He had gotten the laughs that he was going for, though Mona and Roz, front and center, stiffened with lack of amusement, Roz's upper lip listing one way under the weight of her scorn and Mona's listing the other way.

"But the thing about reason is that, if you're truly consistent, which is the first rule of reason, then you will be able to prove that reason has its own strict limitations. The claim that everything must be legitimated through reason is self-refuting. How, after all, can you legitimate that claim? Through reason? That would be viciously circular. In other words, we have to accept reason on faith. We have to accept logic on faith. A man like Bertrand Russell, and presumably a man like Cass Seltzer, is faithful to logic. Can he justify his logic? Is there some logical principle he can use that will prove the legitimacy of logic? And even if he proves it, why would he accept his own proof, if he's really being logical, since accepting it would already be taking for granted that he accepts logic, the very acceptance he's trying to justify? Logic has to be accepted without any proof at all. Logic has to be accepted on faith. Every time an atheist uses a logical principle, or draws a conclusion from premises, or believes a conclusion because he's got a sound argument, he's relying on faith."

Cass had a printed-out copy of his own Appendix folded up in his breast pocket, just in case, and he had taken it out to quickly review #33, discovering as he did so that he was having trouble moving his handshake-crushed right hand.

"So faith is unavoidable. If Bertrand Russell was right that faith is akin to theft, then he was thieving throughout his life. When he and Alfred North Whitehead were working on their Principia Mathematica, trying to deduce all of mathematics from logic, they were robbing left and right.

"I'm relying on faith in reason right now in making my argument that reason always involves faith. But of course that doesn't bother me, since I already recognize the legitimacy of faith. You won't find me cringing from embracing faith. But a man like Cass Seltzer supposedly keeps himself pure of all contact with faith."

Fidley's tone wasn't pretty. If there was a stylistic war going on within the man, represented by the monogrammed cuffs on the one hand and the bone-crushing grip on the other, it was sounding as if the bone-crusher was prevailing.

"Now let's take this a bit further, shall we? Let's talk about that other great higher power called upon by the Bertrand Russells and Cass Seltzers. Let's talk about science.

"The linear progress of science, we're told, has carried us further and further away from religion. The whole great enterprise of modern science began in the sixteenth century with the Copernican revolution, which turned the old Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system on its head and showed us that we are not the center of the universe."

Again, Cass thought he knew where Fidley was heading, though he seemed to be jumping around before finishing any arguments. Cass shuffled his papers so that the arguments from the Big Bang (#4) and from the Fine-Tuning of the Physical Constants (#5) were in front of him.

"Now, I'm not going to argue tonight-at least, not right now-that any of the recent and most sophisticated of scientific discoveries, coming from the best physicists and cosmologists of our day, are showing that the deeper we go into the mysteries of the physical universe the closer to religion we get. The line away from religion reversed itself in the twentieth century, right around the time that the biggest breakthroughs in physics and cosmology were happening. Mark Twain said that when he was fourteen his father was so stupid he could hardly stand to have him around, but that when he got to be twenty-one he was astonished at how much the old man had managed to learn in seven years. That's how it's turning out to be with religion and science, and maybe we can talk about that later.

"But right now I'm going to continue to show that those who protest the most against the reliance on faith are, even in their protests, manifesting their supreme faith.

"It was the philosopher David Hume who demonstrated just what a faith-based enterprise science really is. Science is in the business of discovering the laws of nature. It bases its conclusions about the laws of nature on empirical evidence. Sometimes we discover that what we thought was an inviolable law of nature actually isn't, and so we discard it and try to find one to replace it. But when we find out that some particular law of nature isn't quite right, we don't give up on the lawfulness of nature. We never give up on that. We just give up on our old formulation of the laws of nature, and start searching for a new formulation that can accommodate the new evidence. And so we can ask-this is what David Hume in effect did ask-what would make us give up on the lawfulness of nature? Is there any kind of empirical evidence that would make us give up on that belief-not just give up on our belief that this or that is a law of nature, but on the whole belief that nature is lawful? Of course not. Anytime we get some counterevidence against a law, we go off searching for the right law. We never consider that maybe that counterevidence should be used against the whole idea that nature is lawful. Never! The idea just wouldn't arise, because the whole enterprise of science is ruled by the search for laws. The unlawfulness of nature is unthinkable, not because there's no evidence for it, but because nothing would ever be deemed evidence for it. And we can't even offer any evidence for the lawfulness of nature-this is the tricky part of Hume's argument-because even the notion of evidence already presumes nature's lawfulness. If we were really going to ask for evidence for nature's lawfulness, we wouldn't be able to offer up any evidence without already presuming nature's lawfulness. That's what Hume showed."

