Robert Silverberg: The Stochastic Man

What we build here is a community dedicated to the abolition of uncertainty, the absolute elimination of doubt. Ultimately we will lead mankind into a universe in which nothing is random, nothing is unknown, all is predictable on every level from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, from the twitching of an electron to the journeys of the galactic nebulae. We’ll teach humanity to taste the sweet comfort of the foreordained. And in that way we’ll become as gods.

Gods? Yes.

Listen, did Jesus know fear when Pilate’s centurions came for him? Did he whimper about dying, did he lament the shortening of his ministry? No, no, he went calmly, showing neither fear nor bitterness nor surprise, following the script, playing his appointed role, serenely aware that what was happening to him was part of a predetermined and necessary and inevitable Plan. And what of Isis, the young Isis, loving her brother Osiris, knowing even as a child everything that was in store, that Osiris must be torn apart, that she would seek his sundered body in the mud of the Nile, that through her he would be restored, that from their loins would spring the potent Horus? Isis lived with sorrow, yes, and Isis lived with the foreknowledge of terrible loss, and she knew these things from the beginning, for she was a god. And she acted as she had to act. Gods are not granted the power of choice; it is the price and the wonder of their godhead. And gods do not know fear or self-pity or doubt, because they are gods and may not choose any path but the true one. Very well. We shall be as gods, all of us. I have come through the time of doubt, I have endured and survived the onslaught of confusions and terrors, I have moved into a realm beyond those things, but not into a paralysis such as afflicted Carvajal; I am in another place, and I can bring you to it. We will see, we will understand, we will comprehend the inevitability of the inevitable, we will accept every turn of the script gladly and without regret. There will be no surprises; therefore there will be no pain. We will live in beauty, knowing that we are aspects of the one great Plan.

About forty years ago a French scientist and philosopher named Jacques Monod wrote, “Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence he has emerged by chance.”

I believed that once. You may believe it now.

But examine Monod’s statement in the light of a remark that Albert Einstein once made. “God does not throw dice,” Einstein said.

One of those statements is wrong. I think I know which one.