Roger's Version (11 page)

“That’s not bad, sir, for a non-scientist; but your asking for another molecular law is asking for a bigger deal than you probably know. Also, there’re all
kinds
of additional problems the ‘primordial-soup’ boys just plain ignore. The energy problem, for example: for that first little microscopic Adam to
survive he’d need some energy system to keep him going, and right there you’re in a whole other engineering realm. Enzymes, is another. You can’t make proteins without DNA, but you can’t make DNA without enzymes, and enzymes are proteins. How do you do it? They’ve been mixing up these electrified soups in the laboratory since 1954, and they haven’t come up with anything like life yet. Why not? If they can’t do it with all their controls, how come blind Nature did?”

“Nature,” I pointed out, “had aeons of time, and oceans of material.”

“That’s what I used to think, too,” the young man said, with that irritating, confiding aplomb of his. “But if you look at the figures, it doesn’t check out. We have the purposive intelligence we say Nature doesn’t, and if it was do-able on our terms we should have done it by now. What happens is pathetic, a mess of unrelated polymers. Soup produces soup. Garbage in, garbage out, as we say in the computer business. Out in California, they’re trying to get nucleotides to self-assemble, and O.K., they do, but so slowly it just goes to show: one unit is added every quarter of an hour, as against a fraction of a second in nature.”

“Well, but even that’s indicative, isn’t it, that we’re dealing with a natural and not a supernatural process?” I studied my thumbnail. I had filed away the annoying small notch I had noticed before and now this nail was minutely, almost microscopically shorter than the other, with not quite enough white edge, as though I were a bit of a nail-biter. Verna’s nails had been childishly short, I seemed to recall; whereas Esther’s were too long. Fingernails: they tell time. In less than an hour I would be tackling my heresy seminar, the first of two full sessions spent on the Pelagians. Again and again (I would mischievously begin, to warm up the class) one is compelled to notice how much pleasanter, more reasonable and agreeable,
the heretics in hindsight appear than those enforcers who opposed them on behalf of what became Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Who wouldn’t prefer, for example, plump Pelagius (a “corpulent dog,” fumed Jerome, “weighed down with Scottish porridge”) and his amiable emissary Celestius and his silver-tongued apologist Julian, with their harmless hope that Man could do
some
good, could do
some
thing on his own to activate redeeming grace—who wouldn’t prefer such humanists to irascible Jerome and to romantic Augustine, with his hysterical insistence on the evil of concupiscence (his own at last sated) and the damnability of freshly born babies? Once a Manichee, always a Manichee, Julian had shrewdly pointed out, apropos of our Algerian friend the bishop of Hippo.

The boy was refuting me while my absent mind rehearsed my lecture. “You sound just like the hard-core neo-Darwinists,” Dale said. “They talk grandly about trends, and tendencies, and the inevitable imperfections of the fossil records. Imperfections! There’s almost nothing there, just sheets of creatures that appear and disappear. The so-called gaps aren’t gaps, they’re humongous huge holes.”

Where had I heard that word before, recently?

“Where are the pre-Cambrian fossils?” Dale asked. “Suddenly, multi-celled animals are everywhere, and seven phyla exist, and about five hundred species—arthropods, brachiopods, sponges, worms. Almost everything, in fact, except what you’d expect—protozoans. How did cells learn to congregate? For that matter, how did the prokaryotic cell, which is what the blue-green algae were, develop into our own eukaryotic cell, which has not only a nucleus but mitochondria, the nucleolus, the Golgi apparatus, and stuff they haven’t even figured out what it does yet. The two kinds of cell are as different as a cottage and a cathedral—what happened?”

“Well,” I told Dale, “something did, and I’m not sure I can
myself see the hand of God in it. All this arguing backwards you do, from present conditions, saying they’re so highly improbable—how much further does it get us than the cave man, who didn’t understand why the moon changed shape in the sky every month and so made up various stories about what tricks and antics the gods were up to up there? You seem to think that God obligingly is going to rush into any vacuum, any gap of knowledge. The modern scientist doesn’t claim to know everything, he just claims to know more than his predecessors did, and that naturalist explanations seem to work. You can’t have all the benefit of modern science and keep the cave man’s cosmology, too. You’re tying God to human ignorance; in my opinion, Mr. Kohler, He’s been tied to that too long.”

