Hi, uh, I'm marvin I've been coming here for a while But I haven't ever shared I'm a, well my thing's a little different I guess things started for me About six months ago My wife and I had a baby And it's been, you know, all the clichés It's a miracle, but it's been hell on my sleep 'Cause once I'm up, I'm up So I started getting into late night Comment sessions on science forums Evolution, intelligent design, that kind of thing Now I'm actually a neurochemist I focus on the effects of audio stimuli On brain chemistry Neural plasticity and dopamine production As they relate to music Subpartial alpha and beta waves Microtonal phase shifts Lydian quark compressions You know I'm a real dork for this stuff But for whatever reason The intelligent design is what really gets me going So, I just go trolling the boards Though not trolling really I mean I actually try to engage Educate a little But you know, these people It's just impossible It's like throwing your mind against a wall And I get so heated man It's like I'm intolerant of unintelligence You know? It's my fatal flaw I might as well be getting mad at people For not being able to do calculus Just take the derivative, fool But, you know, I get it Science is suspect I mean look at nutrition Like the scientific evidence For whether you should eat wheat or not is crazy Or if acupuncture works? You know, as layman We mostly trust that what we hear From our preferred media and peers is right But skepticism is a necessary and healthy trait In a scientist, or, at least that's what I thought So, a couple nights ago Cora gets up at like 3am And it's my turn– My wife had an early morning So I get her down And then go straight under my cans Put on some binaural meditation beats And get to it And I'm raging away on someone Talking about the evolution of the eye When suddenly, in my headphones I start hearing something, weird There's a sort of crystal ringing In the 22000 hertz range Sort of a tinny electric crackle It gets me curious So I export the file Isolate the frequency Pitch shift it, slow it down– And when I do all that It resolves, into the sound of a hushed New age voice, saying Hello Marvin, I think this is God Hello Marvin, I think this is God Sounds like someone was having a laugh with you Right, of course, that's what I thought But then the voice answers that thought No, no, I'm not having a laugh And I thought, well that's strange Because this was recorded audio It's not streaming live And then the voice says Well, no, but I'm omnipresent Including in time, so, it's all sort of the same thing for me So I throw my headphones off and go to bed Figured I was exhausted, overworked You know But then in the morning I get a phone call I thought it might be the nanny, running late But no I'm sorry about last night This is probably a more normal way to talk to you Well if you're God A burning bush would actually be more normal Ha, ha, ha No, not that God I mean, that's a version of me But I'm the one, real God At least I think Huh Yeah, so I was starting to freak out A little at this point But still, I was definitely not falling for it So I play along Well what makes you think you're God? Can you do some kind of miracle or something? And at that point my phone turned into a fish Okay No, no, not okay What kind of fish was it? I don't know I don't really know kinds of fish Like a trout maybe? It was phone-sized Trout are a bit bigger than that I think Yeah trout are like this big Like I said I don't really know fish But honestly I'm starting to freak out here Like I am having a mental episode And so, I'm like, get out of the house Get on my bike, head to the lab But when I get there I find out that everyone else Has had the same experience Susie, walt, trillian, kamala The two jacks They're all freaking out Kamala says her phone turned into a kitten And Jack 2 says Well, why didn't we all get kittens? Well, I knew some of you were allergic And we all hear that God is in all of our heads And we are freaking out Don't freak out, don't freak out I'm sorry, it's never easy making first contact Look, I'm just gonna come in now And then through the door walks An 11-year old girl In a mermaid costume What? She says she's trying appearing As a playful child So she seems less threatening But so we're all just taking it in And then walt says Ok, well can you do a miracle all of us can see? And so then she rolls her eyes– She has all these very tween affectations– And then the coffee maker Turns into a baby pterodactyl What? Yeah, Susie was really into it Hey little buddy, aren't you a long way from home? She goes over to it with a pencil And tries to get it to bite it And it's pretty cute But then we're all just, wait What the fuck is going on here? I can do some things, but I'm not sure If I'm actually God I was hoping you could run some tests And see if these are miracles? And here's where we start going down the rabbit hole Now I am a devout atheist But I've always believed that if I was confronted