Brian Raiter
As best as I can remember, I was around eight years old, and I was
looking through one of my parents’ books that I liked. I occasionally
went through the large bookshelf my parents had, looking for something
that didn’t look terminally boring. On one such occasion I had
discovered a Time-Life science book, titled simply “The Stars”. The
first time I ever looked at it, it was largely over my head, but every
now and then I returned to it, and found more and more of it
comprehensible, and more and more of it interesting.
This early-sixties-era Time-Life book introduced me to such marvels as
galaxies, globular clusters and supernovae. In later years it taught
me about the Main Sequence, the carbon fusion chain, and the predicted
fate of our own sun. You might not think that a pre-teen kid would get
excited about a chart showing the Main Sequence. Well, eventually I
would be, but at that age I was much more interested in the
all-too-short section on colliding galaxies. This included a dull
photo, showing two overlapping lights and a artist’s conception,
showing two spiral galaxies passing through each other with red-hot
gases where they overlapped. I imagined the sound of sparking
filaments of electricity to accompany it.
One day I was was paging through this book, looking for more to read
about, and I hit upon a two-page spread that described the early
formation of the solar system. It showed a cloud of interstellar dust
slowly collapsing from its own gravity, spinning faster as it became
denser, until there was enough matter crammed into the center to be a
sun, at which point it started to heat up. When pretty much everything
had collapsed into a single ball, it was spinning fast enough that it
threw off a bunch of extra matter at the equator, where the speeds
were fastest. The ejected matter repeated the original process, with
several different areas forming their own local balls of matter that
drew in nearby matter. Some of them even repeated the part where at
the point of maximum rotational speed they threw off a bit of matter
from the equator before stabilizing, which in turn eventually
collapsed into other balls. Voila: sun, planets, and moons, with the
last straggling bits of matter winding up as asteroids or comets.
Pretty typical as explanations go at that age, in that it seemed to
raise a bunch of really obvious followup questions. Like for example
if it just formed out of a bunch of preexisting matter then where the
heck did that come from? But even at that age I could see that it was
probably easier to explain where a shapeless cloud of dust came from
than a fully formed solar system. It wasn’t trying to do everything,
but was just one piece of the puzzle. Too bad Time-Life hadn’t seen
fit to include the whole thing, but then again maybe it was just in
one of those parts that I was too young to understand.
I had read these pages before, but on this one day something struck me
about it. I reread the text under the pictures to double-check. No
mistake: Here was a description of the formation of the solar system
that made no reference to God. Not even to suggest that God had nudged
the cloud into position, or had given some chunk of matter a bit of a
backspin in order to get things started, or even that he had carefully
watched over it without interfering.
Not even to apologize for not mentioning God. It wasn’t even that
relevant.
There were people, I realized, who didn’t believe in God.
There were holes in my logic, I saw (not immediately, but in the
ensuing days, weeks, months). Just because these people contradicted
the first chapter of Genesis didn’t mean they didn’t believe in God.
They might still believe other parts of the Bible were accurate. They
might believe that God created the interstellar dust, knowing that it
would lead to the solar system and human beings. They might believe in
a different God altogether.
But none of those objections really mattered, I realized. This
explanation for the formation of the solar system was printed in a
regular book, after all. It wasn’t the work of a handful of lunatics
trying to push some wild-eyed beliefs. This idea, that the solar
system formed by itself, had to be pretty widely accepted by
scientists. Or even if it wasn’t, they at least were comfortable with
the idea that it wasn’t God just stepping in and doing it by hand. And
I saw that even if all those people still believed that God did exist,
they couldn’t speak for everybody. I mean, taking this idea to its
logical conclusion was simply too obvious, too compelling. If you
could come up with a plausible notion of how the solar system formed
just by leaving a bunch of interstellar dust alone for millions of
years, then surely equivalent explanations could be found for just
about anything. So even if everyone who worked on this book believed
in God, there definitely had to be other people who didn’t.
And, if it truly turned out that there weren’t any other such people
– well, there was one now.
If it had turned out that every adult I ever met believed in the
Bible, then I wasn’t about to disagree with that. Those are long and
foolish odds. But something within me, even at that age, didn’t find
the Bible stories particularly compelling. They were too strangely
skewed while at the same time too pat, pat in a way that real
explanations never were. All I had needed was reassurance that I
wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
The moment I deduced the existence of atheists, I knew that I was one
too.
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