Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

And now I'd like to welcome Dr. Bernie Steinberg to introduce Ms Goldstein Steinberg is the executive director at Harvard Hillel. And we're very grateful to him for helping to organize tonight's event so please join me in welcoming him to the podium. Thank you. I'm going to be very brief I don't think Rebecca Goldstein needs much of an introduction to an audience like this. Rebecca has been a hero of mine from the beginning of your from your first publication of the mind body problem. I showed that to my daughter in high school. She then decided that she had to go to Columbia she had to major in philosophy. She's been an atheist ever since. But what really struck me about that book and it informs this book as well is that it it crosses over and creates a conversation a deep conversation between literature and philosophy and it to me the kind of conversation that really enhances both domains if indeed you can call them domains what it does as

a literary book among other things is it teaches you how to see how to see reality and I just want to read one maybe three lines from this book which I think really really capture that Rene Descartes identified the seed of the soul as the Peano gland but in Cass's experience cast as the main character cast seltzer. It's the upper lip that reflects the true state of the soul giving accurate tells on the self regarding emotions self-doubt and self-satisfaction will both betray themselves there. And if there is an egotist lurking within the upper lip is the place that will give them away. I think that's an extraordinary insight and also of course funny in an important way and that's another reason that I particularly like this book. It's a book that. That combines piety and playfulness and the piety that that actually is at the bottom of this book is The piety that is the piety of asking

serious questions and frames frames faith and I'm putting this on you so you can come back and argue with me by my intruding the word faith in you know in into this but but it it has to do with the kind of questions one asks. And this book is about is about serious questions. I like it because it's a local book. It's a book that quite literally takes place in Cambridge. It opens one hundred yards from here on the week's bridge. It's a book about the culture of the academy and in particular the culture of Harvard. Very easy to identify from that perspective I like it because it's a Jewish book. It's a Jewish book not only because many of the characters are Jewish but it deals with with with problems and themes that are actually universal. And I don't think there's anything more Jewish than dealing with universal themes. And so I'm just going to go and buy. Pointing out an interesting quality this book its It's called thirty six arguments for the existence of God a work of fiction. And of course the play

between those two is critical at the end of the the fiction. There is actually an appendix that has a very good accurate summary with commentary of thirty six arguments far the existence of God in a critique. And so I'm reading from the argument from. Personal purpose I don't think I wanted this one sorry where is that called logic. It's number one. Yeah yeah. OK so Rebecca gives us eight succinct points the cost of a logical argument which many of us know. She then gives us. Critique one critique to tears it apart and then there is a comment and here's the comment. The cause of a logical argument like the argument from the Big Bang and the argument from the intelligibility of the universe is an expression of our cosmic

befuddlement at the question why is there something rather than nothing. The late philosopher Sidney Morgan Besser had a classic response to this question and if there were nothing you'd still be complaining. So lest lest you complain about the length of this introduction let me turn this over to Rebecca Goldstein. Thank you thank you so much for that. I do use it was just as you know weird and wonderful. Religion does the day you read an atheist novel and the rabbi introduces right. That's that's a second fiddle. This isn't all about the latest of the latest installment in the long running debate between religion and science faith and reason. It's about a guy named Kathy Seltzer who's a psychologist of religion and who hits the big time when he publishes a book called

The Varieties of Religious illusion. He actually has a rather nuanced view of religion but the nuances get lost because of that appendix that he attaches to the and that and that I very conveniently attach to the end of my book is these 436 arguments for the existence of God with three bottles. I think those are far more arguments than I've ever been assembled before the all the classic ones but a lot that Cass thought himself and. One of the reasons he attaches this to his book is that it's his contention that showing the fallacies in the arguments for these instance of God is not going to make a lot of difference in the life of believers it's not going to make much difference in the felt qualities of religious experiences. I'm one of the nuances and cast his view is that the

religious impulse is so rooted in human nature that it erupts even very secular settings it's not just in religion that we find the complexities of the religious experience but all over in academia as well in the sacred halls of the academy as well. And so for example there is caste Seltzer's. Dissertation advisor back when he was a graduate student in his 20s mentor and tormentor whose name is Jonas Clapper and who is the extreme distinguished professor of faith literature and values. He's the only one in his department which is very good because he can't get along with any of his colleagues and he has some suspiciously messianic obsessions. There is an anthropologists name Rose Margolis who is a former

