"Because, impossible as it seems to me in your or anybody's case, that your cousin should say 'There is no god' utterly staggers me."
"When did she say that?"
Paul told him.
He smoked thoughtfully. "Humph," he said at last, dubiously, "but I doubt if Ursula is as much an atheist as an agnostic. She probably put it that way because her god, whatever she thinks, has nothing worth mentioning in common with any idea of God in your mind."
Paul regarded him for a moment in troubled silence, weighing his words. Then he sighed. "It is utterly beyond me," he said. "How, in the face of things as they are, you or anyone can fail to believe in a Creator, an Inspirer, a Supporter, I do not see. It may be old-fashioned, but even Paley's Evidences seem good enough to me. Allow evolution if you like, allow anything, you've got to get back to something. There must have been a beginning, even if it was all the most tenuous of spiral nebulæ. Well, who made that?"
"I haven't the remotest notion," said Manning.
"Well, but...."
"Yes?"
"Well, if God didn't create it, how did it come? What other hypothesis is possible? It's not conceivable, thinkable even at all, that matter is eternal. Why, eternity, backwards or forwards, is unthinkable."
"Exactly. Yet you ascribe this unthinkable attribute to God."