I’m writing this under the sometimes hallucinatory influence of a protracted case of mono, so you’ll just have to forgive all the typos, misspellings and the fact much of it makes little or no sense.
So, this Catholic priest is driving home from the church one night when he suddenly realizes he’s forgotten to say his Mass. Pulling to the side of the road, he cuts the engine but finds the car’s interior lights burned out. So he turns on the headlights, gets out, comes around, kneels down and reads scripture by the high beams. A passing motorist spies him, slows down and hails the priest. “Boy,” he yells, “that must be one hell of a good book!”
If there’s anything more annoying than a religious zealot, it’s an astrophysicist.
They’re both so neurotically myopic. (Don’t look it up—it’s just a fancy word for “near-sighted.)
Could things be worse? Congress is nuts, the President is ineffectual, the world economy is broke, climate change may be beyond repair…and now Stephen W. Hawking has proved there is no God. This from the guy who, in 2002, was convinced that if we can ever truly find a theory for everything, “it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason; for then we should know the mind of God.” What?
Anyway, I guess this means we’re all atheists, or at least Stephen is.
Personally I have great respect for atheists, though I don’t necessarily count myself among them. It isn’t just the brevity, you know; it takes a certain amount of guts to believe there’s no one looking after us, no afterlife, that all is simply a cosmic crap shoot. It’s a lot easier to believe in God than not; at least those that do believe appear to sleep better at night. Of course, there’s that old foxhole adage. You know, the one about there being no atheists in them? Have you ever been in military combat? Have you ever watched a man die, or think he was going to die, in front of you? I have. And yep, they all say the same thing: “Please God, no,” or “Please God, help me,” or words to that effect. The phrase was rampant during WWII, “Please God, help me,” being second only to “Mamma!” just before the injured G.I. went into shock or died or both.
But, I suppose, that may be simply the old “fight or flight” thing, built into all things animal. I mean, when you see your intestines spread out on the dirt in front of you, who you gonna call? And, hey, for all I know God might be “Mamma.”
So. How did Mr. Hawking and most of the rest of the scientific community arrive at this theory/truism about no God? That’s simple. Mathematics! What, you didn’t know everything can be explained by math? Hey, grow up, there are great truths therein. Especially if you believe in physics. No, particularly if you believe in physics. Math works. Numbers don’t lie. Physics work, too. And who, beyond some insane Creationist, doesn’t believe in physics?
Yeah, I admire the hell out of atheists, but it pales beside my respect for religious scientists. Those dudes are way out there. How do you even keep two such antithetical concepts balanced in your mind at the same time and call yourself anything?
Let’s talk about that. We’ll start with that age old story we’ve all heard:
A father is fishing with his son at a river. “Dad, where does the river come from?” the boy asks. “Why, from the rain,” dad answers. “Where does the rain come from?” the boy persists (you can see where this is going) and old dad, who knows his high school physics, replies, “Why, from the sun. It heats the oceans and lakes and creates rain-producing clouds.” “So where’s the sun come from?” Dad is scratching his head at this point. Hmmm…something about hydrogen atoms… And junior’s already got his next question ready: “Where do hydrogen atoms come from?” Which-- when I was a boy--is the place Dad usually turned the conversation to the finer points of bass fishing.
Fortunately, a lot of dads today know the answer to sonny’s question. Hydrogen came from the Big Bang. Along with everything else. Now some bright kid, in this endless game of chicken-before-the-egg might well ask: “So--what came before the Big Bang?” Good question. And, until fairly recently, unanswerable. But that was before we discovered Black Holes. And how Black Holes are related to the Big Bang. One of the chief relationships being that of Time. Which is to say, in a Black Hole Time stops; or, if you prefer, doesn’t exist. Therefore, there can be no God. Why? Because, there would have been no time in which God could have created the Universe. So the answer to what came before the Big Bang? NOTHING.
And the Universe, or universes, happened not by a thinking, sentient being--divine or otherwise--but by pure random chance. Cosmic luck. Or unluck if you don’t happen to like being alive. (Don’t worry, it doesn’t last--even the Ice Capades eventually end.)
