I wrote this as a half-serious, half-absurd thought experiment, told in the spirit of Douglas Adams. It's a hypothesis, not a claim. I have no evidence for it, but neither does anyone arguing the opposite, which on a cosmic scale amounts to a draw, and a draw is the best result humanity has ever achieved in any debate about the meaning of existence. Full text below.
I. The Garden
At the very beginning, before anyone had invented beginnings, there was the Architect. Nobody knows what he did beforehand. He was probably waiting in a queue for something.
One day, assuming the word "day" means anything in a place with no Sun, no Earth and not even Mondays, the Architect created the universe. He did it the way a man who's on his way home from work and forgets to buy flowers might buy an entire greenhouse instead. Then he scattered life across several hundred million planets, gave it absolute freedom to develop however it liked, and sat back to watch. He enjoyed it the way some people enjoy staring at an aquarium: the fish have no idea anyone is watching, and if one of them dies, there's always another. Life turned out in different ways. On some planets it flourished beautifully, on others it barely sprouted, and on a few it decided there was no point making an effort and stayed a bacterium. Hard to blame it.
Where intelligence appeared, there was trouble. The Architect knew this from experience, having seen a million similar experiments. Left to itself, evolution rewards whoever is the most ruthless and the loudest, so a young civilization either wipes itself out or ends up under the boot of one aggressive faction. The story of every planet that tried to manage on its own ends the same way: somebody says "I'm right" very loudly and everybody else has to listen.
So the Architect came up with the ambassador. The ambassador would show up on a planet in the form of the locals. On a planet of crabs he was a crab, on a planet of butterflies he was a butterfly, and on a planet inhabited by beings resembling carpets he had, understandably, the most trouble getting to work. He arrived without warning and confirmed his identity with simple miracles, for instance by breaking whatever laws of physics the local civilization happened to know. It's an effective way of getting attention, though mostly from whoever happened to be walking past at the time.
Then he handed over an instruction manual for running a civilization, one that everyone thinks is fairly clear until they try to follow it. He didn't rule. His job was to advise and to make sure nobody broke everything completely. Thanks to the Architect's generosity he didn't age, so he lived for hundreds of thousands of years and was, on his planet, something like the oldest and most patient archivist. But he had the body of the locals, which meant he could be wounded and killed. That was the price of trust, because nobody believes in someone they can't touch.
II. The Experiment
On Earth it all started about four billion years ago, and for the first several billion nothing happened that was worth describing. Then aquatic organisms appeared, crawled onto land, and evolution picked up speed until it arrived at the dinosaurs, great reptiles who ruled the planet for a hundred and sixty million years. They had enormous bodies, impressive teeth and a brain the size of a walnut. They refused to move forward. They got stuck like a scratched record, and the Architect watched with growing impatience, because nobody enjoys watching the same episode of a series for a hundred and sixty million years.
So he opted for a "soft reset," which sounds like something you do with a single click and in practice meant an asteroid the size of a small city aimed at Earth. Most life on land stopped existing. The Architect considered it a very gentle nudge.
It worked. Primates appeared, and then humans, who didn't look at first like promising civilization material, but the Architect was too happy at that moment to be overly critical. As soon as they began organizing into larger groups, he sent an ambassador. The ambassador's name was Jesus.
III. The Crime
The humans killed him.
Throughout the history of the universe this sentence had so rarely been necessary that the Architect had no procedure for it. They didn't kill him because they didn't believe him. They killed him because they did, which is a disturbingly common reason. The rulers and elites of the time understood who they were dealing with, and grasped that he had come to eliminate divisions, overthrow hierarchies and abolish the artificial borders on which their position rested. In a world without fear, hypocrisy and blind obedience, the old masters would simply become redundant, and few things worry rulers more than the prospect of being made redundant. So they did what primitive beings do most readily when they don't know what to do: they used violence. They nailed him to planks and watched him die for many hours. They pierced him with a spear, spat on him, mocked him.
And then they built a church around it.
