And Eternity

by Piers Anthony

  This time the flash was almost blinding. He had nailed it.

  "But why?" Orlene asked. "Why should Nox care what we think? She has seen it all, long since!"

  "Why should anyone care what anyone else thinks?" Roque asked in return. "Why should the Incarnations care which way souls go, or whether they are separated at all? Why should God care, or Satan? I think we just have to accept as given that entities of all types do care, and that Nox is normal in this respect. She now wishes us to explore the matter of reality and come to a conclusion. Perhaps she is aware of some interesting complication that this exploration will engender, and which will amuse her. So let's start by arguing the case of Evolution. Who will support that?"

  "I support it, of course," Orlene said. "Don't you?" He smiled. "You forget: I am a judge. I try to be impartial. I am not certain that the verdict is in, and in any event, it is not mine to make."

  How can he be uncertain about Evolution? Vita demanded. Everyone knows it's so!

  That's not true at all! Jolie protested. God created the world in six days!

  "Our components disagree," Orlene said. "Vita says Evolution, while Jolie says Creation."

  "Then we have our opposing views, "Roque said. "We shall have to make trial of them. When we make a decision on the matter, Nox will let us return home."

  The globe flashed.

  "Let me be the narrator," Roque said. "I have a fair familiarity with both theories. I suspect that since you are the one, Orlene, who wishes a favor of Nox, you must make the decisions, after hearing the arguments." The globe flashed again. "So, in effect, I am the judge who keeps order. Vita is the apologist for Evolution, Jolie is the apologist for Creationism, and you are the jury who must come to a conclusion. The faster we complete the process, the faster we shall return."

  "But I'm really not an objective jury!" Orlene protested. "I already believe in Evolution!"

  "But can you honestly consider the evidence for another view? Are you able to change your mind if the preponderance of the evidence suggests that you should?"

  "Well, yes, of course. But I really can't see that Creationism could—"

  "That's enough," Roque said. "Reserve your conclusion until you have seen the evidence from both sides." He looked at the globe. "Now, as I make it, we are at the initial stage of the universe, the void, where all is chaos. What does Creationism have to say of the first stage?"

  In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth, Jolie thought.

  What do you mean. God? Vita retorted. Where the Hell did God come from? Who created God?

  Roque smiled. "I can see by your expression that your advocates are already mixing it up. I wonder whether we can get them to manifest separately, so that I can see and hear them, and so keep proper order?" As he spoke, the globe flashed.

  We can do that? Vita asked. We can take separate form?

  Apparently so, here, Jolie agreed.

  But it's my body! How can I exist apart from it?

  Like this. Jolie withdrew her spirit from the body. She appeared as a ghost, clarifying her form. "Now you do likewise, Vita."

  I don't know if I can! But she tried—and succeeded. She emerged as a diaphanous form, translucent and vague. Gee...

  "Concentrate on your form," Jolie said. "Remember, this isn't a true situation; it took me decades to master ghost form, but you should be able to do it immediately, in this vision."

  The form squeezed together and assumed human outline. The mouth opened. "And can I talk too?"

  "Yes, in this situation," Jolie agreed. "It's probably just your thought, but we can hear it."

  "But what about my real body? I mean, how can I—"

  "Perhaps Orlene can assume a different form, for this," Roque put in.

  "I'll try," Orlene said, surprised. "It is strange, being the only soul in this host!" Her form changed, becoming similar to her living one.

  Before long the three of them were settled, each looking and sounding like herself, even though Orlene was actually using Vita's physical body. "It's weird!" Vita exclaimed. "Knowing I'm a ghost, and that Orlene is really my body!"

  "That is not the least of the weirdness," Roque said. "But let us proceed with our business. Suppose I put questions to each advocate in turn, conducting this exploration in an orderly manner. Jolie, how does Creationism describe the beginning?"

  "In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth," Jolie replied promptly.

  "And I want to know just who created God, then?" Vita said.

