36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  “The first time I gave a talk at one of Pappa’s conferences, he told me that if it had been any better he would have had to shoot me,” she had told him tonight on the phone, sounding both proud and sad at the same time.

  “Well, then, please don’t make it any better this time,” he’d responded, which at least had made her laugh.

  The textbooks for his self-tutorial in game theory are piled up on his night table, and he decides to use his sleeplessness to make some more progress toward understanding the Mandelbaum Equilibrium. The farther he gets in the textbooks, the more he’s been enjoying his foray into her science, finding himself increasingly resorting to its form of reasoning in order to clarify things for himself. The first thing to figure out always is whether a situation is a zero-sum game or not. Sum games are the ones where what’s up for grabs—say, some pot of money—stays constant, and zero-sum games are the kind in which one person’s gain is another person’s loss: the addition of all the players’ winnings add up to zero. You win, I lose; I win, you lose.

  All sorts of situations can be analyzed as games, whether zero-sum or not. Take love, for example. Let’s say you’ve got two people in a romantic relationship and neither has said “I love you.”

  Let’s call them X and Y.

  No, let’s call them Cass and Lucinda.

  What are the risks and what are the possible benefits of one of them saying “I love you” first?

  Cass grabs a pen from Lucinda’s night table, and, using the inside of the cover of one of the texts as his sketch pad, he draws himself some boxes:

  If Cass were to say “I love you” and Lucinda responded “I love you,” which is what the top box on the left represents, then there would be a huge payoff. For Cass there would be bliss, and, presumably, for Lucinda there would be bliss as well, so the result would be bliss times two.

  But what if Cass said “I love you” and Lucinda didn’t reciprocate? That would probably result in some degree of discomfort for Lucinda, and a huge loss for Cass, especially if Lucinda was discomfited enough to decide to move out: they had both agreed that the arrangement was experimental.

  Cass supposes he has, for the sake of thoroughness, to fill in the box in which the situation is reversed, the lower box on the left, with Lucinda confessing her love and Cass keeping silent, even though he knows that this square exists only in the realm of the purely theoretical. Still, they call it game theory, don’t they? Better call them X and Y.

  The last box is the one in which neither of them said “I love you.” That is the status quo.

  So now how is Cass supposed to figure out from these boxes the rational thing to do?

  If he says, “I love you,” then, considering the situation only from his own point of view, there is possible bliss but also possible hell, which, he supposes, cancel each other out. If he doesn’t say “I love you,” there is neither bliss nor hell to be gained. He will maintain the present situation, which is certainly a positive one for him—not as positive as bliss, of course, but definitely positive. It seems as if it is rational to keep silent— so rational, in fact, that he wonders why anyone would ever risk saying “I love you” first, which is a bit of a paradox.

  Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that it isn’t always sensible to be rational.

  Or perhaps the Bliss × 2 that can possibly result if a lover speaks out his love is so hugely positive that it blows all the other boxes out of the water. Could that explain why anyone dares to say “I love you” first?

  And here’s another thought: If he shows Lucinda his little grid, it would be a way of indirectly saying “I love you” without taking the risk of saying the actual words. If Lucinda wants to accept his reasoning as a way of saying “I love you” and reciprocate, then they will keep the huge payoff of the first box on the left: Bliss × 2. But if she doesn’t want to reciprocate, then he won’t have blurted out an indiscretion that can’t be taken back. They can keep up their present relationship, maintaining the imperfect-but-preferable-to-nothing status quo. So, by indirectly saying “I love you,” Cass, or X, can possibly get the biggest payoff without risking the biggest payout.

  Cass extends his grid to test out his calculations:

  It is cogent. It is elegant. He has to admit he thinks it pretty damn near brilliant.

  The Seltzer Equilibrium, he decides. Now he has an equilibrium to call his own.