Fidley had paused and given a grand survey of the packed chapel. He had the audience's full attention, and he knew it. Roz was not looking happy, and Mona was downright grim.

"Reason-logic and science-themselves demonstrate that faith is unavoidable. So it can't be true, as this flock of ardent unbelievers has been trying to convince us, that there's faith and religion on one side, and reason and science on the other, and that they are irreconcilable antagonists. Just as faith without reason is blind, reason without faith is crippled."

So is Fidley claiming that Hume showed that faith in the lawfulness of nature is necessary for science to proceed, and that faith in religion is also necessary (for what?), and that science can't say anything against it? That seems blatantly fallacious, and hardly the tactic that, in Lucinda's words, "such a rationalist-University of Chicago and all" would take. But is that where he's headed?

"And there you have it, my first prong of attack. Faith is unavoidable.

"Prong two," Fidley says now, and calmly takes a sip from his glass of water. "Given that we sometimes have to rely on faith, when should we do it? What should we have faith in? Well, reason and science certainly. But what else? We need standards. To say that faith is necessary doesn't throw open the floodgates to all beliefs willy-nilly. We can't just start believing in superstitions, populating our world with leprechauns and Easter bunnies.

"You see, there's serious faith, which is necessary, and then there's frivolous faith. Faith in the laws of logic and the laws of nature is necessary if the world is going to present itself to us coherently. If I doubt logic itself, I don't know how to proceed. There is no way to proceed. My knowing that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man will give me no reason to think that Socrates is mortal. Same thing if I were to start doubting the lawfulness of nature. If I doubt that nature is lawful, then I will never use the past as a guide to the future. Just because light has always traveled at 186,272 miles per second up until today, that would give me no reason to believe that it will do so tomorrow.

"The moral: there are faiths that are unavoidable if coherent lives are to be lived. That's presumably why Cass Seltzer has faith in logic and in science. Cass Seltzer is a man of faith because he can't live his life coherently otherwise.

"These kinds of faiths can be compared to financial investments. When you make an investment, you can't know whether it's going to pay you back. You can only make the investment and see what happens. Has your money worked for you or not? The same principle applies here. Does investing in a faith in logic and science work for us or not? Obviously it does. Without it, we're flat broke. So this is a faith we should keep in our portfolio.

"Are there other faiths that are like this, that are comparable to the faith in science and reason? Well, what about the faith that your own individual life has a purpose? What about the faith that human life in general has meaning, that it matters to the universe that we are here and that we survive and flourish? What about the faith in the dignity of human life, your own and others'? How is it possible to live coherently, leading lives that are worthy of us, without faith in a transcendent purpose and meaning and dignity? These, too, are faiths that pay a good rate of return. To accept them is to see the value of one's life increase exponentially.

"Skepticism in regard to reason and science renders our lives incoherent to the point of unlivable. So, too, does skepticism about the purpose and meaning of our lives, skepticism about whether we have any right to pursue our lives with the seriousness they demand of us. A David Hume could demonstrate the non-demonstrability of reason, but that didn't keep him from reasoning. A Bertrand Russell or a Cass Seltzer can argue for the purposelessness of our individual lives, yet that doesn't keep them from living purposefully, from living as if it all matters. Cass Seltzer pursues his life; in fact, from the looks of it, he pursues it pretty well. Even if he argues that he thinks his life is devoid of purpose, of worthiness, the very vigor with which he is pursuing it gives the lie to his claim. It's just like the person who argues that we shouldn't have faith in reason-he gives the lie to his argument by expecting that his argument will be taken seriously, since if his argument really worked we couldn't take it seriously. Some faiths are unavoidable because without them our very lives become incoherent. Faith that we have a reason to live is a faith like that.

"That is my second prong," Eighteen minutes have elapsed, and he has yet to affirm the resolution that God exists.

