36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

I have had an interesting experience in thinking about my read of this book. I liked reading the book, but not as much as I wanted to like reading it, especially since I enjoyed Betraying Spinoza. I'm not sure whether the problem was with the writing or with my preferences for non-fiction these days. Some of the narrative and the dialog just seemed a bit wooden to me. I enjoyed the story and I identified with Cass, but the book didn't blow me away.

Until I began to look back over the passages that I highlighted. Then the book really took over a whole new meaning for me. First I copied my highlighted passages from my Kindle account to a web page, and then I winnowed those down further to what I thought were the most significant passages. Rereading these passages then really made me appreciate just what a fine book this is.

The major character of the book is Cass Seltzer, a professor of the psychology of religion at a small Jewish university who has just written a best seller, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, which has caused major publications to dub him "the atheist with soul." As part of his book, he has included an appendix with 36 arguments for the existence of God, with a refutation for each argument that points out its flaws. Goldstein has included the appendix as the second half of the novel. It's pretty heady stuff but it seems to me fairly comprehensive, moving from Aristotle's Unmoved Mover through Spinoza's Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe.

I found myself laughing out loud at the foibles of Cass and the people around him. At times, Cass seems a bit like Dobie Gillis as we see him fail at three different love affairs and move with perpetual adolescent wonder and angst through his life. But so much of the comedy also comes at the expense of the pompous academic, Klapper. a thinly veiled parody of Harold Bloom, who makes his graduate students jump through some pretty unrealistic hoops. Some reviewers have felt this character is just too unreal, but it worked for me as broad satire. And Klapper presents a pretty good foil against the Rebbe's son, Azarya, who struggles with the passion to follow his individual genius versus the need of his Hasidic community for him to fulfill a specific and circumscribed role that is central and sacred to them.

But still, it's those passages trying to capture what is really ineffable, moments when Cass is struck with the weirdness of existence, seeking for meaning and feeling special in the the face of being a cosmic fluke lost in an unfeeling and unmeaning universe. "All that one knows is that onen is a part of it, a considered and conscious part of it, generated and sustained in existence in ways one can hardly comprehend, all the time conscious of it, though, of existence, the fullness of it, the reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy of it." So there's part of me that says this is what Camus calls the absurd, man's searching for meaning in a meaningless universe. And yet, I get a sense almost of joy rather than despair. "The brave new world of Modernism, where we aren't shaded from the hard truths of the natural world, and we have to create what meaning we can get from our relations with one another. That's all we have, in the end. The sublime has abandoned us, and what sublimity we have remaining we have to make for ourselves, subliminally, from the material of our our own self."

Is that the same as the look that Sisyphus has as he begins his walk down into valley to begin rolling his rock up the mountain yet once more time? And is that joy, that sublimity, coming from Goldstein's infatuation with Spinoza and his Intelligibility, that the universe, or at least our place in it, is ultimately knowable, even though our own understanding is, and will probably always be, incomplete, but it gives us meaning to strive for intelligibility, and that this striving gives us purpose, gives us dignity, gives us grace? In that regard, it seems in line with Kazantzakis in Saviours of God, maybe, or even--and this is a stretch--Teilhard's evolution toward the omega point. Are Teilhard and Spinoza on the same page, when you get down to it?

"Perhaps that is the proof that no solution exists, that the most gifted among us is feeble in mind against the brutality of incomprehensibility [what a phrase!] that assaults us on all sides. And so we try, as best we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence. And so we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise, what are we?"

Author: Goldstein, Rebecca

Date Published: 2010

Length: 530 pp

electronic print

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind

Scholarly, the book is not. It's another book written to accompany a British television series, but it tells the story so well, if a bit over the top at times ("There was never anything like the great library and museum before, nor has there been since: the single place on earth where all the knowledge of the entire world was gathered together…the key to understanding…simply everything."), it is both enjoyable and informative, filling in the blanks of a lot of my knowledge. I mean, I know the outlines of Alexander's march through Anatolia, the near east, Egypt and thence back through southwestern asia well enough. And I have an inkling, though admittedly not nearly as good, of the Hellenistic kingdoms that shook out from his conquests. But Ptolemy was just a name to me, and it was enlightening to see his efforts at forging an empire in Egypt what would accept a Greek ruler by combining Egyptian religious thought with Greek concepts of rationality, economics, and politics.

