Roger's Version: A Novel

by John Updike

  “Look, sir. We’re getting pretty far afield here, and I know you have those heretics to teach about in a minute. My point about evolution isn’t that we don’t know everything, but that the more we know the more like miracles things seem. People always cite the human eye, as impossibly complex. But take even the trilobite eye, right there at the beginning of the fossil record. It was made up of hundreds of columns, called ommatidia, with, some Swedish scientist discovered just in 1973, precisely aligned crystals of calcite and a wavy lower half of chitin all set up in exact accordance with laws of refraction that weren’t known until the seventeenth century. Mind-blowing, huh?”

  He looked toward me for contradiction, and I mildly said, “That doesn’t mean the trilobites understood the laws of refraction. It just means that some trilobites saw a bit better than others and that those tended to survive and pass on their genes.” But my tone was non-combative; I had decided to let him argue himself into exhaustion. There is a name for this survival tactic: predator satiation. I lit up my pipe, sucking, the held match flaring, each gasping intake audible, as if a small death were in progress.

  “Everywhere you look in evolution,” Dale argued, “there is this problem of coördinated mutations that would have had to have taken place; it’s the coördination puts the odds way off the board. In our eye, the retina, the iris diaphragm, the muscles, the rods and cones, the vitreous humor, the tear ducts, even the eyelids: it’s fantastic to believe it came about by accident, by a set of random errors piled one on top of the other. For example, to make the lens, skin somehow got inside the meningeal coats of the brain. How could that have happened halfway? In all these things, there are these halfway stages where the adaptation wouldn’t work at all and would be a pure handicap. You have these impossibility points where the graph of change as you’d have to plot it just won’t go around the corner. From the standpoint of evolution, the mammalian ear is even more incredible than the eye. Bones that were rigid jawbones in the reptile migrated and became the malleus and the incus, the little hammer and anvil way inside. When the jawbones were becoming the middle ear, what were these intermediate creatures chewing on? Or the whale’s tail: it moves up and down, whereas every land animal’s tail moves from side to side. This is a bigger difference than it sounds; the pelvis has to get smaller, otherwise it would be fractured by an up-and-down movement. But if you imagine this process on the way to the whale, there would come a point when the pelvis would be too small to support the hind legs and still too big to permit the tail musculature! Or take even the archaeopteryx, which evolutionists are so proud of. They may not be able to show you anything between the gastropods and the chordates, or the fish and the amphibians, or amphibians and frogs, but, boy, they can sure show you how reptiles turned into birds. There are only a couple problems. One, true birds existed at the same time as the archaeopteryx, and, two, it couldn’t fly. It had feathers and wings but also a sternum too weak and shallow to anchor the muscles you need for flight! At best it could have flapped up to a low branch.”

