I don't think I'm starting a wave of protest or rioting when I say that Albert Einstein was a genius.
But I'm not talking about E = mc2, or relativity, or the countless thought experiments concocted in that crackpot brain of his. No doubt those were important contributions to science and the world at large, but enough with the same old accolades already. How many different ways are there to ride the same dick?
No, the genius I'm referring to is something other: an Einstein quotation that's never been given its due credit. It's been publicized, recited, used for argument often in the last 75 years, but never has it been lauded as especially genius from the genius, because no one has ever perceived the words as I recently have.
And the quotation goes like this: "God does not play dice with the universe."
At the time of utterance, the statement probably came off as "oh, that's nice," just another bite-sized Einstein axiom about the universe and the laws governing it. Nothing special, right? You read it just now and, if I'm not being too presumptuous, there was nothing in the line that inspired awe from or moved you to tears. That's because axioms, though dulcet to the ear, rarely possess the strength necessary to shatter those higher, more fortified emotional walls.
But look again. "God does not play dice." Is it really an axiom? I say not. I propose that it's less universal statement of truth and more prediction, a very specific and testable scientific hypothesis.
Yes, that's right. Einstein was, for lack of a better term, "doing science" when he said the Almighty One does not play dice with the cosmos. 75 years later and we've learned that he was right; that, per usual, he's been right all along. By scrupulous observation and painstaking trial and error, science has evidenced the remarkable fact that God does not play dice.
What's even more extraordinary is that cosmologists have ascertained the two games that He does play. The first is Telephone, known as such in the US, but more popularly named "Chinese Whispers" in other parts of the world. (Scientists are now debating, based on the game's latter and more original name, whether or not God is of Chinese descent. Should the claim hold up, this will be a colossal blow to the Americans, who've put complete and total faith into the Almighty One, having issued "In God We Trust" on every dollar bill extant for the last 200-plus years. Perhaps China's unremitting rise paired with the US's ever-spiraling fall is telling enough as to which team God is really pulling for.) The second is the universally renowned Game of Silence, also known as the Quiet Game.
We'll first discuss God's playing Telephone. Assuming that most people understand how the game is played, I won't outline the rules and preconditions here. But just in case, below is an amusing video clip demonstrating the game in action:
What scientists have done is reveal the players in the first game of Telephone ever played in the universe's 6,000-year history. I present to you an excerpt from their findings below:
From Conclusions Drawn from the Theory of Games Played by God the Father - Part I: "This Is God Speaking…":
In the beginning there was God. God was God and therefore all-powerful and He could get things very easily, like when one shops at a Costco. But even so, God was unhappy. Omniscient as He was, somehow it slipped past His mind that the more perfect the cosmos, the lesser its problems, and the bored-er the Creator. It was a quandary riddled with paradox, and for the first time in all of eternity, God didn't know what to do.
Fortunately, His ignorance and indecision in the matter endured only a short while before epiphany struck. "Oh me!" God said aloud. "I know how to rectify this boredom! I shall…"
And on the eighth day God made problems.
The problem with making problems, however, was that, though omnipotent beyond all revelation, God was still powerless to fix the mess He had so impulsively created of sheer desperation.
How could that be? Well, the answer had a name, and it was "Free Will."
God had met Free Will on a constellation corner at nighttime three days prior. She was turning tricks for one star a pop, and God was… well, this is a story meant to be consumed by the general public, so the official alibi is that God was passing through the neighborhood in search of a hardware store.
Free will recognized the Alpha and Omega instantly and stopped Him in His tracks.
"You're God."
"I am," God replied. "And you are?"
"Till 9:00 p.m. my name is Stacy. After that you can call me Free Will."
"Nice to meet you, Free Will. Listen, I'm looking for a hardware store around here."
"Whatchu need to go to a hardware store for, babe?"
"I'm in need of a hammer."
"So you can nail things?"
"Yes," said God, "so I can nail things."
Free will blushed. "I bet you like to nail things, Dadd—I mean, Heavenly Father."
"So do you know of a hardware store around here or not?"
"Course I do," said Free Will. "But I got an extra hammer right here if you want it. Save you the trouble of going to the hardware store."
"Oh, that's excellent," said God. "You'll let me borrow the hammer?"
"Anything for you, Mr. Omnipotent. But I should warn you, it's only good for nailing"—the following words in a low, hissy whisper—"certain things."
God gulped.
Afterward they went on to negotiate a fair price: in exchange for the borrowed hammer to nail whatever "certain things" the temptress was referring to, God was to let Free Will dictate the entire fate of the cosmos for the rest of eternity.
Needless to say, God must’ve really wanted that hammer.
That is why, after inventing problems teeming in abundance just to keep busy, the Almighty One could only watch as said problems ran rampant and exacerbated in skyrocketing numbers. As any person of ambition can imagine, not only did the Creator grow bored with all the watching; but restlessness for something—ANYTHING—to do, began to permeate His whole being.
And so God had yet another idea, one that would afford Him all the requisite entertainment He'd been searching for without violating the terms of His agreement with Free Will. He was going to invent a game. Games, He thought, always cure divine entities of their boredom. Why did I not think of this before?
And so on the ninth day, God made Telephone (or Chinese Whispers).
The initial statement to be transmitted was not so much a statement as it was a story, one so lengthy it would turn out to span over a thousand pages in print. Nevertheless, the Almighty One recited His narrative perfectly, exactly as He had envisioned it in His mind, to a man on planet earth that history books remember as Noah, but whose actual name was Dave.