"But I haven't said anything yet about God." Aha! "I've waited for my third prong of attack to introduce Him. I should have convinced you by now that certain faiths are necessary for coherence, and I should have convinced you that among such faiths is that in our own purposefulness, our sense that our lives matter. You know, even someone who ends his life is taking that life seriously, so seriously that he can't stand to live it. We just can't inhabit our lives without taking them seriously."

Cass could be projecting-he's been known to project before-but he seems to sense a slightly more sympathetic note creeping into Fidley's delivery as he swerves toward the existential.

"But how can an individual life acquire this seriousness? What can confer it? It requires something outside an individual's life to make it matter, and that something must itself have agency and purpose. It must have intentionality, which means it must have a mind. And that is exactly what God is. The mind of God is the purposeful agency that confers purposefulness on each of us, even on Cass Seltzer."

No, Cass had definitely been projecting.

"The faith in a God who loves each one of us, who cares about whether we each reach our full potential as human beings, is the very faith required for us to reach our full potential as human beings. The faith in a God who has made us in His image is the faith that confers worth on each of us. How else can mere human lives acquire transcendent meaning if not through a transcendent agency?

"How am I doing for time?" he finally thinks to ask Lenny, who answers jauntily that he'd used up his time several minutes ago, and earns himself a huge laugh. Lenny is now having the time of his life.

"Okay, then, I'll make just one more point," Fidley says, because obviously Lenny is not going to stop him. "And that's that, if you have any doubt that rejection of faith in God impoverishes life and robs men and women of that sense of meaningfulness that makes their lives coherent, then all you have to do is look around at the hollow hedonism, neurotic narcissism, and dissolute degeneracy of a secular age that can't even be alerted to the seriousness of life by a wake-up call like 9/11. It's not just the immorality of our godless age that makes a person want to weep, but also the sad sight of human life untouched by transcendence."

Cass can see Fidley's trapezius muscles contracting, and his right hand slashes the air one time each on the downward beat of "hedonism," "narcissism," and "degeneracy."

Fidley walks back to his seat, and Cass remains sitting a bit too long, so that Lenny actually turns to him with a wide smile and a flourish of his hand to indicate the podium, which of course gets another laugh; at this point, Lenny can do no wrong. Cass stands and walks over to his lectern and looks out at the overflow audience, and the awareness of the absurdity of his standing here, before all these people, in order to negate the resolution 'God exists,' threatens to transport him clean out of who he is supposed to be and what he is supposed to be doing.

Here I am.

No, if any moment is the wrong moment for him to yield to his version of transcendence, this has to be it. He takes a good long look at the kid with the ponytail, he takes a good long look at Roz, and he brings himself back to the question at hand, which is: is he going to go after Fidley's argument?

He doesn't feel he has a grip on it yet. Fidley has appealed to elements of The Argument from Personal Purpose (#19), and The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason (#33), and he's even introduced a snatch of The Argument from Pragmatism (#32) in speaking of beliefs that pay good rates of return; but he's jumbled them up in such a way that the whole is giving the appearance of being greater than the sum of its parts, and Cass can't see his way through the jumble yet. And then he'd thrown in Hume, too, for good measure. What would Azarya say about Fidley's deployment of Hume? Hume is one of Azarya's heroes. He'd all but memorized Hume's essay "On Miracles" when he was an adolescent. Azarya would never stand for Humean skepticism's being misused as a defense of theism.

Back when Cass had been a pre-med and taking exams, sometimes he would look at the questions for the first time and think in a panic that nothing was familiar, that because of some terrible misunderstanding he had studied the wrong text, and that there wasn't a single question on the page that connected with anything that he knew. But then, like a cloud of silt settling out of turbid water and revealing the riverbed below, his mind cleared and the panic subsided, and each question of the exam emerged as an exemplar of a familiar principle. He's hoping that will happen very soon.

On the spot, as Cass is making his preliminary remarks thanking Chaplain Shore and the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard for sponsoring the debate, and thanking Professor Fidley for "initiating the discussion by firing such an intellectually serious salvo," he's decided to postpone discussing Fidley's argument, and instead start out by making his own case independently. Why let Fidley define the terms of his opening argument anyway?

