36 Arguments for the Existence of God

By Robbie on April 6, 2010

Now this blog has officially degenerated to let-me-tell-you-about-a-cool-book-I-just-read. I guess that's why they call it a blog, not a papal encyclical. Anyway, if you have a) a soft spot in your heart for novels that serve as vehicles for metaphysical meditations (say, G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, John Updike's Roger's Version, or Moby-Dick), b) some experience with academics, and c) any interest in the God question, I heartily recommend Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new book. The plot is awfully tricked-out -- at its most time- and tense-spanning it may bring to mind an overmedicated William S. Burroughs and a pair of scissors -- but can be boiled down to: supersmart, sympathetically rendered celebrity atheist confronts the transcendence that he finds recurringly embedded in his everyday environments and perceptions. The environments include the campus of a fictitious college in Cambridge (not Harvard), a bridge over the Charles River, and a Hasidic enclave near New York City. The perceptions include love, design in nature, the tragic nature of life, and, as the novel calls it, "the improbable self."

I wouldn't recommend 36 Arguments for the Existence of God to just anyone. In fact, change "just" to "almost." If you couldn't care less about the milieu of the elite American university and the chattering madmen who lurk within its gates, then this book provides more insider satire than you probably can use. If you value in your reading a smooth, sumptuous daydream of a ride, as opposed to a zigzagging, clattering coalcar excursion over the bones of dead philosophers; if putting down a book to consult Wikipedia or a dictionary or to chew on a puzzle makes you dyspeptic; if learned digressions and supernatural probings leave you cold -- then this book will plunge you into unremitting agony.

These particular obstacles aside, 36  Arguments doesn't take a high IQ to enjoy. This could be a guy thing, but personally, I love when novels are loaded heavy with arcana --loved learning about the rise of Hasidism, the origin and symbolism of the kugel, the ideas of Thomas Nagel, the design of the Merritt Parkway, the ontological proof for God, &c. There is a rapturousness in the disgorging of research that makes for a reading pleasure separate from and maybe equal to the pleasures to be taken from a more shapely, professionally plotted fiction. After closing this book I felt braced, epistemologically sharpened -- even, I'd dare say, smarter than before. An illusion, no doubt; but still, I thank Ms. Goldstein for redeeming an otherwise torpid spring-break week at the beach!