36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction 1st Edition by Rebecca Goldstein (PDF)

Description

From the author of The Mind-Body Problem: a witty and intoxicating novel of ideas that plunges into the great debate between faith and reason. At the center is Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise best seller. Dubbed “the atheist with a soul,” he wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum—“the goddess of game theory.” But he is haunted by reminders of two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his teacher Jonas Elijah Klapper, a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism, and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius, heir to the leadership of an exotic Hasidic sect. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and intellectually captivating, 36 Arguments explores the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐As you read this novel, you are compelled to continue in order to see what kind of climax it’s working up to. But in the end, the climax, the Final Debate, can only disappoint. Both sides of the God debate are sophomoric (pro: without God, there is no purpose; con: look at all the suffering in the world), the kind of debate you could see happening in any reasonably intelligent high school church group. This is disappointing because the two characters in the debate are billed as academic superstars who might even settle the question once and for all. One of them is the novel’s main character, who has been billed as “the atheist with a soul” because of his blockbuster book that not only shook academia to the ground but also attracted a gigantic public following due to the mightiness of its sophistication. Then he comes out looking like a juvenile in the debate of his career. We expected more of Cass. We were expecting to see something of his book in this penultimate scene, the book that so far has been characterized as the greatest thing ever written, the thing that got him hired at Harvard and built for him a financial fortune. We expect to hear him draw upon the insights of his paradigm busting book, and we do, and this is it: How can there be a God with so much suffering in the world? Even worse, the top-of-the-heap academic hyper-sophisticated Harvard audience members love and praise him for it, as though they had never heard this argument before.Another reason you expect the novel to turn out better is that the author is more compelling than any of her characters. Any of her side issues that come and go throughout the story is far more sophisticated than her characters turn out to be. (e.g. the issue of personal identity, luck of the draw, “just-this-ness, me-here-you-there” that inhabits anyone’s biography) Since many of these ponderings are presented via the mind of Cass the superstar and conversations he has with other characters, even to the point where these ponderings originally occurred to him during childhood, it’s not hard to imagine that his magnum opus would delight and enthrall with the subtlety of a Wittgenstein or Shakespeare, but no: In the end, he is ordinary, as though Rebecca Goldstein has suddenly become jealous of him and doesn’t want him to steal the thunder of HER book.Another reason for our high expectation: the author is a superb writer in all respects. I wish I could write as well. And anyone inclined toward higher education will enjoy the academic references in the same manner that readers of literary fiction enjoy literary references. Familiarity with Jewish mysticism will help even more than a background in academia. This is a smart novel that presents presumably smart people. It’s just that the author is smarter than her characters. Cass isn’t the only character to have achieved fame by traveling in cliches. One of his favorite girlfriends has become famous for laying out the deductive options in an elementary problem in rational choice theory, again as though nobody in the wide wide world of scholarship has ever imagined such a thing.Speaking of girlfriends, all of Cass’s women have pretty much the same personality. He even meets two of them via the same process of one, then the other, happening to sit next to him at somebody’s lecture and making quips about the presenter. Their interaction style reminded me of the Ali MacGraw character in Love Story (“Hey, Preppy”), while sometimes the interaction comes off with the “I am in awe” manner of roommates in the Harrad Experiment.More generally, most of the discussion between characters are of the same high-quality academic ilk, full of references, innuendo, sarcasm, irony, self-conscious deliberation about having to footnote one’s talk. They don’t seem to have ordinary conversations. Such people exist, or try to. You may have known some in graduate school. In fact the culture of graduate school inhabits this novel, and in certain respects the author captures it beautifully. But that’s not the ONLY way real people talk, no matter HOW infatuated they’ve become with themselves as too sophisticated to mix with the rabble or watch TV.An aside that I’m not sure what to make of: The novel has an appendix with the same title as the novel itself. In this appendix, thirty-six arguments for the existence of God are presented and refuted. They all have titles, they are all presented as quasi-deductive arguments while the refutations show why some of the postulates or transitional deductions are fallacious (actually, a lot of them are inductive leaps). Some of the arguments are actually classical arguments with attribution, some are quaint and novel, and some are silly. As an informative piece, the appendix beats the novel. But here are the odd parts: a) The novel itself has thirty-six chapter’s each naming an argument for the existence of God. Usually there is no reason at all for seeing any of these chapters as an argument, much less an argument for the existence of God, and the chapter titles have nothing to do with the titles of the thirty-six arguments in the appendix. There is no relationship between the thirty-six arguments named in the novel and the thirty-six named in the appendix. Why did the author do this? If there is something I’m missing, I’d like to know what it is. b) Cass’s fictitious book inside the novel reportedly has the same appendix as Goldstein’s novel. There is some intimation in the novel that Cass’s appendix has nothing apparently to do with his book and that some people like the appendix better than the book. What in Rebecca Goldstein is going on here? Again, if someone knows, please tell me. Happily the appendix makes itself relevant in the Final Debate, where Cass studies it in preparation and consults with it during the debate in an effort to categorize his opponent’s arguments into various combination of the already refuted arguments in the appendix so that he’ll know what to say in response to his opponent.Finally, you’d think that somebody at Harvard would know that “faith” isn’t the only foundation for belief in Science or in Religion or in anything at all. While it’s true that the foundation for belief in Science cannot itself be scientific, anymore than the foundation for belief in Christianity can itself be Christian, Goldstein seems to think, along with Cass’s counterpart in the debate, that the only thing left to explain any of this is rugged faith, a decidedly psychological concept (Cass is a psychologist) relating to belief without reason. Why do you believe something? You just do, maybe because it’s useful. But there are other accounts missing throughout novel: cultural reasons, social reasons, membership affiliation reasons, all having to do with ongoing participation in ritual practices which make the objects of group faith objectively on display and virtually compelling for each and every fully embodied participant. Cass should know this. He is, after all, a participant in some very weird stuff.

