The God on a Train Story (805 words)

A relic of the early Internet about our evolutionary jump to light speed

Gustave Doré, "Me miserable! Which way shall I fly, Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?" (1866) Illustration for Paradise Lost.

I don’t remember how I first stumbled across the god on a train story, which is actually titled Conversation with God on its website. It’s a blog post from c. 2000 by someone calling themselves Harry Stottle, presumably a play on “Aristotle.” The ideas in it are fascinating, and have stayed with me since I first read it 15 or 20 years ago.

Written as a dialogue, it’s the story of the narrator, an atheist computer programmer on a train, who meets a stranger claiming to be God. The god (or as he calls himself, “God”) explains that he was once a species that started out more or less like humans, and which managed over billions of years to evolve without annihilating itself, eventually creating the universe. Meaning that, although we’re still very primitive, we humans could get to a similar evolutionary stage of Godhood, assuming we can hang in there long enough—which God hopes we can do, saying, “I am the first eternal in this Universe. I do not intend to be the last.”

[Download a PDF of Conversation with God here.]

The dialogue mostly revolves around how species evolve from biological to information-based beings, which it appears we humans may be in the earliest stages of doing. “It's a hard slog,” God says sympathetically, “I know. I've been there.” He goes on:

“In many ways the transition to an information species is the most traumatic stage in evolution… This paradigm shift is, for many species, a shift too far. They balk at the challenge and run from this new knowledge. They fail and become extinct. Yet there is nothing fundamentally wrong with them - it is a failure of the imagination. I hope that if I can get across the concept that I am a product of just such evolution, it may give them the confidence to try.”

God goes on to tell the narrator that humans are among about four billion other species in the universe trying to make this evolutionary jump to light speed. It’s dangerous and scary, but God is cautiously optimistic for us: after all, we’ve made it this far without destroying ourselves.

Ever since I first read Conversation with God, I’ve been thinking about humans departing from our familiar meatspace and becoming an “information species,” whatever that means. Is that what’s happening, and is that why people seem so freaked out? I think yes on both counts. But going from biological to information-based beings doesn’t have to mean an end to life, joy, beauty, or freedom. The pleasures of living in our bodies could very well be supplanted by pleasures we cannot imagine. Going from biological to information-based doesn’t mean that the things that make life worth living—love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down—will go away. Those things, those deathbed things, are eternal. They have nothing to do with our bodies.

The whole point, as God says in the story, is “Life Must Go On.” So how will we make it without destroying ourselves? We must buttress our collective will to live, our collective commitment to life—in other words, our collective love for each other and for ourselves. It’s not just our technologies that must evolve, we also need a fresh wave of mythology that speaks to our present scientific understanding without denuding the world of mystery. That’s what I think this story is—myth—although “Harry Stottle,” an atheist who clearly hates religion, might balk at the characterization.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5 (Print by Robert Thew from The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Personally, I don’t need a logical explanation for God as simply a highly evolved species. I’m comfortable with the notion that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. We get hung up on explaining the nature of the deity—whether we are a part of it or it is something external to us, whether we created it in our image or vice-versa. What gender it is! We struggle with our crude tool, language, to explain all the omnis—omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence. We struggle with the word “God” itself, loaded as it is with so much baggage, and we substitute other words: the universe, the collective unconscious, the quantum foam, the Force. But even as an avowed atheist, Stottle (to paraphrase William Blake) is on God’s side without knowing it with this 21st-century burning bush story. Stottle is very much within the ancient lineage of human mythmakers imagining God.

In the story, God hopes that one of the four-and-a-half billion species currently trying to evolve to Godhood ultimately makes it, so that the two Gods can ecstatically unite. The narrator is skeptical, but God replies, “Don't play it down, that's the ecstatic vision driving us all, me included - and when it happens the ecstasy lasts several times longer than this universe has already existed. Believe me, it really is worth the effort.”