36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  And if he’d charged the car service and the leather boots and kaputa and Russian sable shtreimel to his discretionary funds, so what? This was research as legitimate as any, a measure of the creative limits to which a master like Jonas Elijah Klapper would travel, as daring an experimenter as any particle physicist with an accelerator—no, more daring, because it was his own soul that he offered up in the spirit of empiricism.

  Jonas Elijah Klapper was like William James, who had experimented with nitrous oxide in order to determine whether it could induce something like mystical experiences. It could, he found. He wrote about it in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Cass pictured William James, sitting in his worsted-wool vest behind a closed door in his office in Emerson Hall and stoned out of his gourd, a high-pitched giggle emerging from the spread of his long Victorian beard, as he tried to write down the metaphysics floodlighting his mind: “What’s a mistake but a kind of take? What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea? Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment … Agreement—disagreement!! Emotion—motion!!! … Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same! Good and evil reconciled in a laugh! It escapes, it escapes! But— What escapes, WHAT escapes?”

  You’d be laughing at William James, too, he chided himself, but William James would never have laughed at Jonas Elijah Klapper. The thought helped to sober Cass more effectively than picturing starving Ethiopian children, but it was a good thing that Professor Klapper, absorbed by the passing scenery, was disinclined to speak. The professor loved being driven in large fancy automobiles. Zackary Kreiser, who chauffeured him back and forth between Cambridge and Weedham, owned a cramped jalopy that rattled him to the limits of endurance. Might he prevail upon the university to procure a car of this model to be used soley to convey him between his place of work and domicile?

  The professor was overtaken by a brief spasm of loquacity when he saw the forest-green sign announcing that they were on the Merritt Parkway, a scenic highway, he explained, landscaped with native plantings and shrubs, and the result of a Depression-era public-works project.

  “To keep with the aesthetics, there were to be no intersections of local roads, in consequence of which sixty-eight bridges—no two of them alike, and with expert masonwork and ornamentation, some representative of the Art Deco movement, which was then in its heyday—were constructed to channel the local traffic aerially. I happen to remember the surname of the architect who designed all sixty-eight bridges, because it was so droll. The name was Dunkelberger.

  “Imagine Dunkelberger as a man of letters, a man of the abstract instead of the concrete,” said Professor Klapper. “No one would have read him! But ‘designed by Dunkelberger’ has never stopped a motorist from traversing a bridge.”

  And, succumbing to his wicked sense of humor, Jonas Elijah Klapper went into the contortions that were his laughter, and Cass, still harboring strange laughter within him, was happy to join in.

  XVIII

  The Argument from the Arrow of Time

  Cass comes up the back stairs of his apartment, which lead directly into the kitchen. He pauses at the stove to put some water up for tea and then goes into the living room.

  Last night had been his second night of sleeplessness this week, and the deprivation is taking its toll. He had stayed alert during his early-morning taping of an interview for National Public Radio’s The Cutting Edge. The interviewer had introduced him in his famous plummy tones as “Cass Seltzer, the eminent philosopher and one of our deepest divers into the choppy waters churning between religion and science.” Cass has learned to take it all in stride, even the mislabeling of him as a philosopher, which used to embarrass him, making him feel as if he had illegitimately been awarded a few extra IQ points. He had rushed from the radio studio to Frankfurter’s campus, to teach his afternoon advanced seminar, “Psychology of Religion.” The topic today had been the Concept of the Quest in religious contexts.

  But at four in the afternoon, he had slumped. He had begged off keeping his date with Mona for a drink, pleading exhaustion, which was true but also convenient.

  On and off, all day long, he’s been thinking of Lucinda, wondering how her talk would go, is going, had gone. She had set the bar high. Anything less than spectacular success will be counted as failure, and Lucinda isn’t made for failure, in much the same way as he hadn’t been made for success, despite the strange happenings of the last year, which he has spent walking around in someone else’s coat.

