Jerry wondered if the pastor had ever heard of circular reasoning. Yes, the Bible tossed the number "forty years" around a lot. Did that prove divine supervision of history, or did it show that the authors of the Old Testament used the number "forty years" whenever they needed a figure and had no idea what the true number was? Yes, the Bible repeatedly attributed national suffering to violations of God's law. But did this prove that Israel was really any worse right before a foreign invasion than it was the rest of the time, or did the writers just make it sound that way? Did not the book of Ecclesiastes note that sometimes the wicked prosper, and the righteous suffer? Did not Jesus explain that, e.g. the men killed in the collapse of the Tower of Siloam (wherever that was) were no worse sinners than those who did not perish in such accidents? Jerry could not see this perfect consistency of which the pastor spoke.

Perhaps she moved to a better novel.

Obviously, Pastor Edwin wrote the book, and Ray later plagiarized it.

Even for a cardboard fictional character, Jerry seems to have folded a bit easily. After all, Edwin hasn't really addressed the issues that, according to the story thus far, have actually propelled Jerry into God-rejection: how God has allowed the deaths of his father, grandmother, mother, sister, first love, millions of more or less innocents worldwide during WWII, the fact that his wife is dying, the fact that his son is a junkie, the fact that his daughter has gone completely missing from the novel, etc. At least, Edwin hasn't addressed those issues so far as the story goes (but then, the story also hasn't addressed the questions of when, where, or with whom Jerry has committed adultery or when he supposedly murdered Germans just for being Germans; a lot of this novel seems to take place between the parts Ray actually wrote down).

Now, from a purely philosophical standpoint, one might raise the question of how the vast complexity of living things implies that they were created by an omnipotent, omniscient Designer operating in time but existing outside of it: human designers generally seek to make things as simple as possible, and an all-powerful Creator could endow a rock or mud puddle with sentience, mobility, sense, and the ability to manipulate its surroundings. Only a finitely-powerful, finitely-knowledgeable creator would need complexity to accomplish difficult tasks. But again, Jerry, to the extent that he has any real personality or real theological questions, doesn't seem to be interested so much in "what made the universe" but rather in "why should I trust and love that Maker rather than despise Him for letting the universe get so messed up?" And while Theodore Lawson may have provided some hints of an answer to that question, Edwin hasn't.

Jerry frowned with impatience at the minister's transparent sophistry. "I, personally, haven't seen the builder of this building, of course," he noted, "but I've invested in building trades over the years and I've seen buildings from houses to factories to, yes, churches built. I've stood on construction sites and seen the workers, sat in offices and talked to architects. They aren't the same people, by the way; if this building is an argument for God it's an argument for a pantheon that divided up the task of creation."

Edward noted impatiently that every analogy had its limits.

Jerry continued, "but here's the point: I've never heard of anyone who's claimed to seen a builder of, for example, squirrels or trees or entire worlds. Living things, at least, are bred, not built. The limits of your analogy kick in at its very start. Who built your Builder, for example.

Edward pounced in triumph: "only things that start to exist need a builder; God has always existed!"

"Convenient," acknowledged Jerry, "though again, every designer and builder we actually have any knowledge of did have a beginning of his own. Anyway, perhaps the universe has always existed. Remember, this is ca. 1967; no one except professional cosmologists has yet heard of the recent discovery of the cosmic microwave background, so the Big Bang hasn't displaced the Steady State theory that posits that the universe never had a beginning."

"We characters are not bound by mere chronology," Edward reminded Jerry. "Just as your grandmother could be sent to Auschwitz before it was built, we can accept the Big Bang as the prevalent cosmological theory even though it isn't in this particular year!"

"Then," noted Jerry, "we should note that, discounting the possibility of a cyclic universe that has always existed in some form or other, it is quite possible that time did not exist before the Big Bang: the universe has still always existed, and time simply doesn't extend infinitely into the past, as Stephen Hawking will propose a few decades from now."

