Big Bang?

[Otto]

"All the scientists hope to do is describe the universe mathematically, 
predict it, and maybe control it. The philosopher, by contrast, seems 
unbecomingly ambitious: He wants to *understand* the universe; to get 
behind phenomena and operation and solve the logically prior riddles of 
being, knowledge, and value. But the artist, and in particular the 
novelist, in his essence wishes neither to explain nor to control nor to 
understand the universe: He wants to make one of his own, and may even 
aspire to make it more orderly, meaningful, beautiful, and interesting 
than the one God turned out. What's more, in the opinion of many readers 
of literatur, he sometimes succeeds.
    What a botch Nature is. It's true that for some people its splendors 
have been testimony of God's existence. "How can anyone be agnostic?" 
they ask down the ages, at least since the invention of windows: "Just 
look out the window!" But it's equally true that Nature's indifferent 
cruelty and monstrous waste have led others for ages to quite different 
conclusions. For Lucretius the very sloppiness in the cosmos argued that 
that the gods had no hand in it. Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov cannot 
accept a divine program which allows for the torture and death of even 
one sinless little child, let alone the millions and millions who have 
gone that route. Robert Louis Stevenson stands aghast at what he calls 
"our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more drenched with 
blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship. . . ." To 
these observers, at least--who cannot be charged with insensitivity or 
lack of feeling--our lives have neither order nor purpose; our values 
are cruel illusions; our conversations are tedious beyond appraisal; our 
bodies are preposterous, our minds a bad joke. On their view, the 
kindest judgment we can make upon the universe is that of the nihilists, 
that it is absurd. Or that of a friend of mine, a believer, who assure 
me that God *did* make the universe, but only by way of a heavenly 
graduate-school project, which may well fail to earn Him His Master's 
degree. Or that of Stendhal: "God's only excuse is that He doesn't exist."

John Barth, "How to Make a Universe," _The Friday Book_, (1984) p. 17-18.

		
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