"Professor Fidley, in apologizing for the necessity of faith, concedes too soon in admitting that belief in God must rest on faith. If God makes any difference to the world-and what would be the point of believing in any God that didn't make a difference to the world?-then we should be able to see indications of his existence when we observe the world we find ourselves in. And the fact is that this world does not present itself as being one in which there exists a powerful creator who cares about us. On the face of it, it seems a very different kind of world, which is what has inspired the theological line of argument that's called theodicy: the attempt to reconcile the existence of God with the facts about our world that seem to suggest his absence.

"We can observe one feature of our world that is particularly relevant: suffering. Children die of disease; individuals are crippled by accidents and wracked with pain; whole peoples get exterminated. Just on the face of it, the obscene amounts of suffering we observe are not compatible with a God who's both good and in control. Mind you, that's just on the face of it. Believers look for ways of accommodating God's existence with the searing facts of suffering, but they have to work hard at it, and the hard theodical work they need to do is what I mean by the world's offering empirical evidence against God's existence.

"So what are the ways that believers have offered to reconcile so much suffering with the existence of God? First there are the preconditions for free will. If we are truly to be moral agents rather than robots, then we must have the freedom to choose between good and evil. And, given that freedom, the possibility of evil must be there; and, given that possibility, sometimes it will be realized, and when it is realized, suffering will ensue.

"But the requirements of free will can only account for a small part of the suffering we see. It will, perhaps, allow the believer to write off, as cos-mically accounted for, the child who was overheard to whisper to his mother as they were both being marched to their deaths at the extermination camp at Belzec, 'But I tried to be so good, Mama!' Yes, people are given free will, and Belzec was a consequence, and so the theist can write off that child's pathetic cry as accounted for.

"But there is also abundant suffering that comes about not because of the exercise of others' free will but because of natural disasters and accidents and the ravages of disease. And believers have to come up with some other way of dealing with these cases, since their occurrence has nothing to do with the exercise of free will. At this point you hear about the potential for achieving a greatness of the soul in overcoming tragedy. You hear that there are virtues-such as forbearance, and courage, and transcendence in the face of suffering, and compassion and love for those who suffer-which can only be exercised because suffering gives us the opportunity. The moral purpose of life, under this view, has to do with soul-making, and the full extent of what our souls can become can only unfold under the adverse conditions that God generously provides us.

"These are ingenious attempts to reconcile the facts of our world to the existence of a God who cares, and the very ingenuity they require shows how difficult the reconciliation is.

"And of course even here the explanation can't cover all the cases, since so many of those who suffer are never given the opportunity to achieve soul-making at all-like people whose lives are snuffed out in an instant, together with all those who might have developed virtues in the grieving for them, or children who have no way to make sense of their suffering. Once again, their suffering, according to this rationalization, can perhaps serve the moral needs of others, and so can find justification.

"I don't know about any of you, but I find this rationalization, as ingenious as it is, morally offensive. The suffering sacrifice of some so that others are afforded the opportunity to achieve moral transcendence doesn't strike me as descriptive of a moral universe. At the very least, shouldn't all God's creatures be given an opportunity for transcendence? The believer who's satisfied with this ingenious answer isn't paying close enough attention to the facts of suffering. His moral calculus of costs and benefits doesn't add up.

"And it's at this point that the believer, if he feels this objection at all, will take refuge in the inscrutable will of God. Or perhaps he'll argue that the very resistance of these facts of suffering to any explanation that we can come up with points to the existence of God, since there must be a way in which this suffering is redeemed, and since it's not in this world, then it has to be in the next. But, of course, to believe that there must be some way in which this suffering is ultimately redeemed is already to assume a level of transcendent explanation, which is the same thing as assuming God, which makes an argument of this kind circular.

"So at some point the believer, no matter how ingenious his attempts to reconcile the existence of God to the nature of the world, will have to fall back, when it comes to some of the most heartrending of cases, on the inscrutable ways of God. But to speak of the inscrutable ways of God is to acknowledge that the moral complexion of our world doesn't favor the existence of a benevolent deity, which is the very point that I'm making.

"How am I doing for time?"

"You have a minute left," Lenny says, without looking at his watch. Cass has the feeling Lenny is keeping time or not, as the spirit moves him.

