With atheism fashionable and religious fundamentalism on the rise, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God gently mocks the delusions of both the godly and the godless. Cass Seltzer is an academic psychologist at a middle-ranking university whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, becomes an unexpected bestseller because of an appendix that provides a series of refutations to proofs of God's existence. Cass's position is admirably moderate – that belief in God has little to do with the nature or value of religious experience – but he becomes an atheist poster-boy. He may have just received, at the novel's start, an offer of a post at Harvard, but Cass – neurotic and fairly drippy – can't help mooning over his absent girlfriend and worrying about an upcoming theological disputation.
Most of the book is dedicated to Cass's time as a graduate student, when he fell under the tutelage of Jonas Elijah Klapper who, with his rotund physique, orotund periods and obsession with genius and mysticism, is a dead ringer for Harold Bloom. As Klapper's mind pirouettes across the literary and philosophical canon, Goldstein pitilessly exposes how erudition and verbosity can mask an intellectual vacuum: "As must anyone who regards with seriousness the eschatological idea that scaffolds the strata of the greater metaphysics", yadda, yadda yadda.
Unfortunately, Goldstein as much as Klapper is a purveyor of superficial scholarship. Novels of ideas are crippled when their authors use the story to peacock their cleverness and patronise their audience. Here we are subjected to game theory for dummies, Kabbalah for dummies, Matthew Arnold for dummies – none of them integrated in the texture of the novel. Much of her comedy is abysmal, relying on flaccid wordplay, and even her good jokes are destroyed by the accompanying exegesis, as if she is concerned tha t her readers who don't get them should at least realise how well-read she is.
More damagingly, the thesis that 36 Arguments attempts to dramatise – that religious attitudes are to be found in all sorts of areas of life – is essentially trivial. If being religious simply means "having strong feelings", then it is meaningless (and somewhat offensive to believers) to term this universal propensity to unreason as "religious" just because, in our more sober moods, we are suspicious of it. Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher who has written on Gödel and Spinoza, but 36 Arguments proves that with fiction, a lot of learning can be a deadly thing.
