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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
A REFUTATION OF THE THEORY THAT
THE UNIVERSE IS GOVERNED
BY INTELLIGENCE
by
WOOLSEY TELLER
Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and the suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.
-- Lucretius
THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY 38 PARK ROW NEW YORK
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Copyright 1938, by
The Truth Seeker Company
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In Memory of My Mother
ADA STURTEVANT TELLER
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And that inverted Bowl we call the sky,
Where under crawling coop'd we live and die,
Lift not your heads to it for help -- for it
As impotently moves as you or I.
-- omar
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I THINGS LARGE AND SMALL ................... 2
CHAPTER II STAR DUST LOOKS ABOUT .................. 14
CHAPTER III DAWN: NEBULAE AND STARS ............... 18
CHAPTER IV DAYLIGHT: THE SOLAR SYSTEM ............. 30
CHAPTER V DARKNESS: THE ETERNAL DRIFT ............. 47
CHAPTER VI THE FINAL IMPLICATIONS ................. 53
The universe as a totality is without cause, without origin,
without end.
-- KARL Du Prel (Ludwig Buchner, Force and Matter, p. 11).
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
Astronomy ... is of all others the science which seems to
present to us the most striking instance of waste in nature.
-- Richard A. Procter, Our Place Among Infinities, p. 40.
The universe consists in the main not of stars but of desolate
emptiness -- inconceivably vast stretches of desert space in which
the presence of a star is a rare and exceptional event. ... The
stars move blindly through space, and the players in the stellar
blind-man's-buff are so few and far between that the chance of
encountering another star is almost negligible.
-- SIR JAMES JEANS, The Universe Around Us, pp. 87, 88.
Today we know not only that there is a terrible amount of
disorder in the heavens -- great catastrophes or conflagrations
occur frequently -- but evolution gives us a perfectly natural
explanation of such order as there is. No distinguished astronomer
now traces "the finger of God" in the heavens; and astronomers
ought to know best.
-- JOSEPH McCABE, The Story of Religious Controversy, p. 86.
No sign of purpose can be detected in any part of the vast
universe disclosed by our most powerful telescopes.
HUGH ELLIOT, Modern Science and Materialism, p. 39.
We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits
of a star gone wrong.
-- SIR Arthur Eddington, New York Times Magazine, Oct. 9,1932.
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CHAPTER I
THINGS LARGE AND SMALL
The theist and the scientist are rival interpreters of nature,
The one retreats as the other advances.
-- Joseph McCabe. [The Existence of God, p. 84.]
If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge
of nature is calculated to destroy them.
-- Baron D'Holbach. [The System of Nature, p. 49]
We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain
of cosmological theory.
-- John Tyndall [The Belfast Address]
... No evidence or proof of the existence of a God has been
found in the phenomena of nature, based on experience.
-- Charles P. Steinmetz. [John Winthrop Hammond, p. 455]
There is no God, it is clear as the sun and as evident as the
day that there is no God, and still more that there can be none.
-- Ludwig Feuerbach. [Article "Atheism," Ency. Brit.]
WHEN, less than two centuries ago, the famous Laplace was
asked by the Emperor Napoleon why God had not been mentioned by him
in his celebrated work, "Mechanique Celeste," and the astronomer
replied, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis," he uttered a
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
truth which was fully justified by the science of his time.
Astronomy today is no more in need of the god-hypothesis than it
was in Laplace's day: the facts of cosmological research have done
nothing if not completely demolished the last vestige of theistic
interpretation. We live, on the evidence of astronomy, in a godless
universe. ["You should be more ready than any one else," said
Napoleon to Laplace, "to admit that God exists, for you, more than
most, have seen the wonder of creation." That atom of cruelty did
not realize that it was largely because Laplace had seen so much of
the heavens that he was an atheist. (See Emil Ludwig's Napoleon, p.
602.)]
To the average individual casually engaged in contemplating
the stars, the world above him presents a perfect picture of
harmonious relationships. He beholds a blue vault of exquisite
splendor, in which twinkle myriads of far-distant worlds. He sees
the "Stately procession" of the planets, the daily rising and
setting of the sun! The "beautiful order" of the heavens, the
"regularity" of the seasons, the fact that our planets "do not
collide," or that our moon does not "fall" into the earth or our
earth into the sun, make their silent appeal for the existence of
God; the warmth and light of the sun, the "nicety" with which the
earth makes its revolutions "on time," the alternations of day and
night, all tend to show him an "order" and a "harmony" in keeping
with his theistic assumptions. To the astronomer, the facts point
otherwise: their meanings and implications go far deeper than their
surface indications, and he sees instead a purposeless universe
unattended by any signs of intelligent guidance. This is because
there is no superficial sky-gazing or casual observation in his
study of the stars. There are, for him, enough facts in astronomy
to shatter theism.