  He hasn’t turned on any of the lights, but a soft glow from the street-lamp drapes itself across various sections of the furniture and rug, a black-and-gold-and-orange adaptation of a Klimt painting that had been left behind, along with everything else, by Pascale when she took off with her plundering neurologist.

  When he found this place, he couldn’t wait to show it to Pascale. It occupies the two top floors of a spacious Victorian house on gracious Upland Road. It has three bedrooms, high ceilings, and ample light; the rent was surprisingly reasonable, too. But Pascale had at first balked.

  “It is for us too much space.”

  She had scowled, her thin, dark brows drawing themselves into one elegant line of rejection. Too much space seemed an odd drawback. Perhaps what was in her mind was that her emphatic “No!” had not entirely vanquished the delusions of breeding to which Cass had several times confessed. What did her husband have in mind with all those bedrooms? But the dormered room that would be her study, with windows looking out at the park across the way, had made her relent. Sheltered in the closest corner of the park were a few playthings for children—a seesaw, a jungle gym. Perhaps she pictured herself hanging upside down there, for the vertigo and the images. Or perhaps she detected the spirits of the muses thick in the air around her. She had stood there a long time and had finally turned to Cass, her trademark red lips smiling, and said “Yes.”

  There’s a little side yard with a blue spruce that reaches down to the ground in an invitingly cozy way. He often pictures it inhabited by little people playing hide-and-seek. “Please close the gate, remember our children.” The inscription provokes a feeling akin to nostalgia, only directed at the future.

  The kettle is whistling, and he gets up and makes himself some strong tea and takes it back to the couch and picks up the phone and dials Lucinda’s cell and hears her voice on the recorded message and leaves one for her:

  “It’s me. I’ve been thinking about you all day, wondering how your talk went. Call me when you can. I love you.”

  Before he’s even replaced the receiver, he’s gagging on regret. What had he done? What had possessed him? He’s circling the living room in a blurry haze, and he’s bashing his forehead with his open palm to the down-down-down beat of his idiocy.

  It was hearing her voice on the recorded message—her formal voice that held a tinge from the year she’d spent at Oxford. “Lucinda Mandel-baum here. Leave your coordinates, and I shall return your call.” Those tones in his ear had sent that bolt of longing through him. It had bypassed his own will and ended up in his larynx, and, without any intent to do so, he was blathering out those three explosive words. Cass here— that elusive metaphysical substance he had been trying to chase down ever since he was a kid—was collateral damage.

  So much for his late-night cuddles with textbooks on game theory. So much for his grids. So much for his dreams of the Seltzer Equilibrium.

  He considers calling her back, leaving a message to cancel out the other. He could pretend to be drunk, so that she’d conclude that he had been drunk when he called the first time and couldn’t be held responsible. Better yet, since he’s not much of an actor, he can get himself drunk.

  Stop thinking like one of your undergraduates, he tells himself out loud. (He’s talking to himself out loud.)

  He has a vivid sense that if only he concentrates forcefully enough he can rewind the tape of his disaster. What happened isn’t irreversible, it can’t be, Lucinda hasn’t even heard it yet, and also it’s three hours earlier in Santa
Barbara, which he knows is irrelevant, but, still, there must be some way to undo that swerve of recklessness that had momentarily knocked him off course, flip that arrow of time back, but, no (he is still circling the room), no force of exertion is going to return him to that moment before this disaster happened so that he can make it not happen, the irrevocable past, so close and yet so closed, it’s fleeing his grasp, hurtling, hurtling, and then the phone rings.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, Cass. It’s me.”

  “Lucinda!”

  “You sound surprised.” She sounds amused.

  “No, I’m not surprised. In fact, I just called you.” She must not have listened to the message, and what reason will she have to listen to it now, after all, when she’s already speaking to him, making that past message obsolete, she’ll just delete it, and it will be as if it had never been, and all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

  “Yes, I know. I got your message. So, anyway, my talk went very well. The Q & A was certainly the liveliest of the conference so far.”

