Books: Theology and the Computer Roger's Version

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Roger Lambert, 52, is an assistant professor at a divinity school in a Northeastern U.S. city that sounds, as he describes it, a lot like Boston. He is also an ordained Methodist minister, although he gave up active duty 14 years earlier, after the love affair that scandalized his parishioners and broke up his first marriage. Esther, Roger's partner in adultery and now his second wife, comes from a family with money. The Lamberts live in a comfortable house full of books and tasteful furniture. Amid his predictable academic routine, the husband notices that his younger wife may be getting bored; when he comes home in the evenings, he finds her well into the wine they will drink with dinner and listening to opera on the stereo. Roger does not want to think too hard about this and many other things as well: "I am a depressive. It is very important for my mental well-being that I keep my thoughts directed away from areas of contemplation that might entangle me and pull me down."

The news that a theologian of sorts is the main character in John Updike's twelfth novel will not thrill all of the author's devoted readers, although it should not surprise them either. The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Updike's first % novel, was an allegory explicitly framed around contradictory notions of the nature of God. The author's reputation and fame grew with his extraordinarily graceful and graphic renderings of contemporary manners and mores. Couples (1968), the three Rabbit novels, the two collections of stories about the Jewish writer and malingerer Henry Bech, all present surfaces so intriguing that it is possible to ignore their depths. But a Protestant sense of sin peeks through most of Updike's fiction -- sometimes, as in A Month of Sundays (1975), expressed directly by an agonized clerical narrator. Roger Lambert, another lapsed preacher, comes from this austere region of Updike's imagination, suffering not doubts now but numbness. It is the job of Roger's Version to stir its hero back to moral life.

The disruptive agent is Dale Kohler, 28, a computer whiz kid at the university who comes to Roger with a bizarre request: a grant from the divinity school to support the young man's belief that the existence of God can be scientifically proved by processing the accumulating mountain of data about the universe. "God is breaking through," he announces. "They've been scraping away at physical reality all these centuries, and now the layer of the little left we don't understand is so fine God's face is staring right out at us." Crunch enough numbers through the right program, the visitor promises, and the purposeful hand of the Creator will emerge for all to see. Roger's response is not encouraging: "I must confess I find your whole idea aesthetically and ethically repulsive. Aesthetically because it describes a God Who lets Himself be intellectually trapped, and ethically because it eliminates faith from religion, it takes away our freedom to believe or doubt. A God you could prove makes the whole thing immensely, oh, uninteresting."