36 Arguments for the Existence of God (42 page)

Cass feels a forceful hand on his shoulder clamping him from behind. He turns back and discovers it’s Sy Auerbach, adorned in his fedora and impatience.

“Seltzer! What are you doing at the end of a line for your own debate? Haven’t I taught you anything?”

“Sy! What are you doing here?”

“I’m here for your smackdown. I’m going to record it and put the transcript and video up on my blog.”

Cass doesn’t voice the first question that comes to mind: What if Fidley flattens him? Will his agent put that up on www.precipice.org?

“How did you even know about this?” is what he asks. He’s pretty sure there hasn’t been any publicity outside of Harvard.

“Roz Margolis told me. She got in touch with me about representing her and mentioned it. She said it was going to be big, but I had no idea.”

“Neither did I.”

“Obviously, or you would have gotten here sooner. Coming through,” he bellows to the people up front. “Cass Seltzer coming through.”

The crowd parts, and a student usher gushes, “Professor Seltzer, we’re so excited, please follow us,” and he enters the beautiful nave of the church, where the whitewashed pews are quickly filling and heads swivel in his direction as he walks down the long center aisle with Sy Auerbach at his side, a red runner under their feet and a simple Protestant cross before their eyes. The immense windows have the shape of the sublime domes that had been carved into the ice on Cass’s night on Weeks Bridge, and the walls are inscribed with the Harvard dead who had been lost in the wars of the twentieth century.

“You see that demented Op-Ed in today’s
New York Times
?
”
his agent is asking him. “Perfect timing. Coincidence?”

“You mean could he have known about this debate? Unlikely. It was my book that had gotten to him.”

“My congratulations.” Auerbach gives his mirthless laugh.

A thin young man with a ponytail and a ring piercing his eyebrow yells “Cass-man!” as they walk past, and Cass gives a lopsided smile and a halfhearted wave.

“I heard a rumor you were once his student,” Auerbach is saying.

“True.”

Auerbach chuckles softly.

“Remind me to tell you a story about Klapper someday.”

Cass will never remind him. He’ll remember not to remind him.

They pass the chancel and enter the chaplain’s office, tonight being used as the greenroom.

Five people are gathered there, and Cass’s eye is drawn first to a tall-ish man who has the kind of conical build that gives the impression of taking up more volume than it actually does, with broad shoulders and an expansive chest. His hair is silvered and elegantly sheared, falling silky to the finely stitched collar, but his eyes are hard, glinting pebbles and his mouth is a firm line, no give at all in the upper lip. There’s a suggestion of brute force as he stands there with a stillness that suggests reserves of strength that he is straining to hold in check. With an impassiveness that manages to be aggressive, he’s listening to a man who is addressing him with a desperate affability. The setup has the look of a psychological experiment, a verbal analogue to the dollar auction that Lucinda had used to fang Harold Lipkin. The speaker has already doled out so much in trying to win this man’s approval, and if he stops before getting anything at all, any flicker of humanity from those unblinking eyes, then he’ll have nothing to show for his efforts, and there’s no natural way to stop at this point, and Cass bets that the man behind the pebbles probably knows about the dollar auction, but then he commits an error, he glances over at Cass and Sy, which gives the desperate talker an excuse to stop talking as he rushes over to greet them. He’s Lenny Shore, the spiritual leader of the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard, the sponsor of tonight’s event, and he’s a slight man who looks as if he would bend easily,
surprisingly young, with long lank brown hair and a fidgety mouth that isn’t quite able to hold down an expression. He’s wearing a corduroy jacket and black jeans over cowboy boots, and he’s telling Cass—whose attire is the arithmetic mean between Fidley and Lenny, a dark wool jacket bought in France, a green silk tie—how much he admired
The Varieties of Religious Illusion
, and what a great day this is for the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard, and how we are going to be at capacity crowd tonight, which means somewhere in the vicinity of eleven hundred, and how he feels that tonight the Agnostics of Harvard have really arrived, and is there anything that Cass needs or that Lenny or anybody else can do for him, and the crowd is just overwhelming, and Cass is smiling and nodding and trying to give the chaplain whatever he’s needing so that he’ll calm down and meanwhile also stealing sideway glances at the still and powerful man in the corner, who is standing next to an equally handsome and silver-haired woman—clearly his property and almost certainly responsible for the civilizing touches of his elegant haircut and clothes— and who has settled the tempered blade of his gaze onto Cass Seltzer.

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.

“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!”