What do you get when a Jewish college student on a spiritual journey gets into long-winded philosophical conversations with his mother, his girlfriend, a traditionalist campus Rabbi, an observant Jewish professor of philosophy whom you might reasonably describe as a neo-Platonist, an Orthodox Rabbi with training in philosophy and a penchant for pragmatism, an amateur Kabbalist, a philosophy graduate student, and a group of friends that includes a hedonist, a devout Christian, and a cross between a Buddhist and a Hindu? It's anybody's guess, really. But you might get something like the storyline in Joshua Golding's The Conversation: A Novel, in which David, the protagonist, becomes increasingly serious about Judaism and his own Jewishness as he wrestles with a variety of philosophical issues and sparring partners.

For those acquainted with Golding's earlier work, especially his Rationality and Religious Theism, a good deal of the philosophical argumentation in The Conversation will be familiar. There is a lengthy presentation (in the form of a guest lecture delivered by the philosophically trained Orthodox Rabbi, Rabbi Low) of a Pascal's Wager-style argument for the rationality of being a religious Jew – a variant of an argument that forms the backbone of Rationality and Religious Theism – as well as a critical discussion of that argument (in the form of a pair of objections raised by the neo-Platonist professor, Dr Maimon). There is also an extended discussion of two different ‘conceptions of God’, as a being and as Being itself, alternative conceptions that crop up at almost every turn in Rationality and Religious Theism.

But there are at least three features that distinguish The Conversation from Golding's earlier work. First, and most obviously, is its form. It is a novel, and one that is heavy on conversation: hence the title. There is no narrator, and the only apparent exceptions to the conversational style are journal entries written by the protagonist. Even those read like ‘internal conversations’ rather than straightforward monologues. Second, the Pascal's Wager-style argument the Rabbi offers differs in a crucial way from the one Golding put forward in Rationality and Religious Theism. (More on the difference shortly.) And third, The Conversation addresses various questions that arise particularly (or in a particularly acute way) against the backdrop of Judaism – such as the nature of Rabbinic authority and the question why, if the Jews are God's chosen people, they have suffered so much – and which receive little attention in Rationality and Religious Theism. I will not focus on the particularly Jewish questions, mostly because each such question occupies a relatively minor place in the novel, and dwelling on any one of them would probably be making a mountain out of a molehill. I will instead focus on the first two distinguishing features.

Why did Golding embed his philosophical views in the midst of a lengthy dialogue? What did he hope to achieve by doing so? I do not know, but I can speculate. For one thing, he might have hoped to reach a broader audience. By presenting philosophy as a series of informal conversations involving a very diverse group of people, Golding forced himself to minimize the use of philosophical jargon, which resulted in a work that is intelligible to those lacking philosophical training. And even setting aside the increased intelligibility, dialogues can easily entertain to a degree that only a master stylist could match with ordinary philosophical writing. As Hume put it in the introduction to his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ‘Opposite sentiments, even without any decision, afford an agreeable amusement.’ And that is certainly helpful in attracting someone who would not otherwise read a book with philosophical content. Indeed, the novel was published by a non-academic Jewish press, and seems to be marketed to the intellectually curious reader, but not necessarily the philosophically trained one.

However, I suspect there is more to it than an attempt to popularize his work, and an early argument between David and his (first) girlfriend, Helen, seems to confirm my suspicions. David, who takes the position that the only reason to write philosophical dialogues is for enhanced entertainment, appears to be a caricature of a sophomoric analytic philosopher, and Helen, who disagrees, seems to get the better of the argument (pp. 27–30). So what else might explain Golding's adoption of a conversational style?

While there are a couple of explicit reasons offered in the novel for writing philosophical dialogues, neither one seems to be a good explanation of Golding's own choice. Dr Maimon remarks to David that many of the great works in philosophy of religion have been written in dialogue form, from Plato's Euthyphro to Halevi's Kuzari and Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and she offers the Straussian explanation that expressing religiously heterodox views too forthrightly could have got their authors into trouble (p. 170). But this hardly seems an adequate explanation of Golding's own choice, if only because it's not at all obvious what trouble he would get in.

