36 Arguments for the Existence of God (44 page)

So is Fidley claiming that Hume showed that faith in the lawfulness of nature is necessary for science to proceed, and that faith in religion is also necessary (for what?), and that science can’t say anything against it? That seems blatantly fallacious, and hardly the tactic that, in Lucinda’s words, “such a rationalist—University of Chicago and all” would take. But is that where he’s headed?

“And there you have it, my first prong of attack. Faith is unavoidable.

“Prong two,” Fidley says now, and calmly takes a sip from his glass of water. “Given that we sometimes have to rely on faith, when should we do it? What should we have faith in? Well, reason and science certainly. But what else? We need standards. To say that faith is necessary doesn’t throw open the floodgates to all beliefs willy-nilly. We can’t just start believing in superstitions, populating our world with leprechauns and Easter bunnies.

“You see, there’s serious faith, which is necessary, and then there’s frivolous faith. Faith in the laws of logic and the laws of nature is necessary if the world is going to present itself to us coherently. If I doubt logic itself, I don’t know how to proceed. There
is
no way to proceed. My knowing that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man will give me no reason to think that Socrates is mortal. Same thing if I were to start doubting the lawfulness of nature. If I doubt that nature is lawful, then I will never
use the past as a guide to the future. Just because light has always traveled at 186,272 miles per second up until today, that would give me no reason to believe that it will do so tomorrow.

“The moral: there are faiths that are unavoidable if coherent lives are to be lived. That’s presumably why Cass Seltzer has faith in logic and in science. Cass Seltzer is a man of faith because he can’t live his life coherently otherwise.

“These kinds of faiths can be compared to financial investments. When you make an investment, you can’t know whether it’s going to pay you back. You can only make the investment and see what happens. Has your money worked for you or not? The same principle applies here. Does investing in a faith in logic and science work for us or not? Obviously it does. Without it, we’re flat broke. So this is a faith we should keep in our portfolio.

“Are there other faiths that are like this, that are comparable to the faith in science and reason? Well, what about the faith that your own individual life has a purpose? What about the faith that human life in general has meaning, that it matters to the universe that we are here and that we survive and flourish? What about the faith in the dignity of human life, your own and others’? How is it possible to live coherently, leading lives that are worthy of us, without faith in a transcendent purpose and meaning and dignity? These, too, are faiths that pay a good rate of return. To accept them is to see the value of one’s life increase exponentially.

“Skepticism in regard to reason and science renders our lives incoherent to the point of unlivable. So, too, does skepticism about the purpose and meaning of our lives, skepticism about whether we have any right to pursue our lives with the seriousness they demand of us. A David Hume could demonstrate the non-demonstrability of reason, but that didn’t keep him from reasoning. A Bertrand Russell or a Cass Seltzer can argue for the purposelessness of our individual lives, yet that doesn’t keep them from living purposefully, from living as if it all matters. Cass Seltzer pursues his life; in fact, from the looks of it, he pursues it pretty well. Even if he argues that he thinks his life is devoid of purpose, of worthiness, the very vigor with which he is pursuing it gives the lie to his claim. It’s just like the person who argues that we shouldn’t have faith in reason—he gives the lie to his argument by expecting that his argument
will be taken seriously, since if his argument really worked we couldn’t take it seriously. Some faiths are unavoidable because without them our very lives become incoherent. Faith that we have a reason to live is a faith like that.

“That is my second prong,” Eighteen minutes have elapsed, and he has yet to affirm the resolution that God exists.

“But I haven’t said anything yet about God.” Aha! “I’ve waited for my third prong of attack to introduce Him. I should have convinced you by now that certain faiths are necessary for coherence, and I should have convinced you that among such faiths is that in our own purposefulness, our sense that our lives matter. You know, even someone who ends his life is taking that life seriously, so seriously that he can’t stand to live it. We just can’t inhabit our lives without taking them seriously.”

Cass could be projecting—he’s been known to project before—but he seems to sense a slightly more sympathetic note creeping into Fidley’s delivery as he swerves toward the existential.