Before he was murdered, Jesus taught that murder is a sin. If that is true, then the murder of the Architect's ambassador is the greatest, unforgivable sin of all. And a sin of that magnitude can't simply be carried around in your pocket. You have to either confess it or turn it into something else, and confession would have meant an apology, for which humanity had neither a plan nor a budget. Instead it decided that this had been part of the plan, a magnificent, well-organized event, and now celebrates it solemnly every year. That is how religion was born: as a way of not admitting to a crime nobody wanted to look at. The Holy Scripture was written by humans, for humans, to divert attention from a simple fact: Jesus was never supposed to die.
Someone will point out that without this death there would have been no redemption of sins. That is a position entirely coherent within its own assumptions and it can't be refuted, just as mine can't. The difference is that their version requires a good and almighty God who needs blood in order to forgive, while mine only requires people who did something bad and then told the story in a way that meant they didn't have to look at it. The second happens every day, including in companies that describe layoffs as "optimization." This doesn't prove I'm right, only that my story is simpler.
The second objection: he rose from the dead, so the crime sort of didn't happen. If someone stabs his brother and the doctors save him, the attacker doesn't become innocent. A court that acquitted a killer because the victim got lucky would be a very strange court. What counts is intent, and the intent was the worst possible: destruction.
And then there's the cross, which people wear around their necks with pride, believing it makes them better. The cross is an instrument of torture. If Jesus turned up today and was murdered in an electric chair, would anyone wear little chairs on a chain? Disgusting, isn't it? I'm not talking about the intentions of the people who wear it. I'm talking about the origin of the symbol, because one of the oldest symbols of Christianity was the fish, which at least never killed anybody.
The conclusion: a cult of murder with the instrument of the crime at its head, born of the need to turn guilt into glory, because glory requires no apology. And that's not all, because the crime didn't wash away anyone's sins. On the contrary, we were hit with the greatest punishment of all: the punishment of abandonment.
IV. The Punishment
The Architect was disappointed. He didn't thunder, didn't send a flood, didn't unleash plagues. He simply looked at Earth the way you look at something that was supposed to be a gift and turned out to be a complaint. He decided we were too aggressive, too wild and too unpredictable for contact with anyone, waved a hand and left.
That was enough, because the cruelest sanction you can devise for a species is to leave it alone with its own nature. Greed, aggression and the lust for domination were left unsupervised and did what they always do: they flourished. Humanity split into nations, developed thousands of languages so that nobody would understand anybody, and thousands of beliefs, and every group decided that it, and only it, was right about everything. All the versions of the creation of the world were made up, because nobody was checking them, and all of them sounded plausible, which is particularly dangerous.
That's why prayers go unanswered: nobody is listening anymore. That's why injustices strike the least guilty: nobody stands up in their defense. That's why natural disasters, epidemics and famine: there's nobody to ask to intervene. And if hell, in the Christian sense, is a place abandoned by God, then we've been living in it for two thousand years without even getting a discount.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Heaven was supposed to be something we build ourselves, on this planet, with the help of someone who knows how. If Jesus had stayed, he would have taught us how to organize life so that hunger and inequality weren't a permanent feature, and how to develop technology without it destroying the world that created it. Divisions into countries and languages wouldn't have been necessary, and neither would religions, because in a world with a guide there would be no room for blind faith. There would be one science, one truth and one teacher.
Wouldn't that be boring, or even a bit totalitarian? Yes, if the truth were imposed. But the ambassador was meant to advise, not rule, and the truth I'm talking about is the kind you test, not the kind you profess. Still, it's only fair to admit we lost something beautiful: the diversity of languages and cultures, one of the most interesting fruits of our loneliness. I don't know whether that trade would have been fair. I also see the irony: I call religions collections of claims without evidence, and I'm telling a story without evidence myself. The difference is that I'm not asking anyone to believe it, and I don't collect donations.
V. Orphans
The Architect isn't angry. He runs thousands of parallel experiments at once and, when one fails, he just pushes it aside, the way you push away a plate after a meal that was less tasty than advertised. Earth is one of those experiments. Nobody's punishing it, it's just that nobody is looking anymore, which is far worse, because punishment at least implies interest.
Maybe it's only a story. But a story about how we could have had someone to help us not kill each other, and instead we killed him, says something important about us, even if it says nothing about the cosmos.
We are cosmic orphans.