by Joshua Ingle
Without the hum of the golf cart’s motor and the squeak of its seats, the Sanctuary had grown so quiet that Thorn could hear the humans’ breathing. Their footsteps on the asphalt sounded like hammers on wood. No insects buzzed. No wind rustled the pine branches. No cars passed. The Sanctuary had likely not intended for any of its inhabitants to make it this far out.
“We can’t get in that plane with him,” Karen suddenly said, walking behind Virgil now, probably to keep an eye on him. “We need to find a car and get away. He’ll kill us all. What are we still doing here with him?”
No one responded to her, and Thorn was so afraid of what Brandon and Heather’s reactions might be, he refused to actually turn and see what they were. But the group kept walking.
“Are you all crazy?” Karen said. “You’re walking right into a trap!”
“Do I really have to say this again?” Heather asked with more than a hint of annoyance. “If Virgil wanted to hurt us, why has he saved us multiple times tonight? We’re not going to the plane because he wants us to. We’re going to the plane because we think it’s the best way out of here. So don’t blow a gasket. We’re watching him. And Virgil, it’d go a long way toward helping us calm Karen down if you’d just tell us what’s really going on here.”
“You’re lying to yourself,” Karen said before Thorn even had a chance to respond.
“It’s called reason,” Heather said.
“That’s funny, because it sounds a lot like faith.”
Thorn turned to look at the women. Heather was shaking her head and looking up at the sky, like she was trying to wrap her head around Karen’s accusation. “Like faith? What?”
“That’s right,” Karen said. “You have faith just as much as I do. You have faith in reason. And in all kinds of more innocent things, too. You have faith that Brandon loves you, for instance.”
“Hey, no. We’re not going there again. Brandon is affectionate with me, he spends time with me, he sacrificed his social ties in Bristol so he could marry me. That’s all evidence. I don’t need faith to believe that Brandon loves me, and there’s no good reason for Brandon to require my faith. Like I said earlier: why would God value faith?”
“I mean no offense by this, Heather, but at some point along the way, I think you decided that you wanted to fit in with your pleasure-seeking friends.”
“Jeez, give it a rest,” Heather muttered under her breath.
But Karen continued as if Heather hadn’t spoken. “You decided that you didn’t like the idea of a loving God who had standards that He wants you to live by. And I don’t fault you for that. Lots of people get seduced by mainstream science and make the same choices. But you have to understand that scientists have created their theories about a world without God precisely because they don’t want to believe in Him. Most of modern science has been built around a selfish desire to ignore God’s grace, so that people can live carefree lives. Hedonistic lives. But God is trying to draw you nearer to Him, Heather. You don’t have to believe those lies. All it takes is for you to open your heart and accept God’s offer of grace. This might be exactly the night to do it, too. Maybe that’s been God’s purpose through all of this.”
Heather’s feet shuffled on the asphalt. One of her fists was clenched. “So you know that I haven’t thought my views through?” she said. “You know that the entire argument I made to you before the wedding was just a cheap excuse to allow me to live in sin? I’ll tell you what, Ms. Noyce. Atheism isn’t faith. Atheism is an absence of faith. For example, you are an atheist of Allah. That should give you some indication of how my own thinking process works.
“And here’s how science doesn’t work: science doesn’t assume that God is nonexistent, then develop evidence to support that assumption. If science did work that way, it’d be faith-based reasoning—not science.
“Now here’s how science does work. Science looks at evidence with as little bias as possible, then sees where that evidence leads. We don’t start with answers and then go back to questions, like faith does. Scientists start from a place of humility: from not knowing anything. We start with questions, and then we get answers. Those answers aren’t always perfect, or all-encompassing, but because we can test whether or not they’re true, those ideas get either falsified or refined over time. Unlike faith, science is self-correcting. It defends itself against bias. I can see, hear, touch, and smell science, too. Now I don’t know about you, but I’d rather trust that method as a source of knowledge and morality than an ancient book written by people who knew almost nothing about how the world worked. And if you—”
“Enough! That ‘ancient book’ provides a moral compass for me, and for billions of people around the world.”
“So the Bible passages encouraging slavery, rape, and genocide have to be understood in context, I guess.”
“There are no such encouragements in the Bible, and if you think there are, then yes, you have to read it more carefully to understand it.”
Thorn had often wondered about the Bible himself—even in the depths of his depravity, thousands of years ago. There was a time, before the Bible, when demonkind had grown tired. Some had talked openly of abandoning their fight against the Enemy, of just quietly waiting and doing nothing for all time. A few had even tried to defect. Thorn imagined that this behavior would only have grown worse over time.
But then something had happened to change that trajectory: the Enemy spoke to the humans and made them write a Book. And ironically, that Book had not only influenced the humans—it had rejuvenated the demons as well. The truth of the matter was that before the Book, the demons had lacked direction, because they had never known the details of God’s real plan. But the Bible… it offered them a blueprint. It showed them precisely what to fight against.
It gave them new hope.
