If I’m omnipotent, how is it I can’t will that chair opposite to move over one inch to the left, or that fly on the window to drop dead? I try again, harder—and still nothing happens! Even this human body (what there is of it around here)—let alone the universe—refuses to take my orders, and is in no hurry to recover from a common cold.

Well, if there is an all-powerful being, what does he do? Does he promote, design, make, operate, and supervise the universe in all its inconceivable intricacy? If so, I’m certainly not such a one. Nor can I find a scrap of evidence for any such monster of efficiency as this cosmic Works Manager. In fact, he is only the 3rd-person human blown up to infinity, and nothing to do with this 1st person. I’m not like that at all. What there is evidence for—1st-hand evidence right here—is quite another sort of divinity: not the over-worked manager but the whole Works, this ever-present, clearly visible Void which is the primary producer, this Factory of non-existence endlessly turning out all that exists, this central Generator which, supplying all the world’s power, itself runs on no fuel whatever, on sheer Nothingness. Fed from this Source, that little man I see in my mirror is powerless to divert the flow of its energies by a hair’s-breadth from their course. No wonder he can’t by wishing shift that chair. Even if he were to push it over with his foot, the action would really be Another’s.

In fact, it would be truly mine, a function of the infinite power streaming continually from this Void which I am. And why should I want to work petty miracles on chairs and flies when the whole Creation is the non-stop Miracle of This, and therefore all of it just as I like it to be? If I find fault and want to meddle with anything, it’s not this 1st person who feels that way. The fault-finding, too, is all right. This Factory authorizes all its products, but doesn’t expect them to authorize each other.