"Okay, then, I'll wrap it up. It's often said that, just as theism can't be proved, so, too, atheism can't be proved. Just because no argument manages to establish God's existence doesn't show he doesn't exist. Both beliefs depend on faith alone. But to this I respond that there is so much about our world-in particular, its moral complexion-that makes it appear to be unruled by a beneficent being, there is so much that we either have to callously ignore or else lay at the feet of God's inscrutability, that in the absence of any argument for God's existence so compelling as to overcome these facts of suffering-and I haven't heard one tonight-the reasonable conclusion is that God does not exist."

Cass stops speaking, and there's some rustling and whispering and thumping out in the pews as people rearrange their bodies and prepare for the next round.

Fidley goes to his lectern, while Cass remains standing at his, and Cass finds he no longer feels intimidated. He thinks he's acquitted himself well so far, and he wistfully wishes that Lucinda were here to see it. But there are Roz and Mona, both looking optimistic-in fact, Roz looks radiant-and now that he's no longer nervous, he feels grateful to Sy Auerbach for traveling all the way from New York, and to the Agnostic Chaplaincy and to Harvard University, to whom he feels doubly grateful, and he realizes that he's once again on the verge of ascending on the flapping wings of his grateful soul, and so he takes a good hard look at his adversary to bring him back down to this moment and to what still lies ahead. Fidley has struck a formidable pose, his shoulders looking wider than ever, and he's been hastily scribbling while Cass has been doing nothing but counting his blessings like a fool. He concentrates now and thinks he knows what Azarya would say about Fidley's enlisting of Humean skepticism, and thinking that he knows how Azarya would respond calms him down again.

Lenny Shore comes over to Cass's lectern and speaks into his mike.

"Before we go on to the next phase of this debate, I just want to say to Professor Fidley: You know, you're right! And I would like to say to Professor Seltzer: You know, you're right!"

The audience laughs, and Lenny laughs with them, right into the mike.

"So-now on to the questions. Professor Fidley, you have the first question." Lenny returns to his seat.

"Thank you very much. I'm more grateful than ever to have the opportunity to question Cass Seltzer after having listened to him. Only now do I fully understand why he is referred to as 'the atheist with a soul.'"

Felix takes a little longer this time to smile and then waits for a few snickers to join him. Is Lenny keeping time? Roz has murder in her eyes.

"That was an impressively soulful homily on the virtues of atheism. Cass Seltzer makes it sound as if anyone who cares sufficiently for his fellow man is duty-bound to be an atheist. A believer such as Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to serving the most suffering of God's creatures, apparently isn't paying enough attention to the facts of suffering, at least not as much as academicians like Bertrand Russell and Cass Seltzer are paying attention, ministering to God's unfortunates by being professors and writing best-selling books."

This is the second time that Fidley has gotten in a dig about best sellers. Perhaps the sales for Welfare Warfare Wherefore had been disappointing.

"The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, who forfeited his life in the struggle to alleviate the misery of his people, apparently didn't pay close enough attention to how people suffer, or he would never have been a man of God. Despite lives of self-sacrifice-to which, I think even Cass Seltzer will agree, the religious are far more prone then the irreligious- such people as these are cold of heart compared with the atheists, who care too much for their fellow man to be able to believe in God.

"My first question to Professor Seltzer is whether he really does mean to suggest that Mother Teresa was a callous woman."

Fidley spaces out those last six words so that they make their full impact, and there's a faint rushing noise that Cass is pretty sure is coming from the audience and not from inside his own head, as if of the collective intake of breath.

"I'm sorry if I gave the impression that I think believers are callous and uncaring. That certainly isn't something that I believe."

Cass swallows. This head-on attack is unnerving. He's unnerved. He takes a sip of water.

"You and I are here today, Professor Fidley, to debate the resolution 'God exists.' We're evaluating arguments for and against that resolution. As those of you who have read my book know, that's not how I think religious beliefs are generally formed. When it comes to religion, arguments usually come after belief, not before. Far more potent than arguments are certain emotional attitudes that permeate one's whole sense of being in the world, emotional attitudes that orient a person in the world rather than say something true or false. Theistic propositions like 'God exists,' or 'God is good,' or 'God loves me,' are metaphorical expressions for these permeating attitudes and emotions-metaphors that can seriously confuse us. For me to debate the truth or falsity of the proposition 'God exists' with you tonight therefore has nothing much to do with the psychology of religion as I understand it, with what it feels like to hold a spiritual attitude toward the world and to live accordingly. So, when I criticize theodical arguments as being cavalier toward suffering, I'm not criticizing religious people as being cavalier toward suffering, since the whole point of my book is that the psychology of religious conviction has little to do with arguments.