girlfriend of Cass's and who erupts into his contemporary life and she's on a quest for him or immortality through biochemistry. And she is a her Amazonian hunter gatherers have christened her with a name that means in their language a whole lot of woman and she is and. And then there's a very small mathematical genius who is in fact the heart of the book his name is Arya and he is the only son of the Grand Rabbi of his sect of Hasidic Judaism and he's destined as the only son to be grand rabbi himself. And he sees the numbers and he thinks of them as you know he thinks they are. He knows they are angels but most of all there is. There's casts. I'm going to read to you of

brutally condensed version of the much longer first chapter. The first chapter is called The argument from the improbable self. All of the chapters and there are 36 have arguments have titles like The argument from Dapple things or the argument from strange laughter. Well this one and you can try to figure out why this is called The argument from the improbable self. Something shifted something so immense You could call it the world. Call it the world. The world shifted catching lots of smart people off guard churning out issues you had thought had settled forever beneath the earth's crust. The more sophisticated you are the more annotated your mental life the more taken aback you're likely to feel seeing what the world's lurch has brought to light. Thrusting up beliefs and desires you would assume belong to an earlier

stage of human development. What is this stuff us what another. And how can it still be kicking around given how much we already know. It looks like the kind of relics that archaeologists dig up and dust off speculating about the beliefs that once had animated them to the best that they can be reconstructed gone as they are now those thrashings of proto rationality and mythical magical hypothesizing and nearly forgotten. Now it's all gone and forgotten. And mines that have better things to think about have to divert precious neuronal resources to figuring out how to knock some sense back into the species. It's a tiresome proposition having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again. But it's happened on your watch. You ought to have sent up a balloon now and then to get a read on the prevailing cognitive conditions. The

thinks watching out for the think nots. Now you've gone and lets the stockpiling of fallacies reach dangerous levels and the massed weapons of a logic are threatening the survivability of the globe. None of this is particularly good for the world but it has been good for CAS seltzer. That's what he's thinking at this moment gazing down at the frozen river. And regarding the improbable swerve his life has lately take him. He's thinking his life has gotten better because the world has gone bonkers. He's thinking zealots proliferate and seltzer prospers. It's 4am and cast Seltzer is standing on week's bridge the graceful arc that spans the Charles River near Harvard University. Staring down at the river below which is in the rigor mortis of late February in New England the whole of this state is deserted beyond vacancy. Deserted in the way of being

inhospitable to human life. There's not a car passing on Memorial Drive and the elegant river dorms are dark and silent hulks the most hyperkinetic of undergraduates so deeded to purring girls and boys. It's not like seltzer to be out in the middle of an icy night lost in thought while losing sensation in his extremities. Excitement had gotten the better of him. He had lain in his bed for hours mind racing until he gave up and crawled out from under the Lux comforter that his girlfriend Lucinda Mandelbaum had brought with her when she moved in with him at the end of June. This comforter has pockets for the hands and feet and a softness that's the result of impregnation with aloe vera. As a man Cass had been skeptical but he's become a begrudging believer in Lucinda's comforter and in her temper Pete a pillow too suffused with the fragrance of her coconut shampoo

making it all the more remarkable that he for sake his bit for this no man Stretch a frigid night rummaging in the front closet for some extra protection he had pulled out a long forgotten the tricolor scarf that his ex-wife Pascal had learned to knit for him during the four months when she was recovering from aphasia. For months that it produced among other shockers an excessively long French flag of a wool scarf which he wound seven and a half times around his neck before heading out into the dark to deal with the rush in his head. Lucinda's away tonight away for the entire bleak week to come. Cass is missing Lucinda in his bones missing her in the marrow that's presently crystallizing into ice. She's in warmer climes at a conference in Santa Barbara. None Nash equilibria in zero sum games. Among these equilibria is one

that's called the Mandelbaum equilibrium and it's Cass's ambition to have the Mandelbaum equilibrium mastered by the time he picks her up from the airport on Friday. Technically Lucinda is a psychologist like Cass only not like Hass at all. Her work is so mathematical that almost no one would suspect it has anything to do with mental life. Cats on the other hand is about as far away on the continuum as you can get and still be in the same field. He's so far away that he's needy in the swampy humanities for close to two decades. Cass Seltzer has all but oh and the psychology of religion. But only because nobody else wanted it. Not own. Not anyone with the smarts to do academic research in psychology and the ambition to follow through. It had been impossible to get grants in the prestigious journals would return his manuscripts without sending them out for peer review.

