Find an event
Heaven sent
A novelist adds humanity to the God debate.
Rebecca Goldstein is ready for the confusion. The writer has just released a new novel, which follows two books of philosophy, and titled it 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Each chapter borrows its name from some form of argument (though they’re mostly literary, such as “The Argument from Dappled Things”). But the appendix is a work of philosophy, laying out 36 arguments for the existence of God and refuting each one in turn. So it’s a novel about a philosopher, by a philosopher, which also contains a 50-page work of philosophy. No wonder that when we first heard about the book in November, a blog claimed it “combats various justifications for the almighty.”
“Oh wow, I hadn’t heard that one before,” says Goldstein, on the phone from her home in Boston. “But this is my ninth book, and I have to remember that I have control over the work and nothing else. But if people are engaging in my work in ways I didn’t intend—as long as they react—I’m happy.”
Goldstein does sound remarkably happy on the phone, and though she admits that she’s philosophically closely aligned with her protagonist—Cass Seltzer, America’s newest public intellectual celebrity—she sounds much more chipper than he does. At the outset, Seltzer is contemplating a move to Harvard from a university of less renown, thanks entirely to the notoriety earned with the release of his new book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion. A gentler take on atheism, it’s earned him the appellation “the atheist with a soul.” The trouble with souls, though, is that they tend to get tangled up in each other. Cass is no exception, having fallen in love with all-star mathematician Lucinda, but still clinging to his eccentric ex-girlfriend Roz, who’s started an immortality foundation.
If it all sounds a little precious, it is. As far as academic satires go, this one lands in the group that categorizes all college profs as eccentrics (we spent our college years wishing that were true). Still, we’re willing to grant Goldstein the occasional treacly dalliance (did we mention there’s a six-year-old Hasidic math genius?), because of the way she weaves zeitgeist ideas into what is essentially a love story.
“In all of these philosophical arguments, there are ambiguities and subtleties being lost,” she says. “I think that’s what fiction can do, merge the cognitive and the emotional.”
In some ways. 36 Arguments reads as an antidote to the pedantic debates stirred up by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and of course the tidal wave of Christian and Islamic fundamentalists. Cass is a friendly nonbeliever, a guy who lives a rich life without ascribing the riches to a higher power. Though the book takes no stance—despite the appendix, which she says she wrote largely for fun—Goldstein does say there’s one thing she’s hoping readers take home.
“I did want to convince people of the idea that morality and religion are two different things,” she says. “To think that somebody who—for intellectually honest reasons believes the universe does not contain a God—lacks any morals, that’s a real, pernicious fallacy.”
Goldstein reads at Spertus on Thursday 21.
