The Universe Absurd: A Functional Proof for the Omnimalevolent Creator

“Contrivance proves design,” accurately observed William Paley, “and the predominant tendency of the contrivance indicates the disposition of the designer.” Know then the disposition, revealed as it must be through design, through the architecture, and one may know the Designer.

If we assume a designer, a Creator, then what does the most conspicuous of all created things, the Universe itself, reveal? Here we are not canvassing the nature of Creation—its uncontainable urge to self-enrich is uncontroversial and requires no defence as the observation is un-prosecutable—but rather the shape of Creation itself.

Why is it presented as it is?

On first inspection the urge is to perceive the universe as something extraordinarily altruistic, a benign gift endowed by an originator being who is draped in astounding generosity. A second, broader, more sincere and unbiased inspection returns, however, a vastly different conclusion.

What truly is the universe but a treacherous perversion of scale? Is not this thing that has so conspicuously conspired to commission thinking life little more than an obscene, yet deeply personal, private joke—a perilous vagary designed to thoroughly mistreat and abuse in every possible way the very instrument it was instructed to craft: the curious, explorative mind?

In any survey, from any perspective, the universe reveals itself to be studiously absurd: a reckless exploitation of proportion where the residue of grand cosmic choices—life—is directed into existence on mere specs of dust falling through a hazardously huge vacuum of life-annihilating cold and radiation.

In an uncensored sentence: The observable universe is a hostile and frightening corruption of the senses; an immense machine so finely tuned to (under exceptional circumstances) birth minds, only to then release those stains of creation to confront the scale of something that is manifestly incomprehensible.

Consider the reality:

The human mind is grown inside a 0.0013 cubic meters crystalline calcium phosphate box on the 149 million km² rocky surface of a 510 million km² planet that is falling in a straight line over curved space at 108,000 kilometres per hour inside the gravity well of a 6 trillion km² star on a 250 million year sojourn around the centre of a galaxy containing some 400 billion stars and trillions of planets and moons. The immediate solar system appears to end at the Kuiper Belt, its outer edge a mind-stunning 7 billion kilometres away, yet the outermost reach of the Heliosphere is still another 5 billion kilometres further out. The furthest object, however, within the Sun’s gravity well, Sedna, marks the solar system’s diameter to in fact be a sense-jarring 287 billion kilometres in length. The solar system though is tiny, wrapped inside the 142 trillion kilometres wide Local Interstellar Cloud which is in turn nestled within the Local Bubble that stretches to an intellectually absurd 8,000 trillion kilometres in length. The Local Bubble is however clothed inside the 28,000 trillion kilometres across Gould Belt, which is housed within the Orion-Cygnus arm measuring a bewildering 94,800 trillion kilometres in length.

That is the human minds immediate neighbourhood; a postal address in a medium-sized, 950,000 trillion kilometre diameter galaxy that is falling through space at 3.5 million kilometres per hour toward a colossally proportioned object—the so-named Great Attractor—located some 2 billion trillion kilometres away, that is itself hurtling even faster toward the eminently more massive, sense-wrecking Shapley Supercluster four-times further out.

The Milky Way galaxy is however enclosed inside a 26 million trillion kilometres across bubble with 25 sister galaxies, itself encased inside the Local Group with some 54 galaxies and stretching some 93 million trillion kilometres. This parish of galaxies is located inside the Local Sheet measuring 216 million trillion kilometres from end to end; an incomprehensible size, yet an almost invisible wispy node perched inside the 1 billion trillion kilometres in length Virgo Supercluster. Home to over 100 galaxy groups and more than a million galaxies, the Virgo Supercluster is however but a smoky wart within the unfathomably proportioned Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex at 9.3 billion trillion kilometres from end to end, boasting thousands of galaxy groups and billions of individual galaxies. As ungraspable as the Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex is, it is but a single thin filament—a dirty blotch—in the web that makes the observable universe: a flat, ruthlessly cold sheet whose edge lies a thought-haemorrhaging 430 billion trillion kilometres away from earth in every direction.

Is this not precisely how the universe should look if fantasied by a defiled overmind? Is this not exactly how the universe should be presented if shaped by the careful hand of pure but unforgivingly patient malevolence? Who but the immaculate embodiment of malice would design such a contemptible thing? Indeed, is not the vulgarity of scale proof of an Omnimalevolent Creator, greater even than the finely tuned universe itself? Only a thoroughly corrupted, wicked mind could conceive of such impossible proportions and be in possession of the boorish inclination needed to then dangle such an offense to all reasonableness in front of the eyes of a curious explorer—a tiny, living, thinking organic vessel whom through tuning and coercion the Creator had ensured would one day rise to stare out longingly from the shores of their home-world prison.

Here we are all reminded that the most heartbreakingly impassable walls on Alcatraz, Norfolk Island, and Robben Island were not built of stone and mortar, but ocean and distance.

It is a merciless, sadistic, inescapable reality. The curious explorer is shown the prize, yet by the very laws that had fashioned her own mind is never permitted to take a single genuine step toward it. Her heart is shattered in a thousand ways, and then broken irreversibly upon learning that the entire incomprehensible thing is receding, pulling apart and disappearing at 275,000 kilometres per hour across every 100 billion trillion kilometre stretch.

Now, it has been said that if one stares into the abyss long enough the abyss stares back into you[1], and with that the Impartial Observer comes to feel the outermost impressions of the cold, calculating motive revealed through design. The universe, she sees, exists as it does to not simply humble, but abuse, denigrate, and humiliate the minds it was so expertly commissioned to birth. This is malevolence on an unfathomable scale, expressed through immeasurable waste stretched out between distances and times that cannot be understood. It is cruel, but not hateful, depraved, but not vengeful. This is considered pain, carefully presented in careless proportions to blister and disgrace anyone—or anything—that might momentarily dare to ever privately contemplate it is in control.

[1] Nietzsche, F. 1886, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146