Secondum Mobile

In the beginning there was Aristotle
Who taught that things at rest stayed at rest
And that things that move come to a rest
And soon everything was at rest
And God saw that it was Boring.

This Friday the Twentieth of October in the Year of Our Lord 2006, in a clammy computer lab which is marginally better than the hazy hell outside.

This is the second day of creation, which you might have noticed took around three days to come. I can write now that the second day is when stars form and galaxies form, which will initiate hot debates in its future philosophers. Apologetics would explain that I willed the universe continuously, deists would insist that my word on the second day is merely an observation that rules set on the first day was not violated, and relativists would speculate that it happened only as a case of conventional knowledge, what with me hearing the “stars and galaxies forming” cliché from so many instances of cosmological literature now.

If I would bring some revelation to the folks on created Earth it would become the shock of their lives.

Flow of time
This is an important point for my creation thought experiment, because it showed that any theoretical creator has the freedom to not experience a similar temporal procession to his creature. This is assuming the creator treats creation as a novel, or better, a diary.

The creator could
Summarise a billion or two boring years into one paragraph
Hop back to a previous chapter to amend a fault
Finish the whole affair in his own free time
i.e. create the universe in an arbitrary amount of time

Differences between God and the Demiurge
God is benevolent, but the Demiurge has a capacity for irresponsibility.
God can not run out of patience. How could you write all 6 billion lives on this planet alone? Plus everyone that has lived down in history? And wildlife? And possibly aliens?
According to Catholic thought, God chooses to act with logos, or rationality. (We people don’t like the idea of a capricious God) The Demiurge would choose to be purely random a lot of times.

Consciousness, command and free will
This is also important when I deal with my folks. For absolutely any character I write into my universe, they would in some way inherit my consciousness, to a small extent. Let’s bring in the character Diotallevi, who has not been created on the second day but envisioned for a future time. When Diotallevi says to you “Hello world!” I would also be saying Hello World to you, because my actual fingers typed those letters. If I inserted a personality to Diotallevi, as well as a personal world view, they would all stem from a perspective I already know of. Diotallevi would inherit a part of my consciousness.

Of course, if Diotallevi does whatever I write him to do, it would incur some stuff for and against the dodginess of free will in humans. I don’t know if Diotallevi inheriting my consciousness (assuming that I do have free will) would help him being a free person even if under my command, but I leave this question open.

This Saturday the Twenty-First of October in the Year of Our Lord 2006, after a long day.

The Demiurge writes a Subcontinent
Many of us literary creators would create worlds in the form of planets and star systems, and many others would create them in lands, in groups of nations. For me I follow the latter.

Here I go.
I write a subcontinent Penthia, situated upon a planet that its inhabitants has not bothered to name yet; If need comes we may refer to it as the Penthian planet. Penthia juts out of a great desert landmass to the south, and is surrounded on three sides by ocean.

To keep geology and paleontology enthusiasts (including myself) happy I would gladly write every single detail of aesthenospheric activity below the tectonic plates from the primordial planet in the primordial star system to the right now, whenever that is.

This makes me think of Aristotle's causality theory.
Why plate tectonics?
Because,
1. Material cause: stuff in the aesthenosphere
2. Formal cause: the temperate, inhabited subcontinent Penthia
3. Efficient cause: convection of magma and occasional earthquakes
4. Final cause: the interaction between inhabitants and Demiurge <--> Demiurge and God

The Demiurge writes living sub*creation
*Notice the sub- prefix before "creation". This is important.

I shall skip the origin of life and the primordial soup bit because they can be boring to write. The folks down there can figure them out themselves. But by the time sentient beings come to Penthia, they will witness biodidersity in their faces.

Or should I create everything by formality?
There's a bad thing to trying to create your own universe. You can't write everything in, and neither can the readers fill everything in with their imaginations. It all has to be left for God-like precision in the creating, the dedication, and the devotion.

That's a point why the Gnostic Demiurge can not stand: because what we see are more detailed than what the Demiurge can bear to write. It also addresses the fact that the world is not perfect while the Creator is. A perfect eyeball, for example. Heck yeah, any Demiurge can bother to write a perfect eyeball, but only God can make the eyeball special by writing also how the eyeball is different, lovingly documenting its every defects and imperfections. Remember now how many eyeballs exist on Earth alone, and how many species we have on Earth that possesses eyeballs.

But still this argument has holes that any reader can fall quite unsubtly into, and I leave it open to readers.

Let the Penthian planet (man this sounds dodgy) fill with plants. And algae. And let them be perfect plants because man how'd you expect me to write in every angiosperm and gymnosperm and conifer and monocotyledon and those three kingdoms of algae critters all in a day's time? I got limited time you know.

And let it fill up with fungi, every species of lichen and mold and ergot (oh maybe not ergots) and cup fungi and truffles and all that confounding basidiomycota including muschrooms and toadstools (paraphyletic construct, sorry) and chanterelles and boletes sorry what else can I write about these fantastic creatures.

Ok so maybe not let it be filled up with fungi because you know how horrible that would be. Let the ecosystem sort it out then.

And let it fill with animal life, which is the most fantastic of all, sorry for being chauvinistic against the plants and fungi and prokaryotes. All ye crustaceans and orynchopods, ye sponges and ye echinoderms, ye rotifers and other phyla I have not bothered to write, sorry about that. Go to Penthian oceans and prosper.

And all ye hyperotretians and fishes, frogs and salamanders, lizards and dinosaurs and other icky creatures, multiply into what has been written for you (sorry but you'd have to imagine that bit because for a fact I have not written biotic fertility into Penthia. Whoops, now I have.) and make timid people scream.

And all ye birds, ye cranes and storks, you cardinals, pidgeons, hesperyornithines. You mallards, peacocks, penguins, to the meek and multitudinous sparrows, fly with all your might so as to make future humans feel jealous. Enjoy flying!

And all you mammals, the antelopes; the blaauwboks, the springboks, the bonteboks and the whateverboks (man do I love the Afrikaans language) that arc through the aethers in flight. The shrews, the moles and the rats that cling close to ground. The prowling predators, and the herds of aurochs and elephants and bisons. Go to the grasslands and experience hardship as good strong creatures rightfully should.

And after all that, I wrote a human.
Ok, if making a human from the dust has any significance, I'd try it. But then, every other instance of creation has to be from dust, because like the human they are corporeal.

Breathing sentience is a tricky bit. I can't breathe sentience as well, ignorant as I am with the situations of the first human. I could write words into his mouth, but it takes skill to write yourself into a character.

Then again, it would take time to show if humans are sentient.
The next day (the solar day, mind) when he woke up, he asked for a wife.

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