A Naked Singularity: A Novel (63 page)

“Good Lord.”

“Yes.”

“Man, this is like a multiple count indictment they’re working on against me.”

“It would appear so.”

“And Tom’s out for like another week?”

“At least. And even when he returns, Tom’s influence may be waning.”

“Really?”

“Yes, in fact—”

“Anyway on Kingg we’re basically preparing to throw a Hail Mary pass aren’t we?”

“I must warn you, if that’s a sports metaphor those invariably escape me.”

“And if we fail they take him out like a week later right?”

“They execute him yes, if we fail.”

“What do you suppose Kingg will be thinking then?”

“When they execute him?”

“Well, before. Just-before for example.”

“I don’t know, I don’t really know him.”

“You don’t have to know him do you?”

“What do you mean, Casi?”

“They executed a federal prisoner last year didn’t they?”

“Yes, they did.”

“An unrepentant killer right?

“I don’t know.”

“Well, hundreds dead right?”

“Right.”

“At his hands.”

“Yes.”

“And no stated remorse.”

“True but that assumes his public proclamations matched his internal state.”

“Right, in fact that’s sort of what I’m getting at. You know what I heard this guy did just before he was killed? This unrepentant killer and avowed atheist?”

“What?”

“He was offered and received a sacrament, Extreme Unction.”

“Isn’t that like Last Rites?”

“Yes, especially in this context.”

“Okay, why is that meaningful to you?”

“Because Extreme Unction is a sacrament, one of the seven, whereby the recipient is essentially prepared for death and the ensuing afterlife through repentance, forgiveness et cetera. Don’t you find it amazingly anomalous and all sorts of suggestive that this individual, who killed hundreds without apology, and who maintained all along that he did not believe in God, at the last moment basically asked for forgiveness and prepared for an afterlife?”

“Maybe it’s true what they say regarding the dearth of atheists in foxholes.”

“Yes! Let’s talk about that statement. Can we determine whether or not it’s true and what the consequences would be accordingly? Is that even the type of thing we can discover Toom?”

“Yes, of course.”

“How?”

“Through reason.”

“Fine, well, the statement is there are no atheists in foxholes. Is it true?”

“Literally?”

“No, let’s take the alleged truth the statement is trying to express, which is, I think, that people who are faced with their imminent mortality invariably turn to a belief in God and all attendant beliefs. What do you say?”

“First I suppose we need to address what it even means for a statement like that to be true.”

“I guess does the statement accurately reflect the physical world we live in and the people we share it with? In other words, is it true that human beings, when faced with the very real possibility of impending death, invariably turn to a belief in God regardless of their prior level of piety.”

“Phrased that way, I think the answer is simple. The answer would be that the statement, if it means what you just said, is almost certainly
not
true, so few things being true of
all
people.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere Toom, I agree. So let’s modify slightly what we think the statement purports to allege. Imagine we have the individual who coined this phrase before us presently. She says, look, the world is divided into those who believe in God and an afterlife and those who don’t. Of those who don’t, I believe the overwhelming majority of them will in some form adopt such a belief when they believe they are about to die. Do we agree with her?”

“I really wouldn’t know where to begin examining her statement. The little experience I’ve had with people who were aware they were dying was with people who had a belief in God and an afterlife to begin with, although it did seem that the belief was if anything strengthened and not weakened by their circumstances.”

“I knew a woman who worked as a nurse at an intensive care unit. Now as you know nurses are basically saints making a pit stop on earth; dealing with the nastiest shit you can imagine without any of the prestige or compensations doctors get. So, unlike you, she dealt with an endless procession of people facing imminent death and according to her, in all her years, not one,
not one
patient who knew he was about to die persisted in an atheistic or even agnostic belief. Now if you know anything about the extreme laxity of my data-gathering standards then you’ll know that this nurse’s statement, along with my own admittedly limited experience of the near-dead, and along with our Extreme Unction friend is enough to convince me of the general truth of the foxhole statement.”

“So if it is true, a rather large proviso but one which I’m willing to forgo challenging for the moment, what do we take from that?”

“That’s the interesting question of course. Why do human beings engage in this behavior Toom?”

“Maybe they’re seeking comfort. The person is about to have something bad happen to them, as bad as they can envision. Under those circumstances, the person is looking for a consolation, so he latches on to the belief that the imminent end isn’t really an end.”

“A belief he never had before right?”

“Presumably.”

“Well no, I only want to deal with people who truly never believed not those who just said they didn’t but deep down did.”

“Okay.”

“If one of those people is going to adopt a belief purely for psychological comfort, and despite the fact that they believed the proposition to be a complete fiction prior to their predicament, why not adopt a different belief that might offer even more hope without any possible downside. Why not suddenly choose to believe that human beings, despite all evidence to the contrary, are in fact immortal and death is nothing more than an elaborate ruse? Or better yet that human beings are in fact mortal but I myself am not. I am immortal. Why not choose to believe any of those things? Note that those beliefs, if believed in the absence of a God, would arguably offer more comfort to the atheist since they would not involve any apologetic explanation to a higher being both for the disbelief and for any other wrong actions or inactions. So why not?”

“Because those would be the beliefs of a madman. Nothing speaks in their favor, there’s no proof.”

“And where is the
proof
of an afterlife? Of a God? Surely someone who was previously an avowed atheist would be the first to say there is no actual proof right?”

“Maybe there is no proof
per se
but there’s a certain safety in numbers and a lot of other people believe in God and an afterlife whereas seemingly no sane person believes in their own corporeal immortality.”

“Why is that the case? Why is it that countless seemingly sane people believe these things in the absence of proof?”