  So she’d heard his message. She must have heard him say, “I love you.”

  “So you’re happy with the way it all went?”

  They were having a conversation as if nothing had changed. Maybe she hadn’t heard the message through to the end? Or maybe she just hadn’t noticed?

  “Yes, I suppose. I can’t really judge yet. Rishi is speaking later tonight.”

  Can it be that he’s landed in neither bliss nor hell? Can it be that his midnight grids are all wrong?

  “Yes, I know.”

  She’s acting as if he had never uttered the words, and his autonomic nervous system is returning to baseline, and he decides to continue the conversation as if nothing has changed, because quite possibly nothing has.

  “Well, that’s the thing, you see. I’ll only know how well I did when I know whether I did better than Rishi.”

  Or maybe she’s signaling something more?

  “I’m not sure that makes sense, Lucinda. Intellectual achievement isn’t a zero-sum game.”

  “Listen, Cass, you may be the expert on my soul, but I’m the expert on zero-sum games.”

  Her voice is smiling.

  “And this is a zero-sum game?”

  “It is, Cass. Most of what matters in life is a zero-sum game.”

  He laughs at her joke, and they hang up soon after, Lucinda rushing off to dinner, which will be followed by Rishi’s backward-causative talk.

  It’s only later, after they hung up, that it occurs to him to wonder whether her zero-sum comment had been a joke. She hadn’t laughed, and Lucinda always laughs at her own jokes.

  XIX

  The Argument from the Overheard Whispers of Angels

  They had bad Friday-afternoon traffic almost the entire way, and though Klapper was serenely oblivious, Cass was acutely aware of the sinking of the sun as they approached the witching hour of 6:44, when, as Cass had been informed by Cousin Henoch, the Sabbath would begin and travel was prohibited. They had made far too many stops, sometimes for scenic purposes but more often to sample the “facilities and comestibles.” The Merritt Parkway’s rest stops were deemed by the professor to be vastly superior to those of the Massachusetts Turnpike.

  Henoch had arranged that Professor Klapper, as an honored guest, would be staying with the Rebbe, and finally they arrived at the redbrick house across the street from what Roz had dubbed the Costco House of Worship.

  The door was opened by the Rebbe’s little son, Azarya, the child who Roz was convinced was meant to be the future Gauss, “if we can get him away from all that kosher baloney.

  “They’ll have the kid calculating how many Hasidim can dance on the top of a shtreimel. They’ll have him counting the hairs in his father’s beard and multiplying it by the hairs in his side curls to figure out the date of the Messiah’s arrival. It’s a goddamn tragedy. I’d kidnap the kid if I thought I could get away with it, and if I knew what the hell to do with a kid.”

  “Why would you kidnap a child from a loving family?”

  “Because that loving family are a bunch of zealots.”

  “Zealots aren’t allowed to have children? That sounds pretty zealous.”

  “I guess I wouldn’t outlaw zealots’ having children, if only on practical grounds, but, frankly, I think that what they do to kids is immoral. It’s immoral to indoctrinate children so that they never develop the tools to think for themselves. It’s our birthright to think about things for ourselves.”

  Cass laughed.

  “What?”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  “Well, your mother is right. She knew what she was doing when she got the hell out. I’d have thought twice about sleeping with you if you had those side curls. What do they call them again?”

  “Payess. I think my mother’s rebellion had more to do with her hating her own mother so much.”

  “On the contrary, I think that her hating her mother gave her the emotional distance to be objective and to judge the beliefs she was raised on with an open mind and conclude that they’re full of shit.”

  “You’ve got to meet her. You and my mother are going to love each other.”

  “I’d love to meet your mother. I’d love to team up with her about Azarya. Did you tell her about him? She might be our only chance to save him from the forces of benightedness.”

