Roger's Version: A Novel

by John Updike

  While tapping out my pipe on my square-edged glass ashtray with its chipped corners, I took the opportunity to glance behind me out the window; its neo-Gothic panel of ornamentally leaded transparency contained, from bottom to top, the lank grass and reddening oaks of the quad, and then a construction site throwing up dust behind a chain-link fence (our neighbor the University Chemical Research Annex expanding), and then an autumnal sky loaded with radiant, baroque clouds. Clouds are strange: at times they seem gigantic sculptures, bulging with three-dimensional form like those musclebound marble Berninis gesturing halfway up Saint Peter’s walls, and at other times, the exact copies of these same clouds, mere smudges of vapor, virtually nonexistent. They are with us, and yet not with us.

  My visitor waited for my gaze to return to him before he asked me, “How much do you know about the Big Bang theory?”

  “Very little,” I told him, with I suppose some agnostic smugness, “except that it is evidently correct.”

  He affected pleasure at my answer, using that hoary teacher’s trick, positive reinforcement for the sluggish student. “Right! And believe me, sir, the scientists have had a hard time with it: they’ve been betting on eternal, unchanging matter ever since Lucretius. But they’ve had to swallow the pill, and now they’re finding out it’s even bitterer than they thought.”

  How had I become captive, I kept asking myself, to the milky effrontery, the assaultive verbalizing earnestness, of this youth? Verna, I remembered, and behind her, a cloud of odorous memory, Edna, my semi-sister, my shadow in blood.

  “There are three main problems with the Big Bang theory,” my visitor informed me, sketching with his oversize hands as if with blackboard chalk. “The horizon problem, the smoothness problem, and the flatness problem. Uniformity: the background microwave radiation of three K discovered in 1964 has been observed to be uniform within one part in ten thousand, but we’re dealing here with sections of the sky separated by more than ninety times the horizon distance, the distance that light could have travelled at the time the radiation was emitted. So how could these regions have communicated with one another to achieve the uniformity? It seems impossible. Smoothness: to have galaxies now, you had to have had inhomogeneities in the primal fireball, but just short of absolute smoothness—absolutely smooth, you’d have no clumping; a little bit too much, you’d have much too much. There are figures for all this, but I don’t want to bore you. The fact is, for galaxies lasting billions of years to exist at all is statistically very strange. Flatness: the total energy, that is, everything in the universe, and the expansion rate of the Big Bang had to be initially in precise balance, virtually, for the ratio to be what they observe it to be today, between point one and two point oh. This may seem like a spread, between a tenth and two, but in fact it means that, for the ratio to be this close today, energy density at the time of the Big Bang had to equal the expansion rate to one part in ten to the fifty-fifth power: that’s ten followed by fifty-five zeros. Now, if that’s not a miracle, what is? A little, really little, bit less outward push, and the universe would have collapsed back onto itself in a couple million years—that’s nothing, in cosmic terms. I mean, the human species has been around that long. A little bit more, and the stars and galaxies never could have formed; matter would be blowing away too fast, out the window, so to speak. The odds of its working out the way it did are just about as long as you taking some kind of a supergun and hitting an inch-high target on the other side of the universe, twenty billion light-years away.” The young man held his fingers up to indicate the dimension of an inch. The gap seemed a gunsight between our pairs of eyes.

  I hazily asked, “Isn’t this the same thing as an open versus a closed universe? Didn’t I read a while back that they settled it was open?”

  “They tend to say that; but nobody knows how much dark matter there is in the galaxies, or if the neutrino has mass. The point is, it’s debatable, it’s that close. For it to be that close now, it had to be terrifically close then, at the outset. Why? Why so? These amounts are arbitrary, they could have been anything. And there’s dozens of amounts like them that have to be just what they are in order to give life time to evolve. Take the strong force, which binds the atomic nuclei together. Make it five percent weaker, and the deuteron couldn’t form and there would be no deuterium, which means the main nuclear reaction chain used by the sun couldn’t function; if it were two percent stronger, two protons could stick together and the existence of the di-protons would make hydrogen so explosive the present universe would consist entirely of helium. In either case, we wouldn’t be here, would we? There wouldn’t even be a here to be here in.”