Much of our popular confusion in matters of science rests on
a topsy-turvy contemplation of facts. The story is told of a
professor of astronomy who, having concluded his lecture on the
planetary system, called for questions from the floor. A member of
his audience arose to ask him the following question: "I can
understand, now that you have explained it all, how the astronomer
weighs the planets and measures their distances from the sun, but
what bothers me is, how did he find out their names?"
The same, or a similar, bewilderment seems to possess those
who as innocently ask the question, "Who made the stars?" Quite
obviously the question for thoughtful person to ask is, not "Who
made the stars?" but "What made the stars?" Astronomers have a
definite answer. They know not only "what" made the stars, but
"what" determines their movements in space. There is no "Who" or
celestial personality involved in stellar activity.
Asking an astronomer, "Who made the stars?" is very much like
asking a physicist, "Who made the icicles and pretty ice-drawings
on my window-pane?" The answer is no more likely to be "'God" in
the one case than "Jack Frost" in the other. In educated circles
the days are largely past when invisible personalities and unseen
beings are supposed to have anything to do with natural phenomena.
We are leaving behind us the kindergarten stage of our mental
development.
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Those who believe in a "supreme intelligence" in the sky
overlook an important principle of physiological knowledge. "Three
centuries before the beginning of the Christian era," writes the
distinguished anatomist, G Elliot Smith, ["The Evolution of the
Brain" in 'Creation by Evolution,' p. 323.] "some of the wise men
of Greece already recognized in the brain the real organ of mind;
yet it was reserved for modern times to confirm the accuracy of
this early knowledge and to extend it." Accordingly, it is well
here to recall the materialistic basis of mind. Thinking is as much
a function of structure and organization as breathing or walking.
As functions cannot exist apart from their organs, it is the height
of absurdity to imagine a function like thinking existing by itself
or wandering about the heavens without a material substratum. A
"pure spirit" hovering over matter is pure nonsense. Thought is
"immaterial" only as respiration and digestion are immaterial -- we
cannot see, weigh, or handle functions apart from their organs --
but thinking is as material as matter itself when we consider it
mechanically, that is to say, as a form of vibration and sensation
in the nerve fibers of the brain and of the nervous system. Matter
thinks quite as well as it walks, and talks, and dresses for the
opera; and without matter thinking is impossible. "As we understand
it at present," writes George W. Bartelmetz, ["Human Structure and
Development" in The Nature of the World and of Man, p. 468-469.] "a
word or idea comes into consciousness as a result of innumerable
cortical reverberations back and forth from one cell or group of
cells to another." Thought is matter in motion. A cosmic
intelligent being would have to be made of matter.
Astronomers are well satisfied that stars and planets move of
their own accord, or without any external stimulus of a conscious
character. It is the theistic and spiritualistic muddlers of
science who have injected their "God" into the picture, and made of
matter a helpless hag of the gutter.
Matter is not that inert mass which vitalists and
metaphysicians picture for us. Even the most subtle forms of matter
possess within themselves powerful potentialities and assert
themselves in terms of energy.
Every beam of light we receive from the sun carries with it
definite weight, weight which, as jeans reminds us, [The Universe
Around Us, p. 117.] is "as real as the weight of a ton of coal."
Every erg of energy has weight and mass. ["The essential fact is
that an erg of energy in any form has a mass of 1.1.10-21 grammes."
-- Eddington, Stars and Atoms, p. 97.] There is no "matterless" or
"spiritual" energy, or energy existing by itself; energy is matter
-- matter asserting itself. Energy, in every form, is always
identified with and inseparable from matter; the two cannot be torn
apart. The law of the "conservation of energy" embodies the
conservation of matter; neither matter nor energy is ever
destroyed.
