Okay. “His basic argument is that there are thousands of religions in the world and so by definition they can’t all be true. And once you are not believing in all of them but the one you like, you might as well go one centimeter further and discard that last one as well. As you are an a-fairyist, so might you as well be an a-theist.”

“A sound argument, no?”

“Not really. Two plus two not equaling one, two, three, five, six, a thousand, two hundred million is not much of a reason it shouldn’t equal four.”

He looked at me. It felt a little too close, like he wanted something. Abruptly, he said, “Matt Harrison,” and he extended a soft hand across our tables.

“Michael Fireworker,” I responded, taking his hand.

“Is that Mee-chhh-ah-el?” he asked me, dragging out the Hebrew “ch” sound to show he knew its correct enunciation.

“That’s very good.” Most people who don’t grow up speaking Hebrew (or Arabic I guess) can’t make the guttural “ch” sound, which is why I always went with Michael when introducing myself to goyim.

“Do you prefer Meechhael or Michael?”

“Mike is good.”

“Mike,” he said. “And ‘Fireworker.’ What is that, German?” I nodded, impressed. “That would be feuer. And ‘worker’ . . . I don’t get that one.”

“I have no idea. But I think in Yiddish it’s pronounced Foyerverger, if that helps.”

“Yes! Verger is wagon. So ‘Firewagon.’ Perhaps some lusty ancestor of yours managed to join the local roughneck fire department in Renaissance Germany or some such.”

“I wouldn’t know. Are you German?”

“I am not, my young Jewish friend, but in what other language does one read Kafka and Goethe?”

“If you say so.”

“Let’s seeeee . . .” he said, raising his hand toward me, fingers spread and pointing forward, waving back and forth like he was casting a spell. “Aries?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What is the month of your birth, young Michael?”

“Uhh, November?”

“And the day?”

“Nine.”

“Scorpio!” More spell casting. “Mysterious. Impetuous. I should have known.”

I could furnish no response to this strange declaration.

“To your point, I think Professor Dawkins is referring to the equal dearth of evidence for all religious legends as an umbrella for their shared myth-hood. In this way, I fear your arithmetic analogy may be slightly imprecise.”

“Are you an atheist?” I said.

“No. I am an English professor. There’s no such thing as an atheist.”

I mulled this strange statement over in light of the dozens of books by atheists I’d read over the last year.

“There’s no such thing as a theist either,” he continued. “God is unknowable. We are all really agnostics of one kind or another, however we might try to convince ourselves otherwise. But the evidence is not greatly in favor of Big Brother in the sky.”

He lifted his chin at me as if he’d thrown a gauntlet.

“So the universe made itself? Nothing plus nothing equals everything?”

He rolled his wrist in a circle indicating I was repeating a tired trope. “I accept that the origin of the universe is a mystery. But I prefer questions I can’t answer to answers I can’t question.”

“That’s a very convenient way to ignore uncomfortable ‘evidence,’ as you put it.”

He smiled dolefully, like my answer disappointed him, as expected.

I guessed he was fifty-something from the fine lines around his eyes, but there was an innocence in the round shape of his jaw that made him look almost like a child. His hair was floppy and brown with touches of silver and covered, still, most of his head. There was something vaguely pyramidal about him, as if everything in his body, from the wider softness of his belly through the narrowing shoulders compressing to the knot of his paisley bow tie, was all pointing somehow toward his brain. His petulant mouth and critical eyes above half-moon reading glasses seemed to say—I know more than you about pretty much everything.

For myself, I imagined he perceived a scholarly young man. Tall, a hair over six feet, lean, pale frame from a life spent indoors in study. My dark hair was thick and wild, longer than it was supposed to be according to the uniform of my society. I wore no glasses, and my color-changing eyes, in my own imagination, were bright and deep. I had, as a nice finishing touch, the tawny shadow of a lazy, midweek stubble that always seemed rugged to me as I admired it while washing my hands after peeing.

His expression seemed to be cycling toward boredom and I was suddenly enjoying the conversation, so I pressed, “Not too many things in the universe just kind of pop into existence. That’s not really one of the options we entertain as far as the origins of things. If I told you this table,” I knocked on the wood between us, “had materialized out of thin air, and no person or otherwise creative entity had anything to do with its existence in the world, I think you would not believe me. If I asked you for proof of your conviction, I don’t think you would think any was necessary.”

He sighed theatrically and then said, “The point has been made that, extraordinary as God would have to be, there would need to be some extraordinary evidence to establish His existence. Whether the furniture materialized by itself or it was made in a factory in Malaysia is of no great significance. God, on the other hand, is slightly more consequential. So real, hard evidence is what I would be looking for, deductive reasoning not so much.”

“I don’t know if we can reasonably hold it against God for not responding with ‘How high?’ when we say ‘Jump,’ or having the angel Gabriel put in an appearance any time someone has doubts about His existence.”

“Yes, maybe so. But don’t you think He should respond at least once in a while? Three thousand years ago, the Scandinavians looked at lightning and could not understand it and therefore concluded it was Thor sporting with the gods and getting up to whatever other mischief gods get up to. Now we understand lightning is a burst of electricity formed from positive and negative charged particles interacting with each other in the atmosphere and Thor is a fetching Australian actor. The argument you’re making is called ‘the God of the gaps.’ If science can’t explain something, the faithful swoop in and say the ‘gap’ in our understanding is proof for God. Not knowing how something happened isn’t proof it was done by an invisible super-being. It’s proof we don’t know how it happened. Yes, we can’t currently explain the existence of existence, but that doesn’t mean God did it. I assume, given another three thousand years or so, the kids at MIT will figure it out.”

“Even if they did,” I responded, “it would just push the goalposts back a few more yards. The question would remain that whatever original thing you finish at in your chain of cause and effect either made itself or someone or something outside the system made it. Those are the only choices. And even without original cause, the astronomic improbability of an ordered universe developing by unguided processes, and all the other bits you can’t explain, you kind of shrug your shoulders and say, ‘I guess it just happened by itself,’ even though you’re talking about a probability that’s so improbable it doesn’t have a number. It’s ten to the power of absurdity. But you still talk about naturalism like it’s pure reason and you congratulate yourself on what a scientist you are.”