Roger's Version (3 page)

“That’s good,” my visitor had the gall to tell me, “except that, as you say, babies are born all the time, and there’s only one universe, that we know of. That’s what the scientists, to keep their old atheist materialism, are trying to get around. Rather than admit the obvious, that some purposeful Intelligence fine-tuned the physical constants and the initial conditions, they’re proposing a crazy many-universes theory, in which ours is just the one that happens to have the right conditions for intelligent life eventually to emerge. Some of them don’t actually
say
there are all these other universes out there, or back there, somewhere, collapsing or dispersing or churning
around unobserved; they just say that because we are here observing, the universe has to be such-and-such, which they think takes the sting out of it, much as if you said, ‘Of course the planet Earth has water and oxygen, because we’re here.’ That’s the anthropic principle, which, in its weak form at least, is simply a way of begging the issue. Another theory claims that there’s a kind of infinite branching out of quantum-theory indeterminacy. You know, when an electron hits a proton, the wave scatters both left and right; if measurement indicates that the particle in fact went right, then the lefthand part of the wave collapses. Where did it go? It went, according to this theory, into another universe, and so did the observer, a duplicate of him with this small difference, and his instruments, and the room he was in, and the building, and on and on. Furthermore—like I said, it’s crazy—you don’t need an observer for the splitting, it happens whenever a quantum transaction takes place anywhere, on any star: the universe splits into two, over and over, all the time. No way to check it, but they’re there, all these other universes, a million million every microsecond. I mean,
really
. Another guy lately, to get around these really severe embarrassments—severe unless you simply say God is the Creator—proposes that in some ridiculously short fraction of the first second of the Big Bang the universe, because of some theoretical anti-gravitational force that nobody has ever seen in action, expanded exponentially, doubling every ten-to-the-minus-thirty-fourth second or so, increasing the diameter of the universe, which was smaller than that pencil point to begin with, by a factor of ten to the fiftieth before cooling back to normal expansion; so instead of the many universes we have the one big
fat
universe, so to speak, of which the universe we see, right out there to the quasars at ten billion light-years and beyond, is a
tiny, and I mean tiny, fraction, like a Ping-Pong ball in Shea Stadium. And they think religious people stretch the facts. These guys are
des
perate, the ones aware of the problem. They are
squirm
ing.”

He seemed too happy about this—un-Christian, even. “I suppose a fundamental question,” I ventured, “about any modern attempts to relate the observed cosmos to traditional religion becomes the sheer, sickening extravagance of it. If God wished, as Genesis and now you tell us, to make the world as a theatre for Man, why make it so unusably vast, so horribly turbulent and, ah, crushing to contemplate? The solar system, with an attractive background spatter of stars, would have been quite enough, surely. To have the galaxy on top of that, and then all those other galaxies …” My pencil point minutely gleamed, magnitudes bigger than the original universe. With enough scrutiny the faceted sides of graphite left by the sharpening could be seen in the gray light, and flecks of carbon granule. Since the age of eight, when I was praised by the family ophthalmologist for prattling off even the bottom line of his chart, I have taken an innocent pride in the keenness of my eyesight, which reading glasses, acquired seven years ago when I was forty-five, amplify but otherwise leave uncorrected.

“I know. It’s a stunner,” the boy agreed, in one of his irksome glissandos of unexpected serenity and amiable yielding. “Maybe it’s like a demonstration. Of what infinity is. So we won’t say glibly, ‘God is infinite.’ But it’s all just figures, isn’t it? Measure. And there are things we can’t measure. We can’t measure ourselves, for example—”

“Or love, you’re going to say.”

“I was?”

“I think you were. Mr. Kohler, I’ve been dealing with your
age group ever since I retired from the ministry, took my Th.D. at Union, and found an assistant-professorship up here. You’re all wild about love, the word if not the actuality. The actuality, my impression is, is somewhat thorny.”

“Sir, I think I may be older than the age group you usually deal with. I’m twenty-eight. From Akron, originally. I got my B.S. in computer science at Case Western Reserve and then spent a year pulling my head together being a fire watcher in the Salmon River Mountains in Idaho. Then I came east, and I’ve been taking grad courses and involved in various computer research projects ever since.”

