vival. An omnipotent being has no need to rank things. To
God, nothing in the universe would be more interesting,
more worthy, more useful, more threatening, or more
important than anything else.”
“I still think people are more important to God than ani-
mals and plants and dirt. I think that’s obvious,” I argued.
“What is more important to a car, the steering wheel or
the engine?” he asked.

“The engine is more important because without an
engine, there is no reason to steer,” I reasoned.
“But unless you have both the engine and the steering
wheel, the car is useless, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Well, yes. I guess that’s true,” I admitted.
“The steering wheel and the engine are of equal impor-
tance. It is a human impulse—composed of equal parts arro-
gance and instinct—to believe we can rank everything in
our environment. Importance is not an intrinsic quality of
the universe. It exists only in our delusion-filled minds. I
can assure you that humans are not in any form or fashion
more important than rocks or steering wheels or engines.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

I didn’t know how much of the old man’s opinions to take
at face value. Everything he talked about had a kind of logic
to it, but so do many things that are nonsense. I decided it
was best just to listen. Whatever was happening to me, at
least it was different. I liked different.
He started again. “If you want to understand UFOs,
reincarnation, and God, do not study UFOs, reincarnation,
and God. Study people.”
“Are you saying none of those things are real?” I was
offended by his certainty, given the thousands of eyewitness
accounts for each of those things.
“No,” he said, “I am saying that UFOs, reincarnation,
and God are all equal in terms of their reality.”
“Do you mean equally real or equally imaginary?”

“Your question reveals your bias for a binary world
where everything is either real or imaginary. That distinc-
tion lies in your perceptions, not in the universe. Your
inability to see other possibilities and your lack of vocabu-
lary are your brain’s limits, not the universe’s.”
“There has to be a difference between real and imagined
things,” I countered. “My truck is real. The Easter Bunny is
imagined. Those are different.”
“As you sit here, your truck exists for you only in your
memory, a place in your mind. The Easter Bunny lives in the
same place. They are equal.”
“Yes, but I can go out and drive my truck. I can’t pet
the Easter Bunny.”
“Was the rain from this morning real?”
“Of course.”
“But you can’t see or touch that rain now, can you?”
“No.”
“Like the Easter Bunny, the past exists only in your
mind,” he said. “Likewise, the future exists only in your
mind because it has not happened.”
“But I can find evidence of the past. I can check with the
weather people and confirm that it rained this morning.”
“And when you get that confirmation, it would instantly
become the past itself. So in effect, you would be using the

past, which does not exist, to confirm something else from
the past. And if you repeat the process a thousand times,
with a thousand different pieces of evidence, together they
would still be nothing but impressions of the past support-
ing other impressions of the past.”
“That’s just mental gymnastics. You’re playing with
words,” I said.
“An insane person believes his world is consistent. If he
believes the government is trying to kill him, he will see
ample evidence of his belief in the so-called real world. He
will be wrong, but his evidence is no better or worse than
your evidence that it rained this morning. Both of you will
be converting evidence of the present into impressions
stored in your minds and you will both be certain your evi-
dence is solid and irrefutable. Your mind will mold the facts
and shape the clues until it all fits.”
“That might be true of crazy people, but not normal
people.”
“Clinical psychologists have proven that ordinary peo-
ple will alter their memories of the past to make them fit
their perceptions. It is the way all normal brains function
under ordinary circumstances.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Now you do,” he replied.

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
If you were God,” he said, “what would you want?”
“I don’t know. I barely know what I want, much less
what God wants.”
“Imagine that you are omnipotent. You can do any-
thing, create anything, be anything. As soon as you decide
you want something, it becomes reality.”
I waited, knowing there was more.
He continued. “Does it make sense to think of God as
wanting anything? A God would have no emotions, no
fears, no desires, no curiosity, no hunger. Those are human
shortcomings, not something that would be found in an
omnipotent God. What then would motivate God?”
“Maybe it’s the challenge, the intellectual stimulation of
creating things,” I offered.

