36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  Lenny Shore brings Cass and Auerbach over to make the introductions, and it is just as Cass has feared. The man sucking the energy out of the room is Felix Fidley, looking as if his manicured hands might be forming fists beneath his monogrammed shirt cuffs, a sense of menacing potency radiating out from the kind of man to have that kind of wife with that kind of cold beauty that ages so well, not so unlike Lucinda’s, whom Cass desperately wishes he had beside him to give him some ballast, but instead he has Sy Auerbach, who brings ballast enough for any man, though Cass has never felt it as particularly steadying, not when it’s this close, though he certainly appreciates it when it’s representing his interests, it’s made him rich, it’s made him famous, it’s brought him here, to this unlikely moment, about to face off with this man who is several times over more than his match.

  Fidley extends his hand and shakes Cass’s, and the grip all but crushes three metacarpal bones, and nothing is said, Cass feels that Fidley is daring him to open his mouth and offer up some drivel that he can then subject to his impassive stare that will put any inanity that’s there—and there’s always inanity there—up on vivid display. But when it comes to saying nothing, Cass has never had a problem, and sly Sy, too, is keeping his own counsel, and only pastoral Lenny feels compelled to soften the brutal wordlessness with patter.

  Now there’s an usher at the door, and Lenny rushes over, and gives a signal, and they file out of the chaplain’s office back into the nave, Fidley and his wife following after Lenny. Fidley, when he sees the packed church, turns his head to give Cass a measured smile, mutually shared congratulations for having drawn such a crowd, it’s a moment approaching almost warmth, or at least that flickering recognition of shared humanity that Lenny Shore had been desperately seeking.

  There’s a respectful hush as they take their seats up on the dais, their nameplates set out on the table together with glasses and pitchers of water, Cass on the left, Fidley on the right, Lenny Shore in the middle. There’s a lectern on either side of the table, where each will stand when his turn comes.

  Cass looks out at the filled pews, and he’s searching for the fan with the ponytail, whom he finds after a few moments, talking animatedly to a girl who looks familiar, though he can’t place her, and then he lets his eyes travel along the other rows, and he’s startled to see Mona sitting front and center. She must have gotten here early to have nabbed that seat. She gives him two thumbs-up, and her gesture is immediately duplicated by a tall young woman sitting next to her who resembles Roz, and Cass looks again, and it is Roz. They both blow him kisses, and he leans forward in his chair and squints to make sure that his eyes aren’t deceiving him, and Mona and Roz are laughing together, and how like them to have found each other.

  Lenny Shore has risen and is at the lectern near Cass, welcoming the crowd for “this historic debate,” and Cass is still struggling to get his neurons to line up in a way commensurate to the task at hand, but he’s having trouble even paying attention to what Lenny is saying, as he launches into the history of the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard, which was formed in the 1960s and whose intellectual roots go back to some of the most eminent minds of Harvard, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who urged us to “take the bandages of doctrine off of our eyes and live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind,” and William James, who observed that “rationality does not lie on one side or the other. It is a contest between our fears and our hopes, and both the scientist and the religious believer take a gamble,” and who authored a book he had presciently entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience, as if he could foresee that a century later another psychologist of religion would write a book he’d call The Varieties of Religious Illusion (big laugh), and Lenny is finally getting a reaction, and his bendable body is weaving with the excitement, and Cass remembers where he’s seen that girl before, she’s the one who had asked him whether he signs body parts.

  “The Agnostic Chaplaincy is here to serve the spiritual needs of the questioners and doubters, those who enjoy the journey more than the arrival. Our only doctrine is the open mind, and our ethics stresses tolerance for all points of view, which we practice by trying to see things all possible ways.

  “There’s an old Jewish joke about a quarreling couple that comes to the rabbi to get counseling. The rabbi listens to the wife’s complaints about how all the problems are caused by her no-good husband, and the rabbi says, ‘You know, you’re right.’ Then he listens to the husband’s complaints about how all the problems are caused by his shrewish wife, and he says, ‘You know, you’re right.’ The whole time, the rabbi’s wife has been listening in, and as soon as the couple leaves, she asks him, ‘What did you think you were doing in there? How can they both be right?’ The rabbi says, ‘You know, you’re right.’”

  There’s a healthy laugh, and the chaplain is laughing along, and before it completely dies off, Lenny leans in too close to the mike, and his eagerness makes him lose control of his voice, so that it comes out as a squawk, “That rabbi is my role model!” and Cass finds he’s stopped worrying about himself long enough to worry about the chaplain.

  “Of course, everything may change for us tonight. The resolution of tonight’s debate is: ‘God exists.’ We have on each side a masterful persuader, able to make the best case that can be made for his position, so perhaps the question of God’s existence can finally be answered, tonight and at Harvard.”

  Lenny pauses, and the audience, wildly revved up, bursts into applause, pierced by two-fingered whistles. Cass is reassured about the chaplain, he’s doing fine, he’s just overexcited, and Cass can get back to worrying about himself.

