Desperate Games by Pierre Boulle Read Free Book Online

physicists in the group claimed to be above all disciples of Father Teilhard, interpreting what they considered his essential idea to be: inert matter does not exist. Evolution obeys a cosmic design. Having been started at the stage of atoms by this vague cosmicconsciousness in each infinitesimally small particle, and having continued to scale the heights of humanity through an infinitely more important concentration of means, it must end up in total identification with the Universe, through a complete identification with its mysteries.
    There were no doubt quite a lot of differences between these simple formulae and the Christian faith of the Jesuit father, which would perhaps have prompted the latter to disown them as disciples, but the scholars regarded these differences as insignificant details. For Fawell, who belonged to this school of thought, even though he rejected almost everything Christian in Teilhard’s credo, this did not diminish at all the admiration that he bore for him. The God, which he pursued in his passionate researches on matter, he described as the essence of the Universe, but whether one called it by the name Universal Christ, and whether evolution was named christogenesis and the limit of total knowledge signifying fusion was called the Omega point, these were for him simple questions of vocabulary without the least importance. This was not always the point of view of his friends with whom he liked to discuss the subject. Yranne and Zaratoff, for example, criticized quite severely the attempt at synthesis which the religious scholar had made between science and faith, even going as far as accusing him of Jesuitism.
    Strangely enough, when they got involved in a discussion of this sort, Mrs Betty Han, who always kept at least one foot on the ground and whose mind was probably less inclined towards cosmic religiosity, defended both the scholar and the Jesuit vigorously. She did so moreover in a strange manner which was tinged with ambiguity. This synthesis, she asserted, represented in her eyes as a professional psychologist the most perfect example that she knew of the desperate efforts by the human mind to force in an artificial way disparate and even perfectly contradictory elements into agreement with each other. She could not help but admire unreservedly this passionateattempt which had almost succeeded, and maintained that if it was Jesuitism then it was a brilliant aspect of Jesuitism, which she acknowledged with admiration and which stirred her enthusiasm. But when she went that far, the others looked at her in silence, smiling in their perplexity, for the image of Betty as an ‘enthusiast’ was disconcerting, not to say absurd, in the eyes of those of her friends who knew her well.
    Whether they had a vision of total creation made by one god, or of its discovery and assimilation, the physicists could generally agree about an ideal situated in the future and on a sanctification of knowledge. The biologists also ranked knowledge first among their concerns (this was almost the only philosophical view common to both classes of scholars), but they fought doggedly against all temptation towards metaphysics.
    It had not always been like that. During the first half of the twentieth century, some of them even made brilliant efforts to demonstrate with the aid of the mathematics of probability, and citing examples which emphasised the behaviour of monkeys using typewriters, that the emergence of the human brain was such an improbable phenomenon, without some supernatural guidance of evolution, as to be virtually an impossibility. This reasoning has been criticised nowadays, as much, moreover, by contemporary biologists as by physicists. The former objected that if the combination of atoms which would develop into a brain and consciousness were indeed quasi-impossible, then all other combinations would have the same characteristic of being quasi-impossible. All the same, in a lottery comprising