“There is no god, and we are his prophets.”

(Cormac McCarthy, The Road, London: Picador, 2006, p. 181.)

What’s so captivating about this sentence? I find it exemplary of a way in which novelists can express the deepest truths by simply manipulating language and grammar. As this is pretty much the opposite of what (analytic) philosophers tend to do, it is possible my adimiration of the sentence is a symptom of my more general envy of the novelist’s work. I wish I was also capable of simply exuding truths compiling a sentence of 8 words. Instead, my capacities mostly reduce to trying to explain what others mean when they approach the truth, which is what I will try to do here.

As the two statements composing the sentence are in apparent contradiction, we would expect the conjunction “but” to appear there. Yet, McCarthy chose “and” instead. As philosophy students learn in their first logics class, “and” and “but” are logically equivalent connectors but I doubt that, by replacing “and” for “but,” McCarthy is simply making fun of our language, ironically substituting a word for another which is its logical equivalent but is usually taken to be its contrary. (That would be a move much more congenial to the David Foster Wallace of Infinite Jest.)

When we choose “and” rather than “but”, we generally indicate one of two things. Either we do not see any contradiction between the two statements we are connecting (“it’s 8pm in winter and it’s dark”), or, in a stronger sense, we believe that one implies the other (“white bishop takes black queen and it’s check“).

Which of the two senses of “and” McCarthy is employing here is unclear, although I suspect the strongest sense might be the one alluded. For sure, however, McCarhty is indicating that, at least for the character who is making the speech (a cynical survivor in the apocalyptic scenario portrayed in the book), there is no contradiction between the inexistence of God and the fact that we are God’s prophets. Where most would see rupture and irreconcilability, McCarthy sees harmony, order, predictability, even, if possible, in a banal sense (the sentence reads, at least to me, tiresome, as if the character has uttered its many times before and is now weary of exposing its banal truth).

I do not have much to add to this as I believe this couple of observations alone can help see why the sentence is memorable. I leave it to the readers to ponder on why the inexistence of God can be trivially connected to the fact that humans are (condemned to) be his prophets or even to how the first might be thought to imply the latter.

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