“You’re not, then, a physicist?”

“Nawp: I sort of backed into cosmology in connection with my personal philosophy. The physicists, they just want to deal with the numbers, they don’t want this stuff to get out, you have to dig it out. The best brains working on the real implications—Carter and Hawking and I suppose you’d have to include Hoyle—are over in England; all the Americans care about is GUT, for Grand Unified Theory, and that’s just numbers. Numbers about hot air, really. I mean really
hot
, like ten-to-the-twenty-sixth degrees Kelvin, and you have the strong and electroweak forces theoretically combined, and symmetry domains coming out of the freezing, and one-dimensional string defects that would weigh a million tons if they were long enough to go across an atom, and I can’t begin to tell you what-all other stuff, none of which they can prove for beans. According to GUT, protons have to decay, but nobody’s found a decaying proton yet, and if proton life were any less than a million times the age of the universe, you and I would be as radioactive right this minute as the core of a nuclear reactor. Like I say, hot air. Don’t get me off on it; I try not to get spiteful. It’s just that these atheists are so
smug;
they
don’t even think there’s an argument.” He was relaxing, his legs growing so long that his feet in their scuffed Hush Puppies were underneath my desk.

“Twenty-eight is a very common age, actually,” I said, “for people to turn back to religion.”

“I never turned away,” this young man said. The pious often, I have noticed, have a definiteness that in others they would judge rude. “I’ve stayed the way I was raised. My mom and dad had so little to give me intellectually I couldn’t afford to give up anything. The walls in the house were so thin I used to hear them praying together sometimes.”
Why am I telling him this?
I could see him asking himself. His hands began to move, on the defensive attack. “Anyway, what you call religion around here is what other people would call sociology. That’s how you teach it, right? Everything from the Gospels to
The Golden Bough
, Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, it all happened, it’s historical fact, it’s anthropology, it’s ancient texts, it’s humanly
interesting
, right? But that’s so safe. How can you go wrong? Not even the worst atheist in the world denies that people have been religious. They built these temples, followed these taboos, created these traditions, et cetera. So what? Your average normal cheerful nonbeliever says it was all poetic, pathetic foolishness, like a lot of other aspects of human history, like
all
its aspects, really, considering that everybody dies and until he does spends most of his energy trying to feed himself, stay dry and warm, and, what’s the word—?”

“Propagate?” I offered.

“Sure,” he said, slouching lower. “I looked over your catalogue before I came, and studying all that stuff doesn’t say
any
thing, doesn’t com
mit
you to anything, except some perfectly harmless, humane cultural history. What I’m coming to
talk to you about is God as a
fact
, a fact about to burst upon us, right up out of Nature.”

“So you’ve said,” I said, setting down my son’s sharp pencil and discreetly glancing at my watch; my two-hour seminar in ante-Nicene heresy met at three. Today we were to take up Marcion, the first great heresiarch. He plausibly argued that the God of the Old Testament and that of the New were two different Gods—a ditheism that blended into Gnosticism and anticipated Manichaeism. He poured scorn upon the Hebraic Creator-God, who created evil, made pets of licentious and treacherous rascals like King David, and was responsible, this ignorant, vacillating God, for the humiliating and painful processes of copulation, pregnancy, and childbirth, the contemplation of all of which filled Marcion with nausea. He had a case. “Be all this as it may,” I said with deliberation, “what exactly can I do for you, Mr. Kohler?”

A certain pinkness of agitation again suffused my visitor’s unhealthy skin, and his voice dropped so that I had to strain to hear. “I was wondering, sir, about a grant. Whether the Divinity School would like me to pursue, you know, what we’ve been talking about. This evidence that proves that God exists.”

“Well. Worth proving, let us assume. But, as you’ve so shrewdly described our curriculum here, I doubt we could spare a dime. We’re very comfortable, according to you, in asserting that so-called religions once did exist and in teaching Geez and Aramaic to the fanatically interested.”

“Sir, don’t get so huffy, please. I don’t know what you personally believe.”