“Omnipotence means that nothing is a challenge. And
what could stimulate the mind of someone who knows
everything?”
“You make it sound almost boring to be God. But I
guess you’ll say boredom is a human feeling.”
“Everything that motivates living creatures is based on
some weakness or flaw. Hunger motivates animals. Lust
motivates animals. Fear and pain motivate animals. A God
would have none of those impulses. Humans are driven by
all of our animal passions plus loftier-sounding things like
self-actualization and creativity and freedom and love. But
God would care nothing for those things, or if he cared
would already have them in unlimited quantities. None of
them would be motivating.”
“So what motivates God?” I asked. “Do you have the
answer to that question, or are you just yanking my chain?”
“I can conceive of only one challenge for an omnipotent
being—the challenge of destroying himself.”
“You think God would want to commit suicide?” I asked.
“I’m not saying he wants anything. I’m saying it’s the
only challenge.”
“I think God would prefer to exist than to not exist.”
“That’s thinking like a human, not like a God. You have
a fear of death so you assume God would share your preference. But God would have no fears. Existing would be a
choice. And there would be no pain of death, nor feelings of
guilt or remorse or loss. Those are human feelings, not God
feelings. God could simply choose to discontinue existence.”
“There’s a logical problem here, according to your way
of thinking,” I said. “If God knows the future, he already
knows if he will choose to end his existence, and he knows
if he will succeed at it, so there’s no challenge there, either.”
“Your thinking is getting clearer,” he said. “Yes, he will
know the future of his own existence under normal condi-
tions. But would his omnipotence include knowing what
happens after he loses his omnipotence, or would his knowl-
edge of the future end at that point?”
“That sounds like a thoroughly unanswerable question.
I think you’ve hit a dead end,” I said.
“Maybe. But consider this. A God who knew the answer
to that question would indeed know everything and have
everything. For that reason he would be unmotivated to do
anything or create anything. There would be no purpose to
act in any way whatsoever. But a God who had one nagging
question—what happens if I cease to exist?—might be motivated to find the answer in order to complete his knowledge. And having no fear and no reason to continue
existing, he might try it.”
“How would we know either way?”
“We have the answer. It is our existence. The fact that
we exist is proof that God is motivated to act in some way.
And since only the challenge of self-destruction could inter-
est an omnipotent God, it stands to reason that we . . .”
I interrupted the old man in midsentence and stood
straight up from the rocker. It felt as if a pulse of energy ran
up my spine, compressing my lungs, electrifying my skin,
bringing the hairs on the back of my neck to full alert. I
moved closer to the fireplace, unable to absorb its heat.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” My brain
was taking on too much knowledge. There was overflow
and I needed to shake off the excess.
The old man looked at nothing and said, “We are God’s
debris.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
Are you saying that God blew himself to bits and we’re
what’s left?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he replied.
“Then what?”
“The debris consists of two things. First, there are the
smallest elements of matter, many levels below the smallest
things scientists have identified.”
“Smaller than quarks? I don’t know what a quark is, but
I think it’s small.”
“Everything is made of some other thing. And those things
in turn are made of other things. Over the next hundred years,
scientists will uncover layer after layer of building blocks, each
smaller than the last. At each layer the differences between types
of matter will be fewer. At the lowest layer everything is exactly
the same. Matter is uniform. Those are the bits of God.”

What’s the second part of the debris?” I asked.
“Probability.”
“So you’re saying that God—an all-powerful being with
a consciousness that extends to all things, across all time—
consists of nothing but dust and probability?”
“Don’t underestimate it. Probability is an infinitely
powerful force. Remember my first question to you, about
the coin toss?”
“Yes. You asked why a coin comes up heads half the
time.”
“Probability is omnipotent and omnipresent. It influ-
ences every coin at any time in any place, instantly. It can-
not be shielded or altered. We might see randomness in the
outcome of an individual coin toss, but as the number of
tosses increases, probability has firm control of the out-
come. And probability is not limited to coins and dice and
slot machines. Probability is the guiding force of everything
in the universe, living or nonliving, near or far, big or small,
now or anytime.”
“It’s God’s debris,” I mumbled, rolling the idea around
in both my mouth and mind to see if that helped. It was a
fascinating concept, but too strange to embrace on first
impression. “You said before that you didn’t believe in God.
Now you say you do. Which is it?”

“I’m rejecting your overly complicated definition of
God—the one that imagines him to have desires and needs
and emotions like a human being while possessing infinite
power. And I’m rejecting your complicated notion of a fixed
reality that the human mind can—by an amazing stroke of
luck—grasp.”
“You’re not rejecting the idea of a fixed reality,” I
argued. “You’re saying the universe is made of God’s debris.
That’s a fixed reality.”
“Our language and our minds are too limited to deal with
anything but a fixed reality, regardless of whether such a thing
exists. The best we can do is to update our delusions to fit the
times. We live in an increasingly rational, science-based soci-
ety. The religious metaphors of the past are no longer com-
forting. Science is whittling at them from every side.
Humanity needs a metaphor that allows God and science to
coexist, at least in our minds, for the next thousand years.”
“If your God is just a metaphor, why should I care
about him? He would be irrelevant,” I said.
“Because everything you perceive is a metaphor for
something your brain is not equipped to fully understand.
God is as real as the clothes you are wearing and the chair
you are sitting in. They are all metaphors for something you
will never understand.”

“That’s ridiculous. If everything we perceive is fake, just
a metaphor, how do we get anything done?”
“Imagine that you had been raised to believe carrots
were potatoes and potatoes were carrots. And imagine you
live in a world where everyone knows the truth about these
foods except you. When you thought you were eating a
potato you were eating a carrot, and vice versa. Assuming
you had a balanced diet overall, your delusion about carrots
would have no real impact on your life except for your con-
tinuous bickering with others about the true nature of car-
rots and potatoes. Now suppose everyone was wrong and
both the carrots and potatoes were entirely different foods.
Let’s say they were really apples and beets. Would it matter?”
“You lost me. So God is a potato?” I joked.
“Whether you understand the true nature of your food
or not, you still have to eat. And in my example it makes lit-
tle difference if you don’t know a carrot from a potato. We
can only act on our perceptions, no matter how faulty. The
best we can do is to periodically adjust our perceptions—our
delusions, if you will—to make them more consistent with
our logic and common sense.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
What makes things do what they do?” he asked. “What
makes dogs bark, cats purr, plants grow?”
“Before today I would have said evolution makes every-
thing do what it does. Now I don’t know what to think.”
“Evolution isn’t a cause of anything; it’s an observation,
a way of putting things in categories. Evolution says nothing
about causes.”
“Evolution seems like a cause to me,” I argued. “If it
weren’t for evolution I’d be a single-celled creature in the
bottom of some swamp.”
“But what makes evolution happen?” he asked. “Where did
all the energy come from and how did it become so organized?”
It was a good question. “I’ve always wondered how
something like a zebra gets created by a bunch of molecules

