World-Building: Causes & Consequences
Elfland’s Ethics & World Building
Let’s continue some speculative world-building, picking up sort of where I left off with the post linked above. Having gleaned from G. K. Chesterton four foundational premises, it’s time to turn to metaphysics proper and identify two first principles. Or, if one prefers, one first principle and one second principle.
All Being Has One Source
Everything that is exists does so because the Sole Creator wills it to exist. The Sole Creator stands above and outside everything, including time, which itself is one of the Sole Creator’s creatures. The Sole Creator is changeless, eternal, good, immaterial, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and simple (in the sense of having no parts or divisions). The Sole Creator is perfect and transcends all creatures by an infinite degree. Nevertheless, despite the Sole Creator’s absolute transcendence, the Sole Creator freely chooses to reveal its existence and attributes through its creatures to its creatures, all of which in their original state were created good in their very nature.
Evil Is No Thing
Evil is not a thing. Evil has no existence of its own. It is not possible for anything to be perfectly evil because perfection is a quality related to completeness, and evil is a defect. Evil negates or reduces a creature; it never adds, but instead always subtracts.
Consequences
These two principles lead to certain necessary conclusions that are not typical of most fantasy campaign worlds. Here are some of them:
- Any other deities are not really deities. They are creatures who exist only because the Sole Creator wills them to exist.
- Only the Sole Creator can truly create. Other creatures, no matter how powerful, can only take what already is and modify it.
- No creature, no matter how evil, can be completely evil. Existence per se is good because existence is willed by the Sole Creator, who cannot commit any evil act since doing so would diminish the changeless Sole Creator’s perfection.
- Since there is evil that diminishes the Sole Creator’s creatures, and since this evil cannot be the will of the Sole Creator, at least some of the Sole Creator’s creatures must have the capacity to freely choose to inflict harm.
- Any claim that contradicts any of the four preceding consequences is false, either partially or completely.
In the Beginning…
With first principles decided and consequences accounted for, I can plan the next stage of world-building: the origin of the setting’s cosmos. Regardless of the specifics, this cosmos and all it encompasses exist because the Sole Creator wills it to exist. The Sole Creator’s act of creation is not a story. It’s not a myth. It is a fact.
The explanations used by creatures to explain the origins of the cosmos are stories and/or myths. These stories/myths use language (itself a creature that exists because the Sole Creator wills it) to express that which ultimately transcends every language. The most accurate of these stories/myths falls short because the fullness of the Sole Creator can never been expressed by even most exalted tongue.
Next Post? An overview of the player character races from B/X D&D, starting with each race’s patron deity (none of which are truly deities) and their respective creation stories (none of which are completely true).
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