  Roque shook his head. "That remark is out of order. You must give the Evolutionist version of the beginning."

  "Well, it—gee, I've got to remember stuff I forgot in school! But it's something like how the universe formed in a big bang about fifteen or twenty billion years ago, and—"

  "Who created the big bang?" Jolie asked.

  Vita looked nettled. "Well, I don't know, it just sort of—hey, isn't that out of order?"

  "Yes, unless you wish to permit direct debate. For the sake of order, I will direct the question to each in turn. Jolie, who created God?"

  "No one. He always existed. He is the Eternal."

  "And who created the big bang?" he asked Vita.

  Vita had evidently used the reprieve for some quick thinking. "I don't know how it started. But if it's okay for God to be eternal, then it's okay for the universe to be eternal too. So maybe it cycles, getting big and then squeezing together, and what we call the big bang is just this explosion, We can't go back and see, but we do know it's here, so why not accept that it's here, no matter how it started?"

  Roque glanced at Orlene. "Have you been persuaded by either advocate?"

  "I really can't choose between them," Orlene said, surprised. "Either God began and the universe began, or both are eternal. There really doesn't seem to be a conflict there."

  The globe flashed—and their surroundings changed. Vita was startled. "You mean that was it? The right answer was not making up her mind?"

  "Or keeping her mind open, in the face of insufficient evidence," Roque said.

  Jolie peered at the crystal. "I think we are closer to home! The specks aren't as far apart as they were."

  "But still pretty far," Orlene said. "I see lightness and darkness, but it is still chaotic." She was breathing rapidly, trying to get air.

  "Because this must be the second day," Jolie said. "When God made the sky to divide the waters from the waters." As she spoke, the scene seemed to separate into a portion above and a portion below.

  "What are you talking about?" Vita demanded. "It doesn't make sense to divide water from water!"

  "What is your version?" Roque inquired. "I must advise you that we of the flesh are finding this realm inhospitable, so a quick discussion would be appreciated." Indeed, he looked as uncomfortable as Orlene did.

  "The Earth formed out of dust and gas and debris circling the Sun. The water was part of it, though I think at first it was mostly hot rock. So any water was mostly steam, then."

  The scene around them changed, becoming red, molten rock, with clouds of vapor above. They hovered just above the surface, sinking slowly toward it. The heat was stifling.

  "Say—it's showing what we describe!" Vita said. "That helps. You can see that this wasn't made in a day!"

  "Certainly it was!" Jolie replied. "The day of the separation of the waters from the waters."

  "What waters from what waters?"

  "The waters which were above the firmament from the waters which were below the firmament. The waters of the deep universe from the waters of the Earth." As she spoke, the scene around them became one of deep night sky above and deep ocean below. The heat abated; now they were cold.

  "And all this in just one little day? A billion years is more like it! I mean, molten rock doesn't cool overnight, you know."

  Jolie shrugged. "Yes, that day could have been a billion years long."

  "Oh, you don't mean one of our days!"

  "The word 'day' mea
ns different things. A day of Creation means the whole stage, taking just as long as God needs to do it His way."

  "There doesn't seem to be much difference between them, then," Orlene remarked. "I see no inherent conflict, merely ways of looking at it."

  It was the right comment. The globe flashed.

  "Then let's get on to the third day," Jolie said. "God gathered the waters together in one place, in seas, and made the dry land appear."

  The scene shifted again. Now there was land rising from the ocean, jagged and dark. It buckled and cracked, making great folds that were mountains. Storms raged, dumping water on the mountains, which wore them down. New ranges formed, in a constant, restless process.

  "Well, maybe so," Vita said. "I mean, naturally the water settled to the lowest place, and what was left was high and dry. I say a billion years, you say you call that a day, so okay. But let's get some life here! I figure it started in the ocean—they call it the primeval soup or something—and after a while it crawled up on the land, the plants first."