Everywhere we are dealing with matter, matter in an endless
round of activity, expressed in terms of energy. Radiation itself
is a form of energy; and that which we call radio-activity is
merely a transformation of matter from one form of energy to
another. The disintegration of the nucleus of a uranium atom is
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followed, in time, by its transference into the nucleus of a lead
atom. No matter is lost in the transition. Hence, the so-called
"annihilation" of the atom consists of nothing else than the
breaking up of the nucleus of one kind into the nucleus of another
kind of atom. There is no destruction of matter itself; nothing is
lost -- there has been only a change of one atom into another. The
much-talked-of (and highly misnamed) "annihilation of matter" is
metaphysical moonshine, prompted by those who do not know what they
are talking about or by those who mistake an atomic change for the
destruction of matter." ["According to the disintegration theory of
Rutherford and Soddy," writes Sir Edward Thorpe, History of
Chemistry, vol 2, p. 42, "the radio-active elements are forms of
matter undergoing changes resulting in the formation of new forms
possessing chemical and physical properties differing from those of
the parent substance. Here is matter undergoing change, not
"annihilation.']
All the high-sounding talk, but really empty gibberish, about
the "downfall" of materialism rests on phantasies. Matter matters:
it is everywhere; it cannot be destroyed by the breaking up of
atoms into other atoms. It cannot be "annihilated" until some
metaphysician takes a little matter and "explodes" it out of
existence. [The materialist is waiting to see the metaphysician
"annihilate" matter as thoroughly as he, the materialist,
annihilates the mind, or what his spiritualistic opponents call
"spirit." If the mind, as spiritualists insist, is a self-existent
entity, capable of activity apart from the matter of the brain, and
able to wander off by itself, a man in a state of coma, or
undergoing an operation under the influence of ether or chloroform,
ought to be able to witness all that transpires around him.
Instead, his mind is a blank, completely non-existent during the
time his brain ceases to function. His so-called "spirit" cannot
survive the derangement of matter, or the suspended functioning of
his brain. A few drops of prussic acid, an inhalation of gas, or a
clot on the brain, will unbalance or destroy the most serene
mentality. What the spiritualist calls "immortal" goes dead for
hours at a time, and cannot exist even throughout the life-time of
the individual. It is mind, not matter, that is destructible.] He
can do this only in talk, or by clumsily referring to the
"smashing" of atoms into electrons and protons, negative and
positive particles which, besides possessing weight, are, in terms
of energy, still matter.
It is highly important -- essential to an understanding of
astronomy -- that these issues be understood. The universe --
stars, meteors, clam-broth and brain cells -- is made of matter.
Our American philosopher Santayana does well in insisting on
calling matter by its right name, as we call Smith, Smith, and
Jones, Jones -- and also in labeling himself "a decided
materialist."
ATOMS, MEN, AND STARS
WE live in a material universe, in which we ourselves, as
products of the stars, are matter "through and through." That we
are matter that can think is no more remarkable than there is so
much matter, outside ourselves, which never thinks at all. That
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
matter which thinks has simply reached a certain biological stage.
As C. Judson Herrick observes, [The Thinking Machine, p. 250,]
"Mental processes are biological functions of the body in general
and of the brain in particular in just the same sense that
circulation of the blood is a function of the heart or breathing is
a function of the lungs. The evidence for this is biological
evidence." Man has no claim for exclusion from the world of matter.
He is as much matter as the world of stars.
Our foundations of knowledge are more solid than the
epistemologists would have us believe. The hazy maze of obscurities
and airy abstractions into which we have been led by verbal appeal
is losing its lure: our knowledge of the world is fast becoming
recognized as of sensory origin. All claims to supersensory
"knowledge" rest on fraud.
Man's contact with the universe around him is a contact of
matter with matter. There is nothing "spiritual" about it. He
himself is all matter, surrounded by matter. Whether he is
receiving impressions in the form of light from a distant star or
as heat waves generated in the sun, or as any other sense
perceptions, his sensations are physical and are linked with the
brain as the vibrating center. Here is thinking, or matter in
motion. There is no "spiritual" world, no world of transcendental
physics at work within his cerebral cavity. All concepts of a
supersensual world, a world "above" matter, rest on fantastic
imagery.
Astronomy would never have reached the zenith of its
attainments had it listened to metaphysics. Stars are physical
objects: the dream of a world made of dream; is for visionaries
only. To the scientist, stars are real objects moving in the skies.