Even today no one doubts that Einstein was a genius and that E = MC2 was a masterpiece of modern physics. What eventually became into doubt was physics itself. Classical physics, that is. E=MC2 works fine for the world we “know”; that is, the world we all walk around and work and play in. The problem is it begins to fall apart at the subatomic level, the main culprit here being gravity. Way down below at the most tiny levels, things just don’t work like they do in the bigger world. Yet to have a Theory of Everything, the smallest things of life should dovetail with the biggest; but they don’t. So Max Plank came along in 1900 and created quantum mechanics, which attempted to explain the behavior of matter and its interaction with energy on the scale of atoms and atomic particles. Plank devised the first model that was able to explain the full spectrum of thermal radiation; by using a set of harmonic oscillators his model showed that thermal radiation existed in equilibrium. The energy of each oscillator was “quantized”, the energy for each proportional to the frequency of the oscillator. The Plank constant: E=nhf, where n = 1,2,3. For this he won the Nobel Prize of 1918. So, was Einstein wrong? Well…not exactly; more like incomplete. Plank’s view of his own discovery was that quantization was purely a mathematical trick. Einstein took it to another level, suggesting it was not just a trick but that energy in a beam of light occurs in individual packets, which we now call photons. The energy of a single photon is given by its frequency multiplied by Plank’s constant: E = hf. Unfortunately, Einstein died never truly believing in the potential of quantum mechanics. Ever his worst critic, Einstein even admitted that the cosmological constant he introduced when trying to make a static model of the universe was the biggest mistake of his life.
None of which solved the problem that while classical relativity and quantum mechanics seem to coincide just fine on a “real-life” level, quantum (without which we would have no computers, or iPods or just about anything else discovered in recent years) just makes no sense at all. As Richard Feynman once remarked: “quantum mechanics deals with nature as she is absurd.” We still don’t comprehend quantum gravity even though we use it every day, or even which theory combines it with general relativity. This is where the stoic field of science engages in a whole lot of assuming. And, perhaps, even some fantasizing regarding time.
The history of the universe in real time, for instance, appears to start at some minimum size, equal to the maximum size of the history of what we’ll call “imaginary” time. The universe would then expand in real time like the expanding balloon “inflation,” model, grow to a very large size, then collapse again into the so-called “singularity” (Big Bang) where it began. Singularity insists the universe must have a beginning as described by quantum theory, therefore the universe could be finite in imaginary time, but without boundaries or singularities. Say, what? However, in the real time in which we live, there will still appear to be singularities. Right. I’ve got a headache.
This suggests that imaginary time is actually fundamental time, and what we call real time is just some crap we made up. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time there are no singularities or boundaries. Keep in mind that a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we use to describe what we observe. It only exists in our minds.
Which brings us to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You may remember it from Spielberg’s Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum refers to it as the inability to observe something without changing it. Quantum mechanics shows that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and speed, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision; in other words, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. The uncertainty principle shows mathematically that the product of the uncertainty in the position and momentum of a particle (momentum is velocity multiplied by mass) could never be less than a certain value, and that this value is related to Planks constant. Now I have a migraine.
What this pesky uncertain principle seems to imply is that the early universe could not have been uniform, at least not completely. There had to have been uncertainties or fluctuations in both the positions and velocities of particles. During the universe’s initial rapid expansion (inflation model), the uniformities would have been amplified until big enough to form the origin of the galaxies. So—all the complicated structures in the universe could be explained by the no-boundary aspects of its condition and the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.
And here’s the clincher. If space and time formed a closed surface without boundary it might make for some kind of definitive answer to whom or what exactly created it.
It’s generally accepted that the universe was allowed to evolve according to a set of laws, and that God did not intervene to break the laws. But the laws tell us nothing of what the universe would have looked like when it began. If one believes the universe was created by a singularity, one could also suppose that it was created by some outside force. But if the universe is really completely self-contained with no boundary or edge, it would have been neither created nor could it be destroyed, right? It would just…be.
So, why the need for God? Where is He in all this?
In fact, where is a complete unified theory of the universe? Is it all just fantasy, even as you and I, programmed perhaps by a superior form of homo sapien from some far away future or another dimension? Are we not, in fact, made of space dust-- but of (shudder) nothing?
