Read The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas Online
Authors: Robin Harvie
The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (5 page)
As they neared the South Gatehouse, a fog began to roll in. At first it did not seem unusual, other than the fact of it on such a luminous night, but it progressed with preternatural dispatch and had to it an otherworldly density and odor. In the course of taking no more than twenty steps, Nathan and Lou had moved from crystal-clear Christmas air to a dense, miasmic thicket. Instinctively, they turned to retrace their steps, but the brume had closed in on them from behind too, and presently there was no escape. They took a few clumsy steps in the direction they believed to be forwa
rd. Lou, normally sure of foot, stumbled, and then they stopped in their tracks.
Just as he spoke, an ill wind blew through. It sent a chill up Nathan’s spine and activated the dull ache in Lou’s trick knee, which he had injured twenty years earlier running the Tel Aviv Marathon. Lou sensed trouble afoot. The joint only bothered him when something bad was about to happen. The last time, he’d got home from work to find that a wallaby he was dating had absconded with his collection of Richie Rich comic books.
When the gust died down, the air immediately before them had cleared a bit, just enough so that Nathan and Lou could see standing before them the apparition of a figure from the past. With muttonchops, long coat, and vest, he could have been any nineteenth-century English gentleman out for a postprandial constitutional. But he was unmistakably the famous English biologist—staunch advocate of Darwin, notorious verbal sparring partner of Samuel Wilberforce, and coiner of the term “agnostic.”
“Thomas Henry Huxley,” Nathan and Lou said softly, in unison.
“Which one of you is Nathan Townsend?” the specter asked.
“Who wants to know?” Lou asked protectively. It seemed odd that this apparently supernatural creature didn’t know whether Nathan was a human being or a kangaroo.
“I have been sent with an important message for Nathan Townsend.”
“How do we know you’re authentic?” Lou repeated. The ghost’s voice had the appropriate resonance and vibrato, but Lou wanted hard proof.
“When he was seven years old he had to have an impacted marble surgically removed from his right nostril.”
“Anyone could know that. It’s public record.”
“It was, specifically, a blue marble from the game Mouse Trap. He was frustrated because the swinging boot never functioned properly.”
Lou looked at Nathan.
“It’s true,” Nathan said. “He’s for real.”
Lou looked back at the phantasm. “What is it, then? What do you have to say?”
“I have been told to tell you this conclusively once and for all.” Here the ghost of Thomas Henry Huxley paused for dramatic effect. “There is no God!” The proclamation resonated through the red maples and pin oaks of the Ramble. In the distance, an owl hooted.
“How do you know this?” Nathan asked.
“I have been told so by an omniscient, all-knowing being whose credibility I can personally verify.”
“Then that would be God,” said Lou.
“No,” said Huxley. “He sees and knows all, but his power has limits.”
“Such as?”
“He is very poor at golf. He has taken lessons for thousands of years, but he still slices. He also has great difficulty getting the chlorine right in his hot tub.”
“I’ve heard that can be difficult,” Nathan said.
“He knows of your anguish, Nathan Townsend. He wants your mind to be at ease.”
“Thank you,” said Nathan.
Huxley turned. “And Lou Pinto, he told me to tell you that your father loved you very much.”
Tears formed in Lou’s eyes. It was the greatest gift anyone could have given him. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much.”
But the ghost of Thomas Henry Huxley was already gone.
When the fog lifted, Nathan felt as if an enormous weight had also been lifted from his own shoulders. It didn’t seem it should be so easy to secure peace of mind, but Huxley had given it to him. Now he had certainty and conviction, and this in turn made him buoyant. Nathan resumed their walk home with a spring in his step, and an unfamiliar sense of optimism.
“You look like a new man,” Lou said, who felt a great sense of relief himself. “It’s a Christmas miracle.”
Nathan corrected him. “A miracle event,” he said. “A Christmas miracle event.”
Lou smiled, and together they walked into the holiday night.
I do not believe in a personal God and have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If there is something within me that can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN
S
IMON
S
INGH
While Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas, atheists may wonder if there is another birth they might be able to commemorate. One possibility is to give thanks for the arrival of Isaac Newton, who was born on Christmas Day 1642 according to the Julian calendar, which was still in use in England at the time. Another possibility, and probably my preference, is to use Christmas Day as an excuse to celebrate the biggest birth of all, namely, the creation of the entire universe.