  “Felix Fidley is the Manfred Mannessen University Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He did his undergraduate work at Princeton and received his doctorate from Harvard. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering work combining military and economic strategies of rational decision making. His book Welfare Warfare Wherefore was cited by both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times as the best book of the year, and Nathan Paskudnyak of Provocation wrote that if he believed in evolution he would say that Felix Fidley is the most highly evolved thinker alive today. Professor Fidley will be affirming the resolution ‘God exists.’”

  There is a round of applause.

  “Cass Seltzer is a professor of psychology at Frankfurter University with a specialty in the psychology of religion. He did his undergraduate work at Columbia University and received his doctorate from Frankfurter University where he has been a professor ever since. He is the author of The Varieties of Religious Illusion, which spent forty-three weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and has been translated into twenty-eight languages. The New York Times praised Cass Seltzer as being a different species of atheist, giving every indication that he intimately knows the world of the believer from the inside, calling him the William James for our day, and Time magazine christened him ‘the atheist with a soul.’”

  Sy Auerbach is flanked by his Boston and Cambridge clients: Roz’s hero Luke Nanovitch on one side, and the cognitive scientist Arthur Silver on the other. The philosopher Nicholas Duffy, the physicist Eliza Wandel, and Cass’s old colleague Marty Huffer are also there with him. Auerbach must have put out the word, demanding their attendance. He’s been speaking into Silver’s ear throughout Lenny’s introduction, but the rest of the audience is applauding with gusto, and there are more ear-stabbing whistles, and Cass sees that his friend with the ponytail is pumping his fist. Cass knows that he should feel buoyed by the wave of good will, and he would be if only he felt he were going to perform in such a way as to earn it retroactively, but he doesn’t, so instead he feels pummeled by the wave, sickened by the thought of how much disappointment he may yet inflict on the ponytailed student and his tender-armed lass and all the others who are recklessly giving him the benefit of their doubts. He glances sideways at Fidley, who has a slit of a smile slicing into his left cheek, the one closer to Cass.

&nbs
p; “Professor Seltzer will be negating the resolution ‘God exists.’”

  Another burst of applause. Cass smiles wanly, catching Roz’s eye, and she is staring at him steadily, as if she has caught the worrying current of his mood, and she smiles slowly and nods her head with a confidence that seems considered, as if she’s taking to heart his implied admonition in the car and is not only resolved to think before she speaks but to think before she nods.

  “Professor Fidley will be opening. He has fifteen minutes to make his statement, which will be followed by Professor Seltzer’s fifteen minutes. Then Professor Fidley and Professor Seltzer will face off and ask each other questions directly. They’ll have the chance to ask three questions each and shouldn’t spend more than five minutes answering each question. I will be keeping time. And now may this historic moment commence, with the spirits of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James smiling down on us … or not!”

  Lenny has scored again, and he savors the audience’s laughter and then undulates back down into his seat, and Fidley rises and moves to his lectern. Everything he does has a tone of authority.

  “I want first of all to thank the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard for organizing this debate, and thus, as the chaplain put it, giving Professor Seltzer and me a chance to decide this issue once and for all.” He pauses for a brief soft chuckle. “I am particularly delighted to have the chance to debate, of all the atheists who are suddenly taking their responsibilities to enlightenment seriously enough to write best sellers, the one atheist who comes equipped with a working soul.”

  Cass is trying to pay attention to Felix Fidley’s words, trying to keep his mind focused, but the strangeness of his being Cass here is threatening to carry him away.

  “I can’t help but believe that this will make my task easier. If Cass Seltzer has a soul, then he already knows that God exists, even if he doesn’t yet know that he knows. And that is what I’m going to convince him of tonight, and you will be here to witness it.

  “In my spare time I’m a military-history buff,” Fidley is saying, which is the kind of thing that he would be and Cass wouldn’t be, and wouldn’t it be nice if Cass could just sit back and admire the man’s towering presence and assurance. “And so you will forgive me if I take my analogies from that sphere. My strategy tonight can be compared to Khalid ibn al-Walid maneuvers at the Battle of Yarmouk, a great and decisive battle that took place in August in the year 636, between the Islamic Caliphate and the Christian Byzantine Empire.”

  Cass Seltzer is thinking about how many times during the past year he has had the strange impression that he has been wearing somebody else’s coat.

  “Many military historians believe this to be among the most decisive battles of all times, since it was the first of the Islamic victories outside of Arabia, and was followed by a wave of triumph that carried the Muslim conquest to the very shores of Europe. Khalid ibn al-Walid was one of history’s great military strategists, and the strategy he used at Yarmouk is a classic three-pronged attack,” Fidley is saying when it occurs to Cass that Felix Fidley is the man whose coat Cass has mistakenly been wearing.

  “That three-pronged attack is precisely the one that I’ll employ tonight.”

  And tonight’s the night when the legitimate wearer is going to demand his coat back.

  XXXIII

  The Argument from the Violable Self

  He was still holding the New York Times Op-Ed page in his trembling hand.

  “My God,” he had answered the phone.

  “You’ve seen it then, the Klop-Ed.”

  It had been a slip of the tongue that she hadn’t even realized she had made until he laughed, grimly.

  “Are you okay?” was what she mainly had wanted to know.

  “I’m shaken. I’m really shaken.”

