A winner of the National Jewish Book Award and a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, Goldstein presents a novel that transforms the great debate between faith and reason into an exhilarating romance of both heart and mind.
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A winner of the National Jewish Book Award and a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, Goldstein presents a novel that transforms the great debate between faith and reason into an exhilarating romance of both heart and mind.
Read Less
Add this copy of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: a Work of to cart. $1.26, good condition, Sold by More Than Words rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Waltham, MA, UNITED STATES, published 2011 by Vintage.
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Add this copy of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: a Work of to cart. $1.26, good condition, Sold by More Than Words rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Waltham, MA, UNITED STATES, published 2010 by Pantheon Books.
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To review a work of fiction is to review an artifact. In the novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, the title contains a set of terms that is a system in language having a family resemblance to many such systems indigenous to theology and its arguments. In short, it would be amoral though not atheistic to short change this novel by disregarding the cash values of those terms as they occur in moral arguments in that signal debate between characters Cass Seltzer and Felix Fidley.
What world are we in, to be in the world created by author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein? To know how to proceed, I must know that to make sense of this novel is to scrutinize arguments for an inscrutable God signaling the entire thrust of this artifact.
For the sake of civility, Professor Felix Fidley merely suggests trial by combat as a test of truth with his martial mien and opening strategy of argumentation to mimic a battle strategy of Kahlil ibn al-Walid, with his "classic three-pronged attack" at the Battle of Yarmonk. That first prong is to reincarnate the tension between faith and reason to argue that reason takes faith for granted. Moreover, Fidley brings in Hume to illustrate empirical skepticism adorned with a Kantian flourish: "Just as faith without reason is blind, reason without faith is crippled." His second prong is to emphasize serious faith, faith as in trust of valid inferences of formal logic and reliance on the constancy of the speed of light. Then his third prong is that coherence, purpose and meaning in life requires Transcendence, namely, God as desideratum.
With this heavy assault, we can imagine Cass Seltzer finds it "easy to imagine the feelings of those commanders who are in the field against Napoleon", a stance he does not articulate, but instead stands like Martin Luther: "Here I am." Cass stands on his position as "the author of The Varieties of Religious Illusion", a work that harks both to William James and Sigmund Freud. Cass notices that we have our being in a world that is marked by suffering and injustice that arguments from theodicy do not comfortably reconcile. While he is sympathetic and respectful of saintly persons in church work, he leans toward atheism.
Setzer and Fidley then come to grips like Sumo wrestlers in hand-to-hand combat. In religion, Cass distinguishes psychology from argumentation, beliefs founded on feelings as against propositions founded on form. Felix must take the jab against him that his view of morality must ultimately rest on self-interest and the avoidance of Transcendent punishment. Cass solidly states a view of moral reasons as independent of religious commitment and Transcendent beings, a view derived from arguments of Plato. Like King Solomon, Cass has his people with him in his position.
Our author gives these characters a presence that suggests a scenario for a movie, one vaguely reminiscent of Inherit the Wind (1960) or of Ben Hur (1959). In this review, though, we are focused on argumentation itself. Caution is needed here with some terms in this review. An emotivist urged that terms of ethics are like a "bunch of drunks", no one of which can stand alone but together they are coherent and can move along. A merely coherent moral point of view needs more than to stand rhetorically with William James and say, "We often say 'All the world knows' when what we mean is 'I and my circle commonly agree'." Add inferential cogency to that system of terms with a disciplined mind, and a more careful point of view can be generated with sharp relevance respected. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein excels in cogency.
