“I hadn’t thought about it before, but I guess that’s right. He must want us to find our own way, so he intentionally tries not to see the future.”

“For whose benefit does God withhold his power to determine the future?” he asked.

“Well, it must be for his own benefit, and ours, too,” I reasoned. “He wouldn’t have to settle for less.”

The old man pressed on. “Couldn’t God give humans the illusion of free will? We’d be just as happy as if we had actual free will, and God would retain his ability to see the future. Isn’t that a better solution for God than the one you suggested?”

“Why would God want to mislead us?”

“If God exists, his motives are certainly unfathomable. No one knows why he grants free will, or why he cares about human souls, or why pain and suffering are necessary parts of life.”

“The one thing I know about God’s motives is that he must love us, right?” I wasn’t convinced of this myself, given all the problems in the world, but I was curious about how he would respond.

“Love? Do you mean love in the way you understand it as a human?”

“Well, not exactly, but basically the same thing. I mean, love is love.”

“A brain surgeon would tell you that a specific part of the brain controls the ability to love. If it’s damaged, people are incapable of love, incapable of caring about others.”

“So?”

“So, isn’t it arrogant to think that the love generated by our little brains is the same thing that an omnipotent being experiences? If you were omnipotent, why would you limit yourself to something that could be reproduced by a little clump of neurons?”

I shifted my opinion to better defend it. “We must feel something similar to God’s type of love, but not the same way God feels it.”

“What does it mean to feel something similar to the way God feels? Is that like saying a pebble is similar to the sun because both are round?” he responded.

“Maybe God designed our brains to feel love the same way he feels it. He could do that if he wanted to.”

“So you believe God wants things. And he loves things, similar to the way humans do. Do you also believe God experiences anger and forgiveness?”

“That’s part of the package,” I said, committing further to my side of the debate.

“So God has a personality, according to you, and it is similar to what humans experience?”

“I guess so.”

“What sort of arrogance assumes God is like people?” he asked.

“Okay, I can accept the idea that God doesn’t have a personality exactly like people. Maybe we just assume God has a personality because it’s easier to talk about it that way. But the important point is that something had to create reality. It’s too well-designed to be an accident.”

“Are you saying you believe in God because there are no other explanations?” he asked.

“That’s a big part of it.”

“If a stage magician makes a tiger disappear and you don’t know how the trick could be done without real magic, does that make it real magic?”

“That’s different. The magician knows how it’s done and other magicians know how it’s done. Even the magician’s assistant knows how it’s done. As long as someone knows how it’s done, I can feel confident that it isn’t real magic. I don’t personally need to know how it’s done,” I said.

“If someone very wise knew how the world was designed without God’s hand, could that person convince you that God wasn’t involved?”

“In theory, yes. But a person with that much knowledge doesn’t exist.”

“To be fair, you can only be sure that you don’t know whether that person exists or not.”

“Does God have free will?” he asked.

“Obviously he does,” I said. It was the most confidence I had felt so far in this conversation. “I’ll admit there’s some ambiguity about whether human beings have free will, but God is omnipotent. Being omnipotent means you can do anything you want. If God didn’t have free will, he wouldn’t be very omnipotent.”

“Indeed. And being omnipotent, God must be able to peer into his own future, to view it in all its perfect detail.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re going to say that if he sees his own future, then his choices are predetermined. Or, if he can’t see the future, then he’s not omnipotent.”

“Omnipotence is trickier than it seems,” he said.

“I see where you’re going with this,” I said. “You’re an atheist. You think science has the answers and you think religious people are all delusional.”

“Let’s talk about science for a moment,” he replied.

I was relieved. I liked science. It was my favorite subject in school. Religion made me uncomfortable. It’s better not to think too much about religion, but science was made for thinking. It was based on facts.

“Do you know a lot about science?” I asked.

“Almost nothing,” he said.

I figured this would be a short conversation, and it was just as well because my lunch hour was running out.

“Consider magnets,” the old man said. “If you hold two magnets near each other, they are attracted. Yet there is nothing material connecting them.”

“Yes there is,” I corrected. “There’s a magnetic field. You can see it when you do that experiment with the metal shavings on a piece of paper. You hold a magnet under the paper and the shavings all organize along magnetic lines. That’s the magnetic field.”

“So you have a word for it. It’s a ‘field,’ you say. But you can’t get a handful of this thing for which you have a name. You can’t fill a container with a magnetic field and take it with you. You can’t cut it in pieces. You can’t block its power.”

“You can’t block it? I didn’t know that.”

“You can alter a magnetic field by adding other magnetic material, but there is no non-magnetic material you can put between two magnets to block them. This ‘field’ of yours is strange stuff. We can see its effect, and we can invent a name for it, but it doesn’t exist in any physical form. How can something that doesn’t exist in physical form have influence over the things that do?”

“Maybe it has physical form but it’s small and we can’t see it. That’s possible. Maybe there are tiny magnetrons or something,” I said, making up a word.

“Consider gravity,” the old man continued, oblivious to my creative answer. “Gravity is also an unseen force that cannot be blocked by any object. It reaches across the entire universe and connects all things, yet it has no physical form.”

“I think Einstein said it was the warping of space-time by massive objects,” I said, dredging up a memory of a magazine article I read years ago.

“Indeed, Einstein did say that. And what does that mean?”

“It means that space is bent, so when objects seem to be attracted to each other, it’s just that they’re traveling in the shortest direction through bent space.”

“Can you imagine bent space?” he asked.

“No, but just because I can’t imagine it doesn’t mean it’s not true. You can’t argue with Einstein.”

He looked away. I figured he was either annoyed at my answer or just resting. It turned out he was pausing to gather energy. He drew a breath into his tiny lungs and began.

“Scientists often invent words to fill the holes in their understanding. These words are meant as conveniences until real understanding can be found. Sometimes understanding comes and the temporary words can be replaced with words that have more meaning. More often, however, the patch words will take on a life of their own and no one will remember that they were only intended to be placeholders.

“For example, some physicists describe gravity in terms of ten dimensions all curled up. But those aren’t real words—just placeholders, used to refer to parts of abstract equations. Even if the equations someday prove useful, it would say nothing about the existence of other dimensions. Words such as dimension and field and infinity are nothing more than conveniences for mathematicians and scientists. They are not descriptions of reality, yet we accept them as such because everyone is sure someone else knows what the words mean.”