36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  For the most part, fame is agreeable to Cass. For one thing, people treat him more nicely. It’s a revelation to learn what a nice bunch of upright mammals we’re capable of being. Everybody happily, gratefully, applies the Golden Rule when it comes to interacting with the famous. Thou must treat the famous as thou wouldst wish to be treated thyself. Easy! If only everybody could be famous, we would all be effortlessly altruistic.

  Of course, notoriety presents its own challenges. Last week, a girl had shown up after one of his lectures with a copy of his book and asked him if he “signed body parts.” Before he could find his voice or gain control over the blush spreading beyond his high hairline, she rolled up her sweater and offered him the heartbreaking baby innocence of her tender inner arm. Not knowing what else to do, wishing the present moment to become the past as quickly as possible, he had mutilated the butterfly softness in the tiniest spider scrawl he could manage.

  “It must be that Seltzer boyishness I keep reading about,” Auerbach had said, laughing, when Cass had told him about it, wanting his reassurance that this sort of thing was within the bounds of the normal, that it didn’t transgress an academic’s sacred trust to the impressionable young. “Stop worrying and start enjoying. Anyway, why isn’t it a good thing if a guy like Cass Seltzer becomes a cult figure? Why not you rather than a Scientologist moron like Tom Cruise? Think about it, Seltzer.”

  Seltzer is still thinking.

  This boyishness of his: before this year, that quality listed awkwardly in the direction of a handicap, socially and professionally, not to speak of romantically. Not that there had been any romances to speak of during that long cold February of the soul that had arced from the day six years ago when Pascale regained her speech and announced the end of their marriage until that day two and a half years ago, when Lucinda Mandelbaum had sat down next to him at the first Friday-afternoon Psychology Outside Speaker lecture of the new fall semester. But now, under the transfiguration of his fame, even his boyishness has become charmed. He’s no boy (forty-two), but he has got boyish looks and boyish ways, of which he used to be boyishly unaware, until he read himself described as “boyish” in several newspapers, magazines, and blogs too many. So now when he goes bounding across some stage, his hair flapping a bit round his ears in time with his eager strides, somewhere in the recesses of his mind he knows that this is boyish, and that this is good.

  He knows now, too, from the profiles, that though he’s a tall and lanky man—well, of course, that he knew—he carries himself as if he weren’t, as if, as one of the features had put it, “he’s almost apologetic to be taking up so much vertical space.” It’s actually less embarrassing to read these personal descriptions of himself than he would have imagined. It’s hard to take the person featured in these articles seriously as the Cass Seltzer that he’s known all his life.

  Cass is still trying to assimilate the fact that his book has become an international sensation, translated into twenty-seven languages, including Latvian. He understands that it’s not just a matter of what he’s written—as much as he’d like to believe it is—but also a matter of the rare intersection of the preoccupations of his lifetime with the turmoil of the age. When Cass, in all the safety of his obscurity, set about writing a book that would explain how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience, he’d had no idea of the massive response his efforts would provoke.

  He would never have dubbed himself an atheist in the first place, not because he believes—he certainly doesn’t—but because he believes that belief is beside the point. It’s the Appendix that’s pushed him into the role of atheism’s spokesperson, a literary afterthought that has remade his life.

  Tomorrow morning, he will meet with Shimmy Baumzer, the president of Frankfurter University, who will affect his I’m-just-a-hick-from-a-kibbutz demeanor, the better to cover up just how masterful an operator he is.

  “What do I have to offer you to keep you from deserting us for those shmendriks up the river?” Cass knows that Baumzer will say to him, because that’s what he had said to Cass’s former colleague Marty Huffer, now at Harvard, three years ago, when Huffer’s research on the psychology of happiness had hit the big time in a book that a mainstream publisher had brought out to a sizable audience and which had been Huffer’s ticket out of Frankfurter.

  It was Huffer’s editor to whom Cass had originally sent the manuscript of The Varieties of Religious Illusion. Cass knew his name from Huffer’s endless regaling of his former colleagues with tales from the life now lived far above their heads. The editor had called six weeks after Cass had sent the manuscript to him, just at the point when Cass was considering which university press to send it to next, and had invited him to lunch in New York. Over grilled branzini, he had allowed that Cass’s approach was interesting, “especially the Appendix. I liked it. It’s more provocative than the rest of the book. I don’t suppose you could switch it around and make the Appendix the book and the book the Appendix, could you?” While Cass was still gaping, the editor had named his figure.

  “This is the absolute upper limit of what I can offer,” he had said, the slightest seizure distorting his upper lip.

  Going back on the Acela Express—this was the first time Cass had ever taken the expensive high-speed train rather than the slower regional or, more often, the Chinatown bus, which makes the run from New York’s Chinatown to Boston’s for fifteen dollars and only occasionally catches fire—the fumes of his euphoria making him so giddy that he had laughed aloud twice and sufficiently startled the starchy matron next to him so that she had changed places well before she detrained at New Haven, Cass had suddenly thought back to the editor’s oddly defensive words and the equally odd look on his face while he had said them, a suppressed smile of some sort making merry with his upper lip.

