Is there a god?

Of course there is. In fact, there are lots of them.

Look around you. Jews have a god, although it's difficult and/or contentious and/or forbidden to pronounce the name of said creator/lawgiver/covenanter. Muslims, being their fellow patriarchal Abrahamic monotheists, of course have a god known as Allah. One of the few things most Christians can agree on, I think, is that there is indeed a god, and in a truly remarkable moment of unanimity, if not creativity, they even agreed at some point to call their god 'God'.

In short, ample empirical evidence exists to support the proposition that god(s) do(es) exist(s).

If that isn't convincing enough, we can look to the ancient Greeks, who were blessed with a number of colorful, if flawed, gods. The Romans had a pantheon full of gods and goddesses endowed with a wonderful array of humanlike qualities. Those human qualities of gods could make them either appealing or repellant, depending on one's attitude toward humans.

My ancestors the Norse had their own amazing and quirky assemblage of deities, and they were generous enough to share some of them with other Germanic folk in a loose kind of early pagan EU. Hindu tradition has a rich array of gods from Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva down through a plethora of lesser divine beings, embodying for our benefit a mind-boggling range of aspects of our own complex, amazing, and troubled existence.

I'm undoubtedly leaving out many gods and goddesses that exist in a number of cultures of which I am unaware, and I hope members of those cultures will forgive us our omissions (as we forgive those who omit against us). The fact that I don't know about your gods in no way implies that I deny their existence.

Silly question, Is there a god. Clearly there are gods and goddesses all over the place. If it's metaphysical questions you are interested in, you might as well ask, Is there a tree? Is there a mountain? Is there a language? Is there a story? Is there an insect? How many do you want? How much time have you got?

It's not like I lie awake at night wondering about these things, although I do admit the question has come up in dinner-table conversation. (You had to be there.) I bring it up now because I ran across a book recently with the intriguing title 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. I was intrigued as much by the subtitle as the title, but I'm sorry to say it has been a bit of a disappointment both as fiction and as theology.

But I went ahead and read it, and every time I was ready to give up and return it to the library, I'd start to care about the characters, some of whom are well-drawn, a few of whom seem like interchangeable foils for the protagonist, and some of whom are caricatures of the kind of people you love to hate.

It's a valiant literary attempt to do something really extraordinary in a single book, and some of the intellectual questions the author hamfistedly wedges into the narrative are interesting, although, as you might expect, those discursive asides tend to slow down the action just a bit.

It's a great idea to collect a whole bunch of cogent arguments, either for or against a controversial proposition, and use them as the bones of a novel. Here is a sampling from the Appendix, not for your edification but as an indication of the weighty tone that Rebecca Newburger Goldstein brings to her tale:

1. The Cosmological Argument
2. The Ontological Argument
3. The Argument from Design
4. The Argument from the Big Bang
5. The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants
6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws
7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences
8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences
9. The Argument from Answered Prayers
10. The Argument from a Wonderful Life
11. The Argument from Miracles
12. The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness
13. The Argument from the Improbable Self
14. The Argument from Survival After Death
15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation
16. The Argument from Moral Truth
17. The Argument from Altruism
18. The Argument from Free Will
19. The Argument from Personal Purpose
20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance
21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity
22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics
23. The Argument from Holy Books
24. The Argument from Perfect Justice
25. The Argument from Suffering
26. The Argument from the Survival of the Jews
27. The Argument from the Upward Curve of History
28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius
29. The Argument from the Human Knowledge of Infinity
30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality
31. The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal’s Wager)
32. The Argument from Pragmatism (William James’s Leap of Faith)
33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason
34. The Argument from Sublimity
35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza’s God)
36. The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments

You get the idea. She's a Serious Writer.

Postrelativism

"'Relativism' only makes sense in a realist epistemology." - Patty Lather

An article in the New York Times describes the strange position of Western filmmakers in North Korea who, in exchange for the privilege of filming in North Korea, must adhere to authoritarian Pyongyang standards of form and content. In order to reveal an informed view of the state control of the arts and society that is their subject, they have to play by the rules and thus show the absurdity of the rules. Go along and get along.

Very few Western artists have found their way through the obstructionist maze of official oppression to make a documentary film about the extremities of life north of the 38th parallel. The intention to subvert the system could only succeed ironically, by adhering to its restrictions and pleasing the approving authorities. Not biting the hand that feeds you, just obeying it with a straight face.

