36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [38]

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Cass. You know, it’s wonderful that you’ve come up so much in the world, and it’s wonderful that you’re willing to be so generous and help me with connections, and it would be wonderful, too, if you became a friend of the Immortality Foundation. Even if you didn’t want to be a major financial donor, but just enough to indicate that you support what I do.”

“Well, actually, Roz, I’m not sure that I do.”

“You think it’s unrealistic, right? You think it’s science on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors! But it’s not! Some of the biologists that my foundation is supporting have results that are going to make the possibility of radically extending life a reality. I’m talking radically radically!”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Roz, I’m just not altogether convinced that radically radically is such a good idea.”

“Huh?”

“Well, obviously, adding a few years or even decades to our normal life spans would be terrific; nobody would want to go back to the days when forty was considered a ripe old age…”

“Forty! For the first few hundred thousand years of human history, half of the population died in infancy and childhood! A third of young men died in warfare before they were twenty. A woman’s marriage ceremony was rape, and she had a good chance of dying if a pregnancy came from it. Talk about nasty, brutish, and short! But did our species give in to this barbarism? Of course not! And we’re the lucky results of the Glorious Refusal, which means we have the obligation to keep on refusing the barbarities that nature is constantly trying to force on us!”

“Right,” Cass said, smiling. She had delivered her last lines to an imaginary audience of potential donors. “Obviously, the move toward four score and ten has been good. But what I’m not convinced would be so good is extending life so much that the whole meaning of what it is to live a human life would change. And that’s the sort of thing you’re talking about, right? That’s what you mean by radically radically? Radically radically would mean reframing all the basic existential questions. And it’s not clear that we have the wherewithal to think that through. We have a hard enough time with the old set of questions.”

Roz had carefully laid down her fork, which had been on its way to her mouth loaded up with pollo al ajillo.

“I never know how to respond when people say things like that to me. I’m at a loss. It’s like someone saying that they don’t know whether suffering is a bad thing.”

“Well, people say that, too, you know, that it’s necessary that there be some amount of suffering in the world to create the opportunity for certain virtues to develop, virtues like forbearance and compassion…”

“Courage, charity, forgiveness, empathy-even true love, which don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that sting.” Roz finished his sentence for him. “Suffering provides us wonderful opportunities for character-building. Yes, I’m familiar with this line of reasoning. The only people who push it are the God-apologists, who are trying to make excuses for what an insufferable world this is, even though there’s supposed to be an omnipotent, omniscient, and well-intentioned Big Boy running the show. Any suffering the apologists can’t rationalize away as a product of our having the ennobling capacity for free will, including the free will to inflict unspeakable atrocities on one another, they try to explain with this character-building song and dance. I find the song pornographic and the dance macabre. A grieving mother whose child was senselessly lost has the chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop her soul toward tranquil acceptance. And what of that dying child himself, who doesn’t have the psychological and spiritual equipment to transcend what’s happening to him and is never going to get it because he’s going to be dead? Wouldn’t this theodicy require, at the least, that all humans-I’m not even going to bring up the suffering of animals-have an equal opportunity to develop their capacities for nobility? Cass, this is obscene. I don’t have to tell you any of this. I learned it all from The Varieties of Religious Illusion. That’s where I learned the bloody word ‘theodicy’ in the first place.”

A change had come over Roz, a modulation into a lower key. She had been hyper, even for her, since she’d landed on his doorstep yesterday morning. But now her voice had lost its manic edge, her face its clowning slant. She looked, if anything, even younger, flushed and earnest.

“You’re right, of course. I wasn’t actually pushing that argument about suffering, just making the point that it’s not a tautology to say, ‘Suffering is bad.’”

“I think it is. I think that ‘Suffering is bad’ is as obvious as it gets. And even if people don’t think it’s so obvious in the generic case, they catch on fast enough when the suffering is theirs. ‘My suffering is bad’ is a tautology to anyone who says it. I’d like to see someone in the throes of agony still pushing this treacle called theodicy. Sure, the transcendent possibilities afforded by suffering make this a better world. But only when it’s the other guy doing the suffering.”