bouncing around the universe. It seems to me that over
time the universe should become more screwed up and ran-
dom, not organized enough to create zebras and light rail
systems and chocolate-chip cookies. I mean, if you put a
banana in a box and shook it for a trillion years, would the
atoms ever assemble themselves into a television set or a
squirrel? I guess it’s possible if you have enough boxes and
bananas, but I have a hard time understanding it.”
“Do you have any trouble understanding that a human
embryo can only grow into a human adult and never into an
apple tree or a pigeon?” he asked.
“I understand that. Humans have different DNA than
apple trees or pigeons. But with my banana in the box
example, there’s no blueprint telling the molecules how to
become something else. If the banana particles somehow
stick together to become a flashlight or a fur hat, it’s a case
of amazing luck, not a plan.”
“So you believe that DNA is fundamentally different
from luck?”
“They’re opposites,” I said. “DNA is like a specific plan.
Probability means anything can happen.”
The old man looked at me in that way that said I would
soon doubt what I was saying. He didn’t disappoint. As
usual, he began with a question.

“If the universe were to start over from scratch, and all
the conditions that created life were to happen again, would
life spring up?”
“Sure,” I said, feeling confident again. “If all the things
that caused life the first time around were to happen again,
the result should be the same. I don’t know what you’re
getting at.”
“Let’s rewind our imaginary universe fifteen billion
years, to long before the time life first appeared. If that uni-
verse’s origin were identical to our own, would it unfold to
become exactly like the world we live in now, including this
conversation?”
“I guess so. If it starts out the same and nothing
changes it along the way, it should turn out the same.” My
confidence was evaporating again.
“That’s right. Our existence was programmed into the
universe from the beginning, guaranteed by the power of
probability. The time and place of our existence were flexi-
ble, but the outcome was assured because sooner or later life
would happen. We would be sitting in these rocking chairs,
or ones just like them, having this conversation. You believe
that DNA and probability are opposites. But both make
specific things happen. DNA runs on a tighter schedule
than probability, but in the long run—the extreme long

run—probability is just as fixed and certain in its outcome.
Probability forces the coin toss to be exactly fifty-fifty at
some point, assuming you keep flipping forever. Likewise,
probability forced us to exist exactly as we are. Only the tim-
ing was in question.”
“I have to think about that. It sounds logical but it’s
weird,” I said.
“Think about this,” he continued. “As we speak, engi-
neers are building the Internet to link every part of the
world in much the same way as a fetus develops a central
nervous system. Virtually no one questions the desirability
of the Internet. It seems that humans are born with the
instinct to create it and embrace it. The instinct of beavers
is to build dams; the instinct of humans is to build commu-
nication systems.”
“I don’t think instinct is making us build the Internet. I
think people are trying to make money off it. It’s just capi-
talism,” I replied.
“Capitalism is only part of it,” he countered. “In the
1990s investors threw money at any Internet company that
asked for it. Economics went out the window. Rationality
can’t explain our obsession with the Internet. The need to
build the Internet comes from something inside us, some-
thing programmed, something we can’t resist.”

He was right about the Internet being somewhat irra-
tional. I wasn’t going to win that debate and this was not a
place to jump in. He had a lot more to say.
“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as
millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street
corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime it
will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from
any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the
Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly
more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that
is known by one person will be available to all. A decision
can be made by the collective mind of humanity and
instantly communicated to the body of society.
“In the distant future, humans will learn to control the
weather, to manipulate DNA, and to build whole new
worlds out of raw matter. There is no logical limit to how
much our collective power will grow. A billion years from
now, if a visitor from another dimension observed human-
ity, he might perceive it to be one large entity with a con-
sciousness and purpose, and not a collection of relatively
uninteresting individuals.”
“Are you saying we’re evolving into God?”
“I’m saying we’re the building blocks of God, in the
early stages of reassembling.”