“One possible reason is that these beliefs are endemic to human culture and therefore predispose us to their adoption.”

“So that someone who has truly resisted these cultural impetuses their entire life is suddenly incapable of resisting them at a time when, near death, you would expect them to be less affected by societal pressures than at any other time in their life?”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“You make it sound as if these beliefs can never fail to provide comfort but what about our Extreme Unction recipient? You think he wanted to confront what he had done? Wouldn’t such a person be better comforted by the belief that what follows death is a complete nothing?
Nothing
by nature entailing no need to confront one’s senseless slaughter of children?”

“People are petrified of nothingness. Repentance and groveling they can deal with more easily I think. Maybe this fear of a complete nothing, not true belief, was his motivation. Besides, the papers said that although an atheist, he was raised Catholic meaning his last-minute belief may have been nothing more than him reverting, in his darkest hour, to an emblem of his simpler youth and drawing comfort from that. So I’m not ready to concede that he experienced true belief, though of course he may have.”

“What do
you
believe?”

“As I just said, I have no way of knowing what he was truly experiencing.”

“No, I mean what do you believe on the general subject?”

“I leave work early on Fridays to avoid sundown and this isn’t a hat.”

“Right, so you’re just being devil’s advocatey when you say these things. You would say that, if true, the atheist in the foxhole doesn’t so much adopt these beliefs as his eyes are pried open to the truth when spurred on by the extreme circumstances. You would say that the reason so many humans have this belief in God or an afterlife, and not other unsupported beliefs, is that their belief is justified by objective, even if unknowable,
truth,
which they somehow feel or know on some level. Of course, someone would answer that the belief is so popular and widely accepted not because it contains any truth but rather because it is an excellent source of comfort in a cruel world. You might, in turn, answer, as I’ve hinted, that all sorts of beliefs offer or would offer similar or even greater comfort yet they are not adopted with a fraction of the frequency as this belief. You might also add that the belief is often held by those to whom it is unlikely to offer any comfort and by still others whom you would expect the belief to actively discomfort. You could argue from these facts that this type of belief is therefore to some extent ingrained in humans. And to this, someone might respond that even if the belief was ingrained in us, that would not serve as the slightest assurance that the belief is grounded in or otherwise reveals
truth
. Moreover, this person might say, the things you proffer in support of the idea’s ingrained nature constitute mere circumstantial evidence. It may very well be, as you said, that a God belief et cetera is such a major part of our cultural structure and history that it predisposes us to its adoption in such a strong way that it makes the belief seem native and inborn. Which naturally raises the chicken/egg question of why the belief holds such a prominent place in human cultural history. Which place your opponent might grant but only before pointing out that as humans and their culture have evolved, the belief has rightly weakened. Adding that a seemingly strong majority of recent great thinkers have been atheists, or at least agnostics. That the scientific method currently reigns supreme and unchallenged and that one must never forget that there is, after all, no credible proof in support of the belief. To this last objection you could respond that the seeming lack of proof is, in and of itself, a form of proof of the belief ’s truth value. After all, can your opponent name another belief that has persisted for so long and so consistently in the absence of any empirical support? At which point your opponent may very well get fed up and ask if you’re one of those creeps that doesn’t want schools teaching evolution. Evolution, he would say, proves definitively that no single entity created man, discrediting any and all opposing fairy tales like the one found in Genesis. The obvious response being that if there was a supreme being, a being who possessed consummate omnipotence, perfection, and beauty, we would expect him to operate in a certain way. We would, for example, expect that if such a being was to create a race of something called humans it would be done in a celestially and appropriately complex way such as the method described by Darwin. We would also expect that the universe containing those humans would not function in a mechanistic Newtonian fashion but would instead be the bizarrely complex and counterintuitive Einsteinian slash Heisenbergian maelstrom we’ve discovered. In other words, the discovery of increasing complexity in any form is evidence of God not its opposite, not least of all because it makes the accident called life seem even less likely without a guiding force and all those other intelligent-design-type notions. All that you would surely say, and all that your opponent would respond. Back and forth, forth and back, with seemingly no legitimate means for choosing between the two opposing worldviews. Isn’t that the situation we now find ourselves in Toomie, my high-I.Q. compatriot? Is the situation hopeless or can we, by employing reason, determine which is the better view? I cannot imagine two people such as you and I failing at this. Thus am I prepared to stay in this room, for weeks if necessary and with the occasional delivered cheesesteak, in order to, with your help, definitively answer this most important question once and for all. You with me?”

“First things first.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning some day I may be willing to sit down with you and hash all this out but right now it is far more important that we discuss Jalen Kingg’s case and formulate a successful strategy for saving his life.
That
first thing has to come first.”

“First? What could be prior to this question? Can we truly know anything before answering this question?”

“Yes, because this ultimate question you’re talking about is meaningless at the moment. Not to mention that I and countless others have already answered it.”

“Not the way I’m talking about.”

“Maybe not, but to our satisfaction, and that’s the only truly important aspect of the question.”

“You find this kind of activity and these kinds of questions unimportant? You?”

“To a large extent yes. Intellectual discourse and investigation is admittedly great fun but only truly meaningful when conducted in the service of others. In a few days, a bungled mess of a person, a child’s brain in an adult, who has from birth been mercilessly tortured by circumstance will be killed unless you and I use our minds, and all other advantages that were given to us by mere accident, to stop the killers. In service of this goal I’m more than willing to spend the days of thought you’re talking about. But I would no sooner, under these circumstances, engage in what you propose than I would in endless games of tic tac toe.”