36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  Azarya, who didn’t know French but couldn’t help getting Pascale’s drift, pointed to the Red Sox baseball cap he was wearing. He lifted it off his head with a flourish, and two dark-blond payess came flopping down.

  Pascale shrieked with laughter, which cracked them all up, Gabriel Sinai joining in with a high whinnying noise.

  “Non, non, you must put them back tout de suite! It is so much better like that. Oui, comme ça! Plus beau! You are a beautiful boy! It is amazing how the beauty comes out. Better, why don’t you just snip, snip?”

  She ran with her frantic movements, the high heels clacking on the wooden floor, to the kitchen drawer, and pulled out the poultry shears— Cass was surprised she knew where to find them—and advanced toward Azarya, in a pretend menacing way, moving her black-sheathed legs like a stalking panther. She jiggled the poultry shears beneath Azarya’s right ear. Cass uneasily wondered what Pascale was capable of in such an antic mood.

  “I’m not quite ready for that.” Azarya was laughing back at her, not looking worried himself—but, then, he didn’t know Pascale. “One thing at a time.”

  “One thing at a time,” she echoed back. “But of course! We will snip first the one and then the other!”

  They were all laughing, Pascale most of all, suddenly thrust into one of her high-spirited moods. In one of those quick reversals that Cass had seen in her before—in fact, to which he owed his marriage—she now liked Azarya with all the savagery of her certainty. Pascale was kind, as Cass had always known, but with the kindness of a child. She’d been repelled by the sense of his strangeness, perhaps believing that his appearance entailed a rejection of the world outside his own, a smug assertion of superiority. But as soon as she had been able to recognize a fellow human being and see that he was a citizen of a wider sphere—or in any case longed to be—her natural kindness had blossomed.

  Azarya handed Pascale the tulips, and with a happy little exclamation she tore off the paper from the bunch of purples and pinks and yellows.

  “Very beautiful,” she said, gathering them to her narrow chest. “The colors of spring.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. Also the colors of the poet.” He then presented her with the bottle of wine.

  “I hope it’s good. You can imagine how little I know about French wines. The man in the wine store said this was a good one.”

  “Bordeaux! Oh, it is very good! You are being civilized rapidement. Only now let me cut off the unlovely baguettes!”

  Cass had never seen Pascale this animated. It occurred to him that having mathematicians around was probably familiar and therefore wonderful for her, reminding her of her girlhood in the idyllic Bures-sur-Yvette, which she’d spent benignly ignored by her distracted father and hanging upside down on the jungle gym with other mathematical offspring, who were “not so annoying as other children.” Gabriel was fluent in French and clearly enjoyed speaking it, so he directed most of his comments to Pascale and in her native tongue, which put her in a jollier mood still. Gabriel knew Claude Puisssant very well and thought that he might even remember Pascale as a young child, sometimes playing piano at gatherings.

  “I did not play so well!” she said.

  “That’s true,” he agreed, and she shrugged and poured some more of the Bordeaux for herself and Cass. Gabriel and Azarya were sticking to the Carmel.

  But the real treat was to come after dinner, when Gabriel loped over to Pascale’s baby-grand piano. There was sheet music on top and Gabriel looked it over for a while, and then sat down and, without any sheet music, forcefully played the famous third movement of Mozart’s Turkish Sonata. He immediately launched into something else, sounding vaguely familiar, though it was Azarya who got it first, laughing gleefully, and explained to Cass and Pascale that Professor Sinai was playing the same movement from the Turkish Sonata, only “upside down”—that is, inverted.

  Azarya was elated with Gabriel’s inversion of the Mozart and asked him if he could try something that he, Azarya, thought was possible, though he didn’t have the technical proficiency to do it.

  “The idea is to combine the harmonies from the Prelude in C Major, the first in Volume I of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, with the arpeggios of the first étude from Chopin’s Opus 10, also in C major. I can hear it in my head, but I can’t play the piano well enough to do it.”

