Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Atheist with a Soul

Philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein speaks with Martin Levin about God and godlessness, and her new novel

by Martin Levin

I’m thinking that Cass, who’s called an "atheist with a soul," is the character who most embodies your own views, his disbelief in God combined with a larger respect for the religious impulse.

He is. In terms of his life, he’s a little hapless and prone to be taken over by personalities larger than his own. I hope I’m not like that, but in terms of his world views, I am with him.

Tell me about Azarya [a six-year-old mathematical genius whose abilities will be sacrificially lost in the Hasidic world in which he lives.

I thought of this story at least 15 years ago and just didn’t want to write it because I found it heartbreaking and I knew it would have to be tragic. It was an impossible dilemma I was putting this kid in, and I actually thought I’d have to kill him. I resisted writing this for a very long time, but when I got involved with the New Atheism, I thought I could use it as a platform for the Azarya story. His story is the heart of the novel.

Your last book was about Spinoza, and his spirit seems to hover over this one as well.

Spinoza is the great demonstrator that there can be deep experience of transcendence and the sublime, and what one could call a spiritual experience that is not about God. It is about being itself. Cass endorses this view and often expresses himself this way.

The grounding of morality seems to be an important theme, especially as it emerges in the climactic formal debate between Cass and a professor who’s a believer.

One of things I wanted to show was that there’s a fallacy in understanding the grounds of morality, that you don’t need God to be moral, sometimes quite the contrary. In the U.S, religious agendas, especially under the last administration, were being legislated and intruding on things like stem-cell research. You hear people say that the godless must be immoral, since you need God to ground morality. No politician in America can say they don’t believe in God. How could they be moral?

What do you see as the future for atheism, since religion seems to be declining only in Western Europe and growing throughout the rest of the world.

Europe went through its Enlightenment only following protracted, horrible religious wars, when people were convinced that their earlier certitudes were untrustworthy, and modern science and modern philosophy grew out of this. A large part of the world hasn’t gone through this yet. Europe had to have half of its population wiped out before the voices of reason got listened to. But that took a long time. Can we afford that when we have the kind of weaponry that advances in science have given us? We’re in quite a predicament. These very primitive religious emotions – to see the strength of their gathering is terrifying.

Who’s your audience? It won’t be the Valdeners [a Hasidic sect that lives in its own small town and figures largely in the novel] or fundamentalist Christians or Islamists.

Of course not. But can I tell you one wonderful story? Someone wrote to me, I think a professor at Harvard Medical School. He was on a plane carrying the appendix to the novel [which goes through 36 arguments for God’s existence, and which appeared on a blog long before the book was published] and was sitting next to a young Egyptian man who was fascinated by the arguments and their flaws. I just got in the mail two copies of the book, one for him and one that he was going to send to the Egyptian student.

In your own upbringing, what was the turning point that led you away from Orthodoxy?

On the Sabbath, all we did was read. We were quite poor, my father was a cantor and we didn’t own any books. So every Friday I went to the public library. Once I took out The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant, which opened the world for me, gave me for the first time the idea of what thinking could do. As a kid, I felt bad that everyone else seemed to believe and I could not, was always questioning "why do we do this?" That you could reason your way through things was amazing. I also read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, which knocked down all the arguments, showed the fallacies, and I thought: "This is just great."

Not many people have focused on how funny the novel is. How much fun was it to write?

So much fun. I was surprised by the large characters, especially one named Jonas Elijah Klapper, who wants to take over the novel. I had to put a lid on him.

Klapper is hilarious. He reminds me of Harold Bloom, with his long oracular utterances, his recitations from memory, his tendency to tell favoured students they are among the elect.

That astonishes me, because I don’t know Harold Bloom, though other people have mentioned this. But I’ve been around academics and these self-mythologizing, grandiose, extremely pompous characters are the bane of my academic existence. In fact, "Klapper" has become shorthand between my husband and me for that kind of figure.

I’m thinking that Cass, who’s called an "atheist with a soul," is the character who most embodies your own views, his disbelief in God combined with a larger respect for the religious impulse.

He is. In terms of his life, he’s a little hapless and prone to be taken over by personalities larger than his own. I hope I’m not like that, but in terms of his world views, I am with him.

Tell me about Azarya [a six-year-old mathematical genius whose abilities will be sacrificially lost in the Hasidic world in which he lives].

I thought of this story at least 15 years ago and just didn’t want to write it because I found it heartbreaking and I knew it would have to be tragic. It was an impossible dilemma I was putting this kid in, and I actually thought I’d have to kill him. I resisted writing this for a very long time, but when I got involved with the New Atheism, I thought I could use it as a platform for the Azarya story. His story is the heart of the novel.

Your last book was about Spinoza, and his spirit seems to hover over this one as well.

Spinoza is the great demonstrator that there can be deep experience of transcendence and the sublime, and what one could call a spiritual experience that is not about God. It is about being itself. Cass endorses this view and often expresses himself this way.

The grounding of morality seems to be an important theme, especially as it emerges in the climactic formal debate between Cass and a professor who’s a believer.

One of things I wanted to show was that there’s a fallacy in understanding the grounds of morality, that you don’t need God to be moral, sometimes quite the contrary. In the U.S, religious agendas, especially under the last administration, were being legislated and intruding on things like stem-cell research. You hear people say that the godless must be immoral, since you need God to ground morality. No politician in America can say they don’t believe in God. How could they be moral?

What do you see as the future for atheism, since religion seems to be declining only in Western Europe and growing throughout the rest of the world.

Europe went through its Enlightenment only following protracted, horrible religious wars, when people were convinced that their earlier certitudes were untrustworthy, and modern science and modern philosophy grew out of this. A large part of the world hasn’t gone through this yet. Europe had to have half of its population wiped out before the voices of reason got listened to. But that took a long time. Can we afford that when we have the kind of weaponry that advances in science have given us? We’re in quite a predicament. These very primitive religious emotions – to see the strength of their gathering is terrifying.