⭐36 Arguments for the Existence of God is a high-powered, versatile, off road vehicle of a book, and author Rebecca Goldstein uses this literary SUV to take the reader on a mental safari down philosophical/theological pathways that bypass the traditional highways of human thought.Propelled to both fame and fortune by the publication of his book The Varieties of Religious Illusion, the life story of protagonist Cass Seltzer powers this scintillating, if erratic, exploration of the human experience of transcendence.The book makes some intellectual demands on its reader. If 36 Arguments was a college course instead of a book (and in many ways it more than equals a college course), the catalogue would read: “Student must either be, or aspire to be, a polymath. Student must either own an Oxford Dictionary, or have a vocabulary extensive enough such that the student thinks the use of the word `erudite’ is mundane. Student must have the intellectual flexibility to embrace concepts such as `an atheist with a soul’.”The major theme: Goldstein never doubts that humans are widely capable of falling/rising into a state of ecstatic transcendence. What she explores is whether such transcendence is any proof of contact with the divine, rather than a mental state, a mental state that anything from drugs/alcohol, to hypoglycemia, to hypoxia, to marked mental excitation, can induce. In an eerie and powerful presentation of her argument Goldstein writes a scene in which a 6 year old Hasidic prodigy named Azarya delivers a sermon to the assembled Hasidim of his community. Azarya refers to numbers as “maloychim” (angels), and goes on to prove that the number of “prime angels” (prime numbers) is infinite. Azarya proclaims this proof to the Hasidim, who writhe in religious ecstasy as they revel in a sense of infinite numbers of “angels” coming down from heaven. Cass Seltzer, the non-believer guest who is also present during this event, reacts this way “The room is reeling for Cass with Azarya’s angels, beating their furious wings of diaphanous flames” and in parallel with the religious ecstasy of the Hasidim, Cass finds “his face was as wet with tears as any in the room, his trance as deep and ecstatic as that of any Hasid leaping into dance”. The Hasidim are convinced that the source of their ecstasy is the experience of the divine, while non-believer Cass would be more likely to describe his experience as being rooted in “the fraught silence of billions of agitated neurons soundlessly firing”, firing in those parts of the brain that also light up when we hear beautiful music, watch a thundering waterfall, or hold a newborn child for the first time.The vocabulary in 36 Arguments is rich, including words such as metonymous, cantillated, quadronymous, epicerastic, decanal, and pareidolia. Goldstein’s use of word the pareidolia is not accidental, it is near the center of one of her themes: humans form patterns where they do not exist, be they in the clouds above us, the vagaries of the stock market, or the events of daily life. Goldstein, and I suspect her husband Stephen Pinker as well, would make a strong argument that we are hard-wired to do pattern recognition, an evolutionary trait strongly associated with the ability to adapt to the environment that we live in. It’s an excellent trait, when it keeps us from going out into a blizzard or going down a dark alley. It might not be so useful when overuse of pattern recognition leads us to see the face of Jesus in water-stained wallpaper or the cheese patty on our burger, or digitus Dei in a tornado or tsunami.Will this book change the minds of any believers? Maybe a few. But consider the line “They had tried to capture under the net of analytic reason those fleeting shadows cast by unseen winged things darting through the thick foliage of religious sensibility.” My guess is that no hunter, no matter how powerful her/his intellectual weaponry, will bring down all those “winged things”. What is a bit different here is Goldstein’s use of Azyra to whisper to the heart, rather than simply use a cannonade of logic.Goldstein herself is probably the “atheist with a soul” often referred to in the book. Though Goldstein appears to be firmly committed to the neuronal basis of the phenomenon of consciousness, she loses none of her appreciation for the beauty of music, words, or poetry, captured strikingly in a passage in which the protagonist sees his sleeping lover: “He saw the fragility within the fanger, the willed boldness and gumption of this brave and wonderful girl. He saw the dappledness of her. Glory be to God for dappled things, he silently quoted his second favorite poet.”Weaknesses? Jonas Klapper, a major character in young Cass’s life, has a descent into intellectual incomprehensibility that is done in far more detail than needed, inducing the feeling that one has when wading through Umberto Ecco’s book Foucoult’s Pendulum. Characters are occasionally straw men/women, such as the man that Cass goes up against in a formal debate about the existence of God. The climactic debate itself is a bit stodgy, lacking the crackle and fire of much of the rest of the book.What is the conclusion to this artful, patchy, engaging tale that throws off incandescent, if occasionally spluttering, showers of brilliant sparks? Goldstein invites the reader to acknowledge that the human brain is not evolved, not fit in its primate design, to understand everything, and we must accept “the brutality of the incomprehensibility that assaults us from all sides.” What then, ought one do? Goldstein: “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?” Rabbi Hillel does receive proper attribution for this passage.The book does indeed include an Appendix in which 36 arguments for the existence of God are presented, and then disputed. Great stuff to peruse, be you a believer or not, and a fitting place to park Goldstein’s cerebral SUV at the end of its cross-country romp.

