Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“I’ll never achieve your level of tough-mindedness,” he said. William James had distinguished between minds that are tough and tender. Their tone had returned to breezy.

“That’s because you’re the atheist with a soul. I don’t come so burdened.”

“But I’ve gazed into your soul, Lucinda.”

“That would make you the first to do that, including me. May I ask what you saw in there?”

“That would also take me too long to describe over the phone.”

The conversation, so sweet and silly, made him feel guilty for holding out on her about the Harvard offer, especially since the topic of Harvard had come up, and especially since he had spilled the beans earlier that evening over dinner with Roz, who had extravagantly congratulated him, leaning across the little candlelit table they were sharing, making sure to keep her hair from getting singed in the flames, and placing both her palms on his cheeks to draw him in for a smooch. Roz had never learned how to kiss halfway.

They had been sitting in a darkened romantic nook in the Spanish restaurant Dalí. The eccentric little restaurant was a post-kitsch composition of romantic grottoes, arched doorways, beaded curtains, golden tiles, embossed copper ceilings, mosaics, sunflowers, hanging hams, and other Spanish tchotchkes. It had been Roz’s favorite restaurant back when they’d been together, though they had rarely been able to afford it. She had certainly dressed up for the occasion. Cambridge was in deepfreeze, but she was showing a lot of skin in a slinky sleeveless black silk dress that had a red ruffle-flower at the right shoulder and another at the left hip. She was looking good, so good that Cass kept his eyes steadily away from her décolletage, out of loyalty to Lucinda. When he’d complimented her on the dress, remarking on its Dalí-esque appropriateness, she grinned in a way that made him wonder whether she’d known all along she was going to get him to bring her here.

He hadn’t really wanted to go out to dinner, since he has a lot of homework if he’s going to surprise Lucinda with his mastery of the Mandelbaum Equilibrium when she returns on Friday night, but Roz had wheedled him into it.

After some expert flirting with their waiter, Roz got down to business, asking Cass for names of people she could approach as potential donors to the Immortality Foundation.

“As a matter of fact, I do happen to know some people who might be interested. Do you know Luke Nanovitch?”

Cass had met Nanovitch at one of Sy Auerbach’s high-powered dinners, held at the Rialto in Cambridge, where Nanovitch had held forth to the assembled scientists and techies. Nanovitch, an inventor and futurist, has been proved right so many times when announcing what impossible thing he planned to invent next that he’s given up noticing when people don’t buy his prophecies. “Improvements to our genetic decoding will be downloaded via the Internet,” he had announced, his tone of voice the same as if he were predicting that the waiter would soon appear to take their orders. “We won’t even need a heart. The trick is to keep yourself alive for two decades more. It would be beyond ironic to die just short of the singularity that’s just around the corner.” Cass would have thought Nanovitch was mad if he hadn’t met him at an Auerbach-orchestrated dinner. He has faith in his agent’s shrewdness.

“Only by reputation, but I’d love to meet him!” Roz exclaimed now. “Nanovitch is one of my heroes!”

“Yes, I can see why. I heard him talking about your very own cause. Before that, the only thing I’d ever heard along these lines was the idea of flash-freezing corpses…”

“Cryogenics, the human Popsicle! Cryogenics is for crackpots!”

“Ah yes.”

“Don’t give me that smile, Cass. I’m not a crackpot! And if you don’t accept that on faith-though I’m a bit miffed that you don’t-then consider Nanovitch, one of the visionaries of our day. You’re not going to call Nanovitch a crackpot. More like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

“Contemplation of one’s mortality can addle even the clearest of thinkers. It’s a bit like religion in that way. In fact, it is religion.”

When Cass had dared to suggest something along similar lines to Nanovitch, the man had serenely smiled and said, “It’s not religion. It’s molecular biology.”

“By which you mean,” said Roz now, “that fear of death gives a lot of wishful oomph to the God hypothesis.”

“Exactly.”

“All the more reason to try and cure our mortality with scientific advances. If we succeed, we’ll deprive the heaven-mongers of their cruel false promises.”

“The afterlife of the skeptics,” Cass said, smiling.

“Which is all the afterlife that we need! This!” And she threw her glass of Rioja back like a pro, taking the opportunity to remind Cass, after she swallowed, to “drink plenty of red wine. The resveratrol promotes longevity. Which reminds me.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a baggy bursting with pills and capsules: gelatin globules filled with yellow viscous fluid or reddish oils, shiny black pellets and lozenges of mahogany brown, and then some homemade-looking capsules with powders ranging from white to sandy tan to mocha brown. There must have been twenty-five in all.

“You swallow all that?”

She answered by getting them all down with amazing dispatch, using her water, and then taking a long swig of resveratrol as a chaser.

“This is nothing! You should see what I swallow in the morning!”

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Do any of us?”

“But you’re doing something extreme here. You could be doing yourself more harm than good.”

“Look, we all know what’s going to happen if nature is allowed to take its course. This is what strong intervention looks like. That’s what I’m interested in. Strong intervention.”

“You take even more than that in the morning?”

“I take vitamins, antioxidants, and hormones three times a day. The biggest dose is in the morning. The smallest dose is what you just saw.”

“What are you trying to do to yourself, Roz?”

“Live a very long time.”

“You could be killing yourself.”

“Have a little faith. I’m not doing this blindly. I consult with molecular biologists and gerontologists.”

“Do they know what they’re doing? How much real science is this based on?”

“The science is incomplete, sure. It always is. If we wait around to get it, we’ll never live to see it gotten. The best we can do is experiment with ourselves.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Life isn’t a randomized, double-blind, peer-reviewed clinical trial. Big gains require big risks, and we’re after the biggest gain of all.”

Cass decided to say no more about Roz’s experiments on her body. She always was a risk-taker and she always will be one.

“Have you thought about the other high-tech way to cheat death?” Cass was thinking of the position advocated by another participant at Auerbach’s Rialto dinner, a philosopher named Nicholas Duffy. Duffy had been the only one to challenge Nanovitch at all, though he was more or less on the same wavelength. “If you could reverse-engineer the neural program that constitutes a person’s mind, you could upload it to a less-vulnerable physical medium,” Cass said to Roz. “There could even be multiple backups, in case of a power failure or a nuclear attack.”

“You mean just backing up our software, and throwing away this beautiful hardware platform we call my body? Are you kidding , Cass? I don’t want to look into the mirror and see a rectangular screen! I don’t want to run my virtual fingers across your shivering keyboard or have you uploading into me for a virtual roll in the hay! Give me my body or give me death!”