For tens of thousands of years, humans have stared up into the heavens and wondered about the origin of the universe. Up until now every culture, society, and religion has had nothing else to turn to except its creation myths, fables, or religious scriptures. Today, by contrast, we have the extraordinary privilege of being the first generation of our species to have access to a scientific theory of the universe that explains its origin and evolution. The Big Bang model is elegant, magnificent, rational, and (most importantly of all) verifiable. It explains how roughly 13.7 billion
years ago matter exploded into being and was blown out into an expanding universe. Over time this matter gradually coalesced and evolved into the galaxies, stars, and planets we see today.
Before explaining how you might celebrate the birth of the universe, let me quickly explain why we are convinced that there was a Big Bang. First of all, telescope observations made back in the 1920s seemed to show that all the distant galaxies in the universe were redder than they should have been. Red light has a longer wavelength than all the other colors, so it was as if the light from the galaxies was being stretched. One way to explain this stretching of galactic light (otherwise known as the “red shift”) was to assume that space itself was expanding. Expanding space is a bizarre concep
t, but it is exactly how we would expect space to behave in the aftermath of a Big Bang explosion.
However, this single piece of evidence was not enough to convince the scientific establishment that the Big Bang had really happened, particularly as the observations were open to interpretation. For example, the Bulgarian-born astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky pointed out the r
edness of the galaxies was merely an illusion caused by the scattering of light by dust and gas as it passed through the cosmos.
By the way, as well as being a critic of the Big Bang and the data that seemed to support it, Zwicky was also responsible for inventing a beautiful insult. If a colleague annoyed him, Zwicky would scream out, “Spherical bastard.” Just as a sphere looks the same from every direction, a spherical bastard was someone who was a bastard whatever way you looked at him.
A second pillar was needed to support the Big Bang model, and this time the crucial evidence relied on measuring the ingredients of the universe, most importantly hydrogen and helium. These are smallest atoms in the periodic table and the most common in the universe, accounting for 74 percent and 24 percent of all atoms, respectively. Crucially, the only way to create such large amounts of hydrogen and helium is in the wake of the Big Bang. In particular, the pressure, density, and temperature of the early universe would have cooked exactly the right amount of hydrogen and fused it
into exactly the right amount of helium. In other words, the Big Bang is the best (and probably the only) way to explain the abundances of these light elements.
Nearly all the other elements were made later in collapsing stars. These stars provided the perfect environment for the nuclear reactions that give rise to the heavier elements that are essential for life. Marcus Chown, author of
The Magic Furnace
, highlighted the startling significance of stellar alchemy: “In order that we might live, stars in their billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions even, have died. The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the oxygen that fills our lungs each time we take a breath—all were cooked in the furnaces of the stars which expired long before
the Earth was born.”
Because we are made from the debris of nuclear reactions that took place in exploding stars, the romantics among you might like to think of yourselves as being composed of stardust. On the other hand, cynics might prefer to think of yourselves as nuclear waste.
The third, and even sturdier, pillar to support the Big Bang model is the afterglow that should have followed a creation event, which can still be seen today. The theory behind the Big Bang suggests that intense shortwave radiation was released just a few hundred thousand years after the initial expansion. This radiation would have been stretched as the universe expanded, meaning that it would exist today in the form of microwave radiation. These microwaves from the Big Bang should still exist in all parts of the universe at all times and are therefore an excellent make-or-break te
st for whether or not the universe did start 13.7 billion years ago.
Although the Big Bang microwaves were predicted in 1948, they were soon forgotten because astronomers did not have any technology that was sensitive enough to detect microwaves from outer space. However, in 1964 two American radio astronomers discovered them in an episode of pure serendipity. (Serendipity is the art of making fortunate discoveries by accident, or as one anonymous male scientist put it: “Serendipity means looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the farmer’s daughter.”)
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using something called a radio telescope to study galaxies. A radio telescope is a large dish or cone that detects radio waves instead of visible light waves. Annoyingly, the astronomers noticed that they were picking up unexpected radio waves coming all the time from all directions. Initially, they thought the signal might be an error caused by a component within the telescope, so they began to check every single element of the equipment. They searched for dodgy contacts, sloppy wiring, faulty electronics, misalignments in the cone, and so on.
