When I Consider the Heavens . . .
An atheist muses on God
When I consider the heavens, the works of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars that Thou hast ordained, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him?
— Psalm 8
G o outside on almost any night of the year, and if it’s the right time of night and the viewing conditions are good (clear, dark sky, away from bright city lights) and you know right where to look, you can just make out a small, fuzzy, oval patch of light in the constellation of Andromeda. You’re looking at the nearest neighbor to our own Milky Way, the great spiral galaxy M31 (so called because it’s number 31 in a catalog of such specimens compiled in the 18th century by the French astronomer Charles Messier). It is also the most distant object the unaided human eye can see, approximately 2.5 million light years away.
I n Greek myth, Andromeda was the princess of Ethiopia, daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia (both of whose constellations are nearby in the northern sky). When Cassiopeia offended the gods by claiming to be more beautiful than a goddess, Poseidon, Lord of the Sea, punished her by sending fierce storms, tidal waves, and a hideous sea monster to ravage the Ethiopian coasts. Cepheus consulted an oracle to find out what to do, and was told the only way to appease the gods was to sacrifice his daughter Andromeda to the sea monster. So he had her chained to a rock by the seacoast for the monster to have his way with her.
Here she is dangling head over heels in the sky, with her outstretched right hand chained to the rock. That’s the M31 galaxy just above her right knee:
Luckily, who should happen to come flying by on his winged sandals but the demigod Perseus, son of Zeus, fresh from his latest exploit, slaying the snake-haired Gorgon Medusa, whose glance turned people to stone. Here he is, still holding the Gorgon’s severed head. Her winking evil eye is marked by the pulsating variable star Algol, the “Demon Star,” which dims and brightens over a regular, three-day cycle:
Predictably, Perseus is smitten with the lovely Andromeda, rescues her from the sea monster, marries her, and carries her off to his kingdom of Tiryns back home in Greece. Ethiopia is saved from the wrath of Poseidon, and they all live happily ever after except Medusa and the sea monster.
Far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
— Richard Feynman
A charming story, but now let’s talk about reality. That fuzzy oval patch in the sky next to Andromeda’s knee is actually a gigantic spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way, 200,000 light years across, containing roughly a trillion stars:
Somewhere in the interior of one of those trillion stars, a pair of hydrogen nuclei come together. Now, atomic nuclei carry a positive electrostatic charge, which makes them attract negatively charged particles like electrons, while repelling positively charged particles such as other nuclei. If you try to bring two nuclei together, they push like hell to stay away from each other. The nearer you bring them, the harder they push, and the harder you have to push to get them to approach even closer. But the temperature and pressure in the interior of that star are so great that they overcome the force of electrostatic repulsion and smash the two nuclei close enough together for the strong nuclear force to kick in.
The strong force operates on nucleons (protons and neutrons, the particles that make up atomic nuclei). As the name implies, it exerts an attraction between the particles much stronger than their electrostatic repulsion, but only over tiny distances of the scale of an atomic nucleus. Once you get the particles that close together, the strong force takes over, overwhelms the force of electric repulsion, and fuses the two hydrogen nuclei together to form a nucleus of helium. But in the process a tiny bit — about a 150th part, or ⅔ of 1% — of the mass of the original nuclei is lost: converted into energy (E = mc²) in the form of a photon, a tiny packet of pure radiant energy, a particle of light.
I’m going to say this next part slowly, so you can linger over each word and really stretch your mind around it. That photon of light comes flying out from the surface of the star and out into empty space at a speed of
186
thousand
miles
per second
for two
million
years
without encountering any obstruction, until finally after all that time and all that distance, something gets in its way, and it strikes
one of the electrons
in one of the atoms
in one of the molecules
in one of the cells
in the retina of your eye
and jolts that electron into a higher-energy orbit, triggering an impulse from your optic nerve to the visual cortex at the back of your brain, and you see the Andromeda Galaxy.
But that’s just the nearest galaxy nextdoor to ours. The universe is filled with galaxies, two trillion of them, strewn across the sky in every direction as far as our telescopes can see. Here’s a picture known as the Hubble Deep Field, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope out in space orbiting the Earth:
Every object in that picture — not just the obvious spirals but even the tiniest white specks — is a galaxy of hundreds of billions or trillions of stars. And that’s in a patch of sky the size of a needle’s eye held at arm’s length. Remember that photon that stimulated your retina after a two-million-year journey from M31? Most of the galaxies in the picture are thousands of times more distant than that; the light from some of them has traveled through space for 30 billion years before registering on the Hubble’s photodetector. By current estimates, there are on the order of one septillion stars in the known universe. That’s a trillion trillion: 10²⁴, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.
When you feel your heart swell with wild wonder
at the dazzling diamond chandeliers of night,
know your body was built from ancient stardust
and the universe now sees through your eyes.—John Mark Green, Taste the Wild Wonder: Poems
I like to say that I’m an atheist who believes in God. No, not the biblical Creator who calls the universe into being with a word, who has thoughts and plans and purposes and answers prayers and pulls the strings to control events in the world. Not some transcendent universal consciousness or Great Cosmic Mind. Those are all poetic metaphors, or foolish fantasies if you take them literally. The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes said that if horses or lions worshipped gods, their gods would look like horses or lions. We humans have succeeded as a species (so far, anyway) by evolving a brain capable of conceiving thoughts and plans and purposes, so we project those traits onto our god. We have conscious minds, so we imagine a god with a conscious mind. It’s just a form of anthropomorphism, ascribing human qualities to that which is not human.
But I don’t know how anyone can contemplate the truth — the sheer, unvarnished reality — of the cosmos and not be moved to a sense of awe, humility, and wonder in the face of such immensity. We are born into a world not of our own making, brought about by creative forces far beyond our comprehension. The universe has no plan or purpose; the universe just is. Why? What does it mean to “be”? What is existence? As Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz famously asked, Why is there something rather than nothing?
It is that creative power, the essence of Being itself, that we call “God.” It’s as good a name for it as any, as long as you don’t take the conventional scriptural depictions literally. This God doesn’t perform supernatural miracles, split the sea, turn water to wine. The miracles are under our noses, over our heads, all around us, every day. A blade of grass is a miracle. The Andromeda Galaxy is a miracle. You are a miracle. In this sense, not believing in God is like a fish not believing in water. God is the medium in which we swim.
Anyone who can gaze at the Andromeda Galaxy in the night sky or look at that picture of the Hubble Deep Field and not be moved to awe and, yes, reverence has got a hole in their soul.
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“When I Consider the Heavens . . .” by Stephen Chernicoff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
