She wonders, perhaps, am I a little too crude in wanting a sign? This offends me, but my spirits are so low, I can’t rally to my own defence. ‘Life is not a movie,’ she says, ‘and God is not a special effect.’ I still have enough about me to remind her that the Old Testament is stacked with stories starring God as a Special Effect. It’s his USP.

Finally, here was the world's constantly broken promise of transcendence, the cosmic wonder I'd chased impatiently ever since I was a child, rounding every corner with an eager smile that faltered just as quickly. I'd been waiting my whole life to find a feeling this big. It was a religious conversion.

if the existence of God is, in fact, a falsehood – is, in some way, irrelevant. In fact, sometimes it feels to me as if the existence of God is a detail, or a technicality, so unbelievably rich are the benefits of a devotional life. Stepping into a church, listening to religious thinkers, reading scripture, sitting in silence, meditating, praying –