  “But if this God of yours—”

  “Or take the weak force. You know what the weak force is, don’t you, sir?” In his expository excitement he had been forgetting the “sir.”

  “It causes decay in atoms?” I guessed.

  “That’s close enough. It’s about ten-to-the-tenth times weaker than the strong, which is mighty weak; but if it were any weaker, neutrinos couldn’t exert enough pressure on the outer shell of a dying star to bring about a supernova, and without supernova explosions there would be no heavy elements scattered in space, and planets like the Earth wouldn’t exist, and structures like you and me with the carbon and calcium and iron our bodies have to have wouldn’t exist either. Or take the mass of the neutron: if it were only point nine nine eight of its actual value, that’s point oh oh two less, less than that much”—his fingers now measured a gap so small that only a hairline of his eyes’ uncanny blue showed through—“free protons would decay into neutrons via positron emission and there would be no atoms at all!”

  His bony bright hands moved with such rapidity through this last revelation that it seemed, in the leaden but radiant filtered afternoon light of my office, he had indeed pulled the divine rabbit from the cosmic hat. I took in breath to make some obvious objections.

  He leaned forward, closer, so that I saw photons bounce from the bubbles of saliva in the corners of his mouth. He insisted, “The sun. Yellow stars like the sun, to give off so much steady heat for ten billion years or so, are balanced like on a knife edge between the inward pull of gravity and the outward push of thermonuclear reaction. If the gravitational coupling constant were any bigger, they’d balloon and all be blue giants; any smaller, they’d shrivel and be red dwarves. A blue giant doesn’t last long enough for life to evolve, and the red dwarf radiates too weakly to ever get it started. Everywhere you look,” he instructed me, “there are these terrifically finely adjusted constants that have to be just what they are, or there wouldn’t be a world we could recognize, and there’s no intrinsic reason for those constants to be what they are except to say God made them that way. God made Heaven and Earth. It’s what science has come to. Believe me.”

  “It’s not my business to doubt you, Mr. Kohler,” I said, seeing that he had momentarily finished. As he settled back into his chair, it seemed to me that even at this pitch of eloquence, which had reddened his unhealthy cheeks (his face was simultaneously bony and doughy, a face fed on junk food) and which made his acne flare, his eyes somehow floated above his passionate facts. There was a happiness to their pallor but also a coolness, a withdrawal. It would take more of an attack than I could mount to shake him. I set down my pipe and picked up from my desktop a pencil—hexagonal, green, stamped with the name of the private school, PILGRIM DAY, that my twelve-year-old son attends; I had evidently stolen this from him—and focused upon its point, saying, “I do worry a bit about this concept of probability. In a sense, every set of circumstances is highly improbable. It is highly improbable, for instance, that a particular spermatozoon out of the millions my father ejaculated that particular day” (my father, who deserted my mother and me and skedaddled from job to job in the middle echelons of the Midwestern insurance business, whose idea of pleasant conversation was to relate an off-color joke he had heard that morning in the barbershop, who wore cologne and cuff links and
an ex-athlete’s fragile false heartiness to the day of his death, of a cerebral embolism; where had he come from, spurting into these immense matters?) “would make its way to my mother’s egg and achieve my particular combination of genes; but some such combination, given their youth, attitude toward birth control, et cetera, was likely, and mine as probable as any other. No?”

