Roger's Version

If you have on your personal bucket list the thought that you should read one novel by John Updike before you die, what one should that be?

The Rabbit series is over-rated.

The best single Updike, in my opinion, is Roger's Version.

Amazon's "most helpful" review, by someone calling himself "Outside Looking In," captures a nice moment from the book. The protagonist, Roger Lambert, is thinking about ancient Jews and contemporary Protestants.

"How did those Israelites get their hooks into us so deeply, sticking us with their frightful black Bible and it imprecations while their modern descendants treat the matter as a family joke, filling their own lives with violin music and clear-eyed, Godless science? L'Chaim! Compared with the Jews we protestants do indeed dwell in the valley of death."

In essence, Lambert is a Barthian. His "rascally pet" as he says at one point, is the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). What he most admires in Barth is the utter Otherness of Barth's God, the rejection of even an "analogic" relationship between God's Being and our own being. God is essentially a hidden God.

Updike pits this Barthianism against the seemingly more naive views of a younger man,  Dale, who believes that contemporary physics is making God visible, and who believes he can complete that uncovering of God through computer science.

Lambert helps Dale get the grant for his project, but in subtler ways undermines both that project and Dale's faith.

As to the reviewers, David Wisehart thinks the book "both fascinating and frustrating."

David Lodge, writing in The New York Times, speaks of its "richness and viruosity," and says he finished it with "renewed respect for one of the most intelligent and resourceful of contemporary novelists."

Mark Athitakis, writing for Critical Mass, admires the way Updike "smoothly embeds dense scientific discussion into his narrative, anticipating the controversy over Intelligent Design more than a decade before it became a mainstream issue."

Not everyone liked it, though.  In The New York Review of Books, Frederick Crews spoke of "the growth of a belligerent, almost hysterical callousness" in Updike's career generally, which he sees as epitomized here.

I don't see what Crews thinks he sees.

For my deep thinking readers

A link to a few pages from a debate on the existence of God, here: click


Unfortunately, that google-books' site only gives you the preface and the first few pages of the theistic argument. Even if they were going to excerpt it drastically to induce you to buy it, it would have been nice for them to include a bit of each side in the excerpt.

Anyway, in that book, William Lane Craig takes the affirmative position, that God does exist.

Craig received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Birmingham (UK) in 1977, and another, in theology, from the University of Munich (Germany) in 1984. He is best known as the defender of a version of the cosmological argument that focuses on the alleged impossibility of an "actual infinite."

His opponent, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, takes the atheistic side, both arguing that Craig's proofs fail and that there are good reasons to believe there is no God.

They co-authored the preface and there explained the origin of the book in live debates, and its format as due to their shared belief in fairness.

Amen, then, to their shared commitment.

William James

Here's a passage I like from one of the better-known of James' essays: The Dilemma of Determinism.

James has at this point established what he means by "indeterminism," in contradiction to both the hard and the soft forms of determinism.

But, he asks, is indeterminism compatible with theism? If we are the creatures of an all-knowing Creator, then the knowledge of that creator of what we will do next Tuesday surely implies that on next Tuesday we will do something now already determined, doesn't it?

James replies:

"Suppose two men before a chessboard, -- the one a novice, the other an expert player of the game. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly what any one move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, all the possible moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of victory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the novice's king."

Likewise, then, even an infinitely powerful mind could be working through time and despite indeterminist elements in a situation to achieve that Mind's end.

In a footnote, he acknowledges that this (the sort of idea that long after James' death became known as "process theology") may well be considered heterodox.

"This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of time. And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind I have no reply to make....To say that time is an illusory appearance is only a roundabout manner of saying that there is no real plurality, and that the frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time may be its form."