I came across this wonderful passage in Milan Kundera’s ‘Immortality’ written over fifteen years before the publication of Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’ and an elegant argument for a God created universe and an absent Creator:

‘As a little girl, Agnes used to go for walks with her father and once she asked him whether she believed in God. Father answered: ‘I believe in the Creator’s computer.’ The answer was so peculiar that the child remembered it. The word computer was peculiar, and so was the word Creator, for Father would never ever say God but always Creator as if he wanted to limit God’s significance to his engineering activity. The Creator’s computer: but how could a person communicate with a computer? So she asked her father whether he prayed. He said: ‘That would be like praying to Edison when a light bulb burns out.’

Agnes thought to herself: the Creator loaded a detailed program into the computer and went away. That God created the world and then left it to a forsaken humanity trying to address him in an echoless void – this idea isn’t new. Yet it is one thing to be abandoned by the God of our forefathers and another to be abandoned by God the inventor of a cosmic computer. In his place, there is a program which is ceaselessly running in his absence, without anyone being able to change anything whatsoever. To load a program into a computer: this does not mean that the future has been planned down to the last detail, that everything is written ‘up above.’ For example, the program did not specify that in 1815 a battle would be fought near Waterloo and that the French would be defeated, but only that man is aggressive by nature, that he is condemned to wage war and that technical progress would make war more and more terrible. Everything else is without importance from the Creator’s point of view and is only a play of permutations and combinations within a general program which is not a prophetic anticipation of the future but merely sets the limits of possibilities within which all power of decision has been left to chance.

That was the same with the program we call mankind. The computer did not plan an Agnes or a Paul, but only a prototype known as a human being, giving large to a rise number of specimens which are based on the original model and haven’t any individual essence. Just like a Renault car. Its essence is deposited outside, in the archives of the central engineering office. Individual cars differ only in their serial numbers. The serial number of the human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.’

Kundera posits the novelist as God of his own fictional universe which once the ink dries takes on a life of its own in the mind of his readers.

I like the idea of Creation being driven behind the scenes by a vast and complex computer which no one knows how to run, though I also love Douglas Adams’ caveat at the end of ‘So Long And Thanks For All the Fish.’that its actually operated by a team of super intelligent white mice and that dolphins are the most enlightened creatures on the planet.