Goldstein recommended

Positive recommendations for our "recommended" novel in A&S class:

"So extravagantly witty and smart that it's making everything else I've read recently seem drab." -Ron Charles, Washington Post 

"Comic and supremely witty, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is both a satire of the academic world and a feast of philosophical and religious ideas." -Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams

"You do not have to perpetrate an act of faith to confront the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It is faith itself that consists of nothing. Rebecca Goldstein, on the other hand, is quite something." -Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great

"Rebecca Newberger Goldstein does it all. She has written a hilarious novel about people's existential agonies, a page-turner about the intellectual mysteries that obsess them. The characters in 36 Arguments For the Existence of God explore the great moral issues of our day in a novel that is deeply moving and a joy to read." -Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated 

co-mingling

If only our A&S course were a few weeks longer, we could give this timely "recommended" novel the attention it deserves. 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Goldstein -- excerpted on edge.org.*


The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments may be the most psychologically important of the thirty-six. Few people rest their belief in God on a single, decisive logical argument. Instead, people are swept away by the sheer number of reasons that make God's existence seem plausible — holding out an explanation as to why the universe went to the bother of existing, and why it is this particular universe, with its sublime improbabilities, including us humans; and, even more particularly, explaining the existence of each one of us who know ourselves as a unique conscious individual, who makes free and moral choices that grant meaning and purpose to our lives; and, even more personally, giving hope that desperate prayers may not go unheard and unanswered, and that the terrors of death can be subdued in immortality. Religions, too, do not justify themselves with a single logical argument, but rather set themselves up to minister to all of these needs and provide a space in people's lives where large questions that escape answers all come together and co-mingle, a co-mingling that, in itself, can give the illusion that they are being answered.


*Speaking of large co-mingled questions and arguments,  check out edge.org's World Question Center question  for 2010, “How is the internet changing the way you think?,” and dozens of thoughtful replies. And last year's question will figure prominently in our "Future of Life" course next Fall: "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" 


We'll try to create more than the illusion of an answer. But, all is probably vanity. So we should all stop worrying and enjoy our lives. Right?

homo religiosus

Karen Armstrong said nice things about Richard Dawkins to Terry Gross, maybe it's time for atheists to lay off and try to understand her total view. Yes, some of it is silly. But some of it-- like the idea that religion comes from our search for meaning-- makes a lot of sense.

But, score this one for the barmaid.

Dingo's kidneys

Really coulda used a Babel Fish at the retreat yesterday, I'd happily have told a few folks where to stick it. (Maybe this will be developed as a killer app for the iTouch, if it hasn't already. There is in fact a translator site at babelfish.altavista.com.) This "argument," btw, is not so different from the way "scholastics" used to think. Some actually still do. And then, of course, there's the design argument for the spaghetti monster.