2.3 Preserving the Message

The Telephone Game

Consider an experiment: place eight people in a sequence. Provide the first person with a detailed story and ask them to relay it to the next person, translating it into a different language each time. This process continues from one person to the next.

By the final step, the story will have changed significantly, reflecting the cumulative effects of interpretation, translation, and individual perception.

Two Possibilities

For a creator to ensure that a message remains uncorrupted among humans, two possibilities arise:

1. Continuous correction: The creator repeatedly sends messengers to restore and clarify the message as it becomes altered over time, especially as it passes through generations and languages.

2. Perfect preservation: The creator ensures that the message itself is preserved without distortion. In this case, such a message would need to be:

• Perfectly preserved, remaining unchanged over time
• Clear and understandable across different cultures and languages
• Internally consistent, without contradictions
• Universally relevant, applicable to all humans across all times and places
• Convincing to people with different levels of knowledge and understanding
• Remain relevant to all humans across all times

If a creator exists and intends to communicate clearly with humanity, the method would reasonably fall into one of these two approaches.

The next step, then, is to examine the claims of the world’s religions and assess whether any of them meet these criteria.