Of course, this whole thing presupposes that the human mind is capable of even comprehending nothing-- something I’m not so sure about. I mean, if we’re only able to imagine five to seven objects at the same time in our minds, how can we ever hope to imagine something as implacably oblique as nothing? Even unconscious, even in our dreams, we live in a world of somethings. Again, you smarter folks feel free to weigh in here; I’m just a writer/artist behind in my income taxes.
Also there’s that term “random chance” theory of creation. By definition doesn’t that imply there’s something to be random about?
Between the Hubble space telescope and the Hadron Collider, however, we may well be on our way to knowing some very big answers very soon. Even any day now. In the meantime, what I’m experiencing here in my own tiny laymen’s mind is less and less a discrepancy between science and religion and more and more a commonality. To wit:
RELIGION: Can’t explain the Universe, so call it God. SCIENCE: Can’t explain nothing, so call it physics.
Einstein, who knew a thing or two, said: Religion without science is blind; and Science without religion is crippled.” I’ll leave you to chew on that for a moment.
Lest anyone think I’m being hard on science, let me say unequivocally that I bow to no man in my respect for Stephen Hawking. I’m also aware of the fact that if I had been born with an exceptionally brilliant brain only to find the other physical parts of me slowly dwindling away, I might be a tad cynical about the concept of a loving God…might also be of a mind to pursue science instead of religion and tell God to stuff it. In short, pursue complicated mathematical theorems that took my mind off my depressing physical state rather than sitting there paying homage to something that defies definition and reason yet has the gall to resign me to a wheelchair and a voice like a strangled duck.
Which brings us back to the equality of scientists and theologians: the similar degrees of passion with which they pursue their so-called “opposing” vocations. Along with their tendency to be blind to anything ambiguous or abstract. But can we really blame them? Whether scientist or Methodist, somewhere past the age of, say 55, you really don’t want someone walking up and telling you that the thing you’ve spent your lifetime chasing after is pure baloney. It’s withering. And here is where science may appear, at least, to have the upper hand. Math and science do work, at least within the limitations of our human brains. Nothing is more addictive than problem solving once you get the swing of it; sports and TV pale by comparison. You also, inevitably, reach a place where you are, well…smarter than most people around you. Which can lead to a sense of elitism, which can lead to envy in others. And we know how much the Bible hates that. Indeed, it isn’t just the constant new discoveries that science affords, it’s those times scientists, for all their laborious calculations, can’t quite make the math work, the logic and physics fit. Like a game of chess, the more probabilities, the more frustrating the solution. But it’s also a scientist’s salvation: they don’t have time to sit around and feel sorry for themselves, they’re way too busy being convinced they’re pursuing a higher calling. I don’t know the ratio of depression in scientists but I’d wager it’s less than that of dentists. Dentists apparently have the corner on suicide. Don’t ask.
Religion, on the other hand, can appear to be the easy way out.
Can’t figure it out? —ask God. Life treating you badly? – trust in God. Terrified of death? --hang with The Big Guy. Sick of Congress? —well, let’s don’t get carried away here, some things even God can’t fix.
I’m also ignorant of the ratio of suicide/depression in theologians, though I’m guessing it’s pretty low unless, somewhere along the way, one experiences a crisis of faith. Interestingly, theologians and artists pursue the same abstract lines of thought. Yet mortality in artists is infamously high, as is alcoholism. The blank page can be a terrible thing to face every day. Also, art may be a vaunted commodity but it never healed anyone or found any new planets; it’s basically a lonely, self-involved, self-serving pursuit wholly without rules or borders (like the universe?). No rules, in fact, are among the highest principals of art. Like scientists, artists share the isolationism of being ahead of the average mind. But scientists, at least, can compare notes, mingle and argue the same basic theories. The singular artist, however, constantly alone in his mind, wrestling with a boundless world of pure abstract imagination in a galaxy of ego…well, we all know what happen to Van Gogh.
Conversely (there’s always a damn “conversely”) even the most hard-nosed, pragmatic scientist will admit that some of the greatest advances in their field have were made through lateral thinking and the use of pure imagination, even flights of fancy—things that cannot be calculated, tested, written down or pigeonholed. They spring, sometimes fully blown, from the art of taking the abstract and making it cohesive. So. If religion and art follow similar paths of intuitive thought, how can science be a science?