  “Like a modern-day chicken,” I said. “Do you find chickens impossible also? And haven’t I read somewhere that aerodynamic engineers have definitely proved that the bumblebee is incapable of flight?” Seeing the boy about to jump back in, I cleared my throat raspingly, inadvertently swallowing some smoke. It was time I asserted myself: to be lectured before a lecture is tedium upon travail. “The impossibility of the actual,” I informed him, “is not an entirely original proof of God’s existence. The Christians of the second century, when challenged to produce their supernatural credentials, tended to fall back on two arguments. Not, interestingly, Christ’s miracles and Resurrection as sworn to by the Apostles, but, one, the fulfillments by Jesus of Old Testament prophecies, and, two, the very existence of the Church around them. How, they would ask, could a small band of uneducated Syrian fishermen in an obscure corner of the Empire have started up a faith that within a century had spread from India to Mauretania, from the Caspian to the barbarous tribes of Britain? Clearly, God’s hand was at work. The Church, then, its rapid spread, was its own best evidence for the truth of what it proclaimed. Also, this line of argument goes, if Christ had been a fraud or a madman and the Resurrection had been a fiction, why would the Apostles have risked their lives in spreading the Good News? Here, too, you might say we have an ‘impossibility point’ you can’t get around, in the evolution from an obscure Jewish heresy and tiny criminal skirmish into Constantine’s imperial religion. I don’t find the argument flimsy; but I do believe that there are plausible ways to get around it, given a certain historical feel for the first century. We don’t have to postulate intentional fraud on the part of the Apostles, or the Gospel writers; first-century people just didn’t have the same sense of factuality that we do, or of writing either. Writing was sympathetic magic, we should remember: writing something down was to an extent making it so, it was a creative rather than mimetic act, and all the outright falsifications we find in the non-canonical documents contemporaneous with the Gospels—and the entire fabulous birth tale in Luke, for that matter, or the Logos–John the Baptist bit in John—were simply, for the perpetrators, a way of dressing truth, of presenting the truth in the robes and ornaments it should have. So, given the general level of credulity, the existence of numerous parallel religious movements like Gnosticism, the Essenes, and Mithraism, not to mention later historical parallels like that grotesque Jewish episode of Sabbatai Zebi in the seventeenth century, where not even the supposed Messiah’s apostasy to Islam disillusioned all believers, or, in Islam, the way the Mahdi’s or the Aga Khan’s turning into obese sybarites failed to affect their alleged divinity—given all this, we can begin to feel how it did happen, how the myth of the Resurrection, in particular, took hold. Not that in this age of UFO stories peddled weekly to supermarket checkout lines we need any special lessons in human credulity.”

  “Oh come on,” my young visitor exclaimed, his voice pitched as if he were squalling with a roommate. “The Apostles were beaten. On the run. Their leader was dead. Something changed all that. You think it was pure illusion?”

  “ ‘Whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell,’ Paul wrote; his epistles are the oldest texts in the New Testament, the closest to this particular ‘impossibility point.’ ”

  “He also wrote,” my callow young opponent countered, “ ‘If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain.’ Paul was very unambiguous about it, talking about Christ being seen of the Cephas, then of the twelve, then of the five hundred brethren some of whom are fallen asleep, and after that, of James and then all the Apostles, and last of all to Paul himself, as to one born out of due time.”

  “And then a little farther on he said—rather sadly, I have always thought—that if we have hope of Christ only in this life, we are of all men most miserable. But let’s not quote the Bible at each other; there’s much too much of that around here, and in my limited experience it proves only that the Bible was a very badly edited anthology.”

  “Sir, you started it.”

  “In self-defense. I was trying to make the point that, when we don’t know and can never know the exact ins and outs of an event or process, a certain feel is all we have to go on as to what is plausible. When I look at the National Enquirer, with its accounts of these very circumstantial little green men coming out of UFOs or its latest absolute proof that Elvis lives, I get a vague feel for what might have happened early in the first century. When I look at the cases of fossils over in the university zoology museum and at the living animals and birds and insects and worms and germs all around and inside us, evolution to me, despite its gaps and puzzles, feels like a reasonable explanation of the tangled state of affairs.” My pipe had gone out. I sucked on sparkless emptiness.

  “But that’s so sloppy,” the boy burst forth. “You’re thinking in impressions, without looking at the mechanism. To say that ‘Elvis lives’ proves ‘Jesus lives’ is hokum ignores the fact tha
t one is a parody of the other and everybody knows it, even the Elvis worshippers. To say that evolution more or less fits the bill ignores the fact that trained biologists are disturbed by all that it doesn’t explain. There was a man called Goldschmidt, a geneticist. You ever heard of him?”

  I shook my head. “The only Goldschmidt I know was the editor of a Danish magazine that attacked Kierkegaard.”

