“I disagree with your premise,” the professor said as I sat down.

I stared at him blankly.

“What you said before. I don’t think we’re coming into this conversation on equal footing since neither of us can objectively prove their position. You are asserting the presence of an unperceivable thing. Therefore, the burden of proof is very much more on your side of this argument. It’s true I can’t prove God doesn’t exist, but I don’t need to in the absence of convincing evidence He does. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, I have ever seen that makes me think prayer works, that good deeds are rewarded, that a spiritual world exists outside the physical one, that there is any conscious One or Thing out there at all, of any kind.”

Okay then. Here we go. “I agree with you,” I said. “If there was some proof out there from science, math, whatever, that was objectively conclusive, we would all know it by now after however many thousands of years of people thinking and writing and debating about it and we wouldn’t need to have this conversation. Believers don’t believe because they have proof. The proposition is that God put us in this world with one of our chief missions being to find Him and to choose to follow Him. If all that took was a long look in the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope, it would merely be a matter of scientific inquiry or a thought exercise for the smartest person in the world to discover and then just tell the rest of us like the rules of chess. What God did instead is He made the search for Him something intensely personal and experiential. He made it a crucible for each individual to go through over the course of their lives no matter who, what, where, when, or how. It’s a pretty neat trick if you think about it. The fact that no one can tell us some fact or equation that will make our own search for God unnecessary, either way, is quite intentional on God’s part. God wants us to search for Him. Really smart and educated people don’t have an edge here like they do with other philosophical or scientific questions. The most religious, the least religious, the smartest and the dumbest of us are on an equal playing field. And how else could it be? And you know, only God could create such a system. The genius and the fool, the sinner and the saint, are the same. We all have a journey that is unique and personal, but still parallel. Finding God includes logic and reasoning for sure, and evidence, but intellectualizing is only a part of the process.”

“In that case,” he said, “both my intellect and my lived experience have not given me a single valid reason to suspect the existence of God. I probably would have never even thought about it if my parents weren’t Southern Baptists. But I grew up singing hymns and reading scripture. And when I realized their supposedly loving God hated me for what I was, I knew it was all just a crock of bullshit made up by some homophobic Iron Age charlatan high on opium. I did my homework first, though. There’s a whole genre of so-called Christian science literature with proofs and all the nonsense I’m sure you are full of. I read and studied and I searched in the world and I searched in my heart and mind. And I found nothing of substance. I’m sorry to say it, but they lied to you kid. There’s nothing out there. It’s just us and this world and the eighty or so years we have here if we’re lucky and fate doesn’t punch our ticket sooner.”

“Maybe you looked for God in the wrong place.”

“I looked in every place.”

“And in all that you found nothing supernatural? Nothing that made you say, ‘You know, I think there might be more to life than random arrangements of subatomic particles?’”

“Only Cher.”

“What’s Cher?”

“A supernatural being.”

“See. You do believe in the supernatural.”

“I believe in Cher.”

It was clear he was teasing me. I didn’t know what Cher was, but I wasn’t going to admit that to him. I assumed it was one of the pantheistic gods like Vishnu or Lakshmi.

He continued, “Never mind, by the way, the vast majority of believers are children of believers. There’s a little coincidence that challenges your notion of individual discovery. But in any case, what makes you think your position is right and mine is wrong if they’re both subjective and based on personal experience? If you acknowledge there’s no verifiable, objective truth, the only rational conclusion one can make is that God doesn’t exist until some compelling evidence comes along proving that He does.”

“Well, I think the starting point is the undeniable fact that something created the universe.”

“That’s semantic. You’ll still have to explain what made that something, and so on, in an infinite regression. I’m more comfortable resting with the mystery of the origins of what we can see. I don’t know how you make it better by appending the additional mystery of the origin of a thing we can’t see. Or even comprehend.”

I said, “The thing which created time had to be timeless by definition. And the thing that created space can’t just be other space in the same way. That’s God. A being outside of space-time and natural laws. It’s almost a default logical necessity.”

The professor snorted, saying, “You can’t rule out so much of what you don’t know. There are undoubtedly explanations and theories about the origin of the universe science hasn’t yet discovered. The fact that we haven’t thought of them doesn’t make them not possible. Science knows it has not even scratched the surface of the mysteries of space and time. But we know they’re out there. Black holes could easily hold the secret of original cause even though we may never access them. My cosmologist friends tell me there’s good reason to think they do.”

“If that’s the case, no one can prove anything. Any proof a theist brings, you can just pull this trump card that maybe science will be able to disprove it one day. Like, how did the sea split? Even if we knew for sure it happened, if they found chariot wheels at the bottom of the Gulf of Suez or something, you would just say maybe there’s a scientific explanation for splitting seas that scientists haven’t thought of. You won’t be convinced until God Himself manifests in the flesh and invites you to dinner. In which case what you’re effectively saying is the fact that He doesn’t do that proves He’s not there. Which it really doesn’t.”

“You have to admit it makes the whole proposition a little fishy, yes? It is, if maybe not a conclusive proof on its own, at least a valid article of evidence in the case against God.”