In any case, none of this diminishes or lessens the impact of what seems to be a basic human need for God, the atavistic craving for some kind of divine spirit inhabiting all of us. The foxhole thing again. God is the Santa Claus of our adulthood. We’d all like to believe. As we’d all like to be handsome or rich. Which again—for me--draws parallels between religion and science and maybe explains why some scientists still cling to religion. Can even hard science—the vast majority of which is rampant with pure theory anyway—ever really be proven? Can the existence of a God ever truly be unproven? Believing in God is a little like believing in flying saucers: you can’t prove it one way or the other—which is why the fountain of all great religions is, of course, faith. In fact, the point of all religion. And science major or not, we all rely, to a lesser or greater degree, on faith. We have faith we’ll get that raise. We have faith our spouse won’t cheat on us. I have faith I’ll finish this sentence and live to see tomorrow; I certainly can’t prove it. Assuming is a big part of what allows us to get onto the next nanosecond of existence. Is anyone ever truly agnostic? Or bi-sexual?
Science or religion? Religion or science? Science and religion? -- where do you stand? There’s no questioning the human propensity for both: humans have a nascent desire for some form of security, but are at the same time boundlessly curious, ever testing security’s limits. Can science and religion be opposite sides of the same coin? Where, then, does that leave art?
On the other hand, as science itself suggests, is there really such a thing as existence at all in the common sense of the term? Do we—or does anything –truly “exist”, unless someone is there to observe it/us? Do our wives and children disappear as surely as the idea of God the moment our backs are turned? Scary stuff.
There is one last form of refuge, of course.
Philosophy. In which you need neither science nor religion nor art, though they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Cogito ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.”
When French philosopher Descartes examined his beliefs he found it is impossible to doubt that he existed. Even if there was a so-called “deceiving god,” one’s belief in his own existence would be secure, for how could one be deceived unless one existed in order to be deceived? How can something spring from nothing?
But even philosophy may not get us off the hook. Consider the nature of the step from Descartes “I am thinking” to “I exist.” The contention is that this is a syllogistic inference; it appears to require the extra premise: “Whatever has the property of thinking exists,” something good old Descartes failed to justify. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard argues that Descartes already pre-supposes the existence of “I”, and therefore concluding with existence is logically trivial. Descartes is merely “developing the content of a concept”, namely that the “I”, which already exists, thinks. To Kierkegaard, the proper logical flow of argument is that existence is already assumed or presupposed in order for thinking to occur, not that existence is concluded from that thinking. Oh, well…not surprising, I suppose, considering how the French regard Jerry Lewis.
Philosophy does have a great edge here, though. There are lots of regions in mathematics but mainly two that concern modern science: Euclidian and quantum mechanics. But hell, you can be philosophical about damn near anything. On the other hand, maybe that’s not such a plus.
Philosophy, in its own way, can be as dizzying as mathematics. There are many levels but for our purposes we’ll stick to the most commonly warring factions: the dualists and idealists, who believe that minds are made up of non-physical substance usually referred to as consciousness, and the materialists, who hold that what we normally think of as mental substance is ultimately physical matter. I once watched a materialist attempt to explore certain regions of the human brain in an attempt to explain the soul. It was a hoot.
Gottfried Leibniz believed that the mental world was built up of monads, mental objects that are not part of physical world. Monism (any philosophical view which holds that there is unity in a given field of inquiry), may be theologically syncretic by proposing that there is one God who has many manifestation in the diverse religious traditions. Dualism (a state of two parts or co-eternal binary opposition—in science the dichotomy between the observer and the observed) denotes co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality but diluted in general or common usages. Pluralism (the doctrine of multiplicity and the opposition of both monism and dualism) holds that many basic substances make up reality, whereas monism believes existence to be a single substance—matter or mind—and dualism believes two substances, such as matter and mind, to be necessary.)
Philosophy, as mentioned, is not exactly a stranger to religion. Some examples:
Buddhist philosophy, which is suspicious of ontology. The Buddha himself as well as his disciples discouraged ontological theorizing for its own sake. Pluralism and monism are speculative views, the former associated with nihilism and the latter similar to or associated with eternalism. In Buddhist philosophy, the ultimate nature of the world is described as emptiness, which is inseparable from sensorial objects or anything else. Zen teaches that “All is One and All is Different.” I’ve no idea what that doctrine means.
