The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

As things stand, after more than a century of research in a number of fields, we have no evidence at all that the future can be predicted. Better to look directly to the past, to its junkyard of unrealized futures, for it is curiosity about history that should give end-time believers reasonable pause when they reflect that they stand on a continuum, a long and unvarying thousand-year tradition that has fantasized imminent salvation for themselves and perdition for the rest. On one of the countless end-time/rapture sites that litter the Web, there is a section devoted to Frequently Asked Questions. One is: when the Lord comes, what will happen to the children of other faiths? The answer is staunch: “Ungodly parents only bring judgment to their children.” In the light of this, one might conclude that end-time faith is probably as immune to the lessons of history as it is to fundamental human decency.

If we do destroy ourselves, we can assume that the general reaction will be terror, and grief at the pointlessness of it all, rather than rapture. Within living memory we have come very close to extinguishing our civilization when, in October 1962, Soviet ships carrying nuclear warheads to installations in Cuba confronted a blockade by the U.S. Navy, and the world waited to discover whether Nikita Khrushchev would order his convoy home. It is remarkable how little of that terrifying event survives in public memory, in modern folklore. In the vast literature the Cuban Missile Crisis has spawned—military, political, diplomatic—there is very little on its effect at the time on ordinary lives, in homes, school, and the workplace, on the fear and widespread numb incomprehension in the population at large. That fear has not passed into the national narrative, here, or anywhere else as vividly as you might expect. As Spencer Weart put it, “When the crisis ended, most people turned their attention away as swiftly as a child who lifts up a rock, sees something slimy underneath, and drops the rock back.” Perhaps the assassination of President Kennedy the following year helped obscure the folk memory of the missile crisis. His murder in Dallas became a marker in the history of instantaneous globalized news transmission—a huge proportion of the world’s population seemed to be able to recall where they were when they heard the news. Conflating these two events, Christopher Hitchens opened an essay on the Cuban Missile Crisis with the words—“Like everyone else of my generation, I can remember exactly where I was standing and what I was doing on the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly killed me.” Heaven did not beckon during those tense hours of the crisis. Instead, as Hitchens observes, “It brought the world to the best view it has had yet of the gates of hell.”

I began with the idea of photography as the inventory of mortality, and I will end with a photograph of a group death. It shows fierce flames and smoke rising from a building in Waco, Texas, at the end of a fifty-one-day siege in 1993. The group inside was the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists. Its leader, David Koresh, was a man steeped in biblical, end-time theology, convinced that America was Babylon, the agent of Satan, come in the form of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the FBI to destroy the Sabbath- keeping remnant, who would emerge from the cleansing, suicidal fire to witness the dawn of a new Kingdom. Here is Susan Sontag’s “posthumous irony” indeed, as medieval Europe recreated itself in the form of a charismatic man, a messiah, a messenger of God, the bearer of the perfect truth, who exercised sexual power over his female followers and persuaded them to bear his children in order to begin a “Davidian” line. In that grim inferno, children, their mothers, and other followers died. Even more died two years later when Timothy McVeigh, exacting revenge against the government for its attack on Waco, committed his slaughter in Oklahoma City. It is not for nothing that one of the symptoms in a developing psychosis, noted and described by psychiatrists, is “religiosity.”

Have we really reached a stage in public affairs when it really is no longer too obvious to say that all the evidence of the past and all the promptings of our precious rationality suggest that our future is not fixed? We have no reason to believe that there are dates inscribed in heaven or hell. We may yet destroy ourselves; we might scrape through. Confronting that uncertainty is the obligation of our maturity and our only spur to wise action. The believers should know in their hearts by now that, even if they are right and there actually is a benign and watchful personal God, he is, as all the daily tragedies, all the dead children attest, a reluctant intervener. The rest of us, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, know that it is highly improbable that there is anyone up there at all. Either way, in this case it hardly matters who is wrong—there will be no one to save us but ourselves.

STEVEN WEINBERG What About God? From Dreams of a Final Theory

Physics, biology, genetics, paleontology, anthropology—how much more punishment can religion take from the world of science and free inquiry? Professor Weinberg earned a Nobel Prize for his work, elucidated the big bang in his wonderful book The First Three Minutes, and has vastly expanded our knowledge of subatomic particles. He poses the inescapable question and proceeds to offer some equally inescapable answers.

“You know,” said Port, and his voice sounded unreal, as voices are likely to do after a long pause in an utterly silent spot, “the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.”

Kit shuddered slightly as she said: “From what’s behind?”

“Yes.”

“But what is behind?” Her voice was very small.

“Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.”

—PAUL BOWLES, THE SHELTERING SKY

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” To King David or whoever else wrote this psalm, the stars must have seemed visible evidence of a more perfect order of existence, quite different from our dull sublunary world of rocks and stones and trees. Since David’s day the sun and other stars have lost their special status; we understand that they are spheres of glowing gas, held together by gravitation, and supported against collapse by pressure that is maintained by the heat rising up from thermonuclear reactions in the stars’ cores. The stars tell us nothing more or less about the glory of God than do the stones on the ground around us.

If there were anything we could discover in nature that would give us some special insight into the handiwork of God, it would have to be the final laws of nature. Knowing these laws, we would have in our possession the book of rules that governs stars and stones and everything else. So it is natural that Stephen Hawking should refer to the laws of nature as “the mind of God.” Another physicist, Charles Misner, used similar language in comparing the perspectives of physics and chemistry: “The organic chemist, in answer to the question, ‘Why are there ninety-two elements, and when were they produced?’ may say ‘The man in the next office knows that.’ But the physicist, being asked, ‘Why is the universe built to follow certain physical laws and not others?’ may well reply, ‘God knows.’” Einstein once remarked to his assistant Ernst Straus that “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.” On another occasion he described the aim of the enterprise of physics as “not only to know how nature is and how her transactions are carried through, but also to reach as far as possible the Utopian and seemingly arrogant aim of knowing why nature is thus and not otherwise…. Thereby one experiences, so to speak, that God Himself could not have arranged these connections in any other way than that which factually exists…. This is the Promethean element of the scientific experience…. Here has always been for me the particular magic of scientific effort.” Einstein’s religion was so vague that I suspect that he meant this metaphorically, as suggested by his “so to speak.” It is doubtless because physics is so fundamental that this metaphor is natural to physicists. The theologian Paul Tillich once observed that among scientists only physicists seem capable of using the word “God” without embarrassment. Whatever one’s religion or lack of it, it is an irresistible metaphor to speak of the final laws of nature in terms of the mind of God.

I encountered this connection once in an odd place, in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington. When I testified there in 1987 in favor of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, I described how in our study of elementary particles we are discovering laws that are becoming increasingly coherent and universal, and how we are beginning to suspect that this is not merely an accident, that there is a beauty in these laws that mirrors something that is built into the