I had made him sit up, his pale-blue eyes open wide. “Is that what I’m doing?” he asked. “Tying God to ignorance?”

I spread my hand with its still-imperfect thumbnail flat on my desk. “It is. I say, Free Him!” So Dale too had hit home; he had aroused passion in me. I cared about this. Free Him, even though He die.

Dale settled back, a smug or uncertain small smile on his lips, the fleece lining his jacket flaring behind his neck. “All
I
think I’m doing, Professor Lambert, is this: modern man has been persuaded he’s surrounded by an airtight atheist explanation of natural reality. What I’m saying is, Hey, wait a minute, there’s more going on here than they’re letting you know. These astronomers, these biologists are staring something in the face they’re not letting you in on, because they don’t want to believe it themselves. But there it is. You can take or leave it, because that’s the freedom God gave us, but intellectually don’t be intimidated. Intellectually you don’t owe the Devil a thing.”

“Oh. You see the Devil at work.”

“I do. Everywhere. All the time.”

“And who is he, do you think?”

“The Devil is doubt. He’s what makes us reject the gifts God gives us, he makes us spurn the life we’ve been given. Did you know, suicide is the second cause of death among teen-agers, second only to automobile accidents, which are often a kind of suicide also?”

“Funny,” I said. “I would have said, looking at recent history and, for that matter, at some of our present-day ayatollahs and Führers, the opposite. The Devil is the absence of doubt. He’s what pushes people into suicide bombing, into setting up extermination camps. Doubt may give your dinner a funny taste, but it’s faith that goes out and kills.”

“Look, sir. We’re getting pretty far afield here, and I know you have those heretics to teach about in a minute. My point about evolution isn’t that we don’t know everything, but that the more we know the more like miracles things seem. People always cite the human eye, as impossibly complex. But take even the trilobite eye, right there at the beginning of the fossil record. It was made up of hundreds of columns, called ommatidia, with, some Swedish scientist discovered just in 1973, precisely aligned crystals of calcite and a wavy lower half of chitin all set up in exact accordance with laws of refraction that weren’t known until the seventeenth century. Mind-blowing, huh?”

He looked toward me for contradiction, and I mildly said, “That doesn’t mean the trilobites understood the laws of refraction. It just means that some trilobites saw a bit better than others and that those tended to survive and pass on their genes.” But my tone was non-combative; I had decided to let him argue himself into exhaustion. There is a name for this survival tactic: predator satiation. I lit up my pipe, sucking, the held match flaring, each gasping intake audible, as if a small death were in progress.

“Everywhere you look in evolution,” Dale argued, “there is this problem of
coördinated
mutations that would have
had
to have taken place; it’s the coördination puts the odds way off the board. In
our
eye, the retina, the iris diaphragm, the muscles, the rods and cones, the vitreous humor, the tear ducts, even the eyelids: it’s fantastic to believe it came about by accident, by a set of random errors piled one on top of the other. For example, to make the lens, skin somehow got inside the meningeal coats of the brain. How could that have happened halfway? In all these things, there are these halfway stages where the adaptation wouldn’t work at all and would be a pure handicap. You have these impossibility points where the graph of change as you’d have to plot it just won’t go around the corner. From the standpoint of evolution, the mammalian ear is even more incredible than the eye. Bones that were rigid jawbones in the reptile migrated and became the malleus and the incus, the little hammer and anvil way inside. When the jawbones were becoming the middle ear, what were these intermediate creatures chewing on? Or the whale’s tail: it moves up and down, whereas every land animal’s tail moves from side to side. This is a bigger difference than it sounds; the pelvis has to get smaller, otherwise it would be fractured by an up-and-down movement. But if you imagine this process on the way to the whale, there would come a point when the pelvis would be too small to support the hind legs and still too big to permit the tail musculature! Or take even the archaeopteryx, which evolutionists are so proud of. They may not be able to show you anything between the gastropods and the chordates, or the fish and the amphibians, or amphibians and frogs, but, boy, they can sure show you how reptiles turned into birds. There are only a couple problems. One, true birds existed at the same time as the archaeopteryx,
and, two, it couldn’t fly. It had feathers and wings but also a sternum too weak and shallow to anchor the muscles you need for flight! At best it could have flapped up to a low branch.”