God instructed Dave to perform the very reasonable task of memorizing, then relaying to someone else, His story in its entirety, which took 40 consecutive days and nights to narrate to completion. (It is not widely known that God was a spitter when He spoke. Well, His speaking incessantly for 40 straight days was cause for plenty of beatific saliva, which poured tumultuously from the heavens and was the real reason for the Great Flood. This also helps to explain the insurmountable drought that's plagued the Sahara since the beginning of time—God doesn't talk to niggers.)
40 days later and Dave, with only two animals of every kind in his camp, elected to retell God's story to a giraffe named Robert De Niro (not to be confused with the human actor born in the 20th century, who has yet to meet posterity). As can probably be guessed, much of the original account was lost in the transmitting of the tale, mostly because giraffes are animals and therefore incapable of comprehending things.
Nevertheless, the game of Telephone kept on unabated. Robert relayed the story to Moses; who told the burning bush; who told Job; who told His best friend Doug the Canaanite; who told his wife/cousin Sherry-Loo, who, big mouth that she was, told the whole Parents of Jerusalem Middle School Knitting Team; and on and on and on. Eventually, bearing the message was a woman named Myla, who sold those knives capable of cutting through sand to pharaohs on forty-deuce. When at last the time came, she chose an ordinary carpenter named Louis as the recipient to God's diluted-many-times-over tale. It's this last dissemination transaction that is of special importance. Why?
Here's a hint: who else do you know that was a famous carpenter?
Yes, that's right. Had Jesus of Nazareth never taken an acute interest in the cutting, shaping, and installing of natural woods, Louis would most likely have passed the tale from God the Heavenly Father to someone else, and you might be kneeling bedside right now begging for your mom's cancer to be cured by Steve or Larry Christ.
But it was Jesus whom Louis chose as the game's next tether, and here we are 2,000 years later expelling "Jesus fucking Christ!" to the heavens every time we miss an open lay up.
Perhaps this is the most groundbreaking result of our findings in the lab: that Jesus was not who or what he's been touted to be for the thousands of years since his "crucifixion." And that's really the risk one runs in propagating sensitive information to just anyone without duly screening first. The evidence suggests that Jesus fits this "just anyone" description to the tee; that, contrary to popular belief, he was not the son of God, but rather an institutionalized lunatic with a knack for escaping psychiatric hospitals, and who suffered from being self-important, extremely hard of hearing, and not Jewish but jewy.
That he mistook the majority of the tale as being one about him now makes complete sense, given the man's ample symptoms and diagnoses. As a consequent, this is really where God's initial message gets hodge podged. Within no time, Jesus was proclaiming himself to be the son of God, the Messiah, the way and the truth and the life. He assured the world around him that he was acting on strict orders from God the Father, "figuratively for you, literally for me." He started amassing followers to whom he passed on his extraordinarily perverted version of other corrupted versions of God's initial tale. Such misinformation would, in time, shape the basis for the Bible's New Testament as we know it today.
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The authors go on to say that Jesus might not have really died by crucifixion, but rather in childbirth. (For those that are hard of inferring, the implication is that Jesus may or may not have been born with a set of knockers. Whether they were nice and supple or all haggy-like is a matter of debate, and at present it's really anyone's guess.) That's about as much as they know and/or are willing to divulge to the public sphere regarding Telephone.
As for the Game of Silence, scientists are in complete agreement that God did, in fact, partake in its creation, that He commenced playing the game some 2,000 years ago, and that's He's been playing ever since.
So here's another but much shorter excerpt from Conclusions Drawn from the Theory of Games Played by God the Father - Part II: "This Is God NOT Speaking…":
And then one day, the Alpha and Omega just altogether stopped saying things.
Why the drastic change? What prompted the most notorious chatterbox in all of recorded history to achieve something that even the great Charlie Chaplin would only dream of aspiring toward?
Until recently, science was at a loss. We didn't know and we were confused. Still, that didn't stop us from positing a multitude of hypotheses to explain the shift in God's behavior, albeit without much success. Some of of our guesses proved to be just downright silly, like the one put forth by Ryan Hodinger, former Physics Department Head at CIT. (Which means that yes, there are such things as stupid questions, and yes, uttering them aloud can have dire consequences on one's career and, subsequently, quality of life.) Hodinger proposed that the reason God stopped speaking was because of the expanding universe, which is flying away from us so fast that scientists are beginning to think its legs are Jamaican. For the former Physics Head, God was an inextricable part of this expanding universe—a prisoner of sorts—so when the universe gained distance from us (as it is prone to do), so did God. Thus, it wasn't that He had stopped speaking; it was that the distance between us and Him had become too great to discern any of His speech.
Editor's note: Hodinger, you stupid cunt. How's life teaching remedial math at a Juco, you fucking asshole?
We know now that the answer is much simpler; that God loves playing games more than was previously thought, particularly the world-renowned Game of Silence. One needn't do more than picture himself for a nanosecond walking in the Creator's shoes to marvel at just how phenomenal His achievements regarding games prove. Imagine! 2,000-plus years engaging in the same round of the Quiet Game! We mortals can only dream of lasting a whole meal without uttering one of our trademark dumb and useless comments, much less multiple millenia.
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So there you have it. Thanks to Einstein's genius, we've done it. Unearthed what had been, up to the point of discovery, one of the most troubling and vexing riddles of the universe. God has two games of preference: Telephone and the Quiet Game, and He's an unrivaled master at both.
Which leaves me with nothing else to say except the following: the next time someone alludes to "God doesn't play dice" in conversation, I trust that you now know how to respond.
Tune into next week's episode of Cosmos, titled "O Father, Where Art Thou?" in which Neil Tyson Degrasse will do as I did here, but better and more elaborately, speculating on when God will break His silence, and more controversially, whether He already did in the 2003 film Bruce Almighty.
