Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

This was turning into one of the conversations with Roz when Cass wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to be laughing quite as much as he was. Meanwhile, the tapas had started to arrive, with their waiter theatrically reciting the names of the nine dishes as he balanced them expertly around the candlelit table.

“This question of preserving our software or our hardware reminds me of those ancient Judeo-Christian debates on whether an immaterial soul survives the death of the body, or the body itself is resurrected when the Messiah comes,” Cass said, watching Roz tuck into the tapas as if there were no tomorrow, even though she was betting on several centuries’ worth of them.

“What did the ancient rabbis say?”

“They’re pretty much on your side on this one. They choose the body over the disembodied soul.”

“Glad to hear it. Anyway, Cass,” she continued, washing down a green-lipped mussel with some more Rioja, “the sooner you get me in touch with Nanovitch while I’m here in Cambridge, the better. And what about that agent of yours?”

“Sy Auerbach? What do you want with Sy Auerbach?” It occurred to Cass that maybe Roz had a book she had written or was planning to write. Everybody has written or is planning to write a book.

“Auerbach strikes me as the kind who’d want in on immortality. I read that blog of his. He’s our kind of guy!”

“Okay, I’ll give you his coordinates. He’s in New York, of course.”

“I’m on my way to New York! Maybe he’d want to meet me personally! I’d love to be one of the regulars on his blog.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Cass. You know, it’s wonderful that you’ve come up so much in the world, and it’s wonderful that you’re willing to be so generous and help me with connections, and it would be wonderful, too, if you became a friend of the Immortality Foundation. Even if you didn’t want to be a major financial donor, but just enough to indicate that you support what I do.”

“Well, actually, Roz, I’m not sure that I do.”

“You think it’s unrealistic, right? You think it’s science on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors! But it’s not! Some of the biologists that my foundation is supporting have results that are going to make the possibility of radically extending life a reality. I’m talking radically radically!”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Roz, I’m just not altogether convinced that radically radically is such a good idea.”

“Huh?”

“Well, obviously, adding a few years or even decades to our normal life spans would be terrific; nobody would want to go back to the days when forty was considered a ripe old age…”

“Forty! For the first few hundred thousand years of human history, half of the population died in infancy and childhood! A third of young men died in warfare before they were twenty. A woman’s marriage ceremony was rape, and she had a good chance of dying if a pregnancy came from it. Talk about nasty, brutish, and short! But did our species give in to this barbarism? Of course not! And we’re the lucky results of the Glorious Refusal, which means we have the obligation to keep on refusing the barbarities that nature is constantly trying to force on us!”

“Right,” Cass said, smiling. She had delivered her last lines to an imaginary audience of potential donors. “Obviously, the move toward four score and ten has been good. But what I’m not convinced would be so good is extending life so much that the whole meaning of what it is to live a human life would change. And that’s the sort of thing you’re talking about, right? That’s what you mean by radically radically? Radically radically would mean reframing all the basic existential questions. And it’s not clear that we have the wherewithal to think that through. We have a hard enough time with the old set of questions.”

Roz had carefully laid down her fork, which had been on its way to her mouth loaded up with pollo al ajillo .

“I never know how to respond when people say things like that to me. I’m at a loss. It’s like someone saying that they don’t know whether suffering is a bad thing.”

“Well, people say that, too, you know, that it’s necessary that there be some amount of suffering in the world to create the opportunity for certain virtues to develop, virtues like forbearance and compassion…”

“Courage, charity, forgiveness, empathy-even true love, which don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that sting.” Roz finished his sentence for him. “Suffering provides us wonderful opportunities for character-building. Yes, I’m familiar with this line of reasoning. The only people who push it are the God-apologists, who are trying to make excuses for what an insufferable world this is, even though there’s supposed to be an omnipotent, omniscient, and well-intentioned Big Boy running the show. Any suffering the apologists can’t rationalize away as a product of our having the ennobling capacity for free will, including the free will to inflict unspeakable atrocities on one another, they try to explain with this character-building song and dance. I find the song pornographic and the dance macabre. A grieving mother whose child was senselessly lost has the chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop her soul toward tranquil acceptance. And what of that dying child himself, who doesn’t have the psychological and spiritual equipment to transcend what’s happening to him and is never going to get it because he’s going to be dead? Wouldn’t this theodicy require, at the least, that all humans-I’m not even going to bring up the suffering of animals-have an equal opportunity to develop their capacities for nobility? Cass, this is obscene. I don’t have to tell you any of this. I learned it all from The Varieties of Religious Illusion . That’s where I learned the bloody word ‘theodicy’ in the first place.”

A change had come over Roz, a modulation into a lower key. She had been hyper, even for her, since she’d landed on his doorstep yesterday morning. But now her voice had lost its manic edge, her face its clowning slant. She looked, if anything, even younger, flushed and earnest.

“You’re right, of course. I wasn’t actually pushing that argument about suffering, just making the point that it’s not a tautology to say, ‘Suffering is bad.’”

“I think it is. I think that ‘Suffering is bad’ is as obvious as it gets. And even if people don’t think it’s so obvious in the generic case, they catch on fast enough when the suffering is theirs. ‘My suffering is bad’ is a tautology to anyone who says it. I’d like to see someone in the throes of agony still pushing this treacle called theodicy. Sure, the transcendent possibilities afforded by suffering make this a better world. But only when it’s the other guy doing the suffering.”

Cass nodded. He wasn’t going to argue with her. And she was right to bring up the children who never get the chance to theodicize their suffering, just as Dostoevsky had been right: “If the suffering of children goes to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.” Cass had quoted that in his book.

“I loved your book,” she said suddenly, out of the blue. “I haven’t told you yet, have I, how much I loved it? It made me proud.”

“Thank you,” he said, dumbfounded.

Roz, too, seemed a bit unsteady, her pacing slowed.

“You’re doing something important, Cass.”

“Oh, come on, Roz. You used to be able to hold your alcohol better.”

“No, I mean it. I kept thinking that only you could have written The Varieties of Religious Illusion . You’ve spent years trying to understand what happened back then, all the drama with the Klap and Azarya and even me, and this book is the outcome, and the world’s the better for it.”