by John Updike
Ed Snea, whose ceremonies were all laudably brief, began to interrupt: “Mr. Koh-luh, I’m a-wonderin’—”
Jeremy Vanderluyten jumped in heavily. “As I said before, this all seems in the nature of rehash, of eclectic synthesis. Where is the original content that would warrant our financial encouragement and support?”
Dale pulled from the breast pocket of his unaccustomed tweed jacket a wad of computer paper, accordion-folded and with perforations on both sides. I could see from where I sat the paper covered with columns of numbers, masses of gray. “One of the reasons I’m so groggy,” he explained to the panel, with such translucent, care-worn engagingness that Rebecca tilted her bright nose up and Jeremy cast his stern eyes down, “is I was up a lot of last night running some of the universal constants through some random transformations, trying to come up with something for you people.”
“And what might that something be?” Closson asked, rolling his lower lip in a restive, snuff-craving way.
“Something unexpected,” Dale said. “Something more than random.”
His voice had strengthened. He tipped his chin up, facing these inquisitors. We like, it occurred to me, being challenged. That little adrenal rush washes away a lot of problematics and puts our life on the line, where it wants to be. Better see red than be dead. We like a fight because it shoves aside doubt.
Dale unfolded his grotesquely long printout, which tumbled between his knees, and said, “For instance, the speed of light times Newton’s gravitational constant, both in SI units, of course, and one of them a huge number and the other very tiny, comes out almost exactly to the simple number two—one point nine nine nine five three two six.” He looked up. None of the panel had blinked. “That’s an incredible coincidence,” he explained. “Another unexpected unitary result was that the Hubble constant—that is, the rate at which the galaxies are moving away from one another and the universe is expanding—divided by the charge on the proton, which of course is at the other end of the scale of cosmic constants, comes out to twelve and a half, with no remainder. I got to looking at that, last night about two o’clock, and after a while I noticed that all over the sheet there seemed to be these twenty-fours jumping out at me. Two, four; two, four. Planck time, for instance, divided by the radiation constant yields a figure near eight times ten again to the negative twenty-fourth, and the permittivity of free space, or electric constant, into the Bohr radius yields almost exactly six times ten to the negative twenty-fourth. On the positive side, the electromagnetic fine-structure constant times the Hubble radius—that is, the size of the universe as we now perceive it—gives us something quite close to ten to the twenty-fourth, and the strong-force constant times the charge on the proton produces exactly two point four times ten to the negative eighteenth, for another. I began to circle twenty-four wherever it appeared on the printout: here”—he held it up, his piece of striped and striped wallpaper, decorated with a number of scarlet circles—“you can see it’s more than random.”
“I’m not sure I can see that,” Jesse Closson said, peering over his half-glasses. Dale held the paper higher and we could all see that his knobby big hands were jerking, shaking. He was holding the universe in those hands.
“Randomness or the lack of it is no kind of category—” Jeremy Vanderluyten began.
“Mah friend,” Ed Snea pronounced, as if calling a jabbering lawn party to order, “what do these interrelations between these numbers mean? Aren’t you adding apples and oranges, as they say, and then dividing by grapefruit?”
“These aren’t just numbers, they are the basic physical constants,” Dale told him. “These are the terms of Creation.”
“Oh I like that,” Rebecca gushed. She was, I realized, Dale’s first ally on the committee, and he realized it, too.
He turned his head to face her, one on one. “These numbers,” he said intently, with an almost paternal earnestness and yearning for understanding, as the feet flickered over her head, “are the words in which God has chosen to speak. He could have chosen a whole other set, ma’am, but He chose these. Maybe our measurements are still imperfect, maybe my transformations weren’t the most intelligent.… I was getting so tired, and nervous because of this meeting today; there might be a differential equation that would yield something definitive, I just don’t know. But there has to be something here, if anywhere. You don’t like the way the speed of light times the gravitational constant comes out to two?”
“Oh, I like it,” Rebecca repeated, with a different emphasis, “but—”
“This is kabbalism,” Jeremy Vanderluyten rumbled. “Numbers can be made to say anything, you fiddle enough. Just to satisfy my curiosity: see if you have a six six six anywhere there.”
Dale, his head moving in little quantum jumps, looked over his printout and announced, “Yes, sir, I certainly do. Not just three sixes but ten of them, right in a row. The Bohr radius divided by the Hubble radius.”
“See,” the black man said. “Now that’s the number of the Beast, and supposed to mean the end of the world is at hand.”
“Or that two is being divided by three,” Closson said, a pepper of impatience creeping into his bland manner. “These calculations have for me, young man, a certain savor of desperation. As Heidegger might say, your Versteben has been overtaken by your Befindlichkeit.” The other committee members tittered.