  “I’ve never studied the Chopin,” Gabriel said, but despite that disclaimer he instantly launched into the challenge, and played the entire Chopin étude from start to finish, with all the Bach harmonies substituted for the original ones, and then, without pausing, he did the reverse, combining the harmonies of the Chopin étude with the more reserved but beautiful figurations of the Bach prelude.

  Azarya, who could follow much more closely than Cass or Pascale, was beside himself.

  “This has been an impossible dream! It’s as beautiful as I had imagined—more beautiful!”

  Gabriel laughed in his high whinny. He was now completely comfortable, his rubbery mouth stretching into easy smiles, showing his full set of chaotic teeth.

  “It’s a terrific idea. I’m going to add it to my repertoire. Any other combinations you’ve been impossibly dreaming?”

  “I’ve got something I can sing for you. Here’s the idea. You take the thirty-two variations of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, each with thirty-two measures. You take one measure of each of the variations, always in diagonal fashion—in general, the nth measure of the nth variation.”

  “Nice,” Gabriel said. “Let’s hear.”

  The chimelike voice of the child that Cass still remembered was now a tenor, each note struck pure. Gabriel’s face was creased with concentration, and when Azarya had finished, he declared it a marvel.

  “You’re basing it on Cantor’s diagonal proof, of course,” he said, and Azarya smiled, and Gabriel said, “That’s it. You’re coming to MIT.” Cass had known that Gabriel Sinai would be the ideal collaborator.

  Gabriel launched into playing “Sheiner’s Diagonal Variation on Bach’s Goldberg Variations” for himself, more rapidly than Azarya had sung it, and was, by Cass’s count, on the eighteenth measure of the eighteenth variation when Cass heard the phone ringing—nobody else noticed it— and quietly went off to answer it.

  It was his mother. It was difficult to hear her over the laughing and music. He kept his eyes on the action at the piano, Azarya sitting there now and jamming with his gaon. Gabriel was playing the right hand of something that Cass didn’t recognize, and Azarya was playing the left. He seemed to know more about the piano than he had let on.

  “Mom, can you speak up a little? I can barely hear you. Azarya’s here playing a piano duet with Gabriel Sinai. I wish you could see this.”

  Pascale stood behind Azarya, proposing alterations. She had both her hands resting on his shoulders as she leaned over and watched the keyboard, and either he didn’t notice or she was his relative so it didn’t count as a strange female or he just didn’t care.

  His mother said something that he didn’t catch. She barely sounded like herself.

  It wasn’t like Pascale to make casual physical contact. It wasn’t only the faithful who couldn’t help themselves from leaning inward toward Azarya, that crush in the Costco House of Worship, with the tiers of yearning Valdeners straining downward to the child standing on the tish between the gigantic bowls of oranges and apples that the Rebbe would soon be tossing to the scrambling Hasidim.

  “Mom, what’s the matter with you?”

  She was softly crying. He listened to the strange sound of it. Not even his bubbe’s madness-sharpened needling could ever make her break down and cry.

  “Mom?”

  His heart was pounding now, terrified. Was it Jesse? Was it his father?

  “Cass, the Rebbe had a heart attack. He died two hours ago.”

  XXX

  The Argument from the Long Silence of the Night

  to: GR613@gmail.com

  from: Seltzer@psych.Frankfur
ter.edu

  date: Feb. 29 2008 5:00 a.m.

  subject:

  Just on the chance that my last message didn’t get through to you I’m resending it. Don’t worry about waking me. Just call.

  XXXI

  The Argument from the New York Times

  He must have fallen asleep at some point after dawn, since he’s being rudely awakened now into the full brightness of morning. It’s the telephone. He reads the caller ID and sees that it’s Roz and unplugs the receiver and turns over, Lucinda’s pillow muffling his head. The scent of her shampoo has faded over the course of the week.

