36 Arguments for the Existence of God (43 page)

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.

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.

Lenny Shore has proved not to be a strict enforcer of the 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.”

Cass had a printed-out copy of his own Appendix folded up in his breast pocket, just in case, and he had taken it out to quickly review #33, discovering as he did so that he was having trouble moving his handshake-crushed right hand.

“So faith is unavoidable. If Bertrand Russell was right that faith is akin to theft, then he was thieving throughout his life. When he and Alfred North Whitehead were working on their
Principia Mathematica
, trying to deduce all of mathematics from logic, they were robbing left and right.

“I’m relying on faith in reason right now in making my argument that reason always involves faith. But of course that doesn’t bother me, since I already recognize the legitimacy of faith. You won’t find me cringing from embracing faith. But a man like Cass Seltzer supposedly keeps himself pure of all contact with faith.”

Fidley’s tone wasn’t pretty. If there was a stylistic war going on within the man, represented by the monogrammed cuffs on the one hand and the bone-crushing grip on the other, it was sounding as if the bone-crusher was prevailing.

“Now let’s take this a bit further, shall we? Let’s talk about that other great higher power called upon by the Bertrand Russells and Cass Seltzers. Let’s talk about science.

“The linear progress of science, we’re told, has carried us further and further away from religion. The whole great enterprise of modern science began in the sixteenth century with the Copernican revolution, which turned the old Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system on its head and showed us that we are not the center of the universe.”

Again, Cass thought he knew where Fidley was heading, though he
seemed to be jumping around before finishing any arguments. Cass shuffled his papers so that the arguments from the Big Bang (#4) and from the Fine-Tuning of the Physical Constants (#5) were in front of him.

“Now, I’m not going to argue tonight—at least, not right now—that any of the recent and most sophisticated of scientific discoveries, coming from the best physicists and cosmologists of our day, are showing that the deeper we go into the mysteries of the physical universe the closer to religion we get. The line away from religion reversed itself in the twentieth century, right around the time that the biggest breakthroughs in physics and cosmology were happening. Mark Twain said that when he was fourteen his father was so stupid he could hardly stand to have him around, but that when he got to be twenty-one he was astonished at how much the old man had managed to learn in seven years. That’s how it’s turning out to be with religion and science, and maybe we can talk about that later.

“But right now I’m going to continue to show that those who protest the most against the reliance on faith are, even in their protests, manifesting their supreme faith.

“It was the philosopher David Hume who demonstrated just what a faith-based enterprise science really is. Science is in the business of discovering the laws of nature. It bases its conclusions about the laws of nature on empirical evidence. Sometimes we discover that what we thought was an inviolable law of nature actually isn’t, and so we discard it and try to find one to replace it. But when we find out that some particular law of nature isn’t quite right, we don’t give up on the lawfulness of nature. We never give up on that. We just give up on our old formulation of the laws of nature, and start searching for a new formulation that can accommodate the new evidence. And so we can ask—this is what David Hume in effect did ask—what
would
make us give up on the lawfulness of nature? Is there
any
kind of empirical evidence that would make us give up on that belief—not just give up on our belief that
this
or
that
is a law of nature, but on the whole belief that nature is lawful? Of course not. Anytime we get some counterevidence against a law, we go off searching for the right law. We never consider that maybe that counterevidence should be used against the whole idea that nature is lawful. Never! The idea just wouldn’t arise, because the whole enterprise of science is ruled by the search for laws. The unlawfulness of nature is unthinkable,
not because there’s no evidence for it, but because nothing would ever be deemed evidence for it. And we can’t even offer any evidence for the lawfulness of nature—this is the tricky part of Hume’s argument—because even the notion of evidence already presumes nature’s lawfulness. If we were really going to ask for evidence for nature’s lawfulness, we wouldn’t be able to offer up any evidence without already presuming nature’s lawfulness. That’s what Hume showed.”

Fidley had paused and given a grand survey of the packed chapel. He had the audience’s full attention, and he knew it. Roz was not looking happy, and Mona was downright grim.

“Reason—logic and science—themselves demonstrate that faith is unavoidable. So it can’t be true, as this flock of ardent unbelievers has been trying to convince us, that there’s faith and religion on one side, and reason and science on the other, and that they are irreconcilable antagonists. Just as faith without reason is blind, reason without faith is crippled.”