Shortly after his conversation with Dr Maimon, David meets with his teaching assistant, Phil, who is writing his dissertation on ‘Writing and the Art of Philosophy’. Phil claims that ‘philosophy in its highest, truest form, takes place in conversation and discussion rather than in the writing of tracts or works’ (p. 176), and his explanation echoes the Academic Sceptics' interpretation of Socratic dialogues: philosophy is not in the business of giving answers to the ‘big questions’, since it has no such answers. Its only business is thinking about them. Philosophical tracts, Phil says, give the misimpression that we can reasonably or rationally have views on major philosophical issues, while philosophical dialogues demonstrate that no view on any major philosophical issue can be reasonably or rationally maintained. But this too hardly seems an adequate explanation of Golding's own choice, unless he underwent a significant sceptical transformation: his Rationality and Religious Theism is almost entirely devoted to a defence of the rational defensibility of a certain way of life, a way of life that includes (by Golding's own account) holding certain beliefs. And The Conversation gives every indication that Golding still thinks that's true.

Phil's explanation, however, is suggestive of one that plausibly does account for the conversational style of Golding's novel. Phil's explanation, put somewhat more abstractly, is that by calling our attention to competing and apparently equally well-justified points of view, dialogues have the potential to deliver a healthy dose of intellectual humility. (A dialogue need not deliver on that potential, of course. If it is written in such a way that some characters hold patently unreasonable views and offer manifestly unsound arguments, then it will probably contribute to an unhealthy dose of intellectual over-confidence. As Hume wrote in a letter to his friend Gilbert Elliot, it is a ‘vulgar error’ in dialogue-writing to put ‘nothing but nonsense in the mouth of the adversary’.) When a philosopher writes an ordinary philosophical tract, it is hard to avoid giving the impression that she thinks her own views are the only rationally defensible ones (at least the only rationally defensible views for someone who has all the same publicly available evidence as she does). And if a philosopher does not want to give that impression – either because she does not think it is true that hers are the only rationally defensible views (even for someone who has all the same publicly available evidence as she does) or because she does not want others to think that she thinks that – then a balanced philosophical dialogue can be a very helpful device. In the sentence immediately preceding the one quoted above from the introduction to his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume says that philosophical dialogue is a particularly apt medium for those questions of philosophy that are ‘obscure and uncertain’, since ‘Reasonable men may be allowed to differ, where no one can reasonably be positive.’ That is, rather than using a dialogue to show that no philosophical view can reasonably be maintained, as Phil suggests, one might use a dialogue to show that more than one philosophical view can reasonably be maintained.

There seems to be ample textual evidence from The Conversation that Golding believes that each of a plurality of mutually inconsistent philosophical views and mutually incompatible ways of life can be rationally defensible for different individuals, even after they have shared all their publicly available evidence. Dr Maimon says as much regarding the claim that ‘there is a providential and benevolent God who gave Israel the Torah’ and that claim's denial (p. 194); Rabbi Low strongly suggests the same regarding Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (p. 108); and the novel ends with a philosophical ‘symposium’ in which each participant strikes an irenic tone, recognizing at least the reasonableness, and sometimes the partial truth, of the views expressed by those who spoke before. If the fact that a view is espoused by nearly all parties in a philosophical dialogue is good evidence that the view is endorsed by the dialogue's author, then there is good evidence that Golding indeed holds that there can be, and in fact are, a plurality of mutually inconsistent rationally defensible philosophical views. And making that point might well be what Golding was hoping to achieve in writing a book of conversations.

But I am left wondering whether, by Golding's own lights, that point is significant, given Golding's understanding of rational defensibility. On his view, to say that a claim is ‘rationally defensible (for a particular person)’ is to say that that person ‘can describe good reasons for believing in it, and [that person] can come up with reasonable responses to objections’ (p. 193). But if that is all that is meant by ‘rationally defensible’, then to say that a plurality of mutually inconsistent philosophical views can be rationally defensible for different individuals (even after they have shared all their publicly available evidence) is to say something fairly obvious: that with regard to some substantive philosophical questions, more than one side can have good reasons and reasonable responses to objections (even after they have shared all their publicly available evidence). Indeed, that seems true with regard to almost all substantive philosophical questions. The more interesting question is whether both sides can be rational or reasonable in holding their view, and Golding seems not to be taking a stand on that question.

