Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, is a clever and witty academic satire, focusing on two psychology professors. The book is highly entertaining, but also raises important psychological and philosophical issues about religious belief.
The main character in the novel is Cass Seltzer, a psychology professor who has achieved popular fame through a bestselling book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, a title that alludes to William James and Sigmund Freud. The media have dubbed Cass the "atheist with a soul" because he combines skepticism about religion with an appreciation of its psychological significance. His romantic partner, Lucinda Mandelbaum, is also a psychologist, but more hardheaded: she is known as the "goddess of game theory." One of the many funny passages in the book has Cass learning game theory and using it to figure out whether it would be rational to say "I love you" to Lucinda before she has said it to him.
Other delightful characters in the book include Cass's literary agent, Sy Auerbach, who wants to put the antic back in pedantic. Especially fascinating is the oppressively pompous literary scholar, Jonas Elijah Klapper, also known as "the klap". A major development in the book concerns a young prodigy, Azarya, who is drawn to mathematics but remains embedded in his ultra-orthodox Jewish environment.
Rebecca Goldstein knows very well all the environments - academic, literary, and religious - that she amusingly describes. She earned a PhD in philosophy from Princeton and has taught at various universities. In addition to prizewinning novels, she is author of nonfiction works on Spinoza and Godel. She is married to bestselling Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Goldstein was raised in an orthodox Jewish environment, but abandoned religion in favor of philosophy.
Goldstein's novel contains an appendix that precisely states 36 arguments for the existence of God along with sophisticated refutations of them. The 36 arguments include the standard ones such as the cosmological argument (there must be a first cause of the cosmos) and the argument from design (the universe must have had an intelligent designer). It also includes arguments that are rarely discussed by philosophers but are probably much more fundamental to most people's beliefs about religion, such as the argument from personal purpose: without God everything is meaningless. Despite her refutations of these arguments, Goldstein has retained her strong sense of the psychological significance of religion to many people.
Some current theorists have claimed that religious belief has evolutionary roots, based on a "God gene" or a "God spot" in the brain. In my book, Hot Thought, I provide an alternative explanation for religious belief, that the attractiveness of religion is a matter of emotional and explanatory coherence. Thinking of gods historically provided people both with an explanation of puzzling events such as the origins of the earth and with reassurance that things will work out. Philosophy originates not only with wonder, as Plato said, but also with anxiety about the many difficulties of life. Most reassuring of all is the guarantee provided by the most popular religions that life can survive death. Nowadays, we have alternative theories of origins and the meaning of life derived from science. In my new book, The Brain and the Meaning of Life, I argue that love, work, and play should suffice to provide all the meaning that people have historically sought from religion.
From this perspective, religion is not innate, but rather a cultural development that we might call "cognitive-emotional cheesecake". I adapt this metaphor from Steven Pinker's claim that music is not innate, but rather amounts to "auditory cheesecake". A preference for cheesecake is not innate, since cheesecake did not exist during the early stages of human development. But preferences for sugar and fat are innate, and cheesecake cleverly combines them in an appealing way. Similarly, I conjecture, religion is appealing because it combines the psychological needs for explanations and emotional reassurance. As in the case of music, much additional evidence is required to evaluate the plausibility of competing nativist and cultural explanations.
Regardless of the answers to these weighty intellectual questions, Rebecca Goldstein's new book can be read with great pleasure by anyone interested in the foibles of university life. It joins the list of the funniest academic novels that includes David Lodge's Changing Places, Richard Russo's Straight Man, and Goldstein's own The Mind-Body Problem, which begins: "I'm often asked what it's like to be married to a genius." 36 Arguments for the Existence of God will give you lots to laugh about as well as lots to think about.