When they climbed inside the cone they discovered a pair of nesting pigeons that had deposited a “white dielectric material.” Thinking that this pigeon poo was somehow causing the spurious signal, they trapped the birds, placed them in a delivery van, and had them released thirty miles away. The astronomers then scrubbed and polished the cone, but the pigeons obeyed their homing instinct, flew back to the telescope, and started depositing white dielectric material all over again. When I met Arno Penzias in 2003, he described to me what happened when he recaptured the pigeons: “There w
as a pigeon fancier who was willing to strangle them for us, but I figured the most humane thing was just to open the cage and shoot them.”
Of course, even without the pigeons and their pigeon poo, the microwaves still kept coming, and after several weeks Penzias and Wilson eventually realized that they had discovered the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. This was one of the most sensationally serendipitous discoveries in the history of science, and a decade later the lucky duo were rewarded with the Nobel Prize for essentially proving that the Big Bang had really happened.
Some people sneer at the accidental nature of this discovery and question whether it deserved the Nobel Prize. Such folk would do well to remember the words of Winston Churchill: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” Indeed, it seems likely that other astronomers probably detected the microwave radiation from the Big Bang before 1964, but it was so faint that they ignored it and carried on regardless.
In fact, you have probably witnessed this Big Bang radiation yourself without realizing it, because most old radios are capable of picking up microwaves. And because a radio can act as a very, very, very primitive radio telescope, I suggest that you use one as the focus for your Christmas celebration of the birth of the universe. Here’s what you need to do.
At some point over the Christmas period switch on an analog radio and retune it so that you are not on any station. Instead of “Jingle Bells” or “Away in a Manger,” all you should be able to hear is white noise. This gentle, calming hiss is the audible output caused by all sorts of random electromagnetic waves being picked up by your radio aerial. You cannot single them out, but rest assured that about 1 percent or 2 percent of these waves are due to microwaves from the Big Bang. In other words, your humble radio is capable of detecting energy waves that were created over 13 billion years ago.
While everyone else is pulling crackers or arguing over the last chocolate orange segment, you can simply close your eyes and listen to the sound of the universe. You are experiencing the echo of the Big Bang, a relic of creation, the most ancient fossil in the universe.
R
ICHARD
D
AWKINS
I was hoofing it down Regent Street, admiring the Christmas decorations, when I saw the bus, one of those bendy buses that mayors keep threatening with the old heave-ho. As it drove by, I looked up and got the message square in the monocle. You could have knocked me down with the proverbial. Another of the blighters nearly did knock me down as I set a course for the Dregs Club, where it was my purpose to inhale a festive snifter, and I saw the same thing on the side. There are some pretty deep thinkers to be found at the Dregs, as my regular readers know, but none of them could mak
e a dent on the vexed question of the buses when I bowled it their way. Not even Swotty Postlethwaite, the club’s tame intellectual. So I decided to put my trust in a higher power.
“Jarvis,” I sang out as I latchkeyed self into the old headquarters, shedding hat and stick on my way through the hall to consult the oracle. “I say, Jarvis, what about these buses?”
“Sir?”
“You know, Jarvis, the buses, the ‘What is this that roareth thus?’ brigade, the bendy buses, the conveyances with the kink amidships. What’s going on, Jarvis? What price the bendy bus campaign?”
“Well, sir, I understand that, while flexibility is often considered a virtue, these particular omnibuses have not given uniform satisfaction. Mayor Johnson—”
“Never mind Mayor Johnson, Jarvis. Consign Boris to the back burner and bend the bean to the buses. I’m not referring to their bendiness per se, if that is the right expression.”
“Perfectly correct, sir. The Latin phrase might be literally construed—”
“That’ll do for the Latin phrase, Jarvis. Never mind their bendiness. Fix the attention on the slogan on the side. The orange-and-pink apparition that flashes by before you have a chance to read it properly. Something like ‘There’s no bally God, so put a sock in it and have a gargle with the lads.’ That was the gist of it, anyway, although I may have foozled the fine print.”
“Oh, yes, sir, I am familiar with the admonition: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ ”
“That’s the baby, Jarvis. Probably no God. What’s it all about? Isn’t there a God, Jarvis?”
“Well, sir, some would say it depends upon what you mean. All things that follow from the absolute nature of any attribute of God must always exist and be infinite, or, in other words, are eternal and infinite through the said attribute. Spinoza.”
“Thank you, Jarvis, I don’t mind if I do. Not one I’ve heard of, but anything from your shaker, Jarvis, always hits the spot and reaches the parts other cocktails can’t. I’ll have a large Spinoza, shaken, not stirred.”