The undergraduates crowded his courses but that counted. If anything as a strike against him in his department. But now things had happened. Fundamental and fundamentalist things and religion as a phenomenon is on everybody's mind. And among all the changes that religion's new towering profile has wrought in the world which are mostly alarming if not downright terrifying is the transformation in the life of one Cass seltzer. First to come the book which he hadn't titled The Varieties of Religious allusion a nod to both William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience and Sigmund Freud's the future of an illusion. This book had brought CAS an indecent amount of attention. Time magazine and a cover story on the so-called new atheists had singled him out as the only one among them who seems to have any idea of what it feels like to be a believer.

To quote a right of religious allusions from the standpoint of the regretfully disillusioned unquote and had ended by dubbing him the atheists with a soul. I think that's when the magazine came out. Cass is a literary agent sigh Auerbach called to congratulate him. Now that you're famous he said even I might have to take you seriously next to come the girl although that designation hardly does justice to the situation. Not when the situation stands for the likes of Lucinda Mandelbaum known in her world as the goddess of game theory. Lucinda is pure and simple a wondrous creature with adoration her due and Cass's vocation. And now only today as if his cup weren't already gushing over had come a letter from Harvard laying out its intention of

luring him away from Frankfurter University located in nearby Wheaton Massachusetts. About 12 miles up river from where Cass is standing right now. After all that has happened to CAS over the course of this past year he's surprised at the degree of Adha lation he feels at the letter bearing the insignia of Vera toss. But he's an academic his sense of success and failure ultimately determined by the Academy's utilities to use the language of Lucinda's hands. And Harvard counts as the maximum utility. Katz has a letter on him right now with zippered into an inside pocket of his parka insulating him against the cold. Pascal's absurd scarf mumming him up to his rimless glasses he hadn't thought much about where he would go at this hour and it headed straight for Herbert square and then down to the river and then up on to week's bridge dead center which seems to be the

spot that he'd been seeking. The night is so cold that everything seems to have been stripped bare of superfluous existence reduced to the purity of abstraction. Cas has the distinct impression that he can see better in the sharpened air that the cold is counteracting the near-sightedness that has had him wearing glasses since he was 12. He takes them off and of course can't see a thing. I can barely see past the Nimbus phantom of his own breath. But then he stares harder and he seems that he can see better that the world has slid into sharper focus. It's only now with his glasses that he catches sight of the spectacle that the extreme cold has created in the river below. Frozen solid except where it's forced through the three arches of the bridges substructure creating an effect that could reasonably be called Sublime. And in the Conti and sense not cozily beautiful but

touched by a metaphysical chill the quickening water has sculpted three immense and perfect arches into the solid ice soaring 50 or 60 feet to the seas sublime almost as if by design standing dead center on week's bridge in the dead of winter in the dead of night staring down at the sublime formation. Cass is contemplating the strange thing that his life has become to him. His life has become strange to him. He feels as if he's wearing somebody else's coat grabbed in a hurry from the bed in the spare bedroom after a boozy party. He's walking around in someone else's bespoke cashmere. Well that guy's got Cass's hooded parka and only cast seems to have noticed the switch. What has happened is that Cass Seltzer has become an intellectual celebrity. He's become

famous for his abstract ideas and not just any old abstract ideas but atheists abstract ideas which makes him according to some of the latest polls a spokesperson for the most distrusted minority in America the one that most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry. This is a fact. Studies have found that a large proportion of Americans rate atheists below Muslims recent immigrants gays Jews and communists and quote sharing their vision of American society. Atheists the researchers reporters seem to be playing the pariah role once assigned to Catholics Jews and Communists seen as harboring alien and subversive that are more likely as as having no inner values at all and therefore likely to be criminals rapists and wild eyed drug addicts as if as cast often finds himself saying into microphones. The only