“I think I’d know it if we were part of an omnipotent
being,” I said.
“Would you? Your skin cells are not aware that they are
part of a human being. Skin cells are not equipped for that
knowledge. They are equipped to do what they do and
nothing more. Likewise, if we humans—and all the plants
and animals and dirt and rocks—were components of God,
would we have the capacity to know it?”
“So, you’re saying God blew himself to bits—I guess
that was the Big Bang—and now he’s piecing himself back
together?” I asked.
“He is discovering the answer to his only question.”
“Does God have consciousness yet? Does he know he’s
reassembling himself?”
“He does. Otherwise you could not have asked the
question, and I could not have answered.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
If the universe is nothing but dust and probability, how does
anything happen?” I asked. “How do you explain gravity and
motion? Why doesn’t everything stay exactly where it is?”
“I can answer those questions by answering other ques-
tions first,” he said.
“Okay. Whatever works.”
“Science is based on assumptions. Scientists assume that
electricity will behave the same tomorrow as today. They
assume that the laws of physics that apply on Earth will
apply on other planets. Usually the assumptions are right, or
close enough to be useful.
“But sometimes assumptions lead us down the wrong
path. For example, we assume time is continuous—meaning
that between any two moments of time, no matter how

brief, is more time. But if that’s true, then a minute would
last forever because it would contain an infinite number of
smaller time slices, and infinity means you never run out.”
“That’s an old mind trick I learned about in school,” I
said. “I think it’s called Zeno’s Paradox, after some old
Greek guy who thought it up first.”
“And what is the solution?” he asked.
“The solution is that each of the infinite slices of time
are infinitely small, so the math works out. You can have
continuous time without a minute lasting an eternity.”
“Yes, the math does work out. And minutes don’t seem
to take forever, so we assume Zeno’s Paradox is not really a
paradox at all. Unfortunately, the solution is wrong. Infin-
ity is a useful tool for math, but it is only a concept. It is not
a feature of our physical reality.”
“I thought the universe was infinitely large,” I replied.
“Most scientists agree that the universe is big, but
finite.”
“That doesn’t make sense. What if I took a rocket to the
edge of the universe, then I kept going. Couldn’t I keep
going forever? Where would I be if not in the universe?”
“You are always part of the universe, by definition. So
when your rocket goes beyond the current boundary, the
boundary moves with you. You become the outer edge for

that direction. But the universe is still a specific size, not
infinite.”
“Okay, the universe itself might be finite, but all the stuff
around it, the nothingness, that’s infinite, right?” I asked.
“It is meaningless to say you have an infinite supply of
nothing.”
“Yeah, I guess so. But let’s get back to the subject,” I
said. “How do you explain Zeno’s Paradox?”
“Imagine that everything in existence disappears and then
reappears. How much time expires while everything is gone?”
“How should I know? You’re the one making up the
example. How much?”
“No time passes. It can’t because time is a human con-
cept of how things change compared to other things. If
everything in the universe disappears, nothing exists to
change compared to other things, so there is no time.”
“What if everything disappears except for me and my
wristwatch?” I asked.
“Then you would experience the passing of time in rela-
tion to yourself and to your watch. And when the rest of the
universe reappeared you could check on how much time
had passed according to your watch. But the people in the
rest of the universe would have experienced no time while
they were gone. To them, you instantly aged. Their time

and your time were not the same because you experienced
change and they did not. There is no universal time clock;
time differs for every observer.”
“Okay, I think I get that. But how is any of this going
to answer my original question about gravity and what
makes things move?”
“Have you ever seen a graph of something called a
probability distribution?” he asked.
“Yes. It has a bunch of dots on it. The places with the
most dots are where there’s the greatest probability,” I said,
pleased to remember something from my statistics classes.
“The universe looks a lot like a probability graph. The
heaviest concentrations of dots are the galaxies and planets,
where the force of gravity seems the strongest. But gravity
is not a tugging force. Gravity is the result of probability.”
“You lost me.”
“Reality has a pulse, a rhythm, for lack of better words.
God’s dust disappears on one beat and reappears on the
next in a new position based on probability. If a bit of God-
dust disappears near a large mass, say a planet, then proba-
bility will cause it to pop back into existence nearer to the
planet on the next beat. Probability is highest when you are
near massive objects. Or to put it another way, mass is the
physical expression of probability.”

“I think I understand that, sort of,” I lied.
“If you observed God-dust that was near the Earth it
would look like it was being sucked toward the planet. But
there is no movement across space in the sense that we
understand it. The dust is continuously disappearing in one
place and appearing in another, with each new location
being nearer the Earth.”
“I prefer the current theory of gravity,” I said. “Newton
and Einstein had it pretty much figured out. The math
works with their theories. I’m not so sure about yours.”
“The normal formulas for gravity work fine with my
description of reality,” he replied. “All I’ve done is add
another level of understanding. Newton and Einstein gave
us formulas for gravity, but neither man answered the ques-
tion of why objects seem attracted to each other.”
“Einstein did explain it,” I said. “Remember, we talked
about that? He said space was warped by matter, so what
looks like gravity is just objects following the path of warped
space.”
The old man just looked at me.
“Okay,” I said. “I admit I don’t know what any of that
means. It does sound like nonsense.”
“Einstein’s language about bent space and my descrip-
tion of God-dust are nothing more than mental models. If