The wealth of the Nile, "the most production agricultural land in the known world," held it all together, of course, producing something like 20 million bushels of grain a year in seemingly endless fertility. Not for nothing was it called the bread basket of the Roman Empire in later years. But if Pollard and Reid are correct, it was Ptolemy I's vision of Alexandria as the intellectual center of the world that really made the difference. And since Ptolemy, a boyhood friend of Alexander, also received his education from Aristotle alongside Alexander, the museum and library of Alexandria were driven by Aristotle's vision of collecting and understanding all knowledge.

The observations and the knowledge that came out of the museum underlie much of modern science: the geometry of Euclid, the algebra of Diophantes, the geography of Ptolemy. But even then, many of the observations that anticipated the findings of modern science were lost during the "Dark Ages": Eratosthes' measurement of the earth's circumference and tilt, Aristarchus' heliocentric model of the universe, knowledge of the body obtained through dissection (widely practiced in Egypt but strictly forbidden elsewhere), and who knows what else.

The stability of Alexandria depended on wise rule, but this only lasted about three generations. The downfall of the dynasty began with Ptolemy IV, leading to a period of aoubt 150 yers of economic and social decline, until Cleopatra ascended the throne. She sought to restore Alexandria through alliances with Caesar and Anthony, but ultimately brought about the collapse of the dynasty. Did Julius Caesar inadvertently destroy the great library, some 400,000 volumes of all the known works of antiquity? That's what Livy would have us believe, but Pollard and Reid are not so sure. In any case, by the time that "Octavian walked into Alexandria [in 30 BC], the Ptolemaic kingdom came to an end." Alexandria entered into the Roman Empire where it remained until destroyed by the Arab conquest of the Middle East. It also became a city riven by ethnic tensions (the city was originally laid out one third Egyptian, one third Greek, and one third Jewish) and by the vagaries of the different Roman emperors. Caracella, the worst of the lot, executed all males below the age of 25, among others, an estimated 20,000 persons--this after murdering his brother to gain sole possession of the throne.

Much of the thinking in the museum now became more attuned to philosophical and metaphysical speculation, and the big names in Alexandria's intellectual history take a religious turn, beginning with Philo's concept of God as "creativity itself," and the world having been created by "Logos, the word of God." After than, Alexandria became a major source for the development of Christian theology. The speculations of the pagan philosophers Ammonious Sacchus and Plotinus found Christian counterparts in Clement and Origen, who applied Alexandrian rationality to Christian beliefs in coming up with a coherent theology and philosophy of the world. This speculative theology also led to one of the first great battles over heresy in the early church with Arius. Arius' fight with Alexander, the patriarch of Alexandria, and his toadie, Athanasius, triggered the formation of the council of Nicea in 325 under Constantine, leading to the expulsion of the Arians who could not support the formulation of the Trinity put forth in the creed.

Much ugliness ensued in later years. Theophilus sought to destroy pagan philosophy in Alexandria following Theodosius proscription of paganism in 391. Theophilus physically assaulted managed to destroy the contents of both the "daughter library" and the Serapeum, the temple built by Ptolemy I combining the remains of Alexander with the worship of the Searapis bull. Theophilus' successor, Cyril, then incited his bully boys, the Nitratian monks and the Parabolans, using physical force to grab secular power in the city and to also murder the philosopher Hypatia, "the last of the Alexandrian Hellenes." 300 years later, the Sultan Omar I ordered what was left of Alexandria to be destroyed. "Religious bigotry had after a thousand years of enlightenment finally dragged Alexandria into oblivion."

So the story of the Rise and Fall of Alexandria is a good story of light vs. dark, with the dark side winning out in the end, perhaps with a warning for the rest of us. Knowledge is a precious commodity, but also very vulnerable. It can and has been destroyed. It makes for a tidy narrative, but you really have to wonder whether the story is really that neat, that accurate. But as Pollard and Reid make clear, the importance of Alexandria in the history of ideas cannot be underestimated, "If the Renaissance was the 'rebirth' of learning that led to our modern world, then Alexandria was its modern birthplace…in our minds, we are all children of Alexandria."

Author: Pollard, Justin and Reid, Howard

Date Published: 2006

Length: 352 pp & 11 hr 31 min

electronic print and audio

Narrator: Vance, Simon