36 Arguments for the Existence of God (3 page)

“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 hundreds 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.

At moments like this, could Cass altogether withstand the sense that— hard to put it into words—the sense that the universe is
personal
, that there is something
personal
that grounds existence and order and value and purpose and meaning—and that the grandeur of that personal universe has somehow infiltrated and is expanding his own small person, bringing his littleness more into line with its grandeur, that the personal universe has been personally kind to him, gracious and forgiving, to Cass Seltzer, gratuitously, exorbitantly,
divinely
kind, and this despite Cass’s having, with callowness and shallowness aforethought, thrown spitballs at the whole idea of cosmic intentionality?

No, no, that doesn’t capture it either. Those words are far too narrowed by Cass’s own particular life, when what it is he could feel, has felt, might even be feeling now, has nothing to do with the contents of Cass’s existence but, rather, with existence itself, Itself, this, This, THIS … what?

This expansion out into the world, which is a kind of love, he supposes, a love for the whole of existence, that could so easily well up in Cass Seltzer at this moment, standing here in the pure abstractions of this night and contemplating the strange thisness of his life when viewed
sub specie aeternitatis
—that is to say, from the vantage point of eternity, which comes so highly recommended to us by Spinoza.

Here it is, then: the sense that existence is just such a
tremendous
thing, one comes into it, astonishingly, here one is, formed by biology and history, genes and culture, in the midst of the contingency of the world, here one is, one doesn’t know how, one doesn’t know why, and suddenly one
doesn’t know where one is either or who or what one is either, and all that one knows is that one is a part of it, a considered and conscious part of it, generated and sustained in existence in ways one can hardly comprehend, all the time conscious of it, though, of existence, the fullness of it, the reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy of it, and one wants to live in a way that at least begins to do justice to it, one wants to expand one’s reach of it as far as expansion is possible and even beyond that, to live one’s life in a way commensurate with the privilege of being a part of and conscious of the whole reeling glorious infinite sweep, a sweep that includes, so improbably, a psychologist of religion named Cass Seltzer, who, moved by powers beyond himself, did something more improbable than all the improbabilities constituting his improbable existence could have entailed, did something that won him someone else’s life, a better life, a more brilliant life, a life beyond all the ones he had wished for in the pounding obscurity of all his yearnings, because all of this, this,
this, THIS
couldn’t belong to him, to the man who stands on Weeks Bridge, wrapped round in a scarf his once-beloved ex-wife Pascale had knit for him for some necessary reason that he would never know, perhaps to offer him some protection against the desolation she knew would soon be his, and was, but is no longer, suspended here above sublimity, his cheeks aflame with either euphoria or frostbite, a letter in his zippered pocket with the imprimatur of
Veritas
and a Lucinda Mandelbaum with whom to share it all.