Clifford Goldstein: God, Gödel and Grace.

I often say--only halfway jokingly--that those who pretend to know everything make it difficult on those of us who really do. As manifestly as Goldstein would like to be listed in the latter category, he could not more clearly be in the former. I have never read a more despicable namedropper, nor anyone more desperate to seem credible on another's coattails. It really is ludicrous. Let me cite you a few of my favorite examples:

"Ethics and love, hate and hope, transcend not just the periodic table of elements but all 112 other facets of reality that the table represents. Np, Am, Ar, Kr, Xe, Os, Re, Tc, Cs, Ba, Si, and the 101 rest--no matter how microscopically finely tuned and balanced the proportions--can't fully explain heroism, art, fear, generosity, altruism, hate, hope, and passion. To pretend that they can is to equate Luciano Pavarotti singing Il Barbiere di Siviglia with Belching." (26)

Even this small passage yields a treasury of pretense, one which it is a pleasure to dissect. A quick list of insults to the reader: listing eleven elements so make the topic clear, listing them only by their symbol, even the choice of elements is condescending, and of course Goldstein feels compelled to do the arithmetic for the reader and observe that there are 101 others. Then there is the mention of Pavarotti--I feel condescended to even by the fact that Goldstein uses his first name. Is there more than one Pavarotti?--and the use of the Italian name for The Barber of Seville. Anybody who doesn't know opera will have no idea what he's talking about, while anybody who does know opera will quickly recognize that Pavarotti was not even top billing in Il Barbiere. Why not choose a role for which he was really famous? So execrable is Goldstein's disingenuous allusion here that it takes longer to dissect it than it probably did to write.

These are minor sins on paper, but they accumulate so rapidly that the reader is jaundiced by the end of the first chapter. It is no exaggeration to say that there are multiple examples on every last page. Goldstein invokes everyone from Kant and Wittgenstein (favorite reinforcements for those who hope to overwhelm their critics with citations) to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I was both offended and nauseous by the end of the book.

Which was disappointing. My friend Fran pushed this item on me, perceiving, I think, the spiritual quest I am on. She said it was brilliant, but is less skeptical than I am by nature and may have been taken in by Goldstein's namedropping. It is all the more tragic because I am in agreement with Goldstein on many key points. For instance, I have often said that I don't know whether there is anything bigger than I am out there for sure, but that I choose to act as if. After all, if there is not, I don't want to play this game anymore. That is to say that if I (man) am the biggest, most sophisticated mind out there, what fun is that? This is in fundamental agreement with Goldstein's conclusion that "Belief in God [is] about as reasonable as belief in other minds" (94), and I like the way he puts it. He even builds a sound argument leading up to it, and I also appreciate his supposition that "the moral components of the universe [are] just as precise, just as fundamental as the physical ones" (82). The way he lays it out, such a suggestion seems rather reasonable, I hate to admit.

But that's as far as Goldstein really can take his argument. He tries vainly to connect it to ransom theology, but  even he seems to recognize the vanity of it. That spire is unreachable on steps of logic, and requires a submission to that dogma. He is reduced toward the end of the book to such embarassing pleas as "He will, he has promised to, and if we can't trust his promises--then whose?" (110). This is not to say that I blame him. Such feeble arguments are the only way one can really arrive at his predetermined goal. What is sad is not that his ultimate conclusions are insupportable; it is that he wants so desperately for everyone to agree with him. He thinks he is organizing the sum total of Western thought into a grand unified field theory, when he is unable to, in his own words, "step outside the epistemological box stapled together from the empirical, cultural and happenstance scraps scavenged from [his] own intellectual turf" (56).