Dale with dignity admitted, “I do feel desperate, sometimes. But then I think, Why should God make it easy for me, what He’s denied to all of mankind up to now? There was a moment,” he said, “last night. I was tired, and I guess exasperated if not desperate, and began to punch commands at random, and in the middle of the garbage I was getting on the screen there flashed suddenly this beautiful number: one point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero, I don’t know how many zeros, maybe ten, and then a one. Now nowhere in nature is a calculation going to yield such an odd amount, one and one-ten-billionth or whatever it was. But the numbers being generated kept scrolling past, and when I tried to go back to it and take a printout, the computation was gone.”
There was a silence. It occurred to me that not once had Dale glanced in my direction. He and Esther must have had an exceptionally hot time yesterday, in the attic. She had been languid and saucy when I returned at five-forty-five; she and Dale and Richie had been bent above the dining-room table like a sentimental Biblical mezzotint under the Tiffany lamp, their three heads forming a triangle, standing Esther’s the apex. They had been working at hexadecimal numbers. “And two D?” Dale had asked. “What would that be, Richie?”
Silence had stretched, while in the kitchen the refrigerator consulted with itself about making more ice.
“Forty-five,” Esther at last had drawled. “Obviously.”
“Your mom’s right,” Dale had said, embarrassed for her. “See, Richie,” he had explained, “the two on the left means two sixteens, so that’s thirty-two, and the D represents—because, remember, we have to assign a letter to the two-digit numbers under sixteen—” He had waited a second, then himself supplied, “Thirteen. Thirty-two plus thirteen makes—?”
“Forty-five,” the child had said in a weak, troubled voice.
“Exactly! See, you’re getting it!”
“About time,” Esther had said languidly, saucily. Her mouth, even under a fresh application of lipstick, had looked chafed, and her green eyes had glowed, I felt, with how far into nature she had tunnelled and rooted a few hours before. That night, last night, in our dark conjugal bed, out of concupiscent momentum she had fumblingly offered to apply some of her filthy tricks to me; I socked her naked shoulder with the heel of my hand and turned my back, protecting what they used to call roguishly, back in Ohio, the family jewels.
Ed was asking Dale, with delicate distaste, the crucial question. “Do you have any other thoughts as to how to use a computer in this search for”—he could not make his lips, beneath his minimal, as it were demythologized, mustache, pronounce the gawky old monosyll
able—“the Absolute?”
“Or did this shoot your wad?” Closson crackled, too much a Quaker innocent to know, I think, how vulgar the phrase was.
Rebecca did know, and leaned forward to smooth things over, to mother the young man. “Dale, what did you visualize as the end-product of your researches? A technical paper, or something more inspirational?” She sat back and removed her steel-framed glasses from her long white nose, and this changed her aspect for us. She was a woman—Eve, Hawwah, “life.” I felt within me Dale’s heart yearn toward her, a spot of warmth within this chilly trial. She smiled and continued, “What I’m trying to ask is, How could we use your theories, to justify a grant?”
Jeremy, still irritated by the lack of respect paid das moralische Gesetz, asked, “What you trying to prove, shuffling these numbers around?”
“Sir, I’m trying to give God the opportunity to speak,” Dale said, rousing himself to forcefulness. He described to them, more fully than he ever had to me, his notion of making a model of reality along the principles of computer graphics. Shapes, he told the committee, can be subtracted one from another, once they are represented in machine memory as solid primitives, and cross-sections can be computed at any angle, and along any slice, once a few commands are given. In computerized industrial design, such as the making of a die or a mold, negative shapes have an importance equal to that of their positive counterparts; also (and here his expressive hands came into play, elaborately), solid shapes can be created by moving a planar figure along a specified path in space. By making such systems interact, and by injecting local rules for the evolution of these shapes, and by using more global planning algorithms, Dale felt he could simulate our actual world, not in its content so much as in its complexity, at a level that would yield graphical or algorithmic clues to an underlying design, assuming one exists. It was a little like, he said, the common process in computer graphics whereby first a “wire-frame” image of a solid object is generated by vector lines and then, with a simple formula operating on the z coördinate, the hidden edges are eliminated, the edges that in the “real” world—that is, the world we experience with our senses—would be hidden by the object’s opacity; theologically speaking, we move through a world with its hidden edges removed, and Dale’s attempt, with the committee’s indispensable support, would be to restore those edges, removing the opacity and giving Creation back the primal transparency in which, since the Fall, only a few mystics and madmen and, perhaps, children have seen it. Or, if the committee would prefer an analogy from particle physics, his effort would be to subject the macrocosm, transposed into computer graphics, to a process like atom smashing.
Yet Dale’s presentation was halting, and at points his voice dragged to a long pause; it was as if he had rehearsed this moment in his mind so often that when it finally came he had no energy to give it. He was at the end of his strength. He seemed resigned to rejection.
Smelling blood, Jeremy said, in his gravelly grieving dark voice, “Since Kant and Kierkegaard on up through William James and Heidegger, religion has planted itself within subjectivity. Subjectivity is religion’s proper domain. We must not let ourselves be tempted out of that domain. You start poking around with this sort of pseudo-science, you’ll be right back to magic and fundamentalism of the least defensible sort. Good-bye, moral imperatives; hello, voodoo.”
