Divine Invasion, The

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hazy to him then and it was still hazy to him, but anyhow the two of them had wound up in bed, and
now, officially, Dierdre had become his executive secretary.
For her work she blotted up two salaries: the visible one that came with her job and the invisible
one doled out from the substantial account that he was free to dispense as he saw fit. Where all this
money went after it reached Deirdre he hadn't the foggiest idea. Bookkeeping had never been his
strong suit.
"You want the yellow removed from this gray on the side, don't you?" his barber said, shaking up
the contents of a bottle.
"Please," Harms said; he nodded.
"You think the Lakers are going to snap their losing streak?" his barber said. "I mean, they
acquired that What's-his-name; he's nine feet two inches. If they hadn't raised the "
Tapping his ear, Harms said, "I'm listening to the news, Arnold."
"Well, yeah, I can see that, Father," Arnold the barber said as he splashed bleach onto the Chief
Prelate's graying hair. "But there's something I wanted to ask you, about homosexual priests. Doesn't
the Bible forbid homosexuality? So I don't see how a priest can be a practicing homosexual."
The news that Harms was attempting to hear had to do with the health of the Procurator Maximus
of the Scientific Legate, Nicholas Bulkowsky. A solemn prayer vigil had been formally called into
being but nonetheless Bulkowsky continued to decline. Harms had, sub rosa, dispatched his personal
physician to join the team of specialists attending to the Procurator's urgent condition.
Bulkowsky, as not only Cardinal Harms but the entire curia knew, was a devout Christian. He had
been converted by the evangelical, charismatic Dr. Cohn Passim who, at his revival meetings, often
flew through the air in dramatic demonstration of the power of the Holy Spirit within him.
Of course, Dr. Passim had not been the same since he sailed through a vast stained-glass window
of the cathedral at Metz, France. Formerly he had talked occasionally in tongues and now he talked
only in tongues. This had inspired a popular TV comic to suggest that an English-Glossolalia
dictionary be brought out, so that folks could understand Dr. Passim. This in turn had given rise to
such indignation in the pious that Cardinal Harms had it jotted down on his desk calendar somewhere
that, when possible, he should pronounce the comic anathema. But, as usual, he had not gotten around
to such petty matters.
Much of Cardinal Harms's time was spent in a secret activity: he had been feeding St. Anselm's
Proslogion to the great Artificial Intelligence system Big Noodle with the idea of resurrecting the
long-discredited Ontological Proof for the existence of God.
He had gone right back to Anselm and the original statement of the argument, unsoiled by the
accretions of time:
Anything understood must be in the intelligence. Certainly, too, the being greater than which none
can be conceived cannot exist in the intellect alone; for if it were only in the intellect it could be
conceived as existing also in reality and this would be to conceive a still greater being. In such a
case, if the being greater than which none can be conceived is merely in the intelligence (and not
in reality), then this same being is something than which one could still conceive a greater (i.e.,
one which exists both in the intelligence and in reality). This is a contradiction. Consequently,
there can be no doubt that the being greater than which none can be conceived must exist both in
the intelligence and in reality.
However, Big Noodle knew all about Aquinas and Descartes and Kant and Russell and their
criticisms, and the A.I. system also possessed common sense. It informed Harms that Anselm's
argument did not hold water, and presented him with page after page of analysis as to why. Harms's
response was to edit out Big Noodle's analysis and seize upon Hartshorne and Malcolm's defense of
Anselm; viz: that God's existence is either logically necessary or logically impossible. Since it has not
been demonstrated to be impossible which is to say, the concept of such an entity has not been
shown to be self-contradictory then it follows that we must of necessity conclude that God exists.
Upon fastening onto this weary argument, Harms had dispatched a copy via his direct line to the
ailing Procurator Maximus as a means of instilling new vigor in his co-ruler.
"Now take the Giants," Arnold the barber was saying as he valiantly tried to bleach the yellow
from the cardinal's hair. "I say you can't count them out. Look at Eddy Tubb's ERA for last year. So he
has a sore arm; pitchers always get sore arms.
The day had begun for the Chief Prelate Cardinal Fulton Statler Harms; trying to hear the news,
meditating simultaneously on his enterprise vis-�-vis St. Anselm, fending off Arnold's base-ball
statistics this constituted his morning confrontation with reality, his routine. All that remained to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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