Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,29

of his antipathy to theism. He traced it back to his childhood in Cologne, Germany, where he was born in 1923, during the tumultuous era of the Weimar Republic. Cologne, with its famous cathedral, was a predominantly Roman Catholic city. Grünbaum’s family was part of a small Jewish minority, numbering around twelve thousand. They lived on Rubensstrasse, a street named after the Dutch painter. By the time Grünbaum was ten, the Nazis had come to power. He vividly recalls being beaten up in the street by young thugs who announced to him that die Juden haben unseren Heiland getötet—“the Jews killed our Savior.” He also recalls his athletic development being “psychologically stunted” because of the close association between Nazi mass rallies and athletic parades.

While still a boy, Grünbaum began to doubt the existence of God. He was repelled by the “ethically monstrous” biblical story in which Abraham is called on to sacrifice his innocent son as a test of his fealty to God. He found it absurd that there was a taboo against mentioning the name of God, Yehovah. When he blithely pronounced the word out loud in Hebrew class, the teacher pounded the table and told him it was the worst thing a Jew could do.

Grünbaum’s disenchantment with religion, he told me, coincided with the beginnings of his interest in philosophy. The rabbi at the family’s synagogue often alluded to Kant and Hegel in his sermons. Grünbaum was motivated to pick up an introductory book about philosophy, which, among other speculations, dealt with the origin of the universe. He also began to read Schopenhauer, admiring the philosopher both for his compassionate atheistic Buddhism and for his literary flair. By the time of Grünbaum’s bar mitzvah in 1936, at the age of thirteen, he was a confirmed atheist. The next year, his family escaped Nazi Germany for the United States, fetching up in a neighborhood in southern Brooklyn. Grünbaum commuted to high school in the Bronx—an hour and a half each way on the subway—where he mastered English by means of a bilingual edition of Shakespeare’s plays.

Drafted into the army during the Second World War, Grünbaum became an intelligence officer. At the age of twenty-two he was back in Germany with the American army, interrogating captured Nazis in Berlin. Among those he was in charge of questioning, I was amazed to hear, was Ludwig Bieberbach—the man behind the “Bieberbach conjecture,” for decades one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics, ranking just below Fermat’s last theorem. The idea that Bieberbach was an actual flesh-and-blood human—let alone one who customarily lectured to his students at the University of Berlin decked out in a Nazi SA uniform—was slightly staggering to me. Grünbaum’s contempt for this Nazi mathematician was more than moral. It was also intellectual. In supporting Hitler’s anti-Semitism, Bieberbach publicly argued that Nordic mathematicians took a wholesome geometrical approach to their subject, whereas the Jewish mind operated in a morbidly abstract way. The fact that Bieberbach had willfully overlooked the “glaring counterexample” to this generalization—namely, the Jewish physicist Albert Einstein, whose relativity theory showed that gravity was really geometry—enraged Grünbaum. It left him, he said, with a low threshold of indignation when it came to “sloppy, dishonest, and tendentious argument”—including arguments about why the universe exists.

Despite his advanced age and diminutive size, Grünbaum ate with a hearty appetite. He made his way through an entrée of veal and then an enormous plate of angel-hair pasta, followed by another plate of portobello mushrooms. Forgoing wine, which he said made him sick, he continued to drink Cosmopolitans (“that’s my speed”) through the meal, as he regaled me, in his precise diction and vestigial German accent, with philosophical gossip. When it was over, he kindly drove me back to my hotel. On the way, we passed a rather imposing church, presumably one of Pittsburgh’s architectural jewels. “Do you worship there?” I asked him, trying not to sound too puckish.

“Oh, every day,” he replied.

IN MY HOTEL room the next morning, foggily working through the formidable pile of reprinted papers from various philosophy journals the professor had given me—papers with intellectually belligerent titles like “The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology” and “The Pseudo-Problem of Creation”—I tried to fathom why Grünbaum was so disdainful of the mystery of existence. His contempt for those who took it seriously leapt off the page. They were not just “obtuse,” but “exasperatingly obtuse.” Their reasoning was “gross,” “crude,” “bizarre,” and “inane,” amounting to “mere farce.” It was beyond “fatuous”: it was “ludicrously