A thousand years from now science will be foretelling eclipses
and weighing the stars with as much mathematical precision as it
does today: our mystics cannot tell us from one day to the next
what metaphysics will be teaching the day after tomorrow. The
knowledge of experience is solid and compact; its definiteness is
paralleled by its crystalline simplicity. Only in the realm of
jumbled ideas do the reachers for rainbows find a world that
transcends the evidences of their senses. Our metaphysicians cannot
agree among themselves for two minutes at a time: their revelations
from "above" are as hazy and shifty as London fogs.
Like Voltaire's Zadig, who "knew as much of metaphysics as
hath ever been known in any age, that is, little or nothing at
all," our modern mystics take abstractions for realities. They will
tell you where the hole of a doughnut is after the doughnut is
eaten, and where the wind and waves are when the air and ocean are
at rest. They talk about the "spiritual nature" of the mind with
even more enthusiasm than they talk about the "spirituality" of a
toothache or a headache.
Those who believe that knowledge is innate or derived through
channels other than experience ought to come into the world as wise
as they leave it. Some of them do; but it is a poor commentary on
their intellectual poverty that they go out no richer than they
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came in. He who finds wisdom in a world above matter, i.e., in the
realm of metaphysics, is seeing visions quite as vividly as the
drug addict, who can enjoy the most delightful "releases" from the
bonds of "dross" matter: a hypodermic injection will give him
"transports" that are as ethereal as a chapter from Bergson. But he
will come back to earth, realizing that matter was behind it all.
And he can become "spiritualized" again only by the use of a little
more matter, even though, in his "spiritual" moments, he holds it
in contempt.
And here we must take issue with the statement of Bertrand
Russell [philosophy, p. 98; "The Structure of the Atom." that
"matter has become as 'ghostly' as anything in a spiritualistic
seance." How "ghostly" it has become may be judged by anyone who
has walked complacently into a dark room and stumbled over a chair,
or collided with an automobile. For most of us, matter is real. A
man engaged in metaphysical reveries may talk of the "ghostliness"
of matter until he talks himself out of existence. To say that
matter is "ghostly" because its atoms can be divided into smaller
units is the same as saying that the Atlantic Ocean is "ghostly"
because it is made up of molecules. Water does not cease to be
material because it is composed of units smaller than those of
oxygen and hydrogen. A sea captain in a storm, whose ship is being
battered by the waves, could never be convinced that matter is
"ghostly," no matter how many electrons and protons compose a
particular wave. It is enough for him that these mountains of
matter, in the form of water, are pounding his ship.
Those who believe in the "ghostly" qualities of matter must
first show that what we call matter becomes something else when it
is reduced to electrons and protons. This they cannot do. It is not
enough to show us that matter can be reduced to electrons and
protons; it must be shown in what way these units of the atom are
not matter. Certainly they possess all the attributes of matter. As
long as electrons and protons possess mass and weight they are
material particles. "The mass of a proton," says Russell,
[Philosophy, p. 100.] "is about 1,835 times that of an electron: it
takes 1,835 electrons to weigh as much as one proton." When, we
ask, did any ghost weigh as much as that? The "ghostliness" of
matter turns out to be metaphysical quibbling.
The old law as to the impenetrability of matter applies to the
interior of the atom.
Not only do two electrons never travel in the same orbit, but
they never occupy at the same time the same space. An electron, far
out from its nucleus and describing a large orbit, is, as Jeans
says, [The Universe Around Us, p. 130.] "a plain material
particle." The nucleus of the atom, or the proton, is material: its
weight is hundreds of times that of the electron itself. The atom
is composed of material units as surely as babies are composed of
flesh and blood.
There is no need to talk of "empty spaces" in the atom: they
exist. But a man hit with a golf-ball or an Indian club might think
otherwise: it would take more than a suave assurance to convince
him that what really bumped him on the cranium were innocent little
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
electrons and protons. A lot he cares about tiny particles moving
in orbits: in the language of horse-sense, he has been struck by
matter. And he has felt the same thing when he strikes his finger
with a hammer or gets it caught in the jamb of a door. The
"ghostliness" of matter becomes a real materialization under the
laws of everyday physics. We live in a world of tangible realities,
composed of matter.