  “I don’t know why you’re being so hard on this struggling sect that only wants to be left alone. There surely have been lots of gifted children born to families who weren’t in a position to appreciate their talents.”

  “And that’s a tragedy! Wouldn’t it be tragic if Gauss’s father had had his way and his genius son had never been educated?”

  “Would it? I don’t know. Not if it didn’t make anyone unhappy. Not if Gauss himself didn’t realize what he could have been.”

  “Oh yeah, Gauss a happy bricklayer, or whatever his dumb-ass father had wanted for him.”

  “It’s a different situation.” There were times when Cass regretted sharing what he had learned from Men in Mathematics with Roz. “Gauss would have known what he was missing. He’d had enough schooling for that. Azarya belongs to a community that’s completely insular.”

  “So what you’re saying is that the best thing we can do for that child is to ensure that his ignorance is never threatened! Do you hear what you’re saying?”

  “Azarya belongs to a group that reveres knowledge. Okay, so maybe he won’t be a professor of mathematics, but he’ll be a rabbinical scholar. He’ll be the Rebbe someday!”

  “So you’d be okay with Gauss’s going into a monastery and counting the angels on the head of a pin.”

  “Gregor Mendel did okay for himself in a monastery.”

  “Because they left him alone with his pea plants! The whole problem is that Azarya belongs to a sect that thinks it reveres education, but their idea of education has nothing to do with real knowledge! The kid doesn’t even know how to read English.”

  “He’s only six, for crying out loud.”

  “But you know that they’re never going to teach him. They wouldn’t know how to begin to teach him what he needs to learn. You heard his dad. ‘For him they’re toys, and we let him play.’ I swear I’d kidnap him if I could.”

  “Roz, cut it out. It’s upsetting.”

  “Why?”

  “Your values are skewed. You’d take him away from a family that loves him and that he loves. The child would be miserable. Do you think genius is the only thing that matters?”

  “Oh, for chrissakes, Cass. I’m not saying I’d really kidnap him. I’m making a point. But just as an aside, I don’t think he’d be miserable if I did kidnap him. Instead of giving him candy and ice cream, like other kidnappers, I’d ply him with theorems and proofs. I’d hire MIT professors who’d make him so delirious on equations that he’d forget all about New Walden.”

  “Enough.”

 
“No, not enough, because I haven’t yet responded to your gross hypocrisy. You’re criticizing me for placing too much emphasis on genius, when that’s what you Klapperites are totally obsessed with!”

  “That’s entirely different.”

  “Oh yeah? You want to explain how? Other than the major difference that Azarya Sheiner really is a prodigy.”

  “Before you get in touch with my mother to hold the ladder while you abscond with Azarya in a pillowcase, you might just try speaking to his family. Tell them what you think. Tell them about Gauss. Maybe they’ll see to it that he develops his talents.”

  “Oh, of course. Right after my appointment with the pope, when I explain to him why celibacy is such a disaster. And in case you didn’t notice, I’m a woman, and in that community women don’t exactly have clout. Tell them about Gauss! They’ll say, sure, wasting your life on mathematics is okay for some German goy, but not for the future Valdener Rebbe. Why don’t you try to speak to the family? Or, better yet, get the Klap to do it.”

  “Doubtful.”

  “Yeah, you’re right there. That child is an affront to his monumental ego.”

  Azarya was standing there, shyly smiling up at Jonas Elijah Klapper, who craned his neck around, looking to see who was there to welcome him.

  “I remember your question,” Azarya said to him now.

  “What?” Jonas stared down past the obstruction of his own kaputa-upholstered stomach at the child looking up at him.

  “I remember your question.”

  “To which question are you referring, little boy?”

  “How many there are. The prime angels. How long does this go on? I remember your question.”

  Jonas Elijah Klapper stared down at the child a little longer, as if trying to figure out what language he was speaking. He turned to Cass.

  “I wonder why nobody is here to greet me. I need to take care of a few things in the short time left until licht benching.”