On God: An Uncommon Conversation (15 page)

Take this back to Intelligent Design. God looks for Intelligent Design. Then new Intelligent Design gets itself worked upon by existence. The Wright brothers designed an airplane. Don't we know that! And after they got it up in the air for the first time, and it flew a few hundred feet, they went back to the drawing board to refine the knowledge received. Intelligent Design cannot exist without experience. So long as it remains Intelligent Design, pure but untested, it remains analogous to any number of very talented young novelists who don't publish because they never get their book to the point where they want it to be seen. They will not put their book out on the waters. Whereas God, I will obviously argue, tends to launch each Intelligent Design to see what happens to it. That is how God learns, how He proceeds to the next Intelligent Design.

Let me enjoy one extreme aspect of this notion. In my book about Henry Miller, I spoke of three men coming into a hostess's living room: Henry James, Hemingway, and Henry Miller. Each takes off his hat, and behold! To their vast surprise—they had no prior knowledge of this—a cow turd is steaming under each hat. I then go on to say Henry James might have perished from so awful an experience. Hemingway would have gone into a depression—he would have seen it as emblematic of the nature of life: Just when life seemed something you could enjoy, unexpected disasters shattered your mood. And Miller would have said, “Good Lord, how did that turd get on my head? And just look at the hostess. Her nostrils are quivering, or is that because of her twat? She is so excited—what a wonderful moment!” Miller is an example of someone who couldn't stay with a plot for five minutes because he wanted to run right into the world and discover something new about himself and/or the world. He is at one extreme, Henry James at the other. Between them lies the effective use of Intelligent Design.

         

But what would Joyce have done?

Joyce is so much of a genius, I won't try to trim his coattails. I don't know what he would have done with the cow turd.

         

I think he would have appreciated it.

He might have looked for a conflation of the twenty-two words in fifteen languages that illumine the concept of shit. What would be the wonderful sound he would come up with? On the other hand, he could have felt removed from the situation. It was not life he was interested in so much as language.

         

I disagree. The first person to wipe his ass in a novel is Leopold Bloom.

Your point….

         

You recently criticized Sartre's existentialism for being floorless, without floor.

Without a foundation.

         

Because, as you put it, “It is, after all, near to impossible for a philosopher to explore how we are here without entertaining some notion of what the prior force might have been.” Therefore, if we grant your limited God as that prior force, then I'm compelled to ask what force preceded your God? I assume you would choose infinite regress rather than a Prime Mover?

Again, I refuse to be blindsided by such questions. There's a story you're probably familiar with, of Bertrand Russell and an old lady—Russell is talking about the origin of the universe and how it is not knowable. An old lady in the audience speaks up. She says, “On the contrary, Professor Russell. I know the basis of the universe.” He says, “What is it, Madam?” She replies, “The universe is resting upon a turtle.” “Madam, that's very helpful, but what is the turtle resting on?” And she replies, “It's turtles all the way down!”

         

I do remember that.

I'm not going to get trapped in arguments that ask me to explain what came behind the God I'm talking about.

         

But you beat Sartre over the head because he won't allow for a force behind humanity. Why can't we then try to find out…I'm not looking to refute you, but—

Let me put it this way: We first have to become close to God and helpful to God—large questions we haven't even entered. God is not only an element in existence but a moral presence. Until we can feel we are some kind of great help to God, why should God trust us? You remember, at the end of
Harlot's Ghost,
Hugh Montague goes off on this—to me—intriguing speech that God, having decided that the advent of humans was not yet to be trusted, proceeded to then create the illusion of evolution. In reality—so goes Harlot's thesis—the earth was created entire, ex nihilo, by God in six days. He then laid in evidence all over the earth and in the seas that evolution had done it instead over millions of years. Implied in all that is a suggestion that until we get close enough to God to feel we are in some kind of alliance, can we begin to have some knowledge of what might be behind God? But that won't happen until we get nearer. Sartre doesn't let us point in that direction at all.

         

You do see moral relations between God and humans as a possibility, however?

Ultimately. If things go better than I expect they will.

         

I don't know if you're familiar with the philosopher David Hume—

Yes, in college. I had him. Vaguely, you might say.

         

Well, Hume got into the argument for Intelligent Design. One of the proofs of St. Thomas Aquinas for the existence of God is indeed the argument from design. It goes back that far, hundreds of years. Aquinas has many proofs of God's existence, but the fifth one was that design is so perfect in the universe—he didn't even see beyond the solar system—

Right there, you run smack into the most obdurate aspect of Catholicism, the insistence of Catholicism on God's perfection. What characterizes my idea of Intelligent Design is that it is partial—not perfect, but partial—a partial improvement. I'm glad I have the novel to fall back upon as a metaphor for this. When I write a novel, it's an attempt to come up with a piece of intelligent design, but it's never perfect. Some parts are better than others. If it goes into publication, the critical returns come back. Very often, those returns have little relation to what you wrote. Occasionally, they do. Slowly, over the years, you learn more. By the end of your life, you may be wiser as a novelist than when you started. The heart of one of my notions, then, is that God, too, is always looking to become wiser. What you create may, in the beginning, not be understood all too well or, for that matter, not be fashioned well enough yet.

         

Listen to this collision between Aquinas and David Hume: Hume criticized the argument from design. In particular, he emphasized there is no legitimate way to infer the properties of God from the qualities of the world, His creation. For instance, Hume questioned, how can we be sure the world was not created by a team? Or, this may be but only one of many attempts at Creation, the first few having been botched. Or, on the other hand, our world could be the puerile first attempt of an infant deity who afterward abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance.