⭐Novels written largely so the author can show off their great cleverness and knowledge rarely make particularly enjoyable reading. I’ve found A.S. Byatt’s books have got increasingly boring since she began to use them as a vehicle for her own beliefs and to show off quite how widely she read (haven’t yet tackled ‘The Children’s Book’, but ‘A Whistling Woman’ was very turgid). This novel – part atheist polemic, part campus satire – falls into much the same sort of category: Goldstein appears to be writing it in part to show off her vast knowledge of such diverse subjects as game theory, Kabbala, philosophy (I wasn’t surprised to learn that she’s a philosophy professor) and Hasidic Jewish customs, and in part to remind her readers that believing in a God is Probably A Very Silly Thing To Do. Bearing in mind that Goldstein is a former Orthodox Jew who converted to atheism with passion in her twenties, her view is inevitably rather biased.The plot of ’36 Arguments for the Existence of God’ centres around Cass Selzer, a 42-year-old academic working at a reasonably prestigious, second-rank US university called Frankfurter (a bit like calling a university Hamburger), modelled on Brandeis. After years of dutiful teaching and research, Cass has become an overnight success, dubbed ‘The atheist with a soul’ for his book ‘Varieties of Religious Illusion’ (title says it all, really). His Head of Department starts talking about special favours, Harvard beckons… and Cass’s success causes some tension between him and his high-achieving Game Theoretician girlfriend Lucinda Mandelbaum, who’s been demoted via promotion from Princeton to Frankfurter and feels that life is Not Fair for someone of her brilliance. And it’s not the first time that Cass has had women problems – after all, his ‘lupine’ wife Pascale Puissant (which translates as ‘Pascale Powerful’), a French poetess, left him unexpectedly after falling into a fit and then falling in love with her neurologist. Luckily his ex-girlfriend Roz Margolis is around to support him prior to his Great Debate at Harvard with a believer on the nature of God, and to offer some interesting ideas about how humanity can make itself immortal. Not only this, but Roz provides a useful link back to the second narrative strand of the story – Cass’s student days as a postgraduate at Frankfurter, when he fell in love with Roz and also fell under the spell of the Kabbala-loving Professor Jonas Elias Klapper (born Klepfisch). This strand of the story deals with Klapper’s increasingly Messianic delusions, and with his visits with Cass to Cass’s mother’s family, who live in a small, enclosed Hassidic community called New Walden. When Cass discovers that the Chief Rabbi of New Walden’s only son Azarya is a mathematical genius, tensions begin to arise – will Azarya take over from his father as Rabbi, as intended, or follow his intellectual promptings? This forms the subject of the much briefer third strand to the story, in which the teenage Azarya has to choose between university or remaining in his community, even though he’s losing his faith.There’s some good ideas in here, and some brief passages of beautiful writing, but I never felt any of the strands in the story really went anywhere. The story about Klapper, Cass and Roz cuts out abruptly, as if the author’s just got bored with it, and we never learn whether Cass left Klapper before completing his doctorate, and if so how he managed to carve out his career in academe, what happened to Gideon, the acolyte who Klapper has heartlessly betrayed, why Cass and Roz split up – or indeed much else, other than the fact that Klapper gets even madder as time goes on. The story about the teenage Azarya had real promise but I didn’t feel a lot of it was believable – would Cass really have promised a teenage boy he hardly knew that he could live with him and his wife throughout