"To be very prosaic, then, how do you sense the 'turnover' or change in energy level of the lone electron of a hydrogen atom in interstellar space?"
"By deduction from whatever type of recording is made from a radiotelescope."
"You have no physical nerve endings to sense this directly?"
"Of course not."
"But you are quite sure, nevertheless, that so gross a creature as man may be aware of so slight an emission of energy?"
"Yes."
"And that what man can be aware of, God is also aware of?"
"It follows, if God is aware at all."
"If there is a God, then, there wouldn't be much chance that He didn't know about such gross creatures as the men of the Phoenix? Excuse me ... I've gone far afield. You said the radiotelescope. Well, a few other doctors and I have been working on an instrument to measure cellular action currents—in living cells, of course; and I had added an auxiliary component which was supposed to find out what became of certain suspected possible energy emissions not accounted for or required by chemical processes in the cell. Where there's smoke there's fire, you know ... and where there's energy there's apt to be more energy. And here was a nice piece of fresh dying tissue in beautiful condition.
"I put a tiny sliver into the infrascope just as a young child will put anything that comes his way into his mouth for analysis ... and I saw the scintillations on the plate which I knew signalled the ascent of the souls of the cells, the binding energies ... one flash for each dying cell body ... calculated later ... one quantum of binding energy, one soul!"