“I believe quite enough, I think. Though it’s been fourteen years since I served my last parish, I still am an ordained Methodist minister in what they call good standing. Also, let me tell you, I have a class to teach in seventeen minutes.”

“Dr. Lambert, aren’t you excited by what I’ve been trying to describe? God is
breaking through
. They’ve been scraping away at physical reality all these centuries, and now the layer of the little left we don’t understand is so fine God’s face is staring right out at us.”

“Sounds rather grisly, frankly. Like a face through a frosted bathroom door. Or like,” I offered, plucking from my subconscious an image that had been troubling me for months, “that poor young sailor from the Franklin expedition they found this past summer up in Canada, nicely preserved by the ice. He was staring right out at us, too.”

Kohler leaned toward me alarmingly, his speckled jaw bent to one side by the pressure of his conviction. “If God,” he said, “in fact created the universe, then as a fact it
has
to show, eventually. Let me put it another way: God can’t hide any more.”

“If He is omnipotent, I would think it within His powers to keep hiding. And I’m not sure it isn’t a bit heretical of you to toss the fact of God in with a lot of other facts. Even Aquinas, I think, didn’t postulate a God Who could be hauled kicking and screaming out from some laboratory closet, over behind the blackboard.”

The young man said, “You’re being satirical. But do you know why you’re being satirical?”

“A, I am? And B, No.”

“Because you’re afraid. You don’t
want
God to break through. People in general don’t want that. They just want to grub along being human, and dirty, and sly, and amusing, and having their weekends with Michelob, and God to stay put in the churches if they ever decide to drop by, and maybe to pull them out in the end, down that tunnel of light all these NDEs talk about. That’s another place He’s breaking through—all
these near deaths, and all these blissful people reporting back. Until they had this modern medical equipment they couldn’t keep pulling people back from the grave. But I don’t want to use up my seventeen minutes.”

“Twelve. Let’s say ten. I have to glance over my notes.” They were on my desk; I pulled them toward me and glanced at them.
Marcion excomm. Rome 144
, I read to myself.
Tertullian wr. Adversus Marcionem c. 207
. The boy was making me rude.

He persisted. “Aren’t I right, though, sir? You’re horrified to think that God can be proven.”

“I’m horrified, if I am, to hear so much blasphemy coming out of you so serenely.”

“Why is it blasphemy? Why is it blasphemy in this day and age always to raise the possibility that God might be a fact?”

“A fact in our lives, yes, a spiritual fact—”

“That’s like a virtual particle. A piece of hot air.”

I sighed, and sincerely wished the boy dead. This tangle of suppositions about the absolute and unknowable which he had agitatedly sketched reminded me of my dead, the dead who give me my living, those murky early centuries of passionate anchorites and condemnatory prelates whose storms of fine distinction swept back and forth from Athens to Spain, from Hippo to Edessa.
Homoousios
versus
homoiousios
, the
logikoi
versus the
alogoi
. Montanism and modalism and monarchianism, hypostasis and Patripassianism. Blood-soaked discriminations now dust like their bones, those grandiose and prayerful efforts to flay, cleave, and anatomize the divine substance. “The Christian Church,” I began, then halted myself to ask the boy, “You do consider yourself a Christian?”

“Absolutely. Christ is my Saviour.”

I loathed the icy-eyed fervent way he said it. Back home such
flat statements were painted on barns and needlepointed on pillows. I said to him, “The church preaches, I believe, and the Old Testament describes, a God Who acts, Who
comes to us
, in Revelation and Redemption, and not one Who set the universe going and then hid. The God we care about in this divinity school is the living God, Who moves toward us out of His will and love, and Who laughs at all the towers of Babel we build to Him.” I heard myself echoing Barth and the exact quotation flickered at the edge of my mind. Where? I was wearing beneath my coat a cashmere V-necked sweater (“camel” was the name of the shade on the label, amusing Esther, who thinks of my academic specialty as the Desert Fathers, when she bought it last Christmas, in Bermuda, at Trimingham’s), and abruptly I felt too warm, and began to sweat. I was trying too hard. I was dredging up beliefs I had once arrived at and long ago buried, to keep them safe.