I read this book is a series of rushes over six months
because of other things I was doing. This meant I had to recap when I began each
reading. 36 Arguments for the Existence
of God is a philosophical novel by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and it
references a lot of her own upbringing. She is an atheist, but was born into an
orthodox Jewish family and her brother is a rabbi. The story is divided into
thirty-six chapters in an almost Wilsonian manner, except that in RAW's case it
was the number twenty-three. Each chapter is called "Argument
from..." with a qualifier such as "Argument from Dappled Things",
"Argument from Prime Numbers" etc. The story centres around an
academic psychologist called Cass Seltzer, a man who has written a highly
successful book that has become a "new atheist" classic, in a similar
way to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion,
see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/god-delusion-by-richard-dawkins.html.
This has made him hot property in the media. He is always on TV and radio shows
debating with religious believers; the "God vs no God" format that
has become such a common popular meme. The plot then intersperses with
flashbacks of his younger life when he was a student under an eccentric
professor called Jonas Elijah Klapper who is a "spiritual-but-not-religious"
person and is an expert on all religions and mythologies. Cass is from a
hardline closed Jewish community which is incredibly strict, almost a Jewish
equivalent of the Amish, but he is dating a girl called Roz who is a Reform Jew
and an agnostic. They pay a visit to the community and come across a small boy
who is a mathematical prodigy. The problem is that the boy is also the son of
the Valdemare Rebbe, the leader of
this very traditional Jewish society. It's a world in which people wear the
same clothes, eat only kosher food
and on the Sabbath, from every Friday evening until sunrise on Sunday morning,
will not even wipe their bottoms after going to the toilet because that counts
as work which is forbidden. As the boy grows up he has to choose between his
predestined role to be the spiritual ruler of his people or to leave and study
maths at a university, which is his passion. What's interesting is that Prof.
Klapper has an almost cultic hold over his small group of students. One of the
characters is an older man who befriends Cass who has been a postgraduate
student of Klapper's for over a decade. He simply can't break away and leave
his classes. Cass succeeds in doing so and becomes an atheist. There is a lot
of humour in the book, especially around the idiosyncrasies of Prof. Klapper.
Some of the characters are annoying, such as Cass' girlfriend in later life who
is a rather obnoxious feminist called Lucinda Mandelbaum. She is a master
mathematician who is known as the "Goddess of Game Theory", but still
sees herself as a deprived victim, despite her success, simply because she is a
"woman!"; and therefore she feels justified in mistreating her male
colleagues. The story ends with a description of a "God vs no God"
debate that is very vivid and strikes a bell for anybody, like me, who enjoys
watching this ultimate verbal spectator sport. The appendix of the novel
actually contains the famous three dozen real philosophical arguments for the
existence of God and their rebuttals, see: http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/authors/goldstein/36%20Arguments.pdf.
Although of course anybody who follows this controversy will know that the
rebuttals themselves have counter-rebuttals, counter-counter rebuttals and
counter-counter-counter rebuttals ad
infinitum. Does God exist or not? People have been arguing about this
question throughout all of history, so if you expect a single paperback book to
provide a final answer, you'll be disappointed. It was interesting to read
about the atheist vs believer mindset from a Jewish perspective. Judaism has a
far older and richer tradition in discussions like this than Christianity or
Islam does. It is cleverly written and the author has a well-developed and
amusing style that I can appreciate as a fellow fiction writer. Here are two
videos of the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yQbm0kc1o
and: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zsHR8bIGyk.
The book can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/36-Arguments-Existence-God-Fiction/dp/1848871554.
An interesting bit of trivia is that Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is married to
Stephen Pinker, another famous atheo-skeptic pop-philosopher, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU.
See here for more
information: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/does-god-exist.html.
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