Thorn had spotted quite a few inconsistencies in it, though. He knew the God of the Old Testament well. This was the God who had killed the innocent firstborn sons of Egypt during the plagues, who had sanctioned slavery and rape in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, 2 Samuel, and elsewhere. (Comically, demons had fought against rape and slavery for hundreds of years for this very reason.) In the days of the Israelites, God had been a merciless, xenophobic commander, demanding animal sacrifices from His friends and blood from His enemies.
But somewhere between the Old Testament and the New Testament, God changed. After the Roman Empire blossomed and Christ was put to the cross, God became a loving father figure, welcoming all human races into His forgiving embrace. This sudden Biblical jump from wrath to kindness had never made sense to Thorn before. But it did now—now that he’d met the true, limited, and somewhat bipolar God face to face. Thorn understood now that God’s attitudes could change over time, and that as a result, it was only natural that He would amend some of His policies.
But why did He need to send His son as a sacrifice? How did that factor into His tests? Why not just forgive humans directly if they passed the tests?
Both eons ago and now, Thorn could find no ultimate answers to these questions. It was enough to make him doubt the accuracy of the story of Christ that demons had fought so hard against… though naturally he’d never dared to share even a glimmer of this doubt with his fellow demons, lest they think him weak. Humans who doubted the Bible’s authenticity were seen as prey; demons who doubted it were seen as fools.
It was true that the Good Book seemed to represent the combined output of many middling human authors, mixing hearsay and legends over the course of many centuries, each one heedless of the fact that their writing was inconsistent with what had come before. But despite all of this, the Bible as a whole must have been true—or true enough, anyway—since it had been written thanks to direct divine inspiration from the Enemy Himself. Or so the argument went.
And thus demonkind had been obligated to combat it.
Thorn only briefly mulled these matters over before tuning back in to the women’s argument. It was an argument that he�
�having heard both of these positions vigorously defended thousands of times before—found rather dull. But at least the conversation had veered away from whether or not they should trust Virgil. And that was all that mattered for now.
Heather was droning on about science again. “Now, there are certainly a few disreputable scientists. There are scientists who fake their evidence for profit and prestige. But in science, we can get even more profit and prestige by proving those people wrong. If I think that a prominent hypothesis is false, I have incentives to prove it false, and other scientists will celebrate me for doing so! There’s no more a conspiracy among scientists to fabricate evidence against faith than there is a conspiracy among forest rangers to fabricate evidence against Bigfoot. We see what we see, we don’t see what we don’t see, and we accept that.”
“Well, I believe that the realm of science can never comprehend the nature of God,” Karen said, keeping Brandon between her and Heather as they treaded up the hill. “I believe He’s much greater than science.”
“And I think He’s probably not real at all.”
Thorn couldn’t resist chiming in. “And I believe God is an androgynous, fingernail-biting, twenty-five-year-old animal lover with sparkly blue hair, plants growing out of His skin, a weird guttural voice, and a temper He can only control if He has a terrified angel playing the harp for Him.”
Thorn’s contribution to the conversation was met with silence, save for their footfalls. Heather, Karen, and Brandon all stared at him with expressions of utter befuddlement.
Thorn sighed wryly. He half-wished the Judge were here to appreciate the humans’ squabbling with him. “But hey, what do I know?” he finished, then waved them back to their debate.
Karen picked right back up where she’d left off. “What if you’re wrong, Heather? What if you die and go to Hell? And what if you take Brandon there with you?”
“What if you’re wrong, and you waste the one life that you do have on following superstition, wishing for an imagined afterlife?”
“Okay, look, darling. You don’t have to take my word on any of this. We have all the evidence we need walking right here with us.” Karen motioned to Brandon, whose eyes focused forward like he very much did not want to be involved in this discussion. “Brandon was such a happy kid when he was growing up, always running around playing with friends, eager to lend anyone a helping hand. But now he’s gotten your ideas in his head, and look at his life. He’s miserable. Even at his own wedding! Without God in our lives, we lose all joy, all meaning. Emptiness is all that remains. Sadness and sorrow. Purposelessness.”
Heather looked like she was about to speak, but she held her tongue and turned to Brandon. “You can answer her better than I can, hon. Do you have anything to say?”
Brandon’s head swayed lightly from side to side. Thorn leaned closer to hear his quiet reply.
“You’ve said before, Heather, that we all create our own purposes in life,” Brandon began. “And that morality comes from inside of us instead of outside, right? Well, that’s a nice thought, but—and no offense—it doesn’t make sense. If it’s just us little old fallible humans creating purpose, how are those purposes worth anything? They’re subjective and arbitrary. There’s no, like, universal common denominator or anything that makes one purpose better than any other purpose. There’s nothing to base our morality on, so why not just toss morality out the window?” He shrugged and kicked a stray rock in the middle of the street. Karen stretched her arms triumphantly. “I’m sorry, hon. I’m not agreeing with Karen that there is a God, but I think she’s right about life’s emptiness, if we’re honest with ourselves. If God isn’t behind the scenes, pulling all the strings, then what meaning could life possibly hold for any of us?”
“So you got the idea from her,” Heather said in response, raising her eyebrows.