  “My guy,” Dale told me, “fled Hitler’s Germany and wound up at Berkeley. The more he looked at fruit-fly mutations, the more it seemed to him they didn’t account for anything; you never got a new species or a really significant change. Point mutations—that is, single changes in the long strings of genetic code—don’t add up. They happen, and are swallowed by the next generation, and a species remains a species. Goldschmidt published a book in 1940 in which he listed seventeen features of the animal world and challenged anybody to explain how they evolved on a step-by-step basis of small mutations. Hair. Feathers. Teeth. Eyes. Blood circulation. Baleen. Poison fangs in snakes. Segmentation in arthropods. Mollusk shells. Interior skeletons. Hemoglobin. And so on, into some I didn’t understand. Well, who’s come forward since 1940 to explain them? Nobody. Nobody can. Even something you think you can picture, like the giraffe’s long neck, is much more complicated, more coördinated, than you think.” Dale seemed happiest with this example. His hands slid up and down the imaginary neck, quickly cupping and uncupping to explain matters of hydraulic pressure. “To pump blood eight feet up to the head the giraffe has to have such high blood pressure that when he bends down to take a drink he would black out, except there’s a special pressure-reducing mechanism, a network of veins, called the rete mirabile. Also, the blood in his legs would be forced out through the capillaries, so the spaces between the veins are filled with another liquid, also under pressure, and therefore his skin is terrifically strong and, what’s the word, impermeable. In whales—think of whales, Professor Lambert. They appear out of virtually nowhere in paleontology, and in less than five million years have produced eyes that correct for vision underwater, and the tail we talked about, and blubber instead of sweat glands to regulate temperature, and even a complicated mechanism to enable the babies to suckle underwater without drowning. And then you take the ostrich. The ostrich has these calluses—”

  “Mr. Kohler, I don’t doubt,” I interrupted, “that you could sit there and regale me with the wonders of nature for many hours. The wonders of nature are of course an ancient argument for God’s existence, as you can read in the Book of Job.”

  “But it’s not just that they’re wonderful, it’s how—”

  “Exactly what God asked Job. How? I don’t know, and Job didn’t, and you don’t, nor evidently did Mr. Goldschmidt, but there is surely more at stake in theology than this, this mechanical-statistical approach of yours. If God is so ingenious and purposive, what about deformity and disease? What about the carnage that rules this kingdom of life at every level? Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time? There is a whole realm of subjective existential questions you are ignoring. Men disbelieved in God long before Copernicus, long before thunder or the phases of the moon were scientifically understood. They disbelieved for the same reasons men disbelieve now: the world around them feels uncaring and cruel. There is no sense of a Person behind the, behind this wilderness of ingenuity you say natural phenomena present. When people cry out in pain, the heavens are silent. The heavens were silent when the Jews were gassed, they’re silent now above the starving in Africa. These wretched Ethiopians are Coptic Christians, are you aware of that? They said the other night on television that the only noise you hear in the camps of the starving is that of hymns being sung, to the sound of drums and cymbals. People don’t turn to God because He’s likely or unlikely; they turn out of their extremest need, against all reason.”

  “All reason?” Dale looked at me with an unpleasant light in those pale eyes, an optical glow many of our students bring to us: the missionary light, the will to convert, to turn the water into wine, wine to blood, bread to flesh—to convert opposition to allegiance, to flatten all that is non-ego into mirror-smooth pure ego. This perennial presumption of students wearies and disgusts me, year after year. “You really have a stake in this, don’t you?” Dale said. “You’re not just neutral, you’re of the other party.”

  “The Devil’s party, you mean? Not at all. I have my own style of faith, which I don’t propose to discuss with you or anybody else who comes wandering in here looking like a cowboy. But my faith, poor thing or no, leads me to react with horror to your attempt, your crass attempt I almost said, to reduce God to the status of one more fact, to deduce Him! I am absolutely convinced that my God, that anybody’s real God, will not be deduced, will not be made subject to statistics and bits of old bone and glimmers of light in some telescope!”

  I do not like myself when I become engaged. Passion of an argumentative sort makes me feel sticky and hot, caught in a web of exaggeration and untruth. We owe the precision of things, at least, a courtesy of silence, of silent measurement. I wished I could relight my pipe, but there really was no time for the ceremony. My hands, I noticed, were pathetically trembling. I clasped them together and rested them on the desk. In the pulpit in the old days they would tremble like this, when I fingered the lectern Bible for the page holding the day’s text. Damnably thin, those big Bible pages.