That last doesn't fulfill my notion of the passion implicit in the artistry of God. I can't conceive of a great artist ever junking a work and just moving on—not if that has been his major opus. I certainly do lean to the notion that our world is God's major opus. But Hume did put it well on the argument for a perfect universe. From my point of view, he was correct in seeing that as near to intolerable. The notion of a perfect universe scrambles people's brains.

         

All the same, the Catholic Church is a fabulously successful institution—and probably because of that insistence on a perfect universe.

Fabulously successful, yes, but you could also say the Jewish religion has been fabulously successful in one way—the Jews didn't perish. But what a price they paid! And, I'd add, what a price Catholics have paid. To have created a Church that brought so much architectural beauty to the world, so much musical beauty, so much ritual beauty—and then to be locked into a set of notions they can't let go of, that explain nothing, but that elevate contradictions and magnify spiritual and moral confusion.

You know, when they are beautiful, the services of organized religion move me. I feel, “How tragic. How painful.” All this devotion, all this loyalty, and it goes into an intellectual sump. It explains nothing. All you are finally asked to believe is that God will be there to hear your prayers, God will welcome us when we die—as if that's all God has to do.

         

What about Hume's idea that the universe might have been created by a team?

Not impossible. Not impossible. It explains one of my basic notions. The team soon fell out of sorts with one another, and we ended up with God and the Devil.

         

A joint endeavor—

Like those South Seas Companies in the 1700s.

         

If, as you say, the Creator is an Artist and not all creative works are equally successful, wouldn't this lead quite easily to racism? That is, couldn't the “inferior race,” however it's defined, whether the non-Aryans scapegoated by the Nazis or the “ice people” of the Afrocentric extremists, simply be one of God's less successful creations?

Well, I reject the language of the question. One of the absolute disasters that Hitler brought to human understanding was an abuse of the concept of race. Because race offers us great clues. It is perfectly possible—and here again, one can only speculate—but it is perfectly possible that races, in the beginning, were Intelligent Designs for different situations. In other words, for people in the tropics, God was saying, “Well, how can I design the heating system of their bodies so they can bear the excessive warmth more easily?” And He made separate adjustments for the north. We're discovering that living in separate climates produces different relaxations and strictures of the throat. Languages reflect that. Mind you, God as the Artist might be discovering within the material itself where the continuation might be. Certain sculptors talk about how they do not know exactly what the work will become until they cut into the marble. It is the marble that discloses what they must do with the next stroke. The same process of discovery may be present in human or animal design. The environment plays a mighty role.

         

Your conception of God as Artist assumes that God is both vastly—but not all—good and vastly—but not all—powerful. But why couldn't God be not very compassionate but instead immensely curious? He could be fascinated by, but not especially compassionate toward, Creation, much like a child who winds up toys and watches them slam into each other and chortles at the smashup. You say, “In other words, why are there volcanoes? Because God was not a perfect engineer.” Or because, like a two-year-old, God found the noise and fury fascinating and amusing—maybe even the shrieks of the dying fascinating and amusing. To use the ultimately reductive phrase, you keep assuming God is a nice person. That seems a bit arbitrary.

It is arbitrary, and it could be my conditioning. I grew up in a household that was as religious as the next—it wasn't a dogma-driven atmosphere, but I do remember my mother on Friday night praying before a lit candelabrum, praying to the Shekhina, a Hebrew word for the wife of God, and there were tears in my mother's eyes. A feeling of great tenderness came from her. I think I always took it for granted that God was compassionate in relation to us.

Now, the arguments you just raised cannot be refuted. How can I declare, “No, God is not going in for capers.” Of course, God could engage in mean acts. But to me, the notion that God and the Devil are in conflict with each other makes more sense. So I believe we've got this one God who is more good than not.

         

Well, your mother's father was a rabbi.

Yes. He studied to be a rabbi in Lithuania, but by the time he came over here, the only way he could make his living was as a peddler. Then he moved to a town in New Jersey called Long Branch, where he opened a shop and worked as a butcher. There was only one synagogue in Long Branch, so when the regular rabbi was ill or off on vacation, my grandfather stood in for him. And my mother was proud of this. The fundamental snobbery of the Jews—it was much better to be a rabbi than a butcher. As a contrarian Jew, I was delighted; it gave me two different strains to develop.

         

Well, I'm thinking of your mother's devotion and the tear in her eye—obviously, she must have come from a pretty religious household.

My grandfather was most religious—he began studying the Talmud when he was four years old. One of the best things to be said about the Talmud is that it's very hard to become a Fundamentalist while studying it. It's too easy if you live only with the Torah but difficult when reading the Talmud. Unlike the Torah (which is the first five books of the Old Testament), the Talmud inquires into the nuances of things. For instance, in that long-gone age, people brought animals to the temple to be sacrificed. Very often there were small disasters—a poor man might have decided to sacrifice his prize heifer because his child was fearfully ill. But on his entrance into the temple, the heifer would defecate. Well, the Talmud is ready to focus on just where it defecated. Was it outside on the patio? Or did it do the job on the steps? In the vestibule? In the aisle? At the altar approach? Did it defecate on the altar? Outrageous! For all these are separate violations of the most holy and so call for different penalties. In certain cases, the animal can still be sacrificed. At other sites, like the altar, the animal is lost completely. It cannot be eaten. In the Talmud, there are, nonetheless, all these efforts to find zones of relative compatibility between God's laws and human needs—so the Talmud becomes the opposite of the Old Testament (and needless to say, the New Testament), where the law is, in effect, inflexible.