“Nonsense. Ive seen the good parson’s book with its eighteenth-century logic and its quaint rationalism, and know it for a waste of ink and paper. Man does not think; he only thinks he thinks. An automaton, he responds to external stimuli; he cannot order his thought.”
“You mean that there’s no free will? Not even a marginal minimum of choice?”
“Exactly. The whole thing is an illusion. We do what we do because someone else has done what he did; he did it because still another someone did what he did. Every action is the rigid result of another action.”
“But there must have been a beginning,” I objected. “And if there was a beginning, choice existed if only for that split second. And if choice exists once it can exist again.”
“You have the makings of a metaphysician, Hodgins,” he said witheringly, for metaphysics was one of the most despised words in his vocabulary. “The reasoning is infantile. Answering you and the Reverend Shaw on your own level, I could say that time is a convention and that all events occur simultaneously. Or if I grant its dimension I can ask, What makes you think time is a simple straight line running flatly through eternity? Why do you assume that time isnt curved? Can you conceive of its end? Can you really imagine its beginning? Of course not; then why arent both the same? The serpent with its tail in its mouth?”
“You mean we not only play a prepared script but repeat the identical lines over and over and over for infinity? There’s no heaven in your cosmos, only an unimaginable, never-ending hell.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “That you should spout emotional apologetics at me is part of what you call the script, Hodgins. You didnt select the words nor speak them voluntarily. They were called into existence by what I said, which in turn was mere response to what went before.”
Weakly I was forced back to a more elementary attack. “You don’t act in accordance with your own conviction.”
He snorted. “A thoughtless remark, excusable only because automatic. How could I act differently? Like you, I am a prisoner of stimuli.”
“How pointless to risk ruin and imprisonment as a member of the Grand Army when no one can change what’s predestined.”