"But here tonight we are debating arguments, arguments for a proposition, not an emotion, and I maintain that the argument against the existence of God, based on the great amount of suffering that the believer must lay at the inscrutability of God, is stronger than any arguments for the existence. And any theist who thinks he's helped clear up the mystery by appealing to such things as the potential for achieving greatness of soul that suffering presents to some sufferers, but by no means all sufferers, is, yes, cavalier toward suffering, at least while he is consciously making that argument. In some sense, perhaps, the very fact that compassionate people, people who devote themselves to alleviating suffering, can get themselves to believe that the degree of suffering we witness can be explained, is itself a measure of how powerful the psychological mechanisms are."

Cass had felt discomfited by Fidley's question, not only the hostile way in which it had been asked, but by the substance of it as well. He doesn't want to be forced into criticizing religious people. He suspects that Fidley has figured this out about him and is going to exploit it.

Now it's his turn to ask a question, and he looks at Fidley as he speaks, but Fidley doesn't look at him.

"Professor Fidley, you've argued that the belief in God is as necessary to our living coherently as is our belief in logic and our belief in the lawfulness of nature. As you pointed out so eloquently, there can be no thought at all without believing in the fundamentals of thinking, in the rules of logic and the rules of scientific induction. Likewise, you want to argue, our living coherently requires our sense that we matter, and that this mattering in turn requires a Transcendental Underwriter, something beyond ourselves that ensures that we do actually matter. How is it possible to live coherently, you ask, leading lives that are worthy of us, without faith in a transcendent purpose? But there's something about this line of reasoning that strikes me as viciously circular. If we already know that we're worthy of having a transcendent purpose coming to us, why would we need the transcendent purpose? The transcendent purpose would be redundant. And if we don't know that we're worthy unless we acquire that transcendent purpose, then who says we have a transcendent purpose coming to us in the first place? This demand for a transcendent purpose seems either unneeded or unearned, or am I wrong?"

All the talk about Hume, Cass had seen, had been just so much silt-stirring. Fidley's three-pronged argument is an elaborate variation of The Argument from Personal Purpose. Fidley's argument is only as sound as Cass's #19.

Fidley smiles again, that same thin gash cutting into his left cheek, and he keeps his face turned toward the audience.

"It's hard for me to accept anything Cass Seltzer has to say about my argument, since his entire discussion has begged the question in a way I think must be obvious to everyone here, including Cass Seltzer himself. He's coming at my argument from a moral high ground that he can't legitimately claim. There is simply no way for an atheist such as himself to be able to claim any sort of objective morality.

"Cass Seltzer spoke of the tragedy of a child being exterminated by the absolute evil that was Nazism. But how, coming from his worldview, can he possibly maintain that there's anything like absolute evil? It's on the basis of the evil in this world that he argues that our world yields empirical evidence against God's existence. But the absolute distinction between good and evil can be maintained only on the basis of God. According to the Nazi system, it was perfectly okay to send that child to his death. And without God, who's to say the Nazis were wrong?

"Now, Cass Seltzer, of course, is not a Nazi. He has another system from which he judges the Nazis' actions wrong, the suffering inflicted on that child evil. But if it's just some people's systems going up against other people's systems, with no higher authority to adjudicate between them, then it all dissolves into moral chaos and ethical relativism, and Cass Seltzer isn't entitled to talk about the moral complexion of the world at all.

"I can talk about it, but only because I know that there's a God who establishes the objective difference between right actions and wrong actions, between immoral systems like Nazism and moral systems like Judeo-Christian ethics. But how can Cass Seltzer claim such objective moral distinctions?"

Fidley stops speaking, and he still isn't looking at Cass, and Cass isn't quite sure if this is the second question that Fidley is lobbing at him or just a rhetorical flourish.

"Is that your second question to me?"

"Yes, it is." Still the man won't look at Cass, and it's beginning to irk him.

