“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.
XXXIV The Argument from the View from Nowhere
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.