  “I can only imagine. Even I’m shaken.”

  “I wouldn’t have predicted how important he still is to me, how much it all still hurts.”

  “You’re obviously still important to him, too.”

  “That hurts, too.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know exactly. It’s horrible to think of him thinking of me as his nemesis.”

  “Not to belabor the obvious, but he’s stark-raving mad. How can anything he thinks about you bother you?”

  “You’d think not, wouldn’t you, but there it is. I wish I didn’t have any part in his current story. I don’t want to be in his story.”

  “That’s the thing about people. They’re free to use you in their stories as they see fit, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

  “Most of the time we don’t even know how we’re being used.”

  “Better that way.”

  “But that he’d cast me as his Judas!”

  “His is the kind of story that needs a Judas. You’ve done him a favor.”

  “My book’s provoking him into writing that piece isn’t doing him any favors.”

  “Why not? Is it going to ruin his academic reputation?”

  “I’m afraid they’ll come after him with a straitjacket.”

  “He’s in Hot S’fat, according to the byline. Probably half the town thinks they’re messiahs and the other half are the messiahs’ believers.”

  “This piece will put all of his work into doubt.”

  “If you ask me, that’s where it always should have been.”

  “No. The early work was a revelation. He was a revelation.”

  “I’d be careful with that kind of language, Cass, after that Klop-Ed.”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  “It’s interesting how that religiously charged language comes back to you when you talk about him.”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  “Even after all these years of studying the ways that religious emotions are fungible.”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  “You really are in shock, my poor darling. That’s three times in a row that you said I have a point. Do you want me to come over?”

  “Thanks, no. Somehow or other I need to get my mind back on the debate tonight.”

  “You’ve got fodder in the Klop-Ed. Use it to argue that religion is nuts.”

  “Only that’s not what I believe.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Now’s not the time for me to rethink my stand. Now’s the time for me to try and remember what my stand is.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to come over?”

  “Thanks, Roz. I need peace and quiet.”

  The phone had rung all day. He had let the machine pick up. He’d get back to them tomorrow. The only phone call he had taken had come from London.

  “Baby Budd, Jimmy Legs is down on you.”

  “Gideon? Is that you? Gideon!”

  “How you holding up there, Baby Budd?”

  “I read that piece and it’s as if the past twenty years had never been.”

  “It had the same effect on me. I heard that voice again. That’s all I can hear. All those years getting his voice out of my head, and then six hundred and forty-eight words get published in the New York Times and he’s taken over my thought processes. I heard myself telling my wife, Fiona, to take our offspring for a perambulation so that I might be allowed the society of my own inviolable self. There I was, channeling him once again.”

  “You counted the number of words?”

  “Six hundred and forty-eight is the product of thirty-six and eighteen,” Gideon said quietly.

  There was a long trans-Atlantic pause, while Cass tried to think of what to say, and, before he’d decided, there came the laughter. Cass was delighted to learn that Gideon still had his infantile giggle.

  And all day long, no e-mail from GR613. It was so utterly unlike him. In the middle of all his other concerns today, Cass couldn’t stop worrying about Azarya.

  XXXIV

  The Argument from the View from Nowhere

  Lenny Shore has proved not to be a strict enforcer of th
e time. Felix Fidley had used close to fifteen minutes to lay out his first prong, and Cass is still groping for the general shape of the argument.

  The first prong had seemed a version of what Cass had called The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason (#33):

  “Atheists talk a great deal about reason,” Fidley had said, coating the last word with sarcasm. “They claim to be ruled by reason and reason alone. Their allegiance to reason is so strong that they profess themselves to be outraged by anything less than reason—by, in other words, faith. If anything is sacred to a man like Cass Seltzer, it’s reason.

  “Bertrand Russell, a famous English atheist, who wrote an essay entitled Why I Am Not a Christian and who was barred from teaching in this country in the 1940s because of his views concerning marriage and sexuality, said that the difference between faith and reason is like the difference between theft and honest toil. So here was a man who was proud of scandalizing the trustees of the City College of New York with his views about free love, but he was shocked—shocked—by believers caught in flagrante fideo.”

  He had gotten the laughs that he was going for, though Mona and Roz, front and center, stiffened with lack of amusement, Roz’s upper lip listing one way under the weight of her scorn and Mona’s listing the other way.

  “But the thing about reason is that, if you’re truly consistent, which is the first rule of reason, then you will be able to prove that reason has its own strict limitations. The claim that everything must be legitimated through reason is self-refuting. How, after all, can you legitimate that claim? Through reason? That would be viciously circular. In other words, we have to accept reason on faith. We have to accept logic on faith. A man like Bertrand Russell, and presumably a man like Cass Seltzer, is faithful to logic. Can he justify his logic? Is there some logical principle he can use that will prove the legitimacy of logic? And even if he proves it, why would he accept his own proof, if he’s really being logical, since accepting it would already be taking for granted that he accepts logic, the very acceptance he’s trying to justify? Logic has to be accepted without any proof at all. Logic has to be accepted on faith. Every time an atheist uses a logical principle, or draws a conclusion from premises, or believes a conclusion because he’s got a sound argument, he’s relying on faith.”