With irrefutable evidence of God As a good scientist I would change my mind And here was my chance to test that To test my atheism and devotion to rationalism And I gotta say We took care of the pterodactyl pretty quick I mean, we had hypotheses First off there's the jurassic park amber thing Other ways DNA could be preserved Or time travel, spacetime wormholes Which aren't even that controversial In scientific communities Or there's molecular printing Just reorganizing the molecules From the coffee maker into the form of a pterodactyl Which is also pretty non-controversial Speculative science Like 30, 40 years from now We can probably do this So you're saying you guys did not take the pterodactyl to be a miracle Right We just postulated that there could be explanations Beyond our technological capabilities But not supernatural or holy So then we're like, okay, what next And I gotta say Little God was great She did whatever we asked What else did you ask her to do? First we asked for a bunch of Basically telekinetic and transformational stuff All the big bible clichés Walking on water, water into wine Splitting the red sea You did that? Oh, yeah, we went to the beach Plus little God is really into historical accuracy So we actually did it in Egypt circa 1400 bce You time traveled? Yeah, wormhole, no big And then the water too, no big Because if we're postulating future technologies Space time distortions, gravity flux– That any kind of stuff Quickly becomes just not that impressive I mean sure, impressive, but not miraculous It sounds like maybe this is just some very evolutionarily advanced intelligence, right? Where does the God stuff come from? Well first, she claims to have created the universe So we carbon date her And her age is infinite in both directions Suggesting that she's immortal But then that actually gets pretty dark Because Jack 1 says Well, can we kill her? And we're all like no We're not going to try to kill an 11-year old child But then little God just gets up, real calm And breaks into a full suicide sprint Right across the break room Smashing her fucking head right into the fucking metal door, bam Oh my God And she hits the door hard And there is this awful, awful Wet cracking sound And we see her skull get completely smashed in And there's blood dripping down the door And bits of brain everywhere And she is dead And we're gonna have nightmares For the rest of our lives And then we hear the other door open behind us And there she is, little God She saunters back in, all cool and casual And is all See? I'm fine Wait and her body is still on the ground? Yeah So there's two of her? Yeah, so there's two of her Bwuh– But even this, she helps us explain By postulating a whole mess of Super advanced tech I mean we already know it's easy To form any old heap of molecules Into an 11-year old body And with DNA printing and cerebral uploading We had an explanation for any kind of lazarus stuff She pulled And as for her soul Soul is a matterless, infinite substance That exists outside of time and is constantly Separating and reforming So I don't know, that one kind of Turned into semantics But honestly at this point We're starting to doubt everything Like kamala starts in on the uncertainty principle Are our observations affecting the data? Or, is little God manipulating the data? She could be deceiving us by changing the microchips Or moving the ink on the whiteboard She could be corrupting our actual brain waves None of us could prove that this wasn't Just a simple multi-player vr Matrix But when you get to that level of skepticism I mean of course you know that's a possibility In the back of your head But you don't live like that It's paralyzing No, I know, I know But if we're being scientific Scientific about the existence of God Then we can't discount those possibilities I mean evolutionarily We are still infants Technologically and mentally We haven't even hit singularity yet Our little 21st century human minds Can't even begin to conceptualize Some of the actual laws of physics And if we accept that there may be Explanations that are simply beyond our own intelligence Then what evidence could she possibly come up with? Clarke's third law Any sufficiently advanced technology Is indistinguishable from magic If I can explain away something That by all criteria satisfies Any definition of God Then I can explain away anything Any miracle, any wonder Any feeling, any sense of love Or responsibility, or moral Or just sense of meaning I look into my daughter's eyes My wife, what does it mean? We tried so hard to shatter our skepticism But it was like throwing our minds against a wall We traveled into black holes Into quarks We slipped through time backwards and sideways We created new life forms, living suns We watched the universe multiply, invert, spiral, disappear We beheld an infinity of wonders– And yet we sat at our desks In stoic calculation Stripped of awe Paralyzed by the unforgiving relentlessness Of our intellect