they help us deal wth our environment, they are useful. My
description of gravity is easier to understand than Einstein’s
model. In that sense, mine is better.”
I chuckled. I had never heard anyone compare himself
to Einstein. I was impressed by his cockiness but not con-
vinced. “You haven’t explained orbits. Under your theory,
how could a moon orbit a planet and not be sucked into it?
Your God-dust would pop into existence closer to the
planet every time it appeared until it crashed into the sur-
face.”
“You are ready for the second law of gravity.”
“I guess I am.”
“There is one other factor that influences the position of
matter when it pops back into existence. That force is inertia,
for lack of a better word. Although God-dust is unimaginably
small, it has some probability of popping into existence
exactly where another piece of God-dust exists. When that
happens, one of the particles has to find a new location and
alter its probability. To the observer, if one could see such tiny
happenings, it looks like the particles collide and then change
direction and speed. The new speed is determined by how far
from its original spot the God-dust appears with each beat of
the universe. If each new location is far from the old spot, we
perceive the object to be moving fast.”

He continued. “So there is always a dual probability
influencing each particle of God-dust. One probability
makes all God-dust pop into existence nearer to other God-
dust. The other probability is that the dust will appear along
a straight line drawn from its past. All apparent motion in
the universe is based on those competing probabilities.
“Earth’s moon, for example, has a certain probability of
coming toward the Earth and a certain probability of mov-
ing in a straight line. The two probabilities are, by chance,
in balance. If gravity were a tugging force, the way we nor-
mally think of it, there would be some sort of friction, slow-
ing the moon and eventually dragging it to Earth. But since
gravity is nothing more than probability, there is no friction
or tugging. The moon can orbit almost indefinitely because
its position is determined by probability, not by tugging or
pushing.”
“What if all the dust that makes up the moon doesn’t
reappear near its last position?” I asked. “You said it’s only
a matter of probability where the dust reappears, so couldn’t
the moon suddenly vanish if all its dust disappeared and
then appeared on the other side of the solar system?”
“Yes, it could. But the probability of that is ridiculously
small.”
“The trouble with your theory,” I said, “is that matter

doesn’t pop in and out of existence. Scientists would have
noticed that by now.”
“Actually, they have. Matter pops into and out of exis-
tence all the time. That’s what a quantum leap is. You’ve
probably heard the term but didn’t know its origin.”
“I’ll be darned,” I said.

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
Explain free will,” I said.
“Imagine a copper penny that is exactly like an ordinary
penny except that for this discussion it has consciousness. It
knows it is a coin and it knows that you sometimes flip it.
And it knows that no external force dictates whether it
comes up heads or tails on any individual flip.
“If the penny’s consciousness were like human con-
sciousness, it would analyze the situation and conclude that it
had free will. When it wanted to come up heads, and heads
was the result, the penny would confirm its belief in its power
to choose. When it came up tails instead, it would blame its
own lack of commitment, or assume God had a hand in it.
“The imaginary coin would believe that things don’t
just ‘happen’ without causes. If nothing external controlled

the results of the flips, a reasonable penny would assume
that the control came from its own will, influenced perhaps
by God’s will, assuming it were a religious penny.
“The penny’s belief in its own role would be wrong, but the
penny’s belief in God’s role would be right. Probability—the
essence of God’s power—dictates that the penny must some-
times come up tails even when the penny chooses to be heads.”
“But people aren’t pennies,” I said. “We have brains.
And when our brains make choices, we move our arms and
legs and mouths to make things happen. The penny has no
way to turn its choices into reality, but we do.”
“We believe we do,” the old man said. “But we also
believe in the scientific principle that any specific cause, no
matter how complex, must have a specific effect. Therefore,
we believe two realities that cannot both be true. If one is
true, the other must be false.”
“I’m not following you,” I said.
“The brain is fundamentally a machine. It’s an organic
machine with chemical and electrical properties. When an
electrical signal is formed, it can only make one specific
thing happen. It can’t choose to sometimes make you think
of a cow and sometimes make you fall in love. That one spe-
cific electrical impulse, in the one specific place in your
brain, can have one and only one result on your actions.”

“We’ve been through this. Maybe the brain is exempt
from the normal rules because of free will or the soul. I know
I can’t define those things, but you can’t rule them out.”
“Nothing in life can be ruled out. But the penny anal-
ogy is a simple explanation of free will that makes sense and
has no undefined concepts.”
“Being simpler doesn’t make it right,” I pointed out. I
needed to say something that sounded wise, for my own
benefit.
“True, simplicity is not proof of truth. But since we can
never understand true reality, if two models both explain the
same facts, it is more rational to use the simpler one. It is a
matter of convenience.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
Let’s get back to evolution,” I said. “With all your talk
about God, do you think he caused evolution? Or did it all
happen in a few thousand years like the creationists believe?”
“The theory of evolution is not so much wrong as it is
incomplete and useless.”
“How can you say it’s useless?”
“The theory of evolution leads to no practical invention.
It is a concept that has no application.”
“Yeah, I hear what you’re saying,” I said. “But you have
to agree that the fossil evidence of earlier species is pretty com-
pelling. There’s an obvious change over time from the earlier
creatures to the newer ones. How can you ignore that?”
“Imagine that an asteroid lands on Earth and brings
with it an exotic bacteria that kills all organic matter on
Earth and then dissolves without a trace. A million years