“But how can an individual life acquire this seriousness? What can confer it? It requires something outside an individual’s life to make it matter, and that something must
itself
have agency and purpose. It must have intentionality, which means it must have a mind. And that is exactly what God is. The mind of God is the purposeful agency that confers purposefulness on each of us, even on Cass Seltzer.”

No, Cass had definitely been projecting.

“The faith in a God who loves each one of us, who cares about whether we each reach our full potential as human beings, is the very faith required for us to reach our full potential as human beings. The faith in a God who has made us in His image is the faith that confers worth on each of us. How else can mere human lives acquire transcendent meaning if not through a transcendent agency?

“How am I doing for time?” he finally thinks to ask Lenny, who answers jauntily that he’d used up his time several minutes ago, and earns himself a huge laugh. Lenny is now having the time of his life.

“Okay, then, I’ll make just one more point,” Fidley says, because obviously Lenny is not going to stop him. “And that’s that, if you have any doubt that rejection of faith in God impoverishes life and robs men and women of that sense of meaningfulness that makes their lives coherent,
then all you have to do is look around at the hollow hedonism, neurotic narcissism, and dissolute degeneracy of a secular age that can’t even be alerted to the seriousness of life by a wake-up call like 9/11. It’s not just the immorality of our godless age that makes a person want to weep, but also the sad sight of human life untouched by transcendence.”

Cass can see Fidley’s trapezius muscles contracting, and his right hand slashes the air one time each on the downward beat of “hedonism,” “narcissism,” and “degeneracy.”

Fidley walks back to his seat, and Cass remains sitting a bit too long, so that Lenny actually turns to him with a wide smile and a flourish of his hand to indicate the podium, which of course gets another laugh; at this point, Lenny can do no wrong. Cass stands and walks over to his lectern and looks out at the overflow audience, and the awareness of the absurdity of his standing here, before all these people, in order to negate the resolution ‘God exists,’ threatens to transport him clean out of who he is supposed to be and what he is supposed to be doing.

Here I am
.

No, if any moment is the wrong moment for him to yield to his version of transcendence, this has to be it. He takes a good long look at the kid with the ponytail, he takes a good long look at Roz, and he brings himself back to the question at hand, which is: is he going to go after Fidley’s argument?

He doesn’t feel he has a grip on it yet. Fidley has appealed to elements of The Argument from Personal Purpose (#19), and The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason (#33), and he’s even introduced a snatch of The Argument from Pragmatism (#32) in speaking of beliefs that pay good rates of return; but he’s jumbled them up in such a way that the whole is giving the appearance of being greater than the sum of its parts, and Cass can’t see his way through the jumble yet. And then he’d thrown in Hume, too, for good measure. What would Azarya say about Fidley’s deployment of Hume? Hume is one of Azarya’s heroes. He’d all but memorized Hume’s essay “On Miracles” when he was an adolescent. Azarya would never stand for Humean skepticism’s being misused as a defense of theism.

Back when Cass had been a pre-med and taking exams, sometimes he would look at the questions for the first time and think in a panic that
nothing was familiar, that because of some terrible misunderstanding he had studied the wrong text, and that there wasn’t a single question on the page that connected with anything that he knew. But then, like a cloud of silt settling out of turbid water and revealing the riverbed below, his mind cleared and the panic subsided, and each question of the exam emerged as an exemplar of a familiar principle. He’s hoping that will happen very soon.

On the spot, as Cass is making his preliminary remarks thanking Chaplain Shore and the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard for sponsoring the debate, and thanking Professor Fidley for “initiating the discussion by firing such an intellectually serious salvo,” he’s decided to postpone discussing Fidley’s argument, and instead start out by making his own case independently. Why let Fidley define the terms of his opening argument anyway?