Rebecca said, “But, Jere, aren’t you really being a bit un-Biblical? The God of Abraham and Moses wasn’t a subjective phenomenon only; the Israelites experienced Him with their total being, as history. They argued with Him, even wrestled with Him. They were covenanted by Him. You wouldn’t want to be the one to say to God, You can’t come into history, You can’t come into the objective world!”
“Every day of the week,” Closson said, clearing his throat with a nicotine-induced scrape, “prayers invite Him in; and the damnedest thing is, nobody knows, after all these years, if He’s come in or not!”
“What Ah worry about,” said the Reverend Ed Snea with his ceremonious Southern twang, “is, supposing these computers in the kind of array that Mr. Kohler has described to us do acquire something like intelligence, doesn’t that mean they will acquire a subjectivity also, and so even if one of them testifies that in the objective sense there is an Absolute, is that going to mean any more than the testimony of some Jesus Saves hillbilly from the backwoods of Tennessee?”
“Or than that of the Aztec maiden who believed enough in Huitzilopochtli to let the priests tear her heart from her living breast.” Closson’s reptilian eyes twinkled and his foul brown mouth creaked open in a little silent laugh. Religion, it came to me, had never ceased to amuse him.
“What Ah’d like to do,” Ed said, “is give these computers enough rope to hang their selves. Computers in my book are just fancy filing cabinets.”
“In my view it would be a sorry misappropriation,” Jeremy said, “in this day and age when black and women’s studies are starving for funds—”
Rebecca interrupted, “Some of the women I talk to are tired of being studied. Is being a woman all we do? Can’t we say anything about ourselves except that the patriarchal society has forced deodorants on us? My sweet little militants, they look as if they’ve never washed their hair or cleaned their fingernails, as if it were men who invented bathing—” She knew she should stop but went on, with an irresistible swift smile, “I think it’s charming that this young man wants to come over from the science end of the university and give us a helping hand.”
Closson cleared his throat once more and turned his big overstuffed box of a head toward me. “Roger, do you have any insights or thoughts you’d like to share with us before we excuse Mr. Kohler?” One of his cover-over strands had come unstuck and waved out from the side of his head like an inquisitive antenna.
It shocked me, to be called out of my apartness, my existence as purely a shadow. “You know me, Jesse,” I said, with a false jocosity that barked in my own ears. “A Barthian all the way. Barth, I fear, would have regarded Dale’s project as the most futile and insolent sort of natural theology. I also agree with Jere: apologetics mustn’t leave ground where it’s somewhat safe for ground where religion has been made to look ridiculous time and time again. Like Rebecca, I don’t think God should be reduced purely to human subjectivity; but His objectivity must be of a totally other sort than that of these physical equations. Even if this were not so, there are additional problems with provability. Wouldn’t a God Who let Himself be proven—more exactly, a God Who can’t help being proven—be too submissive, too passive and beholden to human ingenuity, a helpless and contingent God, in short? I also see a problem with His facticity, as it would be demonstrated to us. We all know, as teachers, what happens to facts: they get ignored, forgotten. Facts are boring. Facts are inert, impersonal. A God Who is a mere fact will just sit there on the table with all the other facts: we can take Him or leave Him. The way it is, we are always in motion toward the God Who flees, the Deus absconditus; He by His apparent absence is always with us. What is being proposed here for us to finance, I’m sorry, just strikes me as a kind of obscene cosmological prying that has little to do with religion as I understand it. As Barth himself says somewhere—I can’t give you the exact reference offhand—‘What manner of God is He Who has to be proved?’ ”
After this Judas kiss, Dale for the first time glanced my way. His acne, my visual impression was, was clearing up, thanks to Esther’s ministrations. His blue eyes were dazed, clouded. He didn’t understand the favor I had done him.
Jesse, of course, is an ecumenicist and a sentimental Tillichian, and Ed a professional Bultmannite, and Rebecca not insensitive to the streak of suppressed anti-Semitic feeling present in Barth’s professed philo-Semiticism,*
and Jeremy a social activist and an ethical logisticist; by bringing Barth, the scornful enemy of religious humanists and accommodators, the old foe of Tillich and Bultmann, so thumpingly into the discussion, I had swung the committee against me: that is,
toward Dale.
Jesse hawed a bit and tried to sum up: “Well, yes, the Ground of All Being has to be in a somewhat superior sense, I suppose, He can’t be just one more being. But that poses a whole slew of interesting questions, whether being, esse, Sein, is a simple either/or—a binary condition, in Mr. Kohler’s language—or whether there are degrees, intensities.… This is all very interesting, actually: you’ve gotten us to think, young man, and that’s not easy in academic circles. Heh. Heh-heh. You should be hearing from us within two weeks.”
When, ten days later, I told Esther that Closson had let me know that the committee had voted to give Dale a provisional grant of twenty-five hundred dollars, renewable upon application next September subject to his submission by June first of a forty-page paper summarizing his concrete and original results, she said, “That’s too bad. That’s terrible, in fact.”