later, intelligent aliens discover Earth and study our bones
and our possessions, trying to piece together our history.
They might notice that all of our cookware—the pots and
pans and plates and bowls—all seemed to be related some-
how. And the older ones were quite different from the
newer ones. The earliest among them were crude bowls, all
somewhat similar, generally made of clay or stone. Over
time, the bowls evolved into plates and coffee cups and
stainless-steel frying pans.
“The aliens would create compelling charts showing
how the dishes evolved. The teacup family would look like
its own species, related closely to the beer mug and the
water glass. An observer who looked at the charts would
clearly see a pattern that could not be coincidence. The
cause of this dishware evolution would be debated, just as
we debate the underlying cause of human evolution, but the
observed fact of dishware evolution would not be chal-
lenged by the alien scientists. The facts would be clear.
Some scientists would be bothered by the lack of interme-
diate dishware species—say, a frying pan with a beer mug
handle—but they would assume it to exist somewhere
undiscovered.”
“That might be the worst analogy ever made,” I said.
“You’re comparing people to dishes.”

The old man laughed out loud for the first time since we
began talking. He was genuinely amused.
“It’s not an analogy,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
“It’s a point of view. Evolution is compelling not because of
the quality of the evidence but because of the quantity and
variety of it. The aliens would have the same dilemma.
There would be so much evidence for their theory of dish-
ware evolution that opponents would be mocked. The alien
scientists would theorize that forks evolved from spoons,
which evolved from knives. Pots evolved from bowls. Din-
ner plates evolved from cutting boards. The sheer quantity
and variety of the data would be overwhelming. Eventually
they would stop calling it a theory and consider it a fact.
Only a lunatic could publicly doubt the mountain of evi-
dence.”
“There’s a big difference between dishes and animals,”
I said. “With dishes, there’s no way they can evolve. Logic
would tell the aliens that there was no way that a nonliving
dish could produce offspring, much less mutant offspring.”
“That’s not exactly true,” he countered. “It could be
said that the dishes used human beings in a symbiotic rela-
tionship, convincing us through their usefulness to make
new dishes. In that way the dishes succeeded in reproducing
and evolving. Every species takes advantage of other living

things to ensure its survival. That is the normal way living
things reproduce.
“You believe, without foundation, that the alien scien-
tists would see a distinction between the living creatures and
the nonliving dishes, and classify the dishes as mere tools.
But that is a human-centric view of the world. Humans
believe that organic things are more important than inor-
ganic things because we are organic. The aliens would have
no such bias. To them, the dishes would look like a hardy
species that found a way to evolve and reproduce and thrive
despite having no organic parts.”
“But the dishes have no personalities, no thoughts or
emotions or desires,” I said.
“Neither does a clam.”
“Then why do people say they’re as happy as a clam?” I
joked. He ignored me.
“Does it strike you as odd that there isn’t more evidence
today of the mutations that drive evolution?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“Shouldn’t we be seeing in today’s living creatures the
preview of the next million years of evolution? Where are the
two-headed humans who will become overlords of the one-
headed people, the fish with unidentified organs that will
evolve to something useful over the next million years, the

cats who are developing gills? We see some evidence of muta-
tions today, but mostly trivial ones, not the sort of radical
ones there must have been in the past, the sort that became
precursors of brains, eyes, wings, and internal organs.
“And why does evolution seem to move in one direc-
tion, from simpler to more complex? Why aren’t there any
higher life forms evolving into simpler, hardier creatures? If
mutations happen randomly, you would expect evolution to
work in both directions. But it only works in one, from sim-
ple to complex.”
He continued. “And why has the number of species on
earth declined for the past million years? The rate of the for-
mation of new species was once faster than the rate of extinc-
tion, but that has reversed. Why? Can it all be explained by
meteors and human intervention?
“And how does the first member of a new species find
someone to breed with? Being a new species means you can
no longer breed with the members of your parents’ species.
If mutations are the trigger for evolution, the mutations
must happen regularly and in such similar ways that the
mutants can find each other to breed. You would think we
would notice more mutations if it happens that easily.”
“I have the same problem with religion,” I said. “It
seemed like there were all sorts of miracles a long time ago

but now we never see them. With evolution, it looks like
most of the mutating is petering out just when we get smart
enough to study it. It does seem a bit suspicious, as if there
was a point to it all and we’re nearing it.”
“Come back to the coin for a moment,” he beckoned.
“If by chance you flip a balanced coin and it comes up heads
a hundred times in a row, what is the probability that it will
come up heads again on the next toss?”
“I know this one. The odds are fifty-fifty, even though
it seems like the coin is overdue for a tails. It doesn’t make
sense to me, but that’s what I learned in school.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Or to put it another way, the
coin’s past has no impact on its future. There is no connec-
tion between the outcomes of the prior coin flips and the
likelihood of the future ones.
“The rest of the universe is like the coin. The events of
the past appear to cause the present, but every time we pop
back into existence we are subject to a new set of probabil-
ities. Literally anything can happen.”
He shifted in his chair and began again. “Every creature
has a tiny probability of becoming a different species with
each beat of the universe. A duck can be replaced in whole
by a woodchuck. The odds of this happening are so small
that it probably never has and never will happen, but it is

