On "The Last Answer"

I promise to discuss The Moon is a Harsh Mistress again—but for now, I’d like to talk about a story by Isaac Asimov, The Last Answer. In this short story, a man’s soul is preserved by a God-like creature, which keeps people’s minds alive so that they can “think of something new.” The man responds that he does not want to do this, but he realizes that the only way out of the situation is to think of a way to kill the God-like creature. Asimov says that this is the “last answer,” which is what the God-creature desired all along. One of the last lines in the story is:

“For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want–but an end?”

However, I think Asimov is wrong, or, at least, not necessarily right. He is making the assumption that any eternal being would want an end. But this begs the question—why would such a being want an end? (Or we can ask the opposite question, why wouldn’t such a being want an end?) Though there are reasons why an eternal entity would or would not want an end, they all depend on its psychology. If such a being existed, it could have a temperament that would make it want to commit suicide, or it could have one that would not make it want to commit suicide—we have no way of knowing.

Also, I am not sure about another aspect of the story: In the narrative, the eternal being creates the universe to “introduce random factors” to help it think of new things. I have difficult visualizing this—how is it that a (presumably) omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent entity does not know everything? But, in the end, I suppose it depends on the exact nature of the eternal being. To sum it up—Asimov’s description of an eternal being is not necessarily accurate—he humanizes the creature, and makes many assumptions about its nature. A fine story, but by no means philosophically accurate.