college? – and again it cut out before the really interesting bit – Azarya’s final decision. The ‘present-day’ narrative meandered all over the place and didn’t seem to have any structure at all – other than building up to the debate which Cass (obviously) wins hands-down. I didn’t feel that Goldstein examined the whole Cass-Roz-Lucinda love triangle with much perceptiveness or intelligence, Lucinda’s actions in the final section were ridiculously over the top, and Roz’s Immortality Foundation just sounded plain stupid, particularly for such an intelligent woman. Plus I got tired of the fact that all the women always wore designer clothes, were fabulously beautiful and intelligent etc etc – when in fact they came across as plain smug and often pretentious.Nor did I feel the religious side of things was well explored. The ‘Great Debate’ in the final chapters didn’t really take into account the emotional aspects or the transcendental qualities of faith – Goldstein appeared to believe that the ‘leap of faith’ that most believers claim you have to take didn’t exist, and that all believers are convinced that they are right purely through reason. It was interesting that no faiths other than Judaism or Christianity were ever discussed. Like a lot of atheist writers writing about God, Goldstein deliberately hampered the religious side of the argument by making her apologists for religion mostly cranks and hysterics, and her atheists all super-cool, super-attractive and reasonable. This is unrealistic and actually – whether you believe or not – quite offensive. And though Cass was dubbed ‘the atheist with a soul’ he didn’t seem – other than a few bits of marvelling at the beauty of weather or music – to have much insight into why people might need or want faith. Essentially I felt Goldstein’s argument was very one-sided, which made the book feel more like propaganda than a novel.It’s also, unfortunately, not nearly as funny or as atmospheric as it thinks it is. I think Goldstein means her reader to recognize why Cass finds Klapper so impressive – but he actually came across to me, reading, as a complete pretentious fool (the character he resembled most closely, I felt, was A.A. Milne’s Owl in the ‘Winnie the Pooh’ stories, particularly the long words!). This means that Cass seems like a fool for trusting in him. The silly names – ‘Frankfurter’, ‘Weedham’, ‘Persnippety’ – for places weren’t amusing, and all the academic ‘in-jokes’ just seemed smug. I couldn’t work out why the novel was praised as being a great comic novel – I found the comedy far too heavy handed. And the way that the characters quoted the great philosophers over breakfast, couldn’t get through the day without a Proustian moment or its equivalent, and always had a clever quote to hand got tedious.But – taking all this into account I also have to say that Goldstein could spring the odd surprise on the reader, and write with remarkable beauty at times. Some of the scenes with the child and teenager Azarya were beautiful – particularly the one where he and the maths professor start working out ‘equations through music’ at the piano, and the early one where Roz teaches him to read English. Cass, although he came across as a bit wet for much of the time, had a certain pleasing earnestness, and the sections on Roz’s anthropological research were well written. And – to my great surprise – Goldstein suddenly pulled out of the bag a remarkably beautiful final chapter about a Jewish religious service, which seemed to throw into doubt all the earlier statements about how believing in God was essentially wrong, and which almost moved me to tears! So – there was good stuff here, and enough to make one keep reading, even among all the intellectual pretentiousness.Not a book I’d revisit, and far too pleased with itself for the most part – but I would read another book by this author.