not precluded by the nature of the universe. It is simply
unlikely.
“A more likely result is that a creature’s DNA experi-
ences a tiny variation because two bits of God-dust tried to
reappear in the same location and had to make an adjust-
ment. That adjustment set in motion a chain reaction of
probabilities that affected the fate of the creature.
“When you flip the coin, it almost always lands either
heads or tails, even though it could possibly balance on its
edge. If we did not have experience with flipping coins we
might think coins regularly land and stay on their edges.
The edge of a coin has perhaps ten percent as much surface
area as either of its sides, so you might expect that coins
come up ‘edge’ routinely.
“But probability avoids in-between conditions. It favors
heads or tails. Evolution also avoids in-between conditions.
Something in the nature of the God-dust made growing
two eyes likely and growing two heads unlikely. More to the
point, there is something about eyes that supports God’s
inevitable reassembly.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
I have some friends who are skeptics,” I said. “They’re in
that Skeptics Society. I think they’d tear you apart.”
“Skeptics,” he said, “suffer from the skeptics’ disease—
the problem of being right too often.”
“How’s that bad?” I asked.
“If you are proven to be right a hundred times in a row,
no amount of evidence will convince you that you are mis-
taken in the hundred-and-first case. You will be seduced by
your own apparent infallibility. Remember that all scientific
experiments are performed by human beings and the results
are subject to human interpretation. The human mind is a
delusion generator, not a window to truth. Everyone, includ-
ing skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views.
That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are
not exempt from self-delusion.”

“Skeptics know that human perceptions are faulty,” I
argued. “That’s why they have a scientific process and they
insist on repeating experiments to see if results are consistent.
Their scientific method virtually eliminates subjectivity.”
“The scientific approach also makes people think and
act in groups,” he countered. “They form skeptical societies
and create skeptical publications. They breathe each other’s
fumes and they demonize those who do not share their sci-
entific methods. Because skeptics’ views are at odds with the
majority of the world, they become emotionally and intel-
lectually isolated. That sort of environment is a recipe for
cult thinking and behavior. Skeptics are not exempt from
normal human brain functions. It is a human tendency to
become what you attack. Skeptics attack irrational thinkers
and in the process become irrational.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
Do you believe in extrasensory perception—ESP?” I asked.
“That depends how you define it,” he said. “Skeptics try to
make ESP go away by defining it so narrowly that it can’t be
demonstrated in controlled experiments. Believers hold a more
expansive view of ESP, focusing on its utility in daily life.”
“So you’re a believer?” I prodded.
His expression said no. “There are billions of people on
earth. Some of them will have miserable lives from the time
they are born until the day they die. Others will have incred-
ibly good fortune in every facet of their lives. They will be
born to loving parents in well-to-do homes. Their brains and
bodies will be efficient, healthy, and highly capable. They will
experience love. They will never be shy or fearful without
reason. Some might win lotteries. In a word, they will be
lucky over their entire lives, compared to other people.

“Luck conforms to normal probability curves. Most
people will have average luck and some people will experi-
ence extra good luck or extra bad luck. A handful will have
good luck so extraordinary that it will be indistinguishable
from magic. The rules of probability guarantee that such
people exist.”
He continued. “And luck will be compartmentalized in
some people, confined to specific areas of their lives. Some
people will be extraordinarily lucky gamblers and some peo-
ple will have amazing business luck or romantic luck.
“Now imagine that you find the one person on earth
whose specific type of luck involves the extraordinary ability
to guess random things. Such a person is very likely to exist
somewhere on earth. What do you think the skeptics would
conclude about this person’s ESP?”
“If they tested him with controlled experiments and he
repeatedly passed, I think they would conclude he had
ESP,” I said.
“You’re wrong. They would conclude that their tests
were not adequately controlled and that more study needed
to be done. They would say that extraordinary claims
require extraordinary proof. And they would keep testing
until they either got a negative result or lost interest. No
skeptic would take the chance of declaring someone to have

ESP if there were any risk of later being proven wrong.
Their cult does not promote that sort of risk.
“To be fair, in all likelihood, the skeptics have never
been wrong when debunking claims of alleged extraordi-
nary powers. They believe their methods to be sound
because, excluding missteps in individual tests, their meth-
ods have never provided a wrong result in the long run, as
far as anyone knows. But never being wrong is no proof that
the method of testing is sound for all cases.”
“Then you think luck is the same as ESP?” I asked.
“I’m saying the results are indistinguishable.”
“But it’s different because ESP is caused by thoughts
traveling through the air or something like that. ESP has to
have some cause.”
“If you define ESP narrowly to include only the transfer
through the air of information, then skeptics will never
detect it,” he said. “But if you accept luck as being the same
as ESP, then ESP exists and it can be useful, though not reli-
ably so, since luck can change in an instant.”
“I think scientists have proven that thoughts don’t
travel through the air because they can’t detect anything
coming from people’s heads when they concentrate,” I said,
trying to agree. I should have known it would be a waste of
time.