"I'd be glad to answer that question, Professor Fidley, but first I do want to point out that you didn't answer my question, and that disappoints me. Instead, you've switched the topic and are arguing that my own argument makes no sense because it's a moral argument and without God there can be no moral truths. I'm more than happy to address that point.

"Morality is often claimed by the theists to come much easier to them than to the atheists. It's a natural thing to think. The claims of morality seem so mysterious-involving, as they do, not just claims about what is the case but about what ought to be the case-that it's natural to feel that you have to ground them in a mysterious foundation. Morality is mysterious, God is mysterious, let's reduce one mystery to the other and assume that the mystery of God takes care of the mystery of morality. Morality has to be more than just one people's system of values clashing with another people's system of values, Professor Fidley says, and I agree. But then he also says that the only way that it can be more is if there is a higher authority adjudicating between them.

"But grounding morality in God doesn't work at all. After all, you have to ask the question whether God has any reason for his moral adjudication. Does God have some reason for endorsing a system that enshrines a moral principle like 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' while he rejects the principles of Nazism that sent that child and so many like him to their deaths? Professor Fidley asked me how we humans can adjudicate between moral systems if we don't have recourse to God's adjudication. Now I'm asking the same question about how God adjudicates. Either God has a reason for his moral decisions or he doesn't.

"Let's say he does. Well, then, there are reasons independent of his will, and whatever those reasons are provides the justification for what makes those moral decisions the right ones. God's reasons for wanting us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us are the very reasons that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. The reasons are what make such actions moral, and God himself is redundant.

"The alternative is that God has no reason at all because there are no moral reasons independent of God. But if he really has no moral reason pushing him one way or the other-because otherwise that would be the moral reason and we could leave God out of it-God could just as well have reversed himself. He might want each of us to do unto others the very thing we lie in bed worrying that someone might, God forbid, do unto us. He might order a loving father to take his son and prepare him for sacrifice, binding the terrified boy as one binds an animal to be slaughtered, and, because there is no morality independent of God, the father will obey without demurral. Ah, you say, but the Lord stayed the father's hand, as we knew that he would, since he would never demand something as morally heinous as child sacrifice. But that's to bring in a morality independent of God. If there really isn't any morality independent of God, then we would all be in the position of Abraham, prepared to commit the filicide he came close to committing in Genesis 22. We would all be prepared to commit the genocide that God commands in Numbers 31, when he is outraged that not every last woman and male child of the Midianites had been killed. Without any moral reasons independent of God, God's adjudication becomes the whim of an entirely arbitrary authority, and it doesn't clear up the mystery of morality in the least. Without an independent concept of morality, how can we even say that God is good and that therefore his adjudication is relevant to our moral decisions?

"This argument goes back to Plato, and it shows that appeals to God don't help with the problem of grounding morality. Either God has his reasons and those are the reasons and reference to God is unnecessary, or God has no reasons and then morality consists of the arbitrary diktats of a God who we can't even say is good.

"How, then, do we ground morality? Professor Fidley has done part of the work for us by identifying the fundamental adherence that each of us has to our own lives' mattering. He's right in claiming that we can't live coherent lives without feeling that we matter, but that is quite a different thing from our actually mattering in some cosmic sense. We can't get that automatically, just from our wanting to matter or feeling that we do matter. The upward move that Professor Fidley tried to make in the third prong of his argument doesn't work.

"But I do think we can move horizontally outward, and that's the direction to go to legitimate morality. I can't look at other creatures who are committed to their existence and flourishing in the same way as I'm committed to my existence and flourishing without feeling a certain degree of identification, empathy, sympathy, compassion. The intuition that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do unto us flows naturally from this outward move. I don't see any way to get it by some upward move. I presume, however, that you do, Professor Fidley. And I'd like for you to explain how, especially how you get around Plato's argument, which is my question to you."

"Indeed I do, Cass Seltzer. Not only do I think that what you call the 'upward move' can ground morality, I don't believe that anything else can, certainly not your floundering gesture in what you call the outward direction."

Well, this is at least some improvement, as far as Cass is concerned. Fidley may be snarling, but at least he's addressing him directly, and he's actually turned toward him, the two hard pebbles locking onto Cass's gaze.

"As far as I can make out, this sideways movement that's supposed to give you the Golden Rule just comes down to this: seeing the meaning-lessness of your life moves you to compassion for the meaninglessness of other lives."

