Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,23

bit, suddenly concentrating. She glanced at Frank; he was gazing into his coffee cup as if in a reverie, but she was sure he was listening.

John said, “You must know that the gospels were written decades after the event, by people who never met Christ. And that there are other gospels which reveal a different Christ, gospels that were excluded from the Bible by a political process in the third century. So he’s a kind of literary figure really, a political construct. We don’t know anything about the man himself.”

Phyllis shook her head. “That’s not true.”

“But it is,” John objected. This caused Sax and Arkady to look up from the next table. “Look, there’s a history to all this stuff. Monotheism is a belief system that you see appearing in early herding societies. The greater their dependence on sheep herding, the more likely their belief in a shepherd god. It’s an exact correlation, you can chart it and see. And the god is always male, because those societies were patriarchal. There’s a kind of archeology, an anthropology—a sociology of religion, that makes all of this perfectly clear—how it came about, what needs it fulfilled.”

Phyllis regarded him with a small smile. “I don’t know what to say to that, John. It’s not a matter of history, after all. It’s a matter of faith.”

“Do you believe in Christ’s miracles?”

“The miracles aren’t what matter. It’s not the church or its dogma that matters. It’s Jesus himself that matters.”

“But he’s just a literary construct,” John repeated doggedly. “Something like Sherlock Holmes, or the Lone Ranger. And you didn’t answer my question about the miracles.”

Phyllis shrugged. “I consider the presence of the universe to be a miracle. The universe and everything in it. Can you deny it?”

“Sure,” John said. “The universe just is. I define a miracle as an action that clearly breaks known physical law.”

“Like traveling to other planets?”

“No. Like raising the dead.”

“Doctors do that every day.”

“Doctors have never done that.”

Phyllis looked nonplussed. “I don’t know what to say to you, John. I’m kind of surprised. We don’t know everything, to pretend we do is arrogance. The creation is mysterious. To give something a name like ‘the big bang,’ and then think you have an explanation—it’s bad logic, bad thinking. Outside your rational scientific thought is an enormous area of consciousness, an area more important than science. Faith in God is part of that. And I suppose you either have it or you don’t.” She stood. “I hope it comes to you.” She left the room.

After a silence, John sighed. “Sorry, folks. Sometimes it still gets to me.”

“Whenever scientists say they’re Christian,” Sax said, “I take it to be an aesthetic statement.”

“The church of the wouldn’t-it-be-pretty-to-think-so,” Frank said, still looking into his cup.

Sax said, “They feel we’re missing a spiritual dimension of life that earlier generations had, and they attempt to regain it using the same means.” He blinked in his owlish way, as if the problem were disposed of by being defined.

“But that brings in so many absurdities!” John exclaimed.

“You just don’t have faith,” Frank said, egging him on.

John ignored him. “People who in the lab are as hard-headed as can be—you should see Phyllis grilling the conclusions her colleagues draw from their data! And then suddenly they start using all kinds of debater’s tricks, evasions, qualifications, fuzzy thinking of every kind. As if they were an entirely different person.”

“You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.

“Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!”

John stood and took his tray to the kitchen. The rest looked at each other in silence. It must have been, Maya thought, a really bad confirmation class. Clearly none of the others had known any more than her about this side of their easygoing hero. Who knew what they would learn next, about him or any of them?

News of the argument between John and Phyllis spread through the crew. Maya wasn’t sure who was telling the story—neither John nor Phyllis seemed inclined to speak of it. Then she saw Frank with Hiroko, laughing as he told her something. Walking by them she heard Hiroko say, “You’ve got to admit Phyllis is right about that part—we don’t understand the why of things at all.”

Frank, then. Sowing discord between Phyllis and John. And (not a trivial point) Christianity was still a major force in America, and elsewhere. If word got around back home that John Boone was anti-Christian, it could give him problems.