So the universe isn’t a simulation created by a Mind in its mom’s basement. Shame. I thought Don was onto something there.

Let’s consider then another option. The universe, reality and we ourselves were made by a super-being, a God no less. How would that work?

The God looked round. There was nothing, only himself. He did not know for sure that he was a he because he had no Y chromosome or a penis. He hadn’t invented either yet and as an eternal being he had no need of such things. Heavens above, he didn’t even drink or eat so didn’t need dual purpose genitals, not even for urination. He did plan however to create, eventually, when billions of years had past, a sentient being who would have a Y chromosome and a penis. He intended calling this being A Man. This Man would be inherently male so it seemed only right that he, God, should identify as male too.

Damn, he’d digressed again. Where was he? He realised for the billion billionth time (though it was hard to count when time didn’t yet exist and even if it did he’d be outside it) he was nowhere amidst nothing and hadn’t created anything yet. It was time, bearing in mind no time existed, to create the universe, a reality outside of himself.

He looked round again. He was, he had to admit, a bit stuck. There was nothing around with which to create anything; no quarks, no gravity, elements or even Lego; none of the fundamental forces of the universe. There were no fundamental forces because there was no universe. He was going to have to create these things before he could even think about creating a universe. But how? He looked around for something with which to make the quantum realm and gravity and elements and all the other stuff from; but there was nothing. Even as God he was constrained by the principle that something cannot come from nothing. This was a truth universally acknowledged even if there wasn’t yet a universe.

What to do? Could he make a universe from himself, from his own essence as it were? But if he did, would that not diminish him in some way, make him less of a God? A God with a universe-shaped hole in his middle? He didn’t much like the idea of that. It really wouldn’t work.

Could he, he wondered, zap things into existence with just a word? But wouldn’t that be the same as making something from nothing? As such it couldn’t be done. In the far, far future those who believed in him would insist that something could not come from nothing in their arguments with those who doubted his existence. He couldn’t flout the rule and make his acolytes look foolish.

He decided he would have to abandon the whole project. He’d had such plans too, of making his Man and then destroying his descendants in a flood and every other way imaginable until he could send his other Big Idea down to rescue them with special magic. ‘Shit,’ God thought, though that didn’t exist either: ‘I’ll just have to get used to being here all alone with my Big Ideas, surrounded by all this nothing instead of something.’

God’s conundrum demonstrates that it is logically impossible that a God created the universe. Apparently, something cannot be made from nothing, even by a god.