A bar of steel, a slab of marble, or a bit of granite are
concrete forms of matter. To say that matter ceases to exist when
either or all of these things are reduced to electrons and protons,
is to play with words: the smallest components of matter are still
matter. Theoretically and experimentally, we know that the electron
and the proton are material particles. Rutherford's picture of the
atom is substantially that of a tiny solar system, "the heavy
central nucleus playing the part of the sun and the electrons
acting the parts of the planets." [Jeans, The Universe Around Us,
p. 105.]
Our up-to-date model of the structure of the atom no more
invalidates the doctrine of materialism than it invalidates the
materiality and ponderosity of the stars; an atom composed of
electrons and protons is as material as the early atom of the
Greeks: it has gained nothing in "spirituality" nor "ghostliness"
by being found to contain negative and positive charges of
electricity. That it can be "divided" into particles moving in tiny
orbits around a center, like planets around the sun, means nothing
more than that here again is matter in motion. The metaphysicians
and mystics of our day will have to look elsewhere than to modern
physics for a dismissal of matter.
All this, of course, is preliminary to a study of the stars.
We can only know what the stars are, and of what they are composed,
by a reference to physics. The laws of substance govern the largest
as well as the smallest bodies. Stars and atoms are both matter.
Hence, the doctrine of materialism -- the doctrine that matter
in motion makes up the whole of existence -- is at once applicable
to the entire range of phenomena. It embraces the stars, circling
in vast orbits, down to the tiny solar system whirling within the
atom. Man stands midway between a world of enormous bodies and a
world of tiny particles. And he "falls apart" the same as the stars
when the "infinitesimals" shift their positions or change their
configurations.
The early atom of the Greek was a tiny hard sphere, supposed
to represent the least and indivisible unit of matter. There is
nothing in our present understanding which prevents us from
believing that far down in matter there is somewhere an
indestructible unit. The fact that matter is indestructible leads
to this conclusion; in no other way can we account for its eternal
persistency. Break it up as we may, its total volume is the same.
Nowhere is there any evidence of the "annihilation of matter."
[Matter is indestructible, and all the fine-spun talk, by
metaphysicians and others, about the "annihilation" of matter is
verbal exercise. "We have no evidence," says A.S. Eddington, "that
the annihilation of matter can occur in nature." (Stars and Atoms,
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p. 101.) No one, not even Eddington, has yet been able to talk
matter out of existence. The dialectical destroyers of matter are
merely walking with their heads in the clouds. "No direct
observational confirmation," says Jeans, The Universe Around Us, p.
189, "is at present available."]
The "atom" of modern science is quite another thing than that
which the word designated among the Greeks. It is a unit of the
molecule, and is in itself a mass of units. Less "solid" than the
"atom" of the Greeks, it is in every way as material. There is
nothing intangible about its component parts -- the electrons and
protons. They give us evidence of their existence in terms of mass
and weight. Those who preface their study of the stars with a
glance into physics need not trouble themselves over the
"splitting" of the atom. The universe, around us and within, is as
solid as before.
Nor need those who have been brought up on Newtonian and
Euclidian principles trouble themselves about the much-paraded
"curvature of space." "This curved space is not, it is true,"
writes Jeans, [The Universe Around Us, p. 72.] "the ordinary space
of the astronomer. It is a purely mathematical and probably wholly
fictitious space" -- a space which, when linked with time, "is
nothing but a convenient fiction of the mathematician." Real space
-- that in which matter extends itself in three dimensions,
breadth, length, height -- is the space of human experience; the
formal linking of space and time being in the nature of a cryptic
experiment of higher mathematics. "Real space and real time
undoubtedly are distinct," says Jeans. [Ibid, p. 76.] They are
undoubtedly such when we consider that the two leading exponents of
"curved space," Einstein and de Sitter, have recently seen fit to
modify their expressions, and jointly affirm that the facts fit an
uncurved and three-dimensional space. ["Einstein Rejects Curved
Space," Literary Digest, May," 1932.] This is the space of Sir
Isaac Newton, the space known to our boyhood days when fish and
fishing-poles bad three dimensions, and when we were rightly taught
that parallel lines never meet. The space in which stars travel is
as three-dimensional as that in which cows, horses and motor-cars
move.
Astronomy has suffered as much from an overdose of mathematics
as from the "mirages of metaphysics" (Durant). The simplest and
most obvious facts have been turned into reveries. We have been
treated not only to an avalanche of impossible verbalism but to
fog-producing phrases like "space bending back upon itself" --
which is the