⭐This is an unreadable book.It is another example of sentence manufacturing in a pretentious and bad way.it is tasteless.I stopped when I came across first sentence of the third story.It was lasting two pages.

⭐It’s okay. If you are new to weighing up the plausibility of God you will probably like this quite a lot. I have been on this topic for some time and found it contained little I have not already covered. I really wouldn’t bother with this if you have spent a lot of time refuting religious ideas.Also it’s from the perspective of educated people. It is not something that is easy to appreciate if you’re not a university graduate. Not that it’s complicated, it’s the style of it, which I found a bit boring. It’s not down to earth. It’s a bit floaty. I don’t know. It’s just too much ‘of a type’ for me.

⭐I picked this up at the airport out of desperation (it’s really hard to escape those chick lit books in the airport!) and was well rewarded. As other reviewers have said it is very well written: in parts an enjoyable satire on academic life and, I thought, a very thought-provoking tour through the philosophical arguments in favour of or against the existence of god (and a useful summary at the end in the oft-referred-to appendix). I read it just after I had read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and one made an interesting counterpoint to the other – different attitudes to the consideration of god. I do recommend this as well, but Gilead got 5 stars because the writing is of a different order – absolutely fantastic.

⭐This is unlike any novel I have read: it tells an interesting story while attaching each episode in the hero’s life to an argument for the existence of God, arguments that are debunked in the index at the back.Cass Seltzer, the hero, a lecturer at a Jewish university in New England, has written a non-fiction book of the same name, which has made him a media celebrity and a rich man, with an offer of a job at Harvard as a reward. The narrative switches effortlessly between the present day, as Cass waits for his beloved to return from a conference, and the past where he remembers his crazy ex wife, an ex girlfriend and, most importantly, the gloriously pompous mentor whose flaws he cannot see. When the ex girlfriend turns up unexpectedly, Cass is sent even deeper into the past and the strict Hassidic sect that he comes from.Bursting with ideas and yet as easy to read as any thriller, full or rich and vibrant characters, this is a truly original work that deserves to be widely read.

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