  Somehow this odd young missionary had gotten the better of me. I could tell from just the calm, cool way he stared, above his lopsided smile and flecked long jaw, and made no hurry to reply. He had got me to make a profession of faith, and I hated him for this. “Your God sounds like a nice safe unfindable God,” he mildly observed.

  “How’s Verna?” I asked him, gathering up my notes. Pelagius not a strict Pelagian. Offended by Augustine’s tendencies toward antinomianism, Manichaean pessimism. Sin passed down from Adam as part of reproductive process? Corruption distinguishable from helplessness, in P. view.

  The boy, seeing my retreat from the debate, slouched back cockily into his university chair, and even slung one leg over a cherrywood arm. “Yeah. She said you came by last week.” The look he gave me, from someone less high-minded, might have been called sly.

  “I wanted to see her setup,” I confessed. “Not so bad as I’d thought.”

  “As long as she stays right in her apartment, it’s not so bad. She goes outside, she gets hassled.”

  “By—?”

  “By the brothers. A white girl that age with a black child has laid herself wide open.”

  “Do you think she should move?”

  “She can’t afford to.” Was his curt answer a challenge, for me to give her enough money to move? He perhaps knew that I had given her sixty dollars already. How much, I wondered, was my pious young visitor part of a team, himself and Verna, bent on bilking me? This Eighties generation is capable of all sorts of self-righteous criminality along with their deficit-sponsored otherworldliness. Buddha says Non-attachment, Jesus says Do unto others, and the goods of others start getting detached. Well, who can blame them? Television goads them into begging for junk from the moment they open their eyes. The educational system keeps them as dependent as babies into their fourth decades. It’s a throwaway world, all service industries and bubble wrap. The genius of Calvinism had been to make property an outward sign and a sacred symbol; in my old-fashioned way I was trying to gauge the extent of this young man’s proprietorial claims upon Verna. I coveted his access to that messy overheated apartment with its captive girl all rosy from her bath. I had not quite believed her assurances that their relationship was sexless. Again old-fashionedly, I could not imagine two young people of the opposite sex locked in the same room and not copulating, or at least laying hands on each other’s sensitive places.

  I contemplated my visitor as he sat there athwart the shaft of light pouring in the neo-Gothic window at my back, and tried to sort out my feelings toward him
. They consisted of:

  (a) physical repugnance, at his waxiness, and the unreachable luminescence in his eyes, steady as a pale-blue pilot light burning in his skull;

  (b) loathing of his theories, which couldn’t have anything much to them, though some would need an expert to refute;

  (c) envy of his faith and foolish hope that he could grab the hoary problem of belief by a whole new tail;

  (d) a certain attraction, reciprocating what seemed to be his sticky adherence to me, since this second visit to my office served no clear purpose;

  (e) a grateful inkling that he was injecting a new element into my life, my stale and studious arrangements;

  (f) an odd and sinister empathy: he kept inviting my mind out of its tracks to follow him on his own paths through the city. He had mentioned, for instance, that he worked weekends in a lumberyard, and I had merely to think of this fact and the holy smell of fresh-cut spruce was in my nostrils, and the rough-smooth weight of newly planed and end-stained two-by-fours was thrusting against my palms, with a palpable threat of splinters.

  I smiled and asked him, “Am I my half-sister’s daughter’s keeper? How much should I attempt to intervene?”

  He surprised me by saying emphatically, “Not much. At least at first. This is her life, she’s cooked it up, you have to let people have the dignity of their choices. The important thing, I would think, is for her to get out a little, and get some education.”

  “I agree,” I said, pleased that our minds, on less than cosmic matters, could run along the same lines.

  “Verna comes on very rejecting when you first put anything to her,” he said, “but then the next time you visit her she’s shifted around a hundred eighty degrees.”