“Like a modern-day chicken,” I said. “Do you find chickens impossible also? And haven’t I read somewhere that aerodynamic engineers have definitely proved that the bumblebee is incapable of flight?” Seeing the boy about to jump back in, I cleared my throat raspingly, inadvertently swallowing some smoke. It was time I asserted myself: to be lectured before a lecture is tedium upon travail. “The impossibility of the actual,” I informed him, “is not an entirely original proof of God’s existence. The Christians of the second century, when challenged to produce their supernatural credentials, tended to fall back on two arguments.
Not
, interestingly, Christ’s miracles and Resurrection as sworn to by the Apostles, but, one, the fulfillments by Jesus of Old Testament prophecies, and, two, the very existence of the Church around them. How, they would ask, could a small band of uneducated Syrian fishermen in an obscure corner of the Empire have started up a faith that within a century had spread from India to Mauretania, from the Caspian to the barbarous tribes of Britain? Clearly, God’s hand was at work. The Church, then, its rapid spread, was its own best evidence for the truth of what it proclaimed. Also, this line of argument goes, if Christ had been a fraud or a madman and the Resurrection had been a fiction, why would the Apostles have risked their lives in spreading the Good News? Here, too, you might say we have an ‘impossibility point’ you can’t get around, in the evolution from an obscure Jewish heresy and tiny criminal skirmish into Constantine’s imperial religion. I don’t find the argument flimsy; but I do believe that there are plausible ways to get around it, given a certain historical
feel
for the first century. We don’t have to postulate intentional fraud on the part of the Apostles, or the Gospel writers; first-century people just didn’t have the same sense of factuality that we do, or of writing either. Writing was sympathetic magic, we should remember: writing something down was to an extent making it so, it was a creative rather than mimetic act, and all the outright falsifications we find in the non-canonical documents contemporaneous with the Gospels—and the entire fabulous birth tale in Luke, for that matter, or the Logos–John the Baptist bit in John—were simply, for the perpetrators, a way of dressing truth, of presenting the truth in the robes and ornaments
it should have
. So, given the general level of credulity, the existence of numerous parallel religious movements like Gnosticism, the Essenes, and Mithraism, not to mention later historical parallels like that grotesque Jewish episode of Sabbatai Zebi in the seventeenth century, where not even the supposed Messiah’s apostasy to Islam disillusioned all believers, or, in Islam, the way the Mahdi’s or the Aga Khan’s turning into obese sybarites failed to affect their alleged divinity—given all this, we can begin to feel how it
did
happen, how the myth of the Resurrection, in particular, took hold. Not that in this age of UFO stories peddled weekly to supermarket checkout lines we need any special lessons in human credulity.”

“Oh come
on
,” my young visitor exclaimed, his voice pitched as if he were squalling with a roommate. “The Apostles were beaten. On the run. Their leader was dead. Something changed all that. You think it was pure illusion?”

“ ‘Whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell,’ Paul wrote; his epistles are the oldest texts in the New Testament, the closest to this particular ‘impossibility point.’ ”

“He also wrote,” my callow young opponent countered, “ ‘If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain.’ Paul was very
unambiguous about it, talking about Christ being seen of the Cephas, then of the twelve, then of the five hundred brethren some of whom are fallen asleep, and after that, of James and then all the Apostles, and last of all to Paul himself, as to one born out of due time.”

“And then a little farther on he said—rather sadly, I have always thought—that if we have hope of Christ only in this life, we are of all men most miserable. But let’s not quote the Bible at each other; there’s much too much of that around here, and in my limited experience it proves only that the Bible was a very badly edited anthology.”

“Sir, you started it.”

“In self-defense. I was trying to make the point that, when we don’t know and can never know the exact ins and outs of an event or process, a certain
feel
is all we have to go on as to what is plausible. When I look at the
National Enquirer
, with its accounts of these very circumstantial little green men coming out of UFOs or its latest absolute proof that Elvis lives, I get a vague
feel
for what might have happened early in the first century. When I look at the cases of fossils over in the university zoology museum and at the living animals and birds and insects and worms and germs all around and inside us, evolution to me, despite its gaps and puzzles,
feels
like a reasonable explanation of the tangled state of affairs.” My pipe had gone out. I sucked on sparkless emptiness.