Christianity maintains the Creator-creature distinction as fundamental. God created the universe ex nihilo and not from Himself, nor within Himself. So don’t confuse the creator with creation. He transcends it (metaphysical dualism—see Genesis); God’s desire was for intimate contact with his own creation. Some believe Christian metaphysics are dualistic because they describe the Creator’s transcendence of creation but they also reject the idea that it is eternally struggling with other equal powers such as Satan. Augustine argued that evil is not the opposite of good, but rather the absence of good, something that itself does not have existence. C.S. Lewis described evil as a parasite, something that cannot exist without good to provide it with existence.
Judaism holds that God is held to be immanent within creation for two interrelated reasons: a very strong Jewish belief that the Divine life-force which brings the universe into existence must constantly be present. Were it to forsake the universe for even an instant, it would revert to a state of utter nothingness (oh dear, the word again!) as before creation. Secondly, Judaism holds as axiomatic that God is an absolute unity and that He is Perfectly Simple. If His sustaining power is within nature, then His essence is also within nature. Still with me?
Islamic belief holds that “To God belongs the East and the West. Wheresoever you look is the face of God.” The Qur’an provides a monist image of God by describing reality as a unified whole, with God being a single concept that would describe or ascribe all exiting things. “He is the First and the Last, the Outward and the Inward. He is the Knower of everything.
Baha’i teachings include a strong emphasis on social and ethical issues. There are a number of foundational texts that have been described as mystical. The Seven Valleys is considered Baha’u’llah’s “greatest mystical composition.” It was written to a follower of Sufism, in the style of ‘Attar, a Muslim poet, and sets forth the stages of the soul’s journey towards God. The Hidden Words, another of Baha’u’llah’s books, contains 153 short passages in which Baha’u’llah takes the basic essence of certain spiritual truth and writes them in brief form.
When I was a young man in college, philosophy was the “in” thing. Anybody professing to attain true coolness could not graduate without at least a rudimentary course in philosophy. Halcyon days.
Alas, philosophy has slipped in stature from the public consciousness of late, or maybe more precisely been “eaten” by the scientific community. The “in” thing now is to develop new theories to describe what the universe is rather than to ask why. Today’s philosophers have a pretty rough time keeping up with the advances in scientific theories. Indeed, science has become so mathematically and technically confounding hardly anyone but a specialist can hope to grasp it. Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of the century, finally admitted “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” Yipe! What would Aristotle have thought?
As a kid, I went to church every Sunday, without fail. Or rather my mother made me. Ten o’clock services coincided with The Adventures of Superman on TV so you can guess where my loyalties lay. But religion, like philosophy, began to fade from the American Dream in the Sixties for my parents and most Americans. Some of this may have been the increase in mixed marriages and thus couple’s early exposure; Judaism has been particularly hard hit on the ascetic level and race-wise, and thanks to American and Japanese tourism, we’ve all but managed to wipe out the true Hawaiians. But all in all, by mid-century, the nation simply seemed to become a more secular place. I’m not sure anyone knows the real answer, though I have my personal suspicions. It probably began sometime around the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, then got a big boost with the April 8, 1966 cover of Time magazine asking in bold red letters against a stark black background (the only time in history the periodical has ever had a non-image cover) “Is God Dead?” This was the brain-child of editor Otto Fuerbringer, who caught a lot of heat from readers and clergymen and also sold a lot of copies, even though the article itself, “Toward a Hidden God” only briefly mentioned the so-called “God Is Dead” movement. The thrust of the issue was the supposed problems facing modern theologians in making God relevant to an increasingly secular society. Science, it was felt, had all but eliminated the need for religion to explain the natural world; God simply took up less and less time in people’s daily lives. Various scholars were brought in and included the application of contemporary philosophy to the field of theology and a more “personalized” and individualistic approach to religion. In truth the magazine’s cover alone was probably the major cause of all the ruckus. In 2008, the Los Angeles Times named the issue among “10 magazine covers that shook the world.” Not to be outdone, second stringer Newsweek as late as 2009 ran an almost exact clone of the Time cover graphics announcing “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” Better late than never, I guess.