“Professor Fidley, in apologizing for the necessity of faith, concedes too soon in admitting that belief in God must rest on faith. If God makes any difference to the world—and what would be the point of believing in any God that didn’t make a difference to the world?—then we should be able to see indications of his existence when we observe the world we find ourselves in. And the fact is that this world does not present itself as being one in which there exists a powerful creator who cares about us. On the face of it, it seems a very different kind of world, which is what has inspired the theological line of argument that’s called theodicy: the attempt to reconcile the existence of God with the facts about our world that seem to suggest his absence.

“We can observe one feature of our world that is particularly relevant: suffering. Children die of disease; individuals are crippled by accidents and wracked with pain; whole peoples get exterminated. Just on the face of it, the obscene amounts of suffering we observe are not compatible with a God who’s both good and in control. Mind you, that’s just on the face of it. Believers look for ways of accommodating God’s existence with the searing facts of suffering, but they have to work hard at it, and the hard theodical work they need to do is what I mean by the world’s offering empirical evidence against God’s existence.

“So what are the ways that believers have offered to reconcile so much suffering with the existence of God? First there are the preconditions for
free will. If we are truly to be moral agents rather than robots, then we must have the freedom to choose between good and evil. And, given that freedom, the possibility of evil must be there; and, given that possibility, sometimes it will be realized, and when it is realized, suffering will ensue.

“But the requirements of free will can only account for a small part of the suffering we see. It will, perhaps, allow the believer to write off, as cos-mically accounted for, the child who was overheard to whisper to his mother as they were both being marched to their deaths at the extermination camp at Belzec, ‘But I tried to be so good, Mama!’ Yes, people are given free will, and Belzec was a consequence, and so the theist can write off that child’s pathetic cry as accounted for.

“But there is also abundant suffering that comes about not because of the exercise of others’ free will but because of natural disasters and accidents and the ravages of disease. And believers have to come up with some other way of dealing with these cases, since their occurrence has nothing to do with the exercise of free will. At this point you hear about the potential for achieving a greatness of the soul in overcoming tragedy. You hear that there are virtues—such as forbearance, and courage, and transcendence in the face of suffering, and compassion and love for those who suffer—which can only be exercised because suffering gives us the opportunity. The moral purpose of life, under this view, has to do with soul-making, and the full extent of what our souls can become can only unfold under the adverse conditions that God generously provides us.

“These are ingenious attempts to reconcile the facts of our world to the existence of a God who cares, and the very ingenuity they require shows how difficult the reconciliation is.

“And of course even here the explanation can’t cover all the cases, since so many of those who suffer are never given the opportunity to achieve soul-making at all—like people whose lives are snuffed out in an instant, together with all those who might have developed virtues in the grieving for them, or children who have no way to make sense of their suffering. Once again, their suffering, according to this rationalization, can perhaps serve the moral needs of others, and so can find justification.

“I don’t know about any of you, but I find this rationalization, as ingenious as it is, morally offensive. The suffering sacrifice of some so that
others
are afforded the opportunity to achieve moral transcendence
doesn’t strike me as descriptive of a moral universe. At the very least, shouldn’t all God’s creatures be given an opportunity for transcendence? The believer who’s satisfied with this ingenious answer isn’t paying close enough attention to the facts of suffering. His moral calculus of costs and benefits doesn’t add up.

“And it’s at this point that the believer, if he feels this objection at all, will take refuge in the inscrutable will of God. Or perhaps he’ll argue that the very resistance of these facts of suffering to any explanation that we can come up with points to the existence of God, since there must be a way in which this suffering is redeemed, and since it’s not in this world, then it has to be in the next. But, of course, to believe that there must be some way in which this suffering is ultimately redeemed is already to assume a level of transcendent explanation, which is the same thing as assuming God, which makes an argument of this kind circular.

“So at some point the believer, no matter how ingenious his attempts to reconcile the existence of God to the nature of the world, will have to fall back, when it comes to some of the most heartrending of cases, on the inscrutable ways of God. But to speak of the inscrutable ways of God is to acknowledge that the moral complexion of our world doesn’t favor the existence of a benevolent deity, which is the very point that I’m making.