reason to live morally is fear of getting caught and being spanked by The Heavenly Father. The atheists with a soul cast always smiles at the absurdity of the phrase but which is the more absurd element. The truth is and what's the good of a man contemplating any humanly frozen world at 4am if no truthtelling ensues. That CAS is somewhat at a loss to account for what he's done. How do you explain those 36 arguments for the existence of God. See Appendix all of them formally constructed in the preferred analytic style premises parading with military precision in every shirking pre-supposition and sketchy implication forced out into the open and subjected to rigorous inspection. Cas It started out with all the standard arguments for God's existence. The ones discussed in philosophy classes and textbooks. The Cosmological Argument number one. The

Ontological Argument number two the classical teleological argument number three a the arguments from miracles moral truths and mysticism numbers 11 16 and 22 respectively. Paul Scholes wager number 31 and William James's argument from pragmatism number 30 true. He had also analyzed the new batch of arguments recently whipped up by the Intelligent Design crowd to wit. The argument for irreducible complexity. Number three be the argument from the paucity of the nine mutations Number Three see the argument from the original replicator number three. The argument from the Big Bang number for the argument from the fine tuning of the physical constants. Number 5 and the argument from the hard problem of consciousness. Number 12. But then he had gone beyond these two attempting to polish up into genuine arguments. Those religious intuitions and emotions that are often powerfully evocative but to sub

syllogistic to be regarded as actual arguments. He tried to capture under the net of analytic reason those fleeting shadows cast by unseen things darting through the thick foliage of the religious sensibility. So Cass had formulated the argument from cosmic coincidences number seven appealing to such facts as these that the diameter of the moon as seen from the earth is the same as the diameter of the sun as seen from the earth. Which is why we could have those spectacular eclipses when the corona of the sun is revealed in all its glory. He had formulated the argument from sublimity number 34 trying to capture the line of reasoning lurking behind for example the recent testament of an evangelical scientists who had felt his religious doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall.

In fact a trinity of a frozen water fall with three parts to it. For the right observer caste supposed the sublime trinity of Arches etched out in the Charles River below might yield a similar epic Phinney. And then there's the argument from the improbable self. Number 13 Cassatt struggled to squeeze precision into the sense of paradox that he knows too well the flailing attempt to calm the inside outside vertigo to which he's given trying to construct something semi coherent beneath that for to genius step outside himself. That would result from his staring too long at the improbable fact of his being identical with himself as somebody. Hasn't experienced this particular kind of metaphysical seizure for himself and it's hard to find the words to give a sense of what it's like. Cass had experienced it as a boy lying in bed and thinking his way into the sense

of the strangeness of being just this. Cass had the lower bunk bed. Both he and Jessie his younger brother had wanted the higher bunk but as usual Jessie had wanted what he wanted so much more than Cass had wanted it with a fury of need that was exhausting just to watch that. Cas had let it go lie in their wake in his lower bunk cast with think about being himself rather than being Jessie. There was Jessie. And here was Cass. But if someone were looking at the two of them Jessie there Cass here. How could that observer tell that he Cass was CAS here and not Jesse there. It got switched on them everything the same about them the bodies and memories and sense of self and everything else. Only now he was Jesse here and there was CAS there. How would anybody know. How would he know. How

would Jesse. Maybe a switch had already happened maybe it happened again and again and how could anybody tell. And the longer he tried to get a fix on the fact of being CAS here the more the whole idea of it just got away from him. If you tried long enough to grasp it then he could get the effect of being casts here to blank out of existence and then come dribbling weakly back in like a fluorescent fixture flickering on and off toward death. He would get the sense of having been shot outside himself and now was someone who was regarding his being cast seltzer as something like his being in the sixth grade just something about him that happened to be true. Who was that other that he was who was regarding his being cast seltzer as if he didn't have to be cast out sir. The sense of getting is induced in these exercises could be a bit too overwhelming for a kid in a lower bunk bed. It could