"Oh," and Jerry added, "it is entirely logically possible to be an agnostic with regard to some sort of generic Supreme Being, and still be an atheist with regard to specific claims about, e.g. the God Who supposedly inspired the Torah, or the New Testament, or the Koran. In a few years, someone will argue that you, for example, are an atheist with regard to Amaterasu and Marduk and Zeus and most of the other deities humans have worshiped; it is perfectly possible to take this atheism one God further."

Musings on today's excerpt:

First, Ray should stand firm against those who protest that "the women" are relegated to washing the dishes while the men discuss theology. It's a perfectly plausible scene, especially given the time, place, and culture. As a famed science fiction editor (whose name, alas, I have forgotten) noted years ago, in an essay entitled "In Defense of Dumb Blonds" ("and why do you assume I meant just dumb blond women, anyway?"), if you insist that men and women, or whites and nonwhites, be depicted as social equals in every story, you rule out the very possibility of stories illustrating forms of social inequality.

Second, there is no antecedent for "the" meeting. Jerry is going to church again, so presumably this follows some church service he and Connie have just attended, but that should be "a meeting," or Ray should have started by saying, e.g. "Jerry and Connie had gone to church one morning, and ..." If this seems like harping over a small detail, note that this sort of literary slovenliness fills every page of the book.

Third, Jerry continues to live unconstrained by the bonds of mere chronology; as he managed to join the French Resistance before it even existed, and reached full adulthood by the age of 14, he manages to find a pastor who reads Ray Comfort's books thirty years before they're written.

I noticed that also, but to my mind, that just makes the whole Ruby connection weirder. If Ruby did use the pistol Jerry inherited from his father, the police haven't noticed it yet, and (unless the dream about Pastor Ludendorff is symbolically using Germans to stand in for Oswalds) neither Jerry nor Johnny seem worried about the possibility.

Some thoughts that are (like the events in the novel) only vaguely connected to one another:

Good grief, but Ray kills off the women in his novel frequently and without fanfare. At least Connie, unlike poor Lillian or grandma what's-her-name, can die knowing that she helped propel the plot forward (or in whatever direction it might be meandering).

Jerry's daughter, Elizabeth, is still missing in action. Ray even forfeited a chance to re-tell the parable of the Prodigal Son in more detail (Elizabeth could take the elder son's role of being the good child who wondered why no similar fuss was being made over said good child), apparently because that would involve actually providing her with actions and a character.

No competent physician, even in the mid-sixties, would tell a patient flat-out that she had only six months to live; cancer is too subject to individual variations and idiosyncratic procession for that (and if it had progressed so far that it was obvious there was no hope, she'd have symptoms more prominent than a lump in her breast).

Somehow, I'd have thought that given all the build-up with Jack Ruby's bar, the JFK assassination and the murder of his assassin would have had more of an impact on the story. For no more than Ray has made of the connection, we might as well have moved the events up into the mid-sixties and kept the chronology consistent.

If Jerry really did kill Germans just for being Germans, shouldn't we have been told about this back when Ray was describing his actions in World War II? I remember Jerry reading a lot of newspapers, listening to radio broadcasts, slitting the throats of a couple of guards (arguably necessary), and, oh yes, conducting a daring airborne raid (without training) into a Berlin ghetto where he is not mentioned as killing anyone.

Is Jerry really committing adultery (in beds, I mean, not just in his heart), or is he "meeting" other women in the sense that he fantasizes about sleeping with them as he fantasized about killing Germans back in the war, while he's really just reading the paper or listening to the radio or watching TV?

Did Connie ever notice that Jerry sold the house she was living in? Or did Jerry buy it back with the money the Lawsons gave him before she had a chance to notice this?

I, too, feel that Jesus' famous parable of the Prodigal Son would have been much better if the son had, besides wasting his substance on riotous living, made his dad a person of interest in a widely publicized murder case.

Apparently, based on other posts from people who googled the poem, the poem was re-written by such a person.

Note that while there are more alcohol-related deaths than heroin-related deaths, there are also more alcohol users than heroin users. To judge which is more deadly, we would need to examine the death rates among users of both products (complicated by the fact that, of course, there are people who use both products).