“No, sir, my allusion was to the philosopher Spinoza, the father of pantheism, although some prefer to speak of panentheism.”
“Oh, that Spinoza. Yes, I remember he was a friend of yours. Seen much of him lately?”
“No, sir, I was not present in the seventeenth century. Spinoza was a great favorite of Einstein, sir.”
“Einstein, Jarvis? You mean the one with the hair and no socks?”
“Yes, sir, arguably the greatest physicist of all time.”
“Well, Jarvis, you can’t do better than that. Did Einstein believe in God?”
“Not in the conventional sense of a personal God, sir. He was most emphatic on the point. Einstein believed in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
“Gosh, Jarvis, bit of a googly there, but I think I get your drift. God’s just another word for the great outdoors, so we’re wasting our time lobbing prayers and worship in his general direction, what?”
“Precisely, sir.”
“If, indeed, he has a general direction,” I added moodily, for I can spot a deep paradox as well as the next man—ask anyone at the Dregs. “But Jarvis,” I resumed, struck by a disturbing thought, “does this mean I was also wasting my time when I won that prize for scripture knowledge at school? The one and only time I elicited so much as a murmur of praise from that prince of stinkers, the Reverend Aubrey Upcock? The high spot of my academic career, and it turns out to have been a dud, a washout, scrapped at the starting gate?”
“Not entirely, sir. Parts of holy writ have great poetic merit, especially in the English translation known as the King James, or Authorized, Version of 1611. The cadences of the Book of Ecclesiastes and some of the prophets have seldom been surpassed, sir.”
“You’ve said a mouthful there, Jarvis. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher. Who was the preacher, by the way, Jarvis?”
“That is not known, sir, but informed opinion agrees that he was wise. ‘Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth.’ He also evinced a haunting melancholy, sir. ‘When the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.’ The New Testament too, sir, is not without its admirers. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son . . .’ ”
“Funny you should mention that, Jarvis. The passage was the very one I raised with the Reverend Aubrey, and it provoked a goodish bit of throat clearing and shuffling of the trotters.”
“Indeed, sir. What was the precise nature of the late headmaster’s discomfort?”
“All that stuff about dying for our sins, redemption, and atonement, Jarvis. All that ‘and with his stripes we are healed’ carry-on. Being, in a modest way, no stranger to stripes administered by old Upcock, I put it to him straight: ‘When I’ve performed some misdemeanor’—or malfeasance, Jarvis?”
“Either might be preferred, sir, depending on the gravity of the offense.”
“So, as I was saying, when I was caught perpetrating some malfeasance or misdemeanor, I expected the swift retribution to land fairly and squarely on the Woofter trouser seat, not some other poor sap’s innocent derrière, if you get my meaning, Jarvis?”
“Certainly, sir. The principle of the scapegoat has always been of dubious ethical and jurisprudential validity. Modern penal theory casts doubt on the very idea of retribution, even where it is the malefactor himself who is punished. It is correspondingly harder to justify vicarious punishment of an innocent substitute. I am pleased to hear that you received proper chastisement, sir.”
“Quite, Jarvis.”
“I am so sorry, sir, I did not intend—”
“Enough, Jarvis. This is not dudgeon. Umbrage has not been taken. We Woofters know when to move swiftly on. There’s more, Jarvis. I hadn’t finished my train of thought. Where was I?”
“Your disquisition had just touched upon the injustice of vicarious punishment, sir.”
“Yes, Jarvis, you put it very well. Injustice is right. Injustice hits the coconut with a crack that resounds around the shires. And it gets worse. Now, follow me like a puma here, Jarvis. Jesus was God, am I right?”
“According to the trinitarian doctrine promulgated by the early Church fathers, sir, Jesus was the second person of the triune God.”
“Just as I thought, Jarvis. So God—the same God who made the world and was kitted out with enough nous to dive in and leave Einstein gasping at the shallow end, God the all-powerful
and all-knowing Creator of everything that opens and shuts, this paragon above the collarbone, this fount of wisdom and power—couldn’t think of a better way to forgive our sins than to turn himself over to the gendarmerie and have himself served up on toast. Jarvis, answer me this. If God wanted to forgive us, why didn’t he just forgive us? Why the torture, Jarvis? Whence the whips and scorpions, the nails and the agony? Why not just forgive us? Try that on your Victrola, Jarvis.”
