"What would you call that?" I say.
"I don't know. Monkey Fish? Pretend Monkey Fish?"
He turns the page and there's another picture. It looks like a worm with a disembodied vulva coming out of it. I want to laugh but I don't.
"Orchid fish," he says. And then we're called into the dining room to eat.
"So please tell me you don't approve of teaching creationism to kids," Heather says to Adam about five minutes after we've started eating. "Or whatever they're calling it now: intelligent design."
We're eating pasta and roasted vegetables, as promised, with a large salad. Until this new conversational segue, Heather had been talking about her problems finding any decent men at the university. The pasta is almost as impossibly bouncy as she is, and the white spirals slither off your fork if you aren't careful. The vegetables—cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, aubergines, and roasted onions—have been coated with olive oil and lemon juice and they've got that sticky, almost caramelized texture. There's garlic bread, too, and I'm eating as much as I can. In fact, until this moment I'd been much more interested in the food than in the conversation. I tend to hate dinner party conversations, but even I can see that this one could get interesting.
"In what sense?" Adam says.
"As part of science courses," Heather says.
"Aren't creationism and intelligent design different?" I say.
"Not really," she says. "Intelligent design claims to be scientific but it's not: After all, it deals with things you can't ever know."
"The intelligent design people are the ones who say that evolution is too complicated to have happened all by itself, aren't they?" I say.
"Yeah," Heather says. "Like, duh. Just because they don't understand it..."
"I wouldn't teach religion as science," Adam says. "But we do teach parts of science in our religion courses, if that's any help."
"Like what?" Heather says.
"We teach creation myths," says Adam. "And we include the big bang."
"How precisely is the big bang a myth?" Heather asks.
"It's a story," Adam says. "Just like the story that the world hatched from a giant egg, or that God said Let there be light and there suddenly was. They're all just stories about the genesis of the world—none of us was there to gather the actual facts, so we have to conclude that the whole thing is unknowable."
I think about saying something about Alexander Pope's lines on Newton:
Then I think about saying something about thought experiments. Then I think about time and the universe, and I'm about to say something about that, but Heather's faster.
"We are of course still part of the big bang," she says. "So we're observing it all the time. We are 'there' right now." She grins. "I'm no cosmologist or astrobiologist, you understand, but that part of it is blindingly obvious, especially if you've read Jim Lahiri. By the way, help yourselves to more wine and everything."
"I enjoyed the Lahiri book," I say, pouring more wine and taking another slice of garlic bread. "I liked that bit about how the universe contains its own past and present—and, possibly, future, although I didn't completely go along with all that speculative stuff—and that since everything in the universe was originally part of the primordial particle, we could be said to have been 'there' at the beginning."
"Not that I want to cause a row or anything," Adam says, smiling. "But I can't agree with big bang theory any more than I can agree with people who think the world is held up by giant turtles."
"But you can't not agree with big bang theory!" Heather says.
"Why not?"
"Well, it's not an opinion; it's a well-established theory, with plenty of evidence. It's certainly not something you can choose to agree or disagree with. You could try to disprove it, but that's something different."
"So you can form an opinion on, say, creationism, or whether or not there's a God, but I can't form an opinion on whether the universe started as an unimaginably small speck that, for no reason at all, simply exploded?"
"OK, I admit that the beginning bit is pretty far-fetched," Heather says.
"And there is the problem of what came before the beginning," I say.
"Yes, yes," says Heather. "But you can put all that to one side and look at all the evidence for the big bang. The simplest bit to understand is the expanding universe. Once you realize that everything in the universe is moving, and every piece is moving farther away from every other piece, then you realize that, well, yesterday, all the pieces were a bit closer together, and the day before that, a bit closer still. Rewind the tape to the beginning and you see that logically everything must have been lumped together."
"But as a tiny speck...?" says Adam. "Everything's not getting bigger, is it?"
"It depends how you define 'big,'" says Heather. "The universe is getting bigger, but it doesn't have more matter in it. That's the other thing—the universe is a closed system with the same amount of matter that never changes."
"Unless you listen to Stephen Hawking circa 1980," I say.
"I could never get my head around all that black hole stuff," says Heather. "But anyway, Adam, you have to agree with the reverse tape scenario."
"Do I? Oh, can I have some more vegetables, please?"
"Only if you agree with me," says Heather, laughing.
"Oh, well in that case..." Adam holds up his hands as if to stop something big from crashing into him.
"No, I'm only kidding. Here..." She pushes the dish of vegetables towards Adam. "But I still don't see how you can disagree with scientific fact."
"'Fact' is a word. Science itself is just a collection of words. I'm guessing that truth exists beyond language, and what we call 'reality.' It must do; well, if it exists at all, that is."
"Come again?" says Heather, frowning.
"Aha," I say, nodding and raising an eyebrow. "He may have you there."
"It's all just an illusion," says Adam. "Creation myths, religion, science. We tell ourselves how time works—so, for example, you can imagine running your tape-of-the-universe backwards and be sure of what you'd get in this portion of time we call 'yesterday'—but yesterday only exists because we made it up: It's not real. You can't prove to me that yesterday even happened. Everything we tell ourselves to believe is simply a fiction, a story."
"Well," says Heather, "you can't argue with that—which makes me suspicious. And anyway, if all reality is just an illusion, then why do we bother?"
"Bother what?"
"Trying to work it all out. Trying to find the truth."
"You can try to find the truth outside reality," Adam says.
"By doing what exactly?"
Adam shrugs. "Meditation, I think. Or possibly getting very drunk."
I was going to say something pithy about Derrida, but Heather looks genuinely upset now so I decide not to.
"Meditation isn't science," she says.
"That's the point," says Adam.
"For God's sake," she says, slightly breathlessly. "All that woolly, superstitious stuff ... No offense, but you just need words and logic to do science. I teach this evening class on the scientific method for adult returners and I always give them the example of the spiders' webs outside the room I teach in. Basically there's this long passageway outside the classroom with these orange lights attached to the wall. The lights are always on. In the evening you can see the spiders' webs stretched over the lights, and you can see all the crane flies and other night insects that get trapped in them. You could look at that and think: Aren't the spiders clever because they know to build webs where the other insects will fly because they're attracted to the light. Or you can go one step further and realize that you can only see the webs near the lights and that's why you have assumed those are the only ones. A poet might stand there and dream about the cunningness of spiders. A scientist would record exactly how many webs there are, and where, and conclude that some of them are built over the lights just by chance."