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fact—”
    “That’s like a virtual particle. A piece of hot air.”
    I sighed, and sincerely wished the boy dead. This tangle of suppositions about the absolute and unknowable which he had agitatedly sketched reminded me of my dead, the dead who give me my living, those murky early centuries of passionate anchorites and condemnatory prelates whose storms of fine distinction swept back and forth from Athens to Spain, from Hippo to Edessa. Homoousios versus homoiousios , the logikoi versus the alogoi . Montanism and modalism and monarchianism, hypostasis and Patripassianism. Blood-soaked discriminations now dust like their bones, those grandiose and prayerful efforts to flay, cleave, and anatomize the divine substance. “The Christian Church,” I began, then halted myself to ask the boy, “You do consider yourself a Christian?”
    “Absolutely. Christ is my Saviour.”
    I loathed the icy-eyed fervent way he said it. Back home suchflat statements were painted on barns and needlepointed on pillows. I said to him, “The church preaches, I believe, and the Old Testament describes, a God Who acts, Who comes to us , in Revelation and Redemption, and not one Who set the universe going and then hid. The God we care about in this divinity school is the living God, Who moves toward us out of His will and love, and Who laughs at all the towers of Babel we build to Him.” I heard myself echoing Barth and the exact quotation flickered at the edge of my mind. Where? I was wearing beneath my coat a cashmere V-necked sweater (“camel” was the name of the shade on the label, amusing Esther, who thinks of my academic specialty as the Desert Fathers, when she bought it last Christmas, in Bermuda, at Trimingham’s), and abruptly I felt too warm, and began to sweat. I was trying too hard. I was dredging up beliefs I had once arrived at and long ago buried, to keep them safe.
    “I know, I know, that’s great,” my inquisitor said, alert and interested but not shaken by my promulgation. “Still, if He acts as you say, if He is dynamic, then He exists in some way that a complete physical description of the basic universe, which is what we’re at most a decade short of in science, can’t avoid detecting. That’s all I’m saying. We’re almost home, Professor Lambert, and science, because it’s been atheist so long, doesn’t want to admit it; you need somebody like me, who’s willing to make the announcement—to pull all the evidence together and run it through a computer. A computer, see, is a basically simple device, but it can do its simple things over and over very rapidly—”
    I interrupted, “It’s surely too simple, by the way, to say that all scientists have been atheists. Eddington wasn’t, and Newton, as I remember, was quite a zealot. Pascal, Leibniz. Einstein talked about God not rolling dice.”
    “Oh, there’s been a few, sure. But by and large—you don’t deal with these guys the way I do, every day. To them the idea of anything that isn’t chance or matter is absolutely out of bounds. They hate it. Do you have a minute for just one more thing? I can see you’re getting edgy. About fifty years ago, a physicist called Paul Dirac asked himself why the number ten to the fortieth power keeps occurring. The square of the number, ten to the eightieth, is the mass of the visible universe measured in terms of the mass of a proton. The number itself, ten to the fortieth, is the present age of the universe, expressed in the units of time it takes light to travel across a proton. And, get this, the constant that measures the strength of gravity in terms of the electrical force between two protons shows that gravity is ten-to-the-fortieth times weaker! Also, ten to the fortieth to the one-fourth, or ten to the tenth, just about equals the number of stars in a galaxy, the number of galaxies in the universe, and the inverse of the weak fine-structure constant! If you—”
    “Perhaps you should save all this for