He says this with a smile-his most convincing one yet-and he ends it with a brief bark of a laugh. It's a good line, and Cass laughs, too.

"And from this you want to derive morality, Cass Seltzer? That is, to say the least, a pretty tepid system of morality you're offering us, which, even if you could get it to make internal sense, doesn't have much force. I don't see it getting anyone to overcome their immoral impulses.

"As far as that argument from Plato that you are so impressed with is concerned, I can't say that I find it convincing. There's nothing arbitrary about God's moral grounding. It's rooted in God's very character. The being of goodness lies in God. Our life has moral value, sufficient so that Cass Seltzer can pity the suffering of humans, only because we are made in the image of God. There is nothing in the nature of a human being that, in and of itself, entails worthiness. Our worthiness, if it exists at all, has to be derived from something outside us.

"And from what is it derived? From that of which we cannot think without seeing Its worthiness. Seltzer's question-how do we know that God Himself is good?-is as misguided a question as asking what time it is right now on the sun. If you understand that what we mean by the time of day is the relation between the sun and the earth, then you're not going to ask what time it is on the sun. And if you understand that the being of God contains the grounds of goodness in Its very essence, then you're not going to ask whether God is good or not.

"Cass Seltzer is patently confusing how we know with what we know. People can recognize moral values independently of God, and they can use that recognition to understand that God is good. But their recognizing moral values independently of God doesn't mean that moral values themselves exist independently of God. There's knowledge that's independent, and then there's existence that's independent, and these are two different things.

"My belief is that God, who is the foundation of moral values, implants intuitions of these values in each of us. This is what the Bible happens to say, and as Cass Seltzer of all people should know, this is what many psychologists are now reporting, that, beneath the surface differences in our moral points of view, there are deep universals. So it can seem to people like Cass Seltzer that, just because his knowledge of these values can be attained independently of his knowledge of God, the values themselves are independent of God. In fact, there can be no morality independent of God, but that doesn't mean that morality is arbitrary. Morality could not be different, because God is God; He has to be the way He is, and could not be some other way if He is God at all."

Cass has been brought to the point of wondering how sincere Felix Fidley really is. Does he believe what he's saying, or is he trying, as Lucinda predicted, to overwhelm him? His argument has all the structure and verbiage and feel of a philosophical argument, with its familiar distinction between how something is and how we know that something is, but it doesn't really apply to the issue they're debating. The philosophical distinctions glance off the surface without digging in. Even Fidley hadn't sounded completely convinced as he delivered his last few lines, as if he had to get them out but didn't like the taste of them in his mouth. Perhaps Cass will find a way to frame his last question that will expose Fidley's unease with his own sophistry.

But at this point Chaplain Lenny steps in and says that this has been so fascinating, and the time has flown by so quickly, that there's only time for one more question, which he guesses will go to Professor Fidley. Fidley again takes several moments to scan the audience.

"It seems apparent to me, and I certainly hope to many of you who are here tonight, that the Judeo-Christian system of morality, founded on the appeal to an authority beyond us, is the only thing that can confer the sort of worth on each individual that wrings tears from an atheist like Cass Seltzer. Nothing else can do it. No 'is' statement can entail an 'ought' statement. No statement about what people are like, what matters to them, entails that we ought to do unto others as we would wish them to do unto us. If we just stay on the horizontal level of 'is' statements, then we can't possibly get out any 'ought's. This is why we have to move to a whole other level, which is the level of God, the level on which the distinction between 'is' and 'ought' disappears, a point which neither Plato nor Cass Seltzer appreciates. Plato's excuse is that he lived before the great monotheistic discovery had spread to Greece. What's Cass Seltzer's excuse?

"But even if I were to grant Cass Seltzer his tepid sideways moral system, what motivation can he drum up to get anybody to do the moral thing? What motivational force can he put behind it? That's yet another crucial problem with a secular system of morality. It has no muscle. It's a legal system with no means of enforcement, no police to arrest people who break the law-in other words, anarchy. In the end, given a secular morality-if such a thing is even coherent-what you get is a system that is utterly toothless, so the result is the same as if there were no moral system at all: anarchy, anomie, a society consisting of people doggedly acting only in their own self-interest, in fact little more than brutes.