  “That’s good,” my visitor had the gall to tell me, “except that, as you say, babies are born all the time, and there’s only one universe, that we know of. That’s what the scientists, to keep their old atheist materialism, are trying to get around. Rather than admit the obvious, that some purposeful Intelligence fine-tuned the physical constants and the initial conditions, they’re proposing a crazy many-universes theory, in which ours is just the one that happens to have the right conditions for intelligent life eventually to emerge. Some of them don’t actually say there are all these other universes out there, or back there, somewhere, collapsing or dispersing or churning around unobserved; they just say that because we are here observing, the universe has to be such-and-such, which they think takes the sting out of it, much as if you said, ‘Of course the planet Earth has water and oxygen, because we’re here.’ That’s the anthropic principle, which, in its weak form at least, is simply a way of begging the issue. Another theory claims that there’s a kind of infinite branching out of quantum-theory indeterminacy. You know, when an electron hits a proton, the wave scatters both left and right; if measurement indicates that the particle in fact went right, then the lefthand part of the wave collapses. Where did it go? It went, according to this theory, into another universe, and so did the observer, a duplicate of him with this small difference, and his instruments, and the room he was in, and the building, and on and on. Furthermore—like I said, it’s crazy—you don’t need an observer for the splitting, it happens whenever a quantum transaction takes place anywhere, on any star: the universe splits into two, over and over, all the time. No way to check it, but they’re there, all these other universes, a million million every microsecond. I mean, really. Another guy lately, to get around these really severe embarrassments—severe unless you simply say God is the Creator—proposes that in some ridiculously short fraction of the first second of the Big Bang the universe, because of some theoretical anti-gravitational force that nobody has ever seen in action, expanded exponentially, doubling every ten-to-the-minus-thirty-fourth second or so, increasing the diameter of the universe, which was smaller than that pencil point to begin with, by a factor of ten to the fiftieth before cooling back to normal expansion; so instead of the many universes we have the one big fat universe, so to speak, of which the universe we see, right out there to the quasars at ten billion light-years and beyond, is a tiny, and I mean tiny, fraction, like a Ping-Pong ball in Shea Stadium. And they think religious people stretch the facts. These guys are desperate, the ones aware of the problem. They are squirming.”

  He seemed too happy about this—un-Christian, even. “I suppose a fundamental question,” I ventured, “about any modern attempts to relate the observed cosmos to traditional religion becomes the sheer, sickening extravagance of it. If God wished, as Genesis and now you tell us, to make the world as a theatre for Man, why make it so unusably vast, so horribly turbulent and, ah, crushing to contemplate? The solar system, with an attractive background spatter of stars, would have been quite enough, surely. To have the galaxy on top of that, and then all those other galaxies …” My pencil point minutely gleamed, magnitudes bigger than the original universe. With enough scrutiny the faceted sides of graphite left by the sharpening could be seen in the gray light, and flecks of carbon granule. Since the age of eight, when I was praised by the family ophthalmologist for prattling off even the bottom line of his chart, I have taken an innocent pride in the keenness of my eyesight, which reading glasses, acquired seven years ago when I was forty-five, amplify but otherwise leave uncorrected.

  “I know. It’s a stunner,” the boy agreed, in one of his irksome glissandos of unexpected serenity and amiable yielding. “Maybe it’s like a demonstration. Of what infinity is. So we won’t say glibly, ‘God is infinite.’ But it’s all just figures, isn’t it? Measure. And there are things we can’t measure. We can’t measure ourselves, for example—”

  “Or love, you’re going to say.”

  “I was?”

  “I think you were. Mr. Kohler, I’ve been dealing with your age group ever since I retired from the ministry, took my Th.D. at Union, and found an assistant-professorship up here. You’re all wild about love, the word if not the actuality. The actuality, my impression is, is somewhat thorny.”

  “Sir, I think I may be older than the age group you usually deal with. I’m twenty-eight. From Akron, originally. I got my B.S. in computer science at Case Western Reserve and then spent a year pulling my head together being a fire watcher in the Salmon River Mountains in Idaho. Then I came east, and I’ve been taking grad courses and involved in various computer research projects ever since.”

  “You’re not, then, a physicist?”

