“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” My brain was taking on too much knowledge. There was overflow and I needed to shake off the excess.

The old man looked at nothing and said, “We are God’s debris.”

“Are you saying that God blew himself to bits and we’re what’s left?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” he replied.

“Then what?”

“The debris consists of two things. First, there are the smallest elements of matter, many levels below the smallest things scientists have identified.”

“Smaller than quarks? I don’t know what a quark is, but I think it’s small.”

“Everything is made of some other thing. And those things in turn are made of other things. Over the next hundred years, scientists will uncover layer after layer of building blocks, each smaller than the last. At each layer the differences between types of matter will be fewer. At the lowest layer everything is exactly the same. Matter is uniform. Those are the bits of God.”

“What’s the second part of the debris?” I asked.

“Probability.”

“So you’re saying that God—an all-powerful being with a consciousness that extends to all things, across all time— consists of nothing but dust and probability?”

“Don’t underestimate it. Probability is an infinitely powerful force. Remember my first question to you, about the coin toss?”

“Yes. You asked why a coin comes up heads half the time.”

“Probability is omnipotent and omnipresent. It influences every coin at any time in any place, instantly. It cannot be shielded or altered. We might see randomness in the outcome of an individual coin toss, but as the number of tosses increases, probability has firm control of the outcome. And probability is not limited to coins and dice and slot machines. Probability is the guiding force of everything in the universe, living or nonliving, near or far, big or small, now or anytime.”

“It’s God’s debris,” I mumbled, rolling the idea around in both my mouth and mind to see if that helped. It was a fascinating concept, but too strange to embrace on first impression. “You said before that you didn’t believe in God. Now you say you do. Which is it?”

“I’m rejecting your overly complicated definition of God—the one that imagines him to have desires and needs and emotions like a human being while possessing infinite power. And I’m rejecting your complicated notion of a fixed reality that the human mind can—by an amazing stroke of luck—grasp.”

“You’re not rejecting the idea of a fixed reality,” I argued. “You’re saying the universe is made of God’s debris. That’s a fixed reality.”

“Our language and our minds are too limited to deal with anything but a fixed reality, regardless of whether such a thing exists. The best we can do is to update our delusions to fit the times. We live in an increasingly rational, science-based society. The religious metaphors of the past are no longer comforting. Science is whittling at them from every side. Humanity needs a metaphor that allows God and science to coexist, at least in our minds, for the next thousand years.”

“If your God is just a metaphor, why should I care about him? He would be irrelevant,” I said.

“Because everything you perceive is a metaphor for something your brain is not equipped to fully understand. God is as real as the clothes you are wearing and the chair you are sitting in. They are all metaphors for something you will never understand.”

“That’s ridiculous. If everything we perceive is fake, just a metaphor, how do we get anything done?”

“Imagine that you had been raised to believe carrots were potatoes and potatoes were carrots. And imagine you live in a world where everyone knows the truth about these foods except you. When you thought you were eating a potato you were eating a carrot, and vice versa. Assuming you had a balanced diet overall, your delusion about carrots would have no real impact on your life except for your continuous bickering with others about the true nature of carrots and potatoes. Now suppose everyone was wrong and both the carrots and potatoes were entirely different foods. Let’s say they were really apples and beets. Would it matter?”

“You lost me. So God is a potato?” I joked.

“Whether you understand the true nature of your food

or not, you still have to eat. And in my example it makes little difference if you don’t know a carrot from a potato. We can only act on our perceptions, no matter how faulty. The best we can do is to periodically adjust our perceptions—our delusions, if you will—to make them more consistent with our logic and common sense.”

“What makes things do what they do?” he asked. “What makes dogs bark, cats purr, plants grow?”

“Before today I would have said evolution makes everything do what it does. Now I don’t know what to think.”

“Evolution isn’t a cause of anything; it’s an observation, a way of putting things in categories. Evolution says nothing about causes.”

“Evolution seems like a cause to me,” I argued. “If it weren’t for evolution I’d be a single-celled creature in the bottom of some swamp.”

“But what makes evolution happen?” he asked. “Where did all the energy come from and how did it become so organized?”

It was a good question. “I’ve always wondered how something like a zebra gets created by a bunch of molecules bouncing around the universe. It seems to me that over time the universe should become more screwed up and random, not organized enough to create zebras and light rail systems and chocolate-chip cookies. I mean, if you put a banana in a box and shook it for a trillion years, would the atoms ever assemble themselves into a television set or a squirrel? I guess it’s possible if you have enough boxes and bananas, but I have a hard time understanding it.”

“Do you have any trouble understanding that a human embryo can only grow into a human adult and never into an apple tree or a pigeon?” he asked.

“I understand that. Humans have different DNA than apple trees or pigeons. But with my banana in the box example, there’s no blueprint telling the molecules how to become something else. If the banana particles somehow stick together to become a flashlight or a fur hat, it’s a case of amazing luck, not a plan.”

“So you believe that DNA is fundamentally different from luck?”

“They’re opposites,” I said. “DNA is like a specific plan. Probability means anything can happen.”

The old man looked at me in that way that said I would soon doubt what I was saying. He didn’t disappoint. As usual, he began with a question.

“If the universe were to start over from scratch, and all the conditions that created life were to happen again, would life spring up?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling confident again. “If all the things that caused life the first time around were to happen again, the result should be the same. I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Let’s rewind our imaginary universe fifteen billion years, to long before the time life first appeared. If that universe’s origin were identical to our own, would it unfold to become exactly like the world we live in now, including this conversation?”

“I guess so. If it starts out the same and nothing changes it along the way, it should turn out the same.” My confidence was evaporating again.

“That’s right. Our existence was programmed into the universe from the beginning, guaranteed by the power of probability. The time and place of our existence were flexible, but the outcome was assured because sooner or later life would happen. We would be sitting in these rocking chairs, or ones just like them, having this conversation. You believe that DNA and probability are opposites. But both make specific things happen. DNA runs on a tighter schedule than probability, but in the long run—the extreme long run—probability is just as fixed and certain in its outcome. Probability forces the coin toss to be exactly fifty-fifty at some point, assuming you keep flipping forever. Likewise,