  René Descartes identified the seat of the soul as the pineal gland, but in Cass’s experience it’s the upper lip that reflects the true state of the soul, giving accurate tells on the self-regarding emotions. Self-doubt and self-satisfaction will both betray themselves there. And if there is an egotist lurking within, the upper lip is the place that will give him away.

  Flashed by the backside of New London, Connecticut, Cass thought back to the editor’s self-congratulatory upper lip and felt the touch of a misgiving tugging at the edge of his elation. Back in Cambridge, he called Marty Huffer, asking him what he thought of the offer. Ninety seconds after he had hung up with Huffer, Cass’s phone had rung, with Huffer’s agent, Sy Auerbach, on the line.

  “You can’t possibly accept a contract for a book like that without representation,” Auerbach had informed—or flattered or rebuked—him.

  “But I already all but said yes to him,” Cass tried to explain. “I think I may have verbally committed myself to him.”

  “No such thing. From now on, I’m the one he deals with. I’m your representative. Do you get it?”

  “I’m not entirely sure.”

  “Well, here’s something that might help you process it. If I can’t get you more than that offer, then I’ll forgo my commission.”

  “But he was so nice to me.”

  The agent laughed, a mirthless noise.

  “What did he do that was so nice?”

  “Well, for one thing, he took me out to an expensive restaurant.”

  “Which restaurant?”

  “Balthazar.”

  The agent laughed again.

  “Listen, if you let that junket to Balthazar persuade you to accept that offer, then that will be the most expensive lunch you’ve ever had. That lunch will cost you hun
dreds of thousands of dollars.”

  Auerbach had held an auction for The Varieties of Religious Illusion, and not only had the Balthazar editor made a bid five times his “absolute upper limit,” but he had been roundly outbid.

  Cass has certainly had his moments of doubt about his agent, wondering whether beneath the cynical exterior there was an even more cynical interior. Is he showman or shaman? A little of both, Cass has come to think, but a force for good for all that. Sy Auerbach has an agenda that goes beyond putting the “antic” back in “pedantic” and the “earning” back in “learning.” His idea is that the time has come for a different kind of public intellectual. The old-time intellectuals, who were mostly scientifically illiterate, not knowing their asses from their amygdalas, have been rendered worse than dead; they’ve been rendered irrelevant by the scientists and techno-innovators, who are the only ones now offering ideas with the power and sweep to change the culture at large.

  Auerbach harbors such impatience for the glib literati—the “gliberati,” as one of his own digerati had christened them—that Cass has wondered whether there might not be some personal history. In particular, Cass has wondered whether Auerbach might not have known Jonas Elijah Klapper, the man of letters who had once reigned unopposed over vast stretches of the humanities, including Cass Seltzer’s. Certainly, Auerbach must have known of Klapper. There was a time when Jonas Elijah Klapper had been revered by scholars the world over—with the notable exception of the British, whom Klapper had been forced to despise en masse, observing that “they seem to have lost, with their empire, the possibility of understanding me.” The only thing that Klapper, born on the Lower East Side, must have admired about the English was their accent, since he had successfully acquired it. When Sy Auerbach describes the kind of thinker he detests, obscure references rendered in dead languages falling from their lips like flecks of food off a messy eater, it always sounds to Cass as if he’s holding Frankfurter’s former Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values up to his mind’s eye and ticking off his attributes one by one.

  For months, Auerbach had only existed as a disembodied voice on the phone, always answering the “hello” with the announcement “Auerbach.” The image that the voice had conjured had been surprisingly on the mark, as Cass learned when he finally met the man at a packed reading Cass had given at the 92nd Street Y. This was almost a year after Auerbach had held the auction for Illusion that would make an unlikely millionaire and celebrity out of Cass Seltzer. Auerbach is a large and showily handsome man, with a petulant mouth and fine white hair, looking like milkweed that has burst its pod. He wore a dramatic white fedora and a flashy white suit. It was early summer and hot, but he looked the sort who might easily don a billowing Victorian cape when the weather turned cooler, and brandish a silver-tipped walking stick.

  Auerbach, with his uncanny nose for intellectual property, hadn’t hesitated in accepting Cass as a client, unconcerned that there was already a glut of godlessness on the market. Atheist books were selling well, sometimes edging out cookbooks and memoirs written by household pets to rise to the top of the best-seller list. Though he never argues with success, his agent would probably be just as happy if the atheist with a soul went lighter on the soul.

  The atheist with a soul. Cass always smiles at the absurdity of the phrase. But which is the more absurd element? The truth is—and what’s the good of a man contemplating an inhumanly frozen world at 4 a.m. if no truth-telling ensues?—that Cass is somewhat at a loss to account for what he has done. How to explain those Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God (see Appendix), all of them formally constructed in the preferred analytic style, premises parading with military precision, and every shirking presupposition and sketchy implication forced out into the open and subjected to rigorous inspection?