  Now his cell phone is tolling somewhere in the bedroom. With a sigh he gets up and traces the source to his jeans pocket. It’s Roz again. He’s up for the day now, but he doesn’t have the strength yet for Roz. He pulls on the jeans and a sweater and goes downstairs to put up the coffee. He’s feeling shaky from lack of sleep and has a moment of vertigo as he goes downstairs to pick up his Times. He tosses it on the kitchen counter as he pours himself a cup of the dark-roast brew, whose fragrance peps him up before he’s swallowed a mouthful.

  His cell phone is vibrating again in his jeans pocket. Roz again, being relentless. He sips his coffee as he skims the headlines and then flips to the Op-Ed page.

  His first thought is that he really has fallen back asleep, but now the cell phone is ringing again, and it’s Roz, of course, she must be going out of her mind with her need to reach him, and it only makes sense that she would be going out of her mind—at least, that is, if Cass is not at this moment fast asleep and dreaming bizarrely of the New York Times.

  The New York Times

  Friday, February 29, 2008

  Cosmic Tremblings

  By Jonas Elijah Klapper

  Safed, Israel

  I have watched for some years now, in silence but with mounting dismay, as a small sect has presumed to preach from on high. The sect speaks in the name of the false and hollow god, Scientism, claiming all the dominions under heaven for its faceless revelation. They accuse other faiths of intolerance, yet are contemptuous of all who dare believe that there is more than is dreamt of in parsimonious philosophies. They themselves have been indulgently tolerated, even celebrated, their books bought up at rates to enrich their coffers, their ubiquity a grotesque parody of the presence divine. A rough beast indeed is slouching toward Bethlehem.

  For most of my sojourn on Earth my task has been to educate and elucidate. I have seen firsthand how our universities have been corrupted by the triumph of the number crunchers, permitted to crunch the very soul into ashes and dust. The sacred knowledge, preserved in imagery and metaphor, in incantatory language overheard from the higher spheres, has been forgotten, and forgotten, too, the few who remember.

  My years as an educator yielded painful and intimate acquaintance with the band of the proud unknowers. Alas, it is to my own pedagogical failure that I painfully confess. Had I succeeded better, then at least one of the men of falsehood would not be laying evil hands on the evisceration of the world soul. Even here in my place of sacred exile I cannot escape his apostasy, the expression of defiance displayed behind plate glass. Betrayal is, of course, one of the stations on the road to redemption.

  I have kept my silence, but I can no longer, for there are matters beyond me contending. The masters tell us that there are moments of cosmic trembling, when the future lies in the balance. It is always upon one man that the issue is poised.

  The threats to such a one are commensurate with the enormity of what he is asked to do and to be. Every culture and every age has looked to its future and made out his dim form. “I behold him but not near,” says the Hebrew Bible (Numbers 24: 17). He has been called by many names: Ras Tafari, Mahdi, Shiloh, Yinnon, Menachem, Haninah, the Saoshyant, the Hermetic Corpus, the Christ, the Redeemer, the Saviour, the Moshiach, the Messiah, the Anointed, the Son. The names persist even into our day of failing memory.

  There have been far more true Messiahs denied than false messiahs proclaimed. He has been born many times. If the moment is right, then he is of the line of David; otherwise he is but another of the line of Joseph, doomed himself to die, incapable of achieving the foretold redemption.

  The belief that he tarries is erroneous and is partly to be blamed on the equally fallacious belief that he is required to perform miracles. I do but quote here from Maimonides: “Do not imagine that the anointed King must perform miracles and signs and create new things in the world or resurrect the dead. The matter is not so.”

  How then shall he be known? For every age a different attribute is apt. In our day of prodigious forgetting what is more meet than prodigious memory? It is from the faithful rendering of all the world’s words that the Word shall go forth, for in the beginning was the Word.

  And how shall the Word go forth? Jesus chose the Mount to deliver his sermon, but Jesus was born, depending on various reckonings, between 8 B.C. and 6 A.D. To Jesus there was but one medium and that was the human voice. Today would it not be felicitous for the Good News to go forth from the newspaper of record? Here then might it be said: I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

  XXXII

  The Argument from the Precipice

  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, bu
t 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.