“He did not!” Karen said, inching toward Heather as the group neared the hilltop. “If God’s not real, Brandon has nothing to base his sense of morality on, does he? And neither do you. Nothing but your own self-righteousness. If we look to humankind to create our morality, we’ll all end up as egomaniacs, or as nihilists like Brandon.”
“No we won’t,” Heather said.
“Why not? If there’s no Heaven or Hell, and we’ll never be judged for our sins, then we have no reason not to cheat, steal, and murder. Without faith in God, there’s no point in caring for our neighbors, fighting injustice, striving for peace on earth. If God’s not real, who’s responsible for our well-being?”
“We are.” Heather said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“And what should we base our morality on, if not faith in God?”
“We should base it on our happiness.”
“On pleasure-seeking, you mean?”
“No, not just happiness for me and you, but for everybody. Happiness is your universal common denominator, Brandon. So is suffering. Morality lies in pushing humanity away from suffering and toward happiness.”
“Well, if happiness is all there really is to life,” Karen asked, “then what are you going to live for, Heather? For personal achievement? For the approval of your peers? For carpe diem adventure? For wealth and power? For something else that’s ultimately empty?”
“For knowledge!” Heather said immediately. “For progress! For the betterment of humankind. For fairness and equality. For love.” Heather’s eyes flashed over to Brandon, but by the time he returned her gaze, she was looking at Karen again, passion in her voice. “I want to see a world without war. I want to see a sustainable economy built on the love of innovation rather than on the backs of the poor. I want to see a peaceful Middle East, freed from the chains of faith.”
They were cresting the very top of the hill now. Though Thorn could see streetlights on the road behind them and along the downward slope in front of them, no artificial lights lit the hill’s peak. Perhaps this was on purpose, because the hilltop offered a scenic view of the moonlit vista below. Neighborhoods and highways were tucked snugly beneath the hulking black shapes of vigilant little mountains; a river curved between the buildings below then meandered out to the horizon; and above all that, an even greater view: the stars speckling the sky like a million beaming freckles. The tapestry began at one horizon and ended at the other, but it seemed as if a journey across that expanse might take a lifetime or two. Thorn found the starlight so dazzling that for a moment, such a journey seemed worth it.
Heather stepped into the center of the road, raised her arms, and gestured grandly, encompassing the heavens. “I want to see women and men living on Mars, then on the moons of Jupiter, then on planets across the galaxy. I want to learn what’s out there at the largest levels, and what secrets hide inside the smallest subatomic particle. I want to learn how we really came to be here. I want to create art. I want to give to charity. I want to cure cancer. I want to save the planet. I want to keep learning, infinitely. I want everyone to have easy access to education and health care. I want to help every woman and man alive reach their fullest potential. And since I’m alive only once, working toward these goals is way more urgent to me than it’d be if I thought I had an eternity to accomplish them. I’m an atheist and a humanist, Ms. Noyce. And if you say that I don’t have morals, you don’t know me.”
Heather exhaled and let her arms hang at her sides. Brandon’s widened eyes indicated surprise, and perhaps admiration. Reluctantly pacing forward with the rest of the group, Karen hunched her shoulders and fidgeted with her hands, looking a bit rattled and more than a bit pissed off.
“I think what morality you do have was really just stolen from Christianity,” she said at last.
“How could that be?” Heather said. “You ground your morals in a very old book. I ground my morals in empathy. You do the right thing because you think a deity told you to do it. I do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.”
Karen dismissed Heather with a wave of her hand. “I can’t convince you if you don�
��t want to hear my words.” Then she looked past Heather, to Thorn. “And what about you, Virgil? Or whatever you are? You’ve been awfully quiet. What do you think about all this?”
Thorn couldn’t fathom why Karen would ask him such a question. Perhaps she hoped that his vileness would taint Heather’s argument.
He searched for a response. At first, the debate’s subject matter had seemed beneath him, since he knew most of the answers. Yet as it had progressed, he couldn’t help but recall the wicked dogma of the demon world, and how tenaciously it had ensnared Marcus, and the Judge, and even himself. Only after he’d summoned the nerve to honestly question his own beliefs—to ask himself if maybe, just maybe, he was wrong about some things—had he seen those beliefs for what they really were.
“What do I think?” Thorn said. “I think a belief system that is true will stand up to scrutiny. Only liars and dupes fear doubt. For we can never know for sure if we’re right until we’ve tried very, very hard to prove ourselves wrong.”
The humans seemed to take a moment to digest this, none making eye contact with the others. For a few seconds, the thumping of their feet against the ground was the only sound again. Then the buzz of streetlights swelled as they began to descend the hill. For good measure, Thorn added, “Now can we please, for the love of God, go get that airplane?”
11
The immense hangar doors folded upward, creaking a raucous metallic song into the nighttime expanse. The hangar stood in an isolated corner of the airfield, far from any other structures. Brandon had brought them in through a back gate, and fortunately, Thorn hadn’t spotted any new humans during the walk. He’d continued to evade Karen’s constant questions as well.
Brandon slipped underneath the opening doors, then ran to the small office at the rear of the hangar. “I’m getting the keys. I’ll have it up and running as soon as I can.”