be a bit overwhelming still here. Cas is saying standing on Weekes bridge and talking aloud into the sublimely indifferent night. Cas knows he needs to tamp down his tendencies toward the transcendent. It isn't becoming in America's favorite atheists who is at this moment to cast Seltzer who is somehow or other just this here. Here I have. How could it be that of all things One is this thing so that one can say a stronger shingly in the right frame of mind it is astonishing with a metaphysical chill blowing in from a far. Here I have. When you force yourself to think in formal reconstructions when you didn't catch these moments of ravishment under the lens of premises and conclusions when you didn't impale them and label them like so many splayed butterflies bleeding

the transcendental blow right out of them then what. It's hard at a time like this to resist the shameful narcissistic appeal of reasonings like the argument from personal coincidences number 8 and the argument from Answered prayers number nine and the argument from a Wonderful Life. Number 10. William James had rebuked the scoundrel logic that calculates Divine Providence from one's own little goodie bag of games and Cas couldn't agree more with the spirit of James. But here it is his bulging goody bag and call him a scoundrel for feeling personally grateful to the universe when at this same moment that he's standing on week's bridge and tossing hosannas out into the infinite universe there are multitudes of others whose lives are painfully constricting with misfortunes that are just as arbitrary and undeserved as his own expansive good luck. But cast Seltzer does feel grateful. At moments like this could cats altogether

withstand the sense that hard to put it into words the sense that the universe is personal that there is something personal that grounds existence in order and value and purpose and meaning and that the grandeur of this personal universe has somehow infiltrated and is expanding his own small person bringing his littleness more into line with its grandeur that the personal universe has been personally kind to him gracious and forgiving to cast Seltzer gratuitously exorbitantly to finally kind and this despite Cass's having with callowness and shallowness of forethought their own spitballs of the whole idea of cosmic intentionality. You know that doesn't capture it either those words are far too narrowed by Cass's own particular life one. What it is he could feel has felt might even be feeling now has nothing to do with the contents of Cass's existence but rather with existence itself.

This this what. This expansion out into the world which is a kind of love he supposes a love for the whole of existence that could so easily well up in castles are at this moment standing here in the pure abstractions of this night and contemplating the strange this ness of his life when viewed specular a turn a TARDIS that is to say from the vantage point of eternity which comes so highly recommended to us by Spinoza. Here it is then the sense that existence is just such a tremendous thing. One comes into it astonishingly here one is formed by biology and history genes and culture in the midst of the contingency of the world. Here one is one doesn't know how one doesn't know why and suddenly one doesn't know where one is either or who or what one is by there and hope that one knows is that one is a part of it. Sitter 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 intricacies of it and one wants to live in a way that at least begins to do justice to it one wants to expand one's reach of it as far as expansion is possible and even beyond that to live one's life in a way commensurate with the privilege of being a part of and conscious of the whole real being glorious infinite sweep a sweep that includes so improbably a psychologist of religion named Cass Seltzer who moved by Paris beyond himself did something more improbable than all the improbabilities constituting his improbable existence could have entailed. Did something that won him someone else's life a better life a more brilliant life a life beyond all the ones he had wished for in the pounding obscurity of all his yearnings. Because all of this. Yes. This couldn't belong to him to the man who stands on week's

bridge wrapped around in a scarf his once beloved ex-wife puss ball had knit for him for some necessary reason that he would never know perhaps to offer him some protection against the desolation she knew would soon be his and was but is no longer suspended here above sublimity his cheeks aflame with either euphoria or frostbite. A letter in his zippered pocket with the Im pretty much sure Vera tossed and a Lucinda Mandelbaum with whom to share it all. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. If you read the appendix you'll see in fact that there are more than thirty six arguments. I had a group of them because they had to be 36 so there are many teleological arguments there's the classical teleological arguments but then there's all the spin offs and I had to do some fancy numbering because of course it had to be 36 there's all there are there's a lot of religious symbolism through

out this. And not only was I did I know that they were of the thirty six The lama involved next for the sake of whom God does not destroy the world but as a little girl well into my adolescence I was convinced my father was one of them. So yes. Double high as well. Yes of course in Hebrew letters are represented by numbers are represented by the letters and so the letter the number the way you represent 18. Good is also the word for life and which is of course of the greatest value in Judaism. And so the sanctity of life and so 18 is a very very special number and twice is 36. So girdle Godel was believed that the ontological argument which is number two in my appendix could be worked up so that it