  “Nawp: I sort of backed into cosmology in connection with my personal philosophy. The physicists, they just want to deal with the numbers, they don’t want this stuff to get out, you have to dig it out. The best brains working on the real implications—Carter and Hawking and I suppose you’d have to include Hoyle—are over in England; all the Americans care about is GUT, for Grand Unified Theory, and that’s just numbers. Numbers about hot air, really. I mean really hot, like ten-to-the-twenty-sixth degrees Kelvin, and you have the strong and electroweak forces theoretically combined, and symmetry domains coming out of the freezing, and one-dimensional string defects that would weigh a million tons if they were long enough to go across an atom, and I can’t begin to tell you what-all other stuff, none of which they can prove for beans. According to GUT, protons have to decay, but nobody’s found a decaying proton yet, and if proton life were any less than a million times the age of the universe, you and I would be as radioactive right this minute as the core of a nuclear reactor. Like I say, hot air. Don’t get me off on it; I try not to get spiteful. It’s just that these atheists are so smug; they don’t even think there’s an argument.” He was relaxing, his legs growing so long that his feet in their scuffed Hush Puppies were underneath my desk.

  “Twenty-eight is a very common age, actually,” I said, “for people to turn back to religion.”

  “I never turned away,” this young man said. The pious often, I have noticed, have a definiteness that in others they would judge rude. “I’ve stayed the way I was raised. My mom and dad had so little to give me intellectually I couldn’t afford to give up anything. The walls in the house were so thin I used to hear them praying together sometimes.” Why am I telling him this? I could see him asking himself. His hands began to move, on the defensive attack. “Anyway, what you call religion around here is what other people would call sociology. That’s how you teach it, right? Everything from the Gospels to The Golden Bough, Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, it all happened, it’s historical fact, it’s anthropology, it’s ancient texts, it’s humanly interesting, right? But that’s so safe. How can you go wrong? Not even the worst atheist in the world denies that people have been religious. They built these temples, followed these taboos, created these traditions, et cetera. So what? Your average normal cheerful nonbeliever says it was all poetic, pathetic foolishness, like a lot of other aspects of human history, like all its aspects, really, considering that everybody dies and until he does spends most of his energy trying to feed himself, stay dry and warm, and, what’s the word—?”

  “Propagate?” I offered.

  “Sure,” he said, slouching lower. “I looked over your catalogue before I came, and studying all that stuff doesn’t say anything, doesn’t commit you to anything, except some perfectly harmless, humane cultural history. What I’m coming to talk to you about is God as a fact, a fact about to burst upon us, right up out of Nature.”

  “So you�
�ve said,” I said, setting down my son’s sharp pencil and discreetly glancing at my watch; my two-hour seminar in ante-Nicene heresy met at three. Today we were to take up Marcion, the first great heresiarch. He plausibly argued that the God of the Old Testament and that of the New were two different Gods—a ditheism that blended into Gnosticism and anticipated Manichaeism. He poured scorn upon the Hebraic Creator-God, who created evil, made pets of licentious and treacherous rascals like King David, and was responsible, this ignorant, vacillating God, for the humiliating and painful processes of copulation, pregnancy, and childbirth, the contemplation of all of which filled Marcion with nausea. He had a case. “Be all this as it may,” I said with deliberation, “what exactly can I do for you, Mr. Kohler?”

  A certain pinkness of agitation again suffused my visitor’s unhealthy skin, and his voice dropped so that I had to strain to hear. “I was wondering, sir, about a grant. Whether the Divinity School would like me to pursue, you know, what we’ve been talking about. This evidence that proves that God exists.”

  “Well. Worth proving, let us assume. But, as you’ve so shrewdly described our curriculum here, I doubt we could spare a dime. We’re very comfortable, according to you, in asserting that so-called religions once did exist and in teaching Geez and Aramaic to the fanatically interested.”

  “Sir, don’t get so huffy, please. I don’t know what you personally believe.”

  “I believe quite enough, I think. Though it’s been fourteen years since I served my last parish, I still am an ordained Methodist minister in what they call good standing. Also, let me tell you, I have a class to teach in seventeen minutes.”

  “Dr. Lambert, aren’t you excited by what I’ve been trying to describe? God is breaking through. They’ve been scraping away at physical reality all these centuries, and now the layer of the little left we don’t understand is so fine God’s face is staring right out at us.”