  XV

  The Argument from Sacred Circles

  There was no doubt among the seven students that something new and momentous was gathering itself around Jonas Elijah Klapper. His interests were precipitously veering away from literature and into theology, and a paradox shift of untold proportions was working its way out. The intensity of the cerebration going on before their eyes was both exalting and humbling. The ovoid seminar table was like the sacred circle that used to be drawn around the inspired poet-prophet to make a safe place for his wracking genius. His sentences emerged with the profundity, sententiousness, and obscurity of Gideon’s favorite poets, so that Gideon might have said that Jonas Elijah Klapper had become a crucible for poetry, only he knew, as they all knew, that something even beyond poetry was being spilled. His invocations of the thing beyond genius amazed them all, including Jonas Elijah Klapper, who sometimes sat back blinking his eyes in wonder over words he had heard himself speak.

  They were scheduled to meet from four until six-thirty on Wednesdays, but time ceased to behave conventionally once the seminar was under way. One week Jonas went on for four and a half hours without a break. Then there was the week in which he had abruptly gotten up and left after barely twenty minutes had elapsed.

  Nothing surprised them anymore. They felt, at times, as if they themselves were careening toward the Sublime. The Subliminal and the Self had dropped out of the picture.

  The syllabus had dropped out as well, and the seven of them never knew which books they ought to have read, only that the number was formidable, even for Gideon Raven, who was struggling with the rest of them to keep up with this thunderklap-in-the-making, as well as having his own undergraduate classes to prepare, not to speak (really, Cass wished that he didn’t) of the continuing problems he had in his marriage.

  At the top of the list of the books on Jonas Elijah Klapper’s mind was the Zohar, also known as The Book of Splendor, as well as the Yetzirah, also known as The Book of Formation, both of them fundamental texts in Kabbala, or Cabala, or Qabalah, which last was now Jonas’s preferred spelling, upon which, indeed, he would need henceforth to be insistent, because it was his informed suspicion that the alternative orthographic representations preserve far more sinister distortions. “Kabbala” was the spelling preferred by “Pharisaic normative Judaism,” the mainstream Judaism of conventional rabbis, about which Jonas Elijah harbored harsh reservations; “Cabala” was the spelling adopted by the Christian Cabalists, who, beginning sometime around the twelfth century, spuriously argued that Romanism had assumed full ownership of Jewish esotericism.

  “The Christian spelling can most likely be traced to the influential gri-moire Opus Mago-Cabalisticum, which was authored by the Bavarian alchemist and theosophical thinker Georg von Welling, and appeared in 1735. Both variations are distortions of the Hebrew —nota bene, the single beth, the letter qoph, not kaph—which orthographic distortions are not unrelated to the distortions that had been imposed on the ancient proto-Hebraic Gnosis, the Tree of Life, in which all the great religions, from Zoroastrianism to Tantric Hinduism to the New Age of the redwood-hot-tub crowd, have their roots, just as the Tree of Life itself has its roots in the grounding of all existence, which is the pure negativity of absolute unity, referred to sometimes as LO, the Hebrew for ‘no’ or ‘not,’ as in the Detzniyutha, The Book of That Which Is Concealed, which begins, and I quote: ‘The Book of That Which Is Concealed is the book of the balancing in weight. Until LO existed as weight, LO existed as seeing Face-to-Face. And the Earth was nullified. And the Crowns of the Primordial Kings were found as L
O. Until the Head, desired by all desires, formed and communicated the Garments of Splendor. That weight arises from the place which is LO Him. Those who exist as LO are weighed in YH. In His body exists the weight. LO unites, and LO begins. In YH have they ascended, who LO are, and are, and will be.’”

  They were all scrambling to get English-translation copies of The Book of Splendor, and The Book of Formations, and The Book of That Which Is Concealed, since Professor Klapper had never sent his reading list to the campus bookstore. It was Gideon who went and found The Book of Splendor in the stacks, the only one of the books yet translated, and put it on reserve in Lipschitz so that they would all have access to it.