In the good old freedom-loving USA, paragon of democracy, diversity, and dissent, we don't have to resort to such duplicity.

In the Art World as the eminent critic Arthur Danto defines it - you know, galleries, museums, collectors, agents, buyers, sellers, critics - there is a (desperate) need for standards of high art and low, 'fine' and 'folk', this school and that, uptown-downtown, etc., and those distinctions of course serve many purposes. For one thing, the market appears to require them in order to set the value of the products it buys and sells.

If you buy into that worldview, as Danto, et al, clearly do and want the rest of us to do, then you become eligible to belong to the club - or not. [Note: eligibility does not guarantee membership, but buying in is a prerequisite to eligibility; let's get that straight.] It's a realistic view of art and artists, producers and consumers, supply and demand, goods and services, you know the drill. Qua realism, it is what it is; the world just works that way, so if you don't like it, get over it.

Besides, I read it in the New York Times, so it's true. Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, CBS, CNN, whatever. Don't you watch The News? These people make the news. They're professionals in a serious and competitive business. Whether they take themselves and the content they produce as seriously as their target audience does is another question. I'm guessing that the news biz is rife with ironists.

What several friends have tried to teach me on several occasions over the years - I'm a slow learner - is that this realist paradigm is not necessary or even helpful in understanding the world or getting by in it. On the contrary, it is liberating to take a peek outside it as often as possible, to think and act other than what expert opinion makers agree upon, and above all to not waste your life stoking the star-making machinery behind a popular soooong. Yet there are consequences to opting out of the dominant paradigm, and as a young poet once said, to live outside the law you must be honest.

My old friend Nancy tried to convey something like this to me back in Ann Arbor when as a callow lad I was desperately trying to be unique and special and extraordinary - at something, anything. She was as patient as humanly possible, but I was a slow learner in my own poetic and alienated way.

Another friend, Dazey, a couple of years later, was much more direct in setting me straight about art and life. Yes, there is a difference between theater and everyday life, and no, there is no difference between famous people and ordinary people. There are talented, cool, regular people all over the place doing amazing and groundbreaking work, so what if you haven't seen them on TV.

Professor Lather's statement several years later, uttered impromptu in response to my simple-minded assertion on behalf of 'relativism' during her qualitative research class, resonated in a similar way with respect to science, valid data, and education. What counts as 'true' is not the property of the institutions who fund the research. What counts as beautiful is not the property of the record label, the movie studio, or the publishing conglomerate. What counts as good is not the property of the church, the university, or Major League Baseball.

If you've heard all this a hundred times before, I beg your pardon. Like I said, I'm a slow learner, and it helps me to belabor the obvious every once in a while just to remind myself where I am.

Relativism was simply my favorite term du jour for the much more fluid and mutable view that nobody gets to determine for everybody else what the facts are, what is valuable, and whose work is most interesting and consequential. Realists want to stop the world and nail down once and for all what is the case and claim that it's just objectively so (because they said so).

Given that kind of categorical claim, you know someone will make the contrary claim, and since they don't want to be in the 'realist' camp, they have to call themselves something else. So along came the 'relativist' stance, an attempt to undermine realism by taking nothing as given. Okay, fine. That worked for about five minutes and generated a lot of theses by people who repeatedly told each other, "No, no, you don't understand."

But the more radical truth that Lather did understand is that you can't be a relativist without a realist to disagree with. That's like buying into the realist's argument in the first place, so never mind, might as well skip that step. Forget about relativism, because it's barking up the wrong damn tree. Kind of like trying to be all radical and alienated according to the rules of the New York Times and Arthur Danto, because they call the shots about who's hot and who's not, right?

Easter is

Redbuds blooming; daylilies and hosta poking out of the ground, peonies sending up thin tendrils, ajuga and lamium waking up, peach and pear trees budding out.

Transplanting chunks of overgrown thickets to areas of bare ground to fill in spaces; moving a few flagstones to make a better path between two rooms in the garden; pulling a few weeds to free up space for flowers and rocks to be visible; leveling off a couple of square-foot spots in the back corner to mark the last stop of Dali and Isabelle.

Grilling salmon, eating with potatoes, asparagus, and white wine outside with Zelda and Gven.