  Cass had started out with all the standard arguments for God’s existence, the ones discussed in philosophy classes and textbooks: The Cosmological Argument (#1), The Ontological Argument (#2), The Classical Teleological Argument (#3A), the arguments from Miracles, Moral Truths, and Mysticism (#’s 11, 16, and 22, respectively), Pascal’s Wager (#31), and William James’s Argument from Pragmatism (#32). He had also analyzed the new batch of arguments recently whipped up by the Intelligent Design crowd—to wit, The Argument from Irreducible Complexity (#3B), The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations (#3C), The Argument from the Original Replicator (#3D), The Argument from the Big Bang (#4), The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of the Physical Constants (#5), and The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness (#12). But then he had gone beyond these, too, attempting to polish up into genuine arguments those religious intuitions and emotions that are often powerfully evocative but too sub-syllogistic to be regarded as actual arguments. He had tried to capture under the net of analytic reason those fleeting shadows cast by unseen winged things darting through the thick foliage of the religious sensibility.

  So Cass had formulated The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences (#7), appealing to such facts as these: that the diameter of the moon as seen from the earth is the same as the diameter of the sun as seen from the earth, which is why we can have those spectacular eclipses when the corona of the sun is revealed in all its glory. He had formulated The Argument from Sublimity (#34), trying to capture the line of reasoning lurking behind, for example, the recent testament of one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. “At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The next morning, in the dewy grass in the shadow of the Cascades, I fell on my knees and accepted this truth—that God is God, that Christ is his son and that I am giving my life to that belief.”

  For the right observer, Cass supposed, the sublime trinity of arches etched out in the ice below might yield a similar epiphany.

  Cass had named the twenty-eighth in his list “The Argument from Prodigious Genius,” though privately he thinks of it as “The Argument from Azarya.” The astonishment of beholding genius, especially when it shows up in child prodigies, is so profound that it can feel almost like violence, as if a behavioral firestorm has devastated the laws of psychology, leaving us with no principles for explaining what we’re seeing and hearing. “There are children who are born as if knowing” are words that Cass had heard twenty years ago, inspired by a child who could see the numbers and thought that they were angels.

  And then there’s The Argument from the Improbable Self (#13), another one that engages Cass in a personal way. He had struggled to squeeze precision into the sense of paradox he knows too well, the flailing attempt to calm the inside-outside vertigo to which he’s given, trying to construct something semi-coherent beneath that vertiginous step outside himself that would result from his staring too long at the improbable fact of his being identical with … himself.

  If somebody hasn’t experienced this particular kind of metaphysical seizure for himself, then it’s hard to find the words to give a sense of what it’s like. Cass had experienced it as a boy, lying in bed and thinking his way into the sense of the strangeness of being just this.

  Cass had had the lower bunk bed. Both he and Jesse, his younger brother, had wanted the higher bunk, but, as usual, Jesse had wanted what he wanted so much more than Cass had wanted it, with a fury of need that was exhausting just to watch, that Cass had let it go. Lying there awake on his lower bunk, Cass would think about being himself rather than being Jesse. There was Jesse, and here was Cass. But if someone were looking at the two of them, Jesse there, Cass here, how could that observer tell that he, Cass, was Cass here and not Jesse there? If it got switched on them, everything the same about them, the body and memories and sense of self and everything else, only now he was Jesse here and there was Cass there, how would anybody know? How would he know, how would Jesse? Maybe a switch had already happened, maybe it happened again
and again, and how could anybody tell?

  The longer he tried to get a fix on the fact of being Cass here, the more the whole idea of it just got away from him. If he tried long enough to grasp it, then he could get the fact of being Cass here to blank out of existence and then come dribbling weakly back in, like a fluorescent fixture flickering on and off toward death. He would get the sense of having been shot outside himself, and now was someone who was regarding his being Cass Seltzer as something like his being in the sixth grade, just something about him that happened to be true. Who was that Other that he was who was regarding his being Cass Seltzer as if he didn’t have to be Cass Seltzer? The sense of giddiness induced by these exercises could be a bit too overwhelming for a kid in a lower bunk bed.

  It could be a bit overwhelming still.

  “Here I am,” Cass is saying, standing on Weeks Bridge and talking aloud into the sublimely indifferent night.

  Cass knows he needs to tamp down his tendencies toward the transcendental. It isn’t becoming in America’s favorite atheist, who is, at this moment, Cass Seltzer, who is, somehow or other, just this here.

  “Here I am.”

  How can it be that, of all things, one is this thing, so that one can say, astonishingly—in the right frame of mind, it is astonishing, with the metaphysical chill blowing in from afar—“here I am”?

  “Here I am.”

  When you didn’t force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn’t catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn’t impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then … what?

  It’s even hard at a time like this to resist the shameful narcissistic appeal of reasonings like The Argument from Personal Coincidences (#8) and The Argument from Answered Prayers (#9) and The Argument from a Wonderful Life (#10). William James had rebuked the “scoundrel logic” that calculates divine provenance from one’s own goody bag of gains, and Cass couldn’t agree more with the spirit of James, but here it is, his bulging goody bag, and call him a scoundrel for feeling personally grateful to the universe when, at this same moment that he is standing on Weeks Bridge and tossing hosannas out into the infinite universe, there are multitudes of others whose lives are painfully constricting with misfortunes that are just as arbitrary and undeserved as his own expansive good luck, but Cass Seltzer does feel grateful.