Where did it begin? Was there nothing and then something? Even the Celestials, the noblest of beings to enter the human consciousness, did not know what was in the dark before the light was turned on.
—Peter Lord-Wolff, The Silence in Heaven
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Martin Gardner (author of The Night Is Large and Knotted Doughnuts and Other Mathematical Entertainments), Steven J. Brams (author of Superior Beings), Karen Armstrong (author of A History of God), and William Poundstone (author of Labyrinths of Reason) for their books, which provide excellent background material to various paradoxes relating to omniscience. Background reading for Chapter 9 can be found in my book Time: A Traveler’s Guide, in which I also discuss the brain, volition, and time distortion. Quotations from biblical sources are usually from either the King James version or the New International version.
I am grateful to Brian Mansfield for his wonderful illustrations at the beginning of each chapter. I thank Edward J. Gracely, Eric Kaplan, Royce Denton, David Glass, Reinhold Niederhagen, Craig Becker, and Dennis Gordon for useful advice and comments. I thank Samuel Marcius for various font symbols.
The secret of cosmogenesis. The universes are bubbles blown by God, who does not realize that a demon is insufflating both love and hate into them. From Jean-Ignace Isidore Grandville’s Un Autre Monde.