As I said above, The Conversation includes a Pascal's Wager-style argument for the rationality of being a religious Jew that differs in a crucial way from the one Golding earlier offered in his Rationality and Religious Theism. The earlier argument, in its bare essentials, went like this: it is rationally defensible for some people to believe that it is at least slightly more likely that they will attain or maintain the good relationship with God if they follow the Jewish religious way than if they do not; therefore, it is rationally defensible for some people to follow the Jewish religious way. Golding's reason for thinking that this is a valid argument is his assumption that the value of the good relationship with God (supposing there is a God) is ‘qualitatively superior’ or ‘incomparably greater’ than the value of any other state of affairs in which a human being could be involved. (Golding assiduously avoids assuming that it is infinitely valuable, in order to avoid the objection that if it is indeed infinitely valuable, then every available course of action that could possibly issue in the good relationship with God – including, presumably, the non-religious way – will have the same expected value (i.e. infinite value). But I do not see how he can avoid that assumption. Assume, as Golding in fact assumes for the sake of argument in Rationality and Religious Theism (p. 80), that there is no value at all in a situation in which one pursues the Jewish religious way but does not attain the good relationship with God and that there is some high degree of value that one attains by following an alternative course, no matter whether one attains the good relationship with God. Then if the value of the good relationship with God is finite, then there is some number (perhaps extremely low) such that if the difference between the likelihood of attaining or maintaining the good relationship with God given that one follows the Jewish religious way and the likelihood of attaining or maintaining the good relationship with God given that one follows some alternative course is lower than that number, then the expected value of following the Jewish religious way will be lower than the expected value of following an alternative course. I am also not sure what the phrases ‘qualitatively superior’ and ‘incomparably greater’ mean or how they are supposed to be relevant to the correct evaluation of the expected value. But I will not quibble about these matters any further.) And so by the Expected Value Maximization Principle, anyone who finds himself with the belief that it is at least slightly more likely that he will attain or maintain the good relationship with God if he follows the Jewish religious way than if he does not do so, ought rationally to follow the Jewish religious way. But then from the claim that there are those for whom it is rationally defensible to hold that belief, it would seem to follow that there are those for whom it is rationally defensible to follow the Jewish religious way.

There is much to say about this fascinating argument, and Golding says much more to develop and defend its premise. But I want to turn instead to the variant of this argument that is presented by Rabbi Low in The Conversation. The central difference between the two arguments is this: while in the earlier argument the state of affairs of great value was attaining or maintaining the good relationship with God, in The Conversation it is living a maximally meaningful life. And here is what Rabbi Low says about living a meaningful life: ‘What does it mean to live a meaningful life? It means to live a life that one has a strong motivation to live. The stronger the motivation you have for doing what you do, the more meaning there is to your life’ (p. 100).

The rest of Rabbi Low's lecture consists in a defence of the claim that it is at least slightly more likely that a person will live a maximally motivated life if she follows the Jewish religious way than if she does not, and hence a defence of the rational defensibility of that claim. This part of the lecture is very thought-provoking. But the overall argument seems significantly weaker than the one Golding offered earlier. One source of weakness is already acknowledged in the novel, in the form of an objection by Dr Maimon, and that is that the analysis of a ‘meaningful life’ seems wrong. It seems that one could be maximally motivated, and even experience deep feelings of fulfilment, and yet live a meaningless life, if one's projects are not objectively good, or worse, are objectively bad. The subjective side of things just doesn't seem sufficient for meaningfulness. As Dr Maimon puts it, ‘surely there's a difference between believing that one's life has great meaning and actually having a life that has great meaning’ (p. 109). Her objection does not receive an adequate reply from Rabbi Low, or from anyone else in the novel. But perhaps this objection can be answered: maybe Golding could defend a ‘wholly subjective’ analysis of meaningfulness after all. (Relevant here is Susan Wolf's Meaning in Life and Why it Matters, along with Nomy Arpaly's reply.)

More problematic, I think, is the second source of weakness in the argument: nowhere does Rabbi Low argue for the claim that the value of a maximally meaningful life is incomparably greater than the value of any other state of affairs in which a human being could be involved, which is the claim that is needed for his argument. And that would seem to be a very difficult thing to argue for, especially if a ‘meaningful life’ is given a wholly subjective analysis. It's one thing to claim that a relationship with a supreme Being of infinite worth is of incomparable value, and quite another to claim that living a life that is maximally motivated is of incomparable value: the latter just seems implausible. To compound matters further, there can't be two states of affairs each such that its value is incomparably greater than the value of the other. So if having ‘the good relationship with God’ is incomparably greater than any other state of affairs in which a human being could be involved – and that is a claim that is very natural for any religious theist to accept – then it is simply false that living a maximally meaningful life is incomparably greater than any other state of affairs in which a human being could be involved. (At least if having the good relationship with God is a different state of affairs from living a maximally meaningful life; given Rabbi Low's analysis of a ‘meaningful life’, that seems obviously so.) This second weakness seems very difficult to overcome. So while I think there is much to mull over in Rabbi Low's ruminations on the Jewish religious way and a motivated life, if one is looking for a promising Pascal's Wager-style argument for being a religious Jew, or a religious theist of any stripe, Golding's earlier work is a better bet.