  Another event that seemed to herald great-things-in-the-making was Professor Klapper’s exchanging his office for the adjacent one of Mar-jorie Cutter, his secretary. Marjorie was now occupying the large and sunny corner office, with its thick carpets and sectional sofa, and Professor Klapper was squeezed into quarters that duplicated more than ever the office he had left behind at Columbia. His students half expected to look out the window and see the traffic of Amsterdam Avenue creeping below.

  Zackary Kreiser had suggested that Professor Klapper’s retreat to a confined space might signify his symbolic return to the womb while he was in the process of gestating some immense new idea. But Miriam Chan had shot down Zack’s suggestion, since it would entail that Jonas Elijah Klapper was the gestatee rather than the gestator.

  Cass had defended Zack’s intuition, remembering Klapper’s words to the Valdener Rebbe that the Qabalist cosmic vessels, shattered in the birthing of the world, are to be thought of as representing the womb of the Cosmic Feminine Presence. Cass had left out the story of how he had happened to hear Professor Klapper speaking on the subject of gynecologico-cosmogony, but he convinced them that the Qabalist account of the shevirah, the violent bursting of the vessels that brought forth the flawed world, was not irrelevant to Jonas Elijah Klapper’s seeking the narrowed space of Marge’s former office.

  The seven had done the moving and rearranging for the professor. They had just been able to squeeze Klapper’s huge desk into his new office, but there wasn’t space for much more, only his own green-cushioned chair and a flimsy metal folding chair that he kept folded up near his desk but could, if he wished, set up for a visitor, which he had done when Cass came by this afternoon to discuss the next phase of his independent study on faith. They were supposed to meet every Tuesday afternoon, but the last two Tuesdays, Cass had found the door closed and his knock had drawn no response. The first week, he went to the next office over to ask Marge whether she knew when Professor Klapper would be back.

  Marge had been in the navy after high school and seemed to Cass still to have a military no-nonsense-ship about her. She could hold her own with the professors, including Jonas Elijah Klapper, who didn’t scare her, even when he got grouchy. “I think it’s just his blood sugar that gets low, and I keep a bunch of those butterscotch candies that he loves on my desk and just hold them out to him when he gets cranky and he calms down,” she’d tell the other secretaries. But she had a soft spot for some of the students, and Cass was her favorite, as good a kid as she had ever met outside the military.

  “Isn’t he there?”

  He shook his head. She picked up the phone and dialed the professor, letting it ring for a while.

  “He might have stepped out to the gents’,” she’d said. “Why don’t you wait here a bit.”

  But it was quite a bit more than a bit, since Cass had asked her if that adorable little blonde girl with the wide grin that showed the missing tooth was her daughter, and learned that it was Krista, her daughter Kim-berly’s daughter, and then he was shown more photos—it was like looking at a depressing time-lapse sequence go from bright-eyed, pigtailed Krista, to slack-jawed, slatternly Kimberly, to slit-eyed, triple-chinned Marjorie—and heard how Marge had had to take them in, Krista and Kimberly and Kimberly’s good-for-nothing layabout husband (Cass didn’t learn his name, though he did learn his brand of beer), and build on to the back of her house so that they wouldn’t be out on the street, and now she didn’t know when she would be able to retire, though it was all worth it for Krista, who was the sunshine of her life. After about forty-five minutes, Cass asked whether he should try Professor Klapper’s door again, since he was expected there, and Marge let him go, but not before forcing him to take a handful of butterscotch candies.

  Cass hadn’t checked with Marge the next week, when Professor Klapper hadn’t answered Cass’s knock again, but the week after that, Cass had found the office door open, the professor sitting at his desk and reading. Professor Klapper had looked up startled at Cass’s knock, peering at him intently over his bifocals before telling him where he might find the chair, which Cass, after a moment of hesitation, interpreted as an invitation to sit.

