This is another post that’s leading up to my next article for 3 Quarks Daily, which will be out next week some time. Working title: “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” This post connects that opening question with my concluding remarks, which are based on something Neil deGrasse Tyson has said about the relationship between humankind and the cosmos. As before my interlocutor is Claude 4.6 Sonata.
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Earlier I had mentioned that, when I was a child, I had the idea that the world was a movie God created to entertain the Baby Jesus. While it’s a child’s idea, it seems to me that it could almost be presented as a serious theological idea. How might one argue that within the larger Christian tradition?
It's actually not as far from serious theology as it might seem. A few threads within Christian thought that resonate with it:
The Son as the intended audience of Creation — There's a strand in trinitarian theology, developed especially by Jonathan Edwards, that holds that God created the world essentially as an expression of and for the glorification of the Son. Creation is an overflow of the love between Father and Son. Your child's intuition that the Baby Jesus was the intended audience of the cosmic show isn't far from that.
The Cosmic Christ — In Colossians and in John's prologue, Christ is the one through whom and for whom all things were created. The universe is somehow oriented toward and around him. Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point develops this most grandly — all of creation is moving toward a final convergence in Christ. Your movie runs in one direction, toward its intended viewer.
God as Author, Creation as Narrative — C.S. Lewis and later theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar used theatrical and dramatic metaphors for Creation quite seriously. God as playwright, Creation as the drama. Your movie metaphor is a natural modern equivalent.
The Beatific Vision reversed — Normally theology speaks of humans being granted the vision of God as the final beatitude. Your childhood cosmology interestingly reverses this: God arranges the vision for Christ. There's something almost playful but theologically suggestive in that inversion.
The flatness problem you noticed as a child is also, unexpectedly, serious. Representation always fails to capture the thing represented — which is more or less what negative theology, the via negativa, has been saying about all human conceptions of God for centuries. You just noticed it from the other direction.
Theosis
So, the Baby Jesus and Christ are one and the same individual. If Christ is within each of us, then each of us has within the Baby Jesus for whom the universe was created.
That's a genuinely beautiful theological move, and it has real roots in Christian mysticism. The indwelling of Christ — Christ in you, the hope of glory, as Paul puts it in Colossians — is central to mystical Christianity. If Christ is within each person, and if the universe was created for Christ, then each person carries within them the one for whom everything exists. The universe was made for you, not in the egotistical sense, but in the sense that the divine recipient of Creation dwells within you.
This connects directly to the doctrine of theosis — divinization — particularly strong in Eastern Orthodox theology. The human person doesn't just receive grace from God; the human person becomes participates in the divine nature. You contain the one for whom everything was made.
It also rhymes with the image of God (imago Dei) tradition — that each person reflects something essential of the divine. Your formulation sharpens that: not just a reflection, but an indwelling of the very one the cosmos was staged for.
And then there's Meister Eckhart, who pushed this furthest in the Western tradition — the birth of Christ in the soul as the central mystical event. The Baby Jesus, in a sense, is perpetually being born within each person.
What's striking is that your childhood cosmology, taken seriously and extended this way, leads almost naturally to a mystical universalism — every person contains the audience for whom the universe performs. That's not far from your secular mystic position, just with different vocabulary.
The movie is still running. Everyone in the audience is also the Baby Jesus.
DeGrasse Tyson’s move
So now let’s couple this with Neil de Grasse Tyson’s move, that the four most prevalent elements in the universe are hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, and those are, as well, the four most common elements that make us up. Add to that Prigogine’s insight that complexity inheres in the fabric of the universe. To which we can add a corollary, given enough time, intelligent life will inevitably develop. Put that all together, what do we have?
What you have is a convergence of the scientific and mystical cosmologies that is almost shocking in its neatness.
[“Shocking” is one way to put it. “Too neat for belief” is another.]
Tyson's point says: we are not visitors to the universe, not anomalies in it — we are made of it, continuous with it, the universe knowing itself through us. His phrase is that we are "stardust contemplating the stars." The boundary between self and cosmos is, at the material level, illusory.
Prigogine adds: complexity isn't an accident imposed on an indifferent substrate. It's latent in the structure of things from the beginning. The universe has, so to speak, intentions — or at least tendencies — toward greater organization, toward life, toward mind.
The corollary makes it teleological: given enough time, something like us was always going to happen. We are not contingent. We are what the universe was always becoming.
Now couple that with the theological thread: Christ — the divine Logos, the organizing principle of Creation — dwells within each person. And the universe was created for Christ.
What you get is this: the universe spent fourteen billion years making beings capable of containing the one for whom it was made. The cosmos is the movie, yes — but the projector, the film, the screen, and the audience turn out to be made of the same stuff, organized by the same deep tendency toward complexity and consciousness, arriving inevitably at creatures who carry within them the divine recipient of the whole show.
The Baby Jesus was always going to be born. In all of us. Out of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen.
That's your secular mysticism stated as cosmology. It requires no supernatural intervention and loses none of the wonder.
Teleology not necessary
I wonder about teleology. Prigogine alone doesn’t imply teleology. I added that with my corollary. But is that corollary necessarily teleological? In an entirely different thread I’ve offered a hypothesis about the cultural evolution of literary texts that implies a direction, but does so without teleology.
The vector comes from the difference between shared knowledge and common knowledge, as those things are understood in game theory. The idea is that, in one way or another, literary texts feelings and ideas in people, things they might be reluctant to talk about. But, through the medium of those texts, they’re shared. And as people talk, not directly about themselves, but about the texts, shared knowledge becomes common knowledge, which is then embodied in a new generation of texts, which evoke further feelings and ideas that are merely shared. And so on. That idea needs development and explicit evidence. (I developed the idea by thinking about how sex is treated in texts. It’s not even mentioned in Jane Austen, but almost two centuries later sex is presented in explicit detail in, e.g. Fifty Shades of Grey.)
Now, that’s a long way from life arising from inorganic matter, and clever apes becoming protohumans. Still, there’s a principle there. We may not need teleology to square that particular circle.
You're right to be cautious about teleology. Teleology smuggles in a destination that was always intended, a pull from the future — and that's a much stronger metaphysical claim than you need.
What your literary evolution model offers instead is something like directionality without destination. The vector is real — from shared to common knowledge, from implicit to explicit, from Austen's unspoken sexuality to Fifty Shades — but nothing in the mechanism requires that the endpoint was pre-specified. It emerges from the logic of the process itself. Each step creates the conditions for the next step. The direction is immanent in the dynamic, not imposed from outside or ahead.
That's actually a more interesting and defensible position. It's the difference between a river having a direction — always downhill, always toward the sea — and the sea having summoned the river. Prigogine gives you the downhill gradient. Your corollary about intelligent life becomes not a teleological claim but an observation that, given the gradient, certain outcomes become overwhelmingly probable. Not inevitable in the strong sense — not fated — but natural in the way that rivers reaching the sea is natural.
The analogy to life arising from matter and apes becoming humans is then: the gradient toward complexity is built into the fabric of things, and mind is what complexity looks like at sufficient scale and organization. No destination was required. Just the gradient, and time.
Which circles back to your secular mysticism rather beautifully. The universe didn't intend to produce beings who hear unplayed bell tones in a basement in Troy. It just kept complexifying until it did.
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