“But your thoughts do travel across space,” he said.
“The question is whether another person can decode the
information.”
“How do thoughts travel across space?”
“When anything physical moves, it has a gravitational
impact on every other object in the universe, instantly and
across any distance. That impact is fantastically small, but it
is real. When you have a thought, it is coupled with a phys-
ical change in your mind that is specific to that thought, and
it has an instant gravitational ripple effect throughout the
entire universe.
“Can people decode these fantastically weak signals,
mixed with an unbelievably large amount of other gravita-
tional noise? No. But the signals are there.”

[TEAM_DERRICK]

“
What about remote viewing?” I asked. “You’ve heard of
that. It’s when a psychic draws a picture of some distant place
without being there. How’s that done? Is that luck too?”
“Sometimes. But pattern recognition is a big part of it
too.”
“How? There’s no pattern if you’re sitting in a room in
one part of the world and the object is someplace else.”
“Everyone has a different ability to recognize patterns
in their environment,” he said. “It is a skill, like music and
math and sports. The rare geniuses in those fields seem
downright supernatural. It is as if they possess special pow-
ers. In a sense they do, but it would be more accurate to
describe their skills as an abundance of a natural ability as
opposed to something supernatural.

“Consider a typical math prodigy. Math geniuses often
report knowing the answers to problems without being
aware of having made a calculation. The top geniuses in
every field report the same experience. At the highest levels
of performance people are not aware of the processes they
are using.
“There is nothing mystical or magical about the per-
formance of geniuses just because they are unaware of how
they do what they do. The subconscious calculations of
their minds happen so fast that they don’t register as mem-
ories. It seems as if the answers just arrive.
“Some apparent psychics, the ones who are not inten-
tional frauds, are geniuses at pattern recognition, but they
are not necessarily aware of the source of their abilities. Like
math geniuses, so-called psychics don’t know how they do
it. They only know that it works.”
“Okay,” I said, momentarily accepting his explanation
so I could test it. “How does pattern recognition explain a
psychic who predicts where a murdered person’s body will
be found? Where’s the pattern?”
“Most of the reports about psychics who locate bodies
are false. Reporters usually get their information by talking
to people and writing down what they are told, but the sto-
ries are only as good as the reliability of the people inter-

viewed. Psychics can make vague predictions and later claim
credit for anything that was near the mark. The media tells
the story of the fascinating successes and ignores the failures
as being not newsworthy. The public gets the impression
that psychics can locate dead bodies with regularity. In fact,
such cases have been rare and probably a result of genius-
level pattern recognition, or luck, or simple exaggeration.
“Let’s say the police get a report that a child has been
abducted. Police detectives are trained to recognize patterns
so they would know that the perpetrator is probably male
and probably someone known by the child. And they could
predict that the child is dead if missing more than forty-
eight hours, with the body probably left outdoors within
fifty miles of the crime. Let’s say the police call in an FBI
profiler who is even more proficient than the police at spot-
ting criminal patterns. Based on experience and statistics
with similar crimes, the profiler might predict that the per-
petrator has a certain type of background, upbringing, and
personality. The police detectives and the FBI profiler can
produce information that would seem psychic if you didn’t
know it was based on simple patterns. Now let’s say the
police contact a so-called psychic who is a genius at pattern
recognition. At the genius level, far more subtle patterns
come into play.”

He continued. “For example, the entertainment and
news media create patterns in the public’s minds. Let’s say
that several movies and TV shows about kidnappings in the
past year have created a pattern about the best place to dis-
pose of dead bodies. That pattern could influence a perpe-
trator to pick a drainage ditch instead of an old shack. The
psychic unknowingly picks up on the pattern and ‘feels’ that
the child will be found in a drainage ditch. A search of
drainage ditches proves the psychic right.
“In such a case, the so-called psychic’s powers would be
useful and in some sense genuine, but they could never be
reproduced under controlled experiments. In a lab setting,
all patterns are removed.”
“What about a guy who talks to your dead relatives?” I
asked. “He always has information about the survivors and
about the dead person that couldn’t be a coincidence.
How’s that done?”
“That, too, is pattern recognition, along with show-
manship, and sometimes trickery. Some of what passes as
extraordinary psychic ability is nothing but playing the
odds. The psychic might say, for example, that the deceased
husband saw the widow kissing his picture. That would be
a safe guess. Most widows kiss pictures of their dead hus-
bands. Or the psychic might say that the departed husband

liked to work with his hands at home. That applies to almost
all men.
“The psychic can pick up many patterns suggested from
a person’s voice, accent, clothes, age, name, health, and eth-
nicity. Let’s say a client has smoke-stained teeth. Smokers
are likely to live with other smokers. The psychic might
guess that a loved one recently died from heart or lung
problems. That would be a good guess.”
“Okay, what about those televangelists who heal people
on TV? Those people look healed to me. Is that fake?”
The old man just laughed. I laughed too.