  “That Moses Maimonides would be highly esteemed within normative Judaism was by no means a foregone conclusion,” Professor Klapper had launched in, even before Cass had finished unfolding the metal chair. “Maimonides, after all, was the rabbi who performed the mixed marriage between the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover and Yahweh. Be that as it may, Maimonides has been pronounced kosher, gathered, as it were, into the folds of the four-fringed garment. Maimonides lived in trying times— indeed, when have great men not? He was a physician who ministered to no less a personage than the Sultan Saladin, and his prescription for the Jewish soul was a large pill of Thirteen Principles that he said all Jews must swallow if they are to merit entrance in the world to come. I myself have always queried whether belief could be prescribed—take thirteen and call me in the morning—but, then, I am by nature querulous.

  “The twelfth principle concerns the Messiah, in whose coming we are adjured to believe: ‘He who doubts or diminishes the greatness of the Messiah is a denier in all the Torah.’ And yet he forbids one to think on the time when he shall come: ‘You should not calculate times for him to come, or look in the verses of the scriptures to see when he should come.’ And where does that leave us?”

  Cass was well aware by now that these questions were not intended to be answered, but the slim possibility that this one could be the exception, and the professor was awaiting a response, was always enough to set up a raucous commotion in his chest.

  “We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah. Is it not extraordinary?”

  Cass nodded.

  “At the heart of the cold Aristotelian rabbi’s exegesis, the bloodred blossom of antinomian chiasmus. And can you not help but compare it with the observation of the poet who might have been giving voice to his Jewish ancestry when he proclaimed that the only paradise is paradise lost?”

  Cass was pretty sure that Professor Klapper was talking about Proust here; but was Marcel Proust Jewish?

  “But my concern here is not with Proust per se, and it is only the striking parallelism that has brought me to Proust, raised a Roman Catholic, though born of a Jewess”–ah!—“and though Marcel was as devoted a son as any Jewish mother could have desired, who, in renouncing the hell’s fire of sexual passion, implied that the only authentic love is for the woman who gave one the gift of one’s life, the gift of one’s genius”— Klapper paused here several long moments, his trembling eye focused on the silver-framed picture on his desk—“yet, though he was a model Jewish son, he was not a self-identifying Jew and was unfamiliar with any of the canonical Jewish texts, though of course one cannot be certain, the presence of knowledge being easier to ascertain than its absence. And yet who would deny that Proust’s pronouncement is a temporal transposition of the Maimonidean position that the only Messiah is an uncome Messiah?”

  Klapper settled an inquisitorial stare upon Cass, and this time he really seemed to be wanting an answer, and what could be offered in answer to his last question other than “Nobody?”

  “Reb Chaim!” Professor Klapper cried out, and Cass’s heart heaved so hard
his shirt collar might have perceptibly moved.

  “It all reminds me of a Hasidic tale, in the tradition of wisdom storytelling which you, Reb Chaim, with your exalted lineage, will be able to appreciate on multitudinous strata. An innkeeper and his wife are awakened in the middle of the night by the heartrending sobs of one of the guests. He goes to investigate, entering the room of sobbing and finding there a simple Jew, barefoot and dressed like a peasant, sitting on the cold wooden floor and weeping. There is nothing about him to betray the fact that he is a renowned Hasidic master, traveling incognito in order to see the state of the world. Each night at midnight, he climbs out of bed and mourns the destruction of the Holy Temple and the scattered nation of Israel. ‘Why the tumult, my good man?’ inquires the distressed innkeeper. ‘What calamity has befallen you?’ ‘I cry over our Diaspora and the suffering it has wrought, and I beseech the Almighty to send the Messiah, who will restore the kingdom and return us to the Holy Land.’”

  Klapper rocked his upper body back and forth as he spoke the master’s words, impersonating the motions of Orthodox Jews in prayer, and the thick layer of posh that usually overlaid his pronunciation was temporarily removed, leaving bare the cadence of the Tillie E. Orlofsky projects on East Broadway, itself an echo of the singsong cadence of Eastern Europe.