Conroy said, “Imagine this cosmology: Forget about starting the universe with just the right finely-tuned Big Bang needed to create stars, planets, intelligent life … and a culture capable of making sense of it all. Instead, take as your ‘starting point’ the fact that there’s a living human being who can explain an entire universe, in terms of a single theory. Turn everything around, and take it as the only thing given that this one person exists.”

I said irritably, “How can it be the only thing? You can’t have a living human being … and nothing else. And if it’s given that this person can explain the universe, then there has to be a universe to explain .”

“Exactly.”

Conroy smiled, calmly and sanely, but the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I suddenly knew what she was going to say next.

“From this person, the universe ‘grows out’ of the power to explain it: out in all directions, and forward and backward in time. Instead of being blasted out of pre-space – instead of being ‘caused’ inexplicably at the beginning of time – it crystallizes quietly around a single human being.

“That’s why the universe obeys a single law – a Theory of Everything. It’s all explained by a single person. We call this one person the Keystone. Everyone, and everything, exists because the Keystone exists. The Big Bang model of cosmology can lead to anything at all: a universe of cold dust, a universe of black holes, a universe of dead planets. But the Keystone needs everything which the universe actually contains – stars, planets, life – in order to explain vis own existence. And not only needs them: the Keystone can account for all of them, make sense of all of them, without gaps, without flaws, without contradictions.

“That’s why it’s possible for billions of people to be wrong . That’s why we’re not living with stone age cosmology – or even Newtonian physics. Most explanations just aren’t powerful, rich or coherent enough to bring a whole universe into being – and to explain a mind capable of holding such an explanation.”

I sat and stared at Conroy, not wishing to insult her, but at a loss for anything polite to say. This was pure cult-speak at last: she might as well have been telling me that Violet Mosala and Henry Buzzo were the incarnations of a pair of warring Hindu deities, or that Atlantis would rise from the ocean and the stars would fall from the sky when the Final Equation was written.

Except that, if she had, I doubt I would have felt the same uneasy tingling down my back and across my forearms. She’d steered close enough to the shores of science, for enough of the way, to disarm me a little.