  "Yes," Jolie said. "God said let the Earth bring forth grass, and herbs, and fruit trees, each yielding fruit after its kind." As she spoke, a green carpet formed across the land and trees sprouted, grew, flowered, and put forth many types of fruit.

  "And this day could have been another billion years long?" Vita asked, trying for irony.

  "Yes."

  The girl shook her head, bemused. "I can go with that."

  "So can I," Orlene said. The globe flashed.

  "And on the fourth day," Jolie said, "God made two great lights, the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night." The Sun and Moon appeared, their light forging through the mists that had shrouded them before.

  "Hey, wait!" Vita cried. "There were three days before there was any sun? Plants grew before—"

  "There was light," Jolie said. "It just wasn't the Sun's light, until God decided that it should be so."

  "Or until the Earth orbit stabilized. You do know that the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around?"

  Jolie smiled. "I suppose if you stood on the Sun, and watched the Earth, it would look that way. But we're standing on the Earth and looking at the Sun, and we can see that the Sun goes around the Earth."

  "There is a case to be made," Roque said with a smile. "Technically, bodies in space orbit each other."

  "Viewpoint," Orlene said. "I still see no inherent conflict." The globe flashed.

  "On the fifth day," Jolie said, "God created the great whales and all the fishes of the sea, and every winged fowl." Around them the creatures appeared, the ocean teeming with life, the sky showing birds.

  "But are your days still a billion years long?" Vita demanded. "If you give them time. Evolution makes them evolve, so that's all right."

  "The days can be that long if you wish," Jolie said. "God did it in the time he did it; it really doesn't matter."

  "Then we still don't really have a conflict," Orlene said, and the globe flashed again.

  "On the sixth day God made everything that was on the land," Jolie said, and all the creatures of the land appeared.

  "Oh no you don't!" Vita cried. "Where are the dinosaurs?" A huge lumbering reptile appeared.

  "You mean those bones God put in the ground to amuse scientists?"

  "Yes, I mean those bones! The first creatures on land were the insects, and then the amphibians, and then the reptiles, and then the birds and the mammals. You claim the birds and whales came first, but whales aren't fish, they're mammals, and they couldn't have existed before mammals did. Even if your days are each a billion years long, you can't screw up the order of things like that!"

  "But there were no dinosaurs," Jolie protested. "Life has always been as it is now, with all the present creatures and no others. God created them together, and then He created man in His own image to have dominion over them, and from that time to this it has been about six thousand years."

  "What of the fossil record? It shows how the present animals evolved from the early ones."

  "Do you mean that you have a chain of bones that shows an unbroken line from your dinosaurs to the modern creatures?"

  "Well, not exactly. The dinosaurs died out. But the little mammals evolved after that, and we have their bones to prove it."

  "You may have bones, but they are only what God put there. And I think even so, they do not have unbroken lines. For example, how good a line of bones do you have for human beings?"

  "Uh, not too good, for people, I don't know why.

  But—"

  "Because your notion that man evolved from animals is a fantasy," Jolie said, warming to her subject. "Foolish men see a few bones and think that proves Evolution, but smart ones see that the bones are only bones, put in the ground the same time man himself was put on the Earth. If it were otherwise, the bone record would be continuous and it's not even close."

  Vita was taken aback. "Gee, you really believe this stuff!" she exclaimed. "But you know, that doesn't prove anything. I saw a man once looking for a handful of change he'd dropped. He'd had to carry a bag of things into his house, then he came out later to round up the change, and all he could find was a few pennies. Know why? Because it was by a sidewalk, and some coins must've rolled into the gutter and gotten washed through the storm grate, and some fell in cracks between slabs, and some were lost in the grass—and there were people walking by all the time, and they would've picked them up and taken them away. So if you'd judged by what he found, you'd have said that all he dropped was two cents—but he really dropped over a dollar in change. Now you take those bones: some of them were dragged off and chewed to pieces by predators, some got washed into the sea, some got crushed by stones or just plain weathered away in the course of millions of years. Only a few ever got buried where maybe some scientist found them—and that's why the fossil record is so skimpy. I don't think God's a tease; He wouldn't put down wrong clues just to confuse people. He didn't do it at all; it happened by itself. We've found enough to show us the way of it, and that's what the fossil record proves."

