Joss had apparently been ready to reply a few sentences back, a look of genuine pleasure unexpectedly on his face, but Ellie’s rush of words was gathering momentum, and perhaps he felt it impolite to interrupt.
“Also, why would you think that God has abandoned us? He used to chat with patriarchs and prophets every second Tuesday, you believe. He’s omnipotent, you say, and omniscient. So it’s no particular effort for him to remind us directly, unambiguously, of his wishes at least a few times in every generation. So how come, fellas? Why don’t we see him with crystal clarity?”
“We do.” Rankin put enormous feeling in this phrase. “He is all around us. Our prayers are answered. Tens of millions of people in this country have been born again and have witnessed God’s glorious grace. the Bible speaks to us as clearly in this day as it did in the time of Moses and Jesus.”
“Oh, come off it. You know what I mean. Where are the burning bushes, the pillars of fire, the great voice that says `I am that I am’ booming down at us out of the sky? Why should God manifest himself in such subtle and debatable ways when he can make his presence completely unambiguous?”
“But a voice from the sky is just what you found.” Joss made this comment casually while Ellie paused for breath. He held her eyes with his own.
Rankin quickly picked up the thought. “Absolutely. Just what I was going to say. Abraham and Moses, they didn’t have radios or telescopes. They couldn’t have heard the Almighty talking on FM. Maybe today God talks to us in new ways and permits us to have a new understanding. Or maybe it’s not God–”
“Yes, Satan. I’ve heard some talk about that. It sounds crazy. Let’s leave that one alone for a moment, if it’s okay with you. You think the Message is the Voice of God, your God. Where in your religion does God answer a prayer by repeating the prayer back?”
“I wouldn’t call a Nazi newsreel a prayer, myself,” Joss said. “You say it’s to attract our attention.”
“Then why do you think God has chosen to talk to scientists? Why not preachers like yourself?”
“God talks to me all the time.” Rankin’s index finger audibly thumped his sternum. “and the Reverend Joss here. God has told me that a revelation is at hand. When the end of the world is nigh, the Rapture will be upon us, the judgment of sinners, the ascension to heaven of the elect–”
“Did he tell you he was going to make that announcement in the radio spectrum? Is your conversation with God recorded somewhere, so we can verify that it really happened? Or do we have only your say-so? Why would God choose to announce it to radio astronomers and not to men and women of the cloth? Don’t you think it’s a little strange that the first message from God in two thousand years or more is prime numbers… and Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics? Your God must have quite a sense of humor.”
“My God can have any sense He wants to have.”
Der Heer was clearly alarmed at the first appearance of real rancor. “Uh, maybe I could remind us all about what we hope to accomplish at this meeting,” he began.
Here’s Ken in his mollifying mode, Ellie thought. On some issues he’s courageous, but chiefly when he has not responsibility for action. He’s a brave talker… in private. But on scientific politics, and especially when representing the President, he becomes very accommodating, ready to compromise with the Devil himself. She caught herself. The theological language was getting to her.
“That’s another thing.” She interrupted her own train of though as well as der Heer’s. “If that signal is from God, why does it come from just one place in the sky–in the vicinity of a particularly bright nearby star? Why doesn’t it come from all over the sky at once, like the cosmic black-body background radiation? Coming from one star, it looks like a signal from another civilization. Coming from everywhere, it would look much more like a signal from your God.”
“God can make a signal come from the bunghole of the Little Bear if He wants.” Rankin’s face was becoming bright red. “Excuse me, but you’ve gotten me riled up. God can do anything.”
“Anything you don’t understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges t our intelligence. You simply turn you mind off and say God did it.”
“Ma’am I didn’t come here to be insulted…”
“`Come here’? I thought this was where you lived.”
“Ma’am–” Rankin was about to say something, but then thought better of it. He took a deep breath and continued. “This is a Christian country and Christians have true knowledge on this issue, a sacred responsibility to make sure that God’s sacred word is understood…”
“I’m a Christian and you don’t speak for me. You’ve tapped yourself in some sort of fifth-century religious mania. Since then the Renaissance has happened, the Enlightenment has happened. Where’ve you been?”
Both Joss and der Heer were half out of their chairs. “Please,” Ken implored, looking directly at Ellie. “If we don’t keep more to the agenda, I don’t see how we can accomplish what the President asked us to do.”
“Well, you wanted `a frank exchange of views.'”
“It’s nearly noon,” Joss observed. “Why don’t we take a little break for lunch?”
Outside the library conference room, leaning on the railing surrounding the Foucault pendulum, Ellie began a brief whispered exchange with der Heer.
“I’d like to punch out that cocksure, know-it-all, holier-than-thou…”
“Why, exactly, Ellie? Aren’t ignorance and error painful enough?”
“Yes, if he’d shut up. But he’s corrupting millions.”
“Sweetheart, he thinks the same about you.”
When she and der Heer came back from lunch, Ellie noticed immediately that Rankin appeared subdued, while Joss, who was first to speak, seemed cheerful, certainly beyond the requirements of mere cordiality.
“Dr. Arroway,” he began, “I can understand that you’re impatient to show us your findings, and that you didn’t come here for theological disputation. But please bear with us just a bit longer. You have a sharp tongue. I can’t recall the last time Brother Rankin here got so stirred up on matters of the faith. It must be years.”
He glanced momentarily at his colleague, who was doodling, apparently idly, on a yellow legal pad, his collar unbuttoned and his necktie loosened.
“I was struck by one or two things you said this morning. You called yourself a Christian. May I ask? In what sense are you a Christian?”
“You know, this wasn’t the job description when I accepted the directorship of the Argus Project.” She said this lightly. “I’m a Christian in the sense that I find Jesus Christ to be an admirable historical figure. I think the Sermon on the Mount is one of the greatest ethical statements and one of the best speeches in history. I think that `Love your enemy’ might even be the long-shot solution to the problem of nuclear war. I wish he was alive today. It would benefit everybody on the planet. But I think Jesus was only a man. A great man, a brave man, a man with insight into unpopular truths. But I don’t think he was God or the son of God or the grandnephew of God.”
“You don’t want to believe in God.” Joss said it as a simple statement. “You figure you can be a Christian and not believe in God. Let me ask you straight out: Do you believe in God?”
“The question has a peculiar structure. If I say no, do I mean I’m convinced God doesn’t exist, or do I mean I’m not convinced he does exist? Those are two very different statements.”
“Let’s see if they are so different, Dr. Arroway. May I call you `Doctor’? You believe in Occam’s Razor, isn’t that right? If you have two different, equally good explanations of the same experience, you pick the simplest. The whole history of science supports it, you say. Now, if you have serious doubts about whether there is a God–enough doubts so you’re unwilling to commit yourself to the Faith–then you must be able to imagine a world without God: a world that comes into being without God, a world where people die without God. No punishment. No reward. All the saints and prophets, all the faithful who have ever lived–why, you’d have to believe they were foolish. Deceived themselves, you’d probably say. That would be a world in which we weren’t here on Earth for any good reason–I mean for any purpose. It would all be just complicated collisions of atoms–is that right? Including the atoms that are inside human beings.
“To me, that would be a hateful and inhuman world. I wouldn’t want to live in it. But if you can imagine that world, why straddle? Why occupy some middle ground? If you believe all that already, isn’t it much simpler to say there’s on God? You’re not being true to Occam’s Razor. I think you’re waffling. How can a thoroughgoing conscientious scientist be an agnostic if you can even imagine a world without God? Wouldn’t you just have to be an atheist?”