could avoid what seems to be its fatal flaw pointed out by Emmanuel Conte. It's all in the appendix. And in particular there is. There's Number 35 of my actually number 36 is the argument from the abundance of arguments. But number 35 is my favorite argument and that's the argument for Spinoza's God. The problem with that argument is if it's as if it's a valid argument it falsifies all the other arguments. But there is a way in which that argument takes into account good old New ontological arguments so yes. Yes when Sir Isaac Newton had said that. Rising Newton was a very religious man as many scientists have been very religious and

said that God's continual input into creation keeps the world going. And you know one could say that science has developed a good way since Sir Isaac Newton. I was you know it Sir Isaac Newton lived in the 17th century and had much to do with the foundations laying down the foundations of science the laws of nature in and of themselves don't explain why they were something rather than nothing so it's certainly possible. But I would say here here's Cass's argument and it would be for it. It's not just science itself. Here's how Cass's argument goes. And it's a three pronged argument. And I pretty much agree with him. It's that first you look at the arguments for God's existence and see if any

of them are valid after all in the absence of good reasons to believe in the existence of something then you know usually we don't believe in something we believe in the thing known as Ockham's Razor you need good grounds in order to believe that something exists. So you look at the arguments and you see if they're there. They really hold up. He thinks they don't. He tried he tries to go through each one and point out what the fallacy is. That doesn't prove that God doesn't exist it just means that we have and prove God's existence. Even that doesn't prove that God doesn't exist. Next step in his argument is that. The biological science and sciences and in particular psychology has gone through a fery great expanse in its reach in recent decades and has begun to be able to offer us reasons for why we might be highly inclined to believe in the existence of God even if there is no evidence forthcoming.

So his arguments he's a psychologist's of religion he's particularly influenced by evolutionary psychology but he is he feels that that branch in science not not physics but but the new behavioral sciences are offering us ways of explaining our great tendency to believe and Kat's things this tendency is so strong and so multifaceted it comes from so many different directions that as I said it's not only confined to religion and third and for him for seltzer This is the third prong and the most important aspect of the argument and it could stand on its own it doesn't even need the other two aspects of it is the nature of the world the world that we observe around us and he argues this very strongly he has a debate with a theist. At Memorial Church there is a showdown in Memorial Church and the two of them debate and seltzer the.

Torturous logic the mental gymnastics known as the odyssey that you have to go through in order to reconcile the nature of this world with all of its suffering the excessive suffering of innocents. And you don't need any more demonstration of this. It's all very vivid before our minds right now. The nature of that world to try to reconcile it with the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob the God of the three great monotheistic religions is is just to him it it's it's too hard. And so those three prongs together the arguments don't work we have a way of explaining. Nevertheless why we have such a tendency to believe. And three of the just the empirical nature of the world with all its suffering. That's why he's an atheist it's not on the basis of the laws of nature the laws of

nature don't explain themselves. That's a very long answer. Yes well actually I your we could question can be answered. I have a blurb from Christopher Hitchens. You know one of those rare things they don't exist very often he doesn't give out blurbs very often. Richard Dawkins's has read the book and is going to use it in his next debate. The appendix is very handy when you're. And. Yeah. And Dan Dan it you know they they have they've already had and they have a they like it but interesting only enough at the Templeton Foundation you know had organized and they were interested in reconciling religion and science or in the big questions as they put it now and they had organized a dinner around the book a dinner salon and had invited you know a bunch of New York thinkers columnists heavy duty doods

and they some were believers and some not. And it was really interesting. I mean I try to keep quiet because they are wonderful. What was interesting was that those who were religious saw this as an affirmation of the religious impulse. You know in Cass's spiritual experience he clearly has spiritual experiences. But even other things you know they feel they found an affirmation of religiosity. And the atheists you know certainly not you know Dawkins which of course Christopher would not have like my book. So this is the wonderful thing about fiction because everybody brings their own experience to it. And it's you know and reads it with a different orientation I mean that's why I turn to fiction away from philosophy and train of loss I sometimes write philosophy but fiction is this way of being able to get into the these different orientations toward reality that go so

very deep you know that there is almost as if you're talking you're not you're talking past each other. And I wanted to get at that here but it is it is from a cast is Jewish. And you know it's Arya this this boy who really demonstrates in many ways. That religion is about far more than the belief in God. And maybe you feel this more when you're Jewish than Christian I don't know but that the arguments for God's existence are pretty much beside the point. When you're when you're Jewish and this little boy really demonstrates this but but I think that that is universally true. I mean I took issue with one review in particular. She's been quite nice but when you know that we know is in this odd that it's from a Jewish point of view that is like me isn't it odd that when Dusty wrote about the controversy between religion and science he wrote about the Orthodox