  "But God could have put down those bones," Jolie said.

  "Those bones don't prove how they were put down. You have one theory, I have another. Can we choose between them?"

  Orlene shook her head. "I have to confess, I have my bias, but I can't honestly choose between them. It could have happened either way."

  The crystal flashed. "We're much closer to home now," Roque said, peering into it. Indeed, they now stood in a setting that was almost modern, with a variety of broad-leafed trees nearby and fir trees in the distance. A deer was browsing several hundred feet away, and there was the sound of birds in the trees.

  "But we aren't through with the subject yet," Jolie said. "You mentioned this soup from which life formed, as if this is easy. But the most primitive type of life is unimaginably complex! Even a single living cell has so many molecules, such intricate processes, that it would take a small library of texts just to write out the DNA code! The odds against such a perfectly functioning system coming together by chance are astronomical. Indeed, even your scientists will tell you that it would probably take longer than the whole age of the universe, as they figure it, from start to finish, for that to happen. It has to have been done by design—God's design."

  "No it doesn't," Vita retorted. "There may be hundreds of billions of planets just like ours in the universe, all with their soups, so the chances of it happening on at least one of them aren't that bad. But Evolution doesn't claim that a single living cell just popped into existence from soup. It happened by easy stages. Maybe just two molecules came together by chance, at first, and that worked better than the loose ones, so they stayed that way. Then, maybe a million years later, a third one bumped into them, and if mat worked better, it stayed. That's natural selection. All those molecules churning around all the time, banging into each other, some combinations are bound to work together better than others. It may be chance that brings them together, but once t
hey are together, it's not chance anymore. So the key proteins were formed in that soup, bit by bit. When one combination produced life, it was only a little step—but it worked better, so it kept on, and made copies of itself, and then things really got going. Mutation—"

  "But almost all mutations are bad!" Jolie protested.

  "So those ones die. If one in a thousand mutations makes something better, then that's what survives. It just keeps going, getting better, because the worse ones either die or are less competitive. If more than one version works, then we get different species, and finally we have all the plants and creatures of the world today, including man. Mutation and natural selection, in little steps, with a lot of time—that accounts for everything. We sure don't need God to do it for us!"

  Orlene shook her head. "It could have happened either way. God could have done it, or Evolution could have, or God could have used Evolution as His tool to do it."

  The globe flashed. They now seemed to be quite close to home.

  "We haven't settled this yet," Jolie said. "Even if Evolution could have done it, it still had to have an orderly universe. You claim that everything started in one big bang. How can an explosion lead to the systematic organization of galaxies and stars and planets we find? It could generate only chaos—and only God could have brought order out of that confusion."

  "Not so," Vita argued. "In one of my math classes they got into computer-aided designs. You could start with any shape and keep changing it randomly, and if you selected for what you wanted, you could come up with just about any picture you wanted. It's cumulative. It might take a hundred steps or more, but it happened. I started with a V and made it into a flying bat, just by picking the right shapes the computer generated."

  "But the universe had no one to pick shapes!" Jolie said. "Except God!"

  Vita was taken aback. "You mean I'm arguing your case? No, I'm just saying that out of a random shape, order can come, if something selects for it. It doesn't have to be a person. In the case of the universe, I think it was gravity. When two bits of matter got together, they attracted others, just a little, and formed a ball in time. Eventually there were great stars, and when they got too big, they collapsed inward and made black holes, and they started sucking everything else in, making galaxies. We're just some of the fluff that hasn't gotten sucked into the hole yet. Some organization! I don't see it as any celestial design, just as part of the process. And life isn't all that great, either, it's really just the slime on the surface of our planet. But it's what we are."