In any case, what Time didn’t perhaps begin, the murder of Robert Kennedy and Dr. King combined with the nation-ripping war in Vietnam and President Nixon’s outsing eventually helped end. Disillusionment stalked the land. Religion may have remained a number of things, but hip wasn’t one of them.
In the end perhaps philosophy wins out. There either is or isn’t a God, but only those already dead know the answer. Or do they?
Wouldn’t it be just devilishly awful if, in fact, there is indeed a God who watches over us all now and takes care of us in his golden kingdom afterwards, but you can only get there if you believe? Otherwise, it’s the black nothingness of an empty cosmos for your sad ass.
On the other hand, obliteration may have its finer points: what we can’t be conscious for or comprehend can’t hurt us. And do we really want to meet up again with Aunt Tessie and Uncle Gus? When his local clergyman visited W. C. Fields on his death bed, the priest was amazed to find Fields reading the Bible. “What on Earth are you doing!” the priest declared. “Looking for loopholes!” Fields replied.
Maybe there are some. It’s like the time the little boy asked his own reverend if there was really a Hell. “We know there is a Hell,” the good reverend replied, “because the Bible tells us so. But as God is all-forgiving, there’s probably no one in it.”
Why does my mind keep trying to form an analogy here with the recent debacle in Congress over the debt limit? Two factions, supposedly united under the same cause, behaving like selfish, self-serving children…whose biggest responsibility was only the entire nation—no, let’s face it, the entire world.
There’s a terrific little Stanley Kramer film starring Spencer Tracy called Inherit the Wind worth your attention. It’s a parable based on the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, a fictionalized account of the Scope “Monkey” trials of 1925. The play was conceived as a response to the hysterics of 1950’s McCarthyism--a trait it shares with another film, High Noon—and is critical of creationism. Tracy plays defense council Henry Drummond (patterned after real life Clarence Darrow), Frederic March prosecutor Matthew Harrison (real life William Jennings Bryan). Gene Kelly plays E. K. Hornbeck (Henry Mencken) of the Baltimore Herald, who has personally seen to it that Drummond comes to town to represent the teacher in the case, Hornbeck’s newspaper and radio network providing nationwide coverage of a minor legal matter that would soon became a national sensation. All the stars’ parts are marvelous and the movie is packed with terrific scenes, especially when Drummond--backed into a corner by judge and jury--is forced to put Brady himself on the witness stand. Brady wins the trial but Tracy as Drummond wins the day by driving home the point that teacher Cates, like anyone else, demands the right to think for himself and teach science over creationism if he wishes.
For me, the best part of the film comes at the denouement when Tracy and Kelly are alone in the courtroom after the trial. A self-professed elitist and cynic (and presumably atheist) Kelly regales Tracy for showing March for the pious buffoon he is, and congratulates Tracy, who he feels is the true winner. The voice of reason throughout the film, Kelly (and we) are surprised when Tracy admonishes the newspaper man and actually defends the pious March. “He was a great man in his day,” Tracy says, “until he began to look for God too high up and too far away.” Kelly is shocked to find there might be any kind of religious streak in the science-minded Tracy, who has just fought a long trial decrying creationism. But Tracy only shakes his head sadly at Kelly. “What the hell are you?” he asks Kelly. “You don’t believe in anyone or anything, care about anyone or anything but yourself. And when you die, you’ll be all alone with your cynicism and disbelief, no friend or relative or anyone to come to your funeral.”
A sobered Kelly looks initially thoughtful for a moment-- but finally smiles back at Tracy. “No,” he replies, “you’ll be there-- defending my right to be alone.”
Kelly leaves and Tracy is alone to pack up. On the desk before him are the two books that formed the basis of the trial: Darwin’s Origin of the Species and the Holy Bible. Tracy picks up the two books, one in either hand.
As a fifteen year old, comprehending most of what I just saw, I waited on the edge of my seat hardly breathing, waiting to see which book Tracy would take home with him. I mean, Spencer Tracy!--our greatest actor and everybody’s surrogate father; he even looked a little like the way I imagined God would.
Tracy looks at both books in his hands a moment, finally smiles, slaps the two books together under his arm, and walks out of the courtroom.