“Really, sir, you surpass yourself. That is most eloquently put. And if I might take the liberty, sir, you could even have gone further. According to many highly esteemed passages of traditional theological writing, the primary sin for which Jesus was atoning was the original sin of Adam.”
“Dash it, Jarvis, you’re right. I remember making the point with some vim and élan. In fact, I rather think that may have been what tipped the scales in my favor and handed me the jackpot in that scripture knowledge fixture. But do go on, Jarvis, you interest me strangely. What was Adam’s sin? Something pretty fruity, I imagine. Something calculated to shake hell’s foundations?”
“Tradition has it that he was apprehended eating an apple, sir.”
“Scrumping, Jarvis? That was it? That was the sin that Jesus had to redeem—or atone according to choice? I’ve heard of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but a crucifixion for a scrumping? Jarvis, you’ve been at the cooking sherry. You are not serious, of course?”
“Genesis does not specify the precise species of the purloined comestible, sir, but tradition has long held it to have been an apple. The point is academic, however, since modern science tells us that Adam did not in fact exist, and therefore was presumably in no position to sin.”
“Jarvis, this takes the chocolate digestive, not to say the mottled oyster. It was bad enough that Jesus was tortured to atone for the sins of lots of other fellows. It got worse when you told me it was only one other fellow. It got worse still when that one fellow’s sin turned out to be nothing worse than half-inching a D’Arcy Spice. And now you tell me the blighter never existed in the first place. Jarvis, I am not known for my size in hats, but even I can see that this is completely doolally.”
“I would not have ventured to use the epithet myself, sir, but there is much in what you say. Perhaps in mitigation I should mention that modern theologians regard the story of Adam and his sin as symbolic rather than literal.”
“Symbolic, Jarvis? Symbolic? But the whips weren’t symbolic. The nails in the cross weren’t symbolic. If, Jarvis, when I was bending over that chair in the Reverend Aubrey’s study, I had protested that my misdemeanor, or malfeasance if you prefer, had been merely symbolic, what do you think he would have said?”
“I can readily imagine that a pedagogue of his experience would have treated such a defensive plea with a generous measure of skepticism, sir.”
“Indeed you are right, Jarvis. Upcock was a tough bimbo. I can still feel the twinges in damp weather. But perhaps I didn’t quite skewer the point, or nub, in re the symbolism?”
“Well, sir, some might consider you a trifle hasty in your judgment. A theologian would probably aver that Adam’s symbolic sin was not so very negligible, since what it symbolized was all the sins of mankind, including those yet to be committed.”
“Jarvis, this is pure applesauce. ‘Yet to be committed’? Let me ask you to cast your mind back yet again, Jarvis, to that doom-laden scene in the beak’s study. Suppose I had said, from my vantage point doubled up over the armchair, ‘Headmaster, when you have administered the statutory six of the juiciest, may I respectfully request another six in consideration of all the other misdemeanors, or peccadilloes, which I may or may not decide to commit at any time into the indefinite future? Oh, and make that all future misdemeanors committed not just by me but by any of my pals.’ Jarvis, it doesn’
t add up. It doesn’t float the boat or ring the bell.”
“I hope you will not take it as a liberty, sir, if I say that I am inclined to agree with you. And now, if you will excuse me, sir, I would like to resume decorating the room with holly and mistletoe, in preparation for the annual Yuletide festivities.”
“Decorate if you insist, Jarvis, but I must say I hardly see the point anymore. I expect the next thing you’ll tell me is that Jesus wasn’t really born in Bethlehem, and there never was a stable or shepherds or wise men following a star in the East.”
“Oh, no, sir. Informed scholars from the nineteenth century onward have dismissed those as legends, often invented to fulfill Old Testament prophecies. Charming legends, but without historical verisimilitude.”
“I feared as much. Well, come on, Jarvis, out with it. Do you believe in God?”
“No, sir. Oh, I should have mentioned it before, sir, but Mrs. Gregstead telephoned.”
I paled beneath the t. “Aunt Augusta? She isn’t coming here?”
“She did intimate some such intention, sir. I gathered that she proposes to prevail upon you to accompany her to church on Christmas Day. She took the view that it might improve you, although she expressed a doubt that anything could. I rather fancy that is her footstep on the stairs now. If I might make the suggestion, sir . . .”
“Anything, Jarvis, and be quick about it.”
“I have unlocked the fire escape door in readiness, sir.”
“Jarvis, you were wrong. There is a God.”
“Thank you very much, sir. I endeavor to give satisfaction.”