Church I mean isn't that odd. No you pick. That's the thing about writing a novel you don't write about religion in general home. How does a novel portray. You know novelists portray that there's no such thing as religion in general there is particular religions and I actually think that Judaism which started this whole thing much of the film is is not an arbitrary choice even. It's also the one that I know most intimately but it's not arbitrary either. But there are psychologists of religion you know and it's especially you know people who are trying to put forth evolutionary psychological explanations and then how certain aspects of these beliefs had survival values or are continuations are extensions of beliefs that have survival value. So you know just for example are

hypothesizing about causes which is you know the origin of science and everything you know is has great survival value and religion part of religion is an extension of that kind of reasoning trying to extend causal reasoning beyond. There's also have been very interesting things written I know Paul Bloom evolutionary psychologist has written on the evolutionarily supported tendency for us to believe in dualism that we are not just bodies but that we're bodies and souls and this this sense emerges very early on in children I actually remember when my oldest daughter was a little kid and she was like

me she talked with her hands and I she was always. And so we were sitting at the dinner table and there was always something was being spilled but she was always talking and she you know knocked over a glass of something or other and then she said look at what my body did. And I said you didn't do it. No no I didn't. My body did it and you know by which she meant you know it wasn't intentional she didn't mean to do this thing. But you know I pursued it with her more as she was about two and a half and sure enough she was a dualist. She was a you know and so it these things that emerge and there are psychologists who are explaining these sorts of things that you find there you find it in religion all together supported by by by psychology. I don't know if Harvard has one. They do have evolutionary psychologists. Yeah. I mean what he's not it's not middle ground in the sense that he's wishy washy about the existence of God.

Yes. You're not a gnostic he really but he is. I mean one of the things that I was interested in doing in the sixth and that's book is just present godless spiritual experience you know that the notion that if you don't you know believe in God that you're not capable of this expansive you know world affirming ecstatic transcendent experience is it's a terrible belittlement of. Of all the godless I think and so it was very important for me to show him that we don't know that it's a it's a position and I mean it just as a truth it's a truth we have this capacity psychological Congo's wide for being able you know to get outside of ourselves in this you know ecstatic way that's what the word ecstasy means to stand beside to stand beside what yourself you know

and from the Greek they had it big time. We have it all. You know math can do it science can do it art can do it music can do it. And it often finds it it's very natural for it to take religious expression. But the experience itself you need not be a religious one it can be a religious one and that's the language that comes most naturally. But Cass resists that language. His intellectual integrity leads him to resist the religious language but the experience I think I think is universal. I think you know I think everybody who's been touched by things you know greater than themselves and have felt that expansion out into the world what Spinoza the godless Spinoza called intellectual love of God they are to the you know the language that comes most naturally is God language but it's not intrinsically. A religious experience a candy but it needn't be

so if that's a middle ground. I think it's just being true to psychology to human psychology. I'm a Spinoza sed. Yeah you know when Einstein was asked. He was saying some things that were making people a little nervous about what you know whether he believed in God and he got a telegram from a rabbi who happened to be named Goldstein Rabbi Goldstein sent him a telegram saying Do you believe in God. And Einstein very cannily wrote back I believe in Spinoza's God. And you know it's like OK you're not an atheist but in fact Spinoza's God is you know it's not a transcendent God it's it's the world itself it's what I show casts reveling in it various times I mean he's always slipping off into this even when he's in Memorial Church and he's supposed to be keeping his mind on debating this for a middle bowl Fiesta opponent. He starts slipping away. X to say has to call him self back you know. So he's he's very

given to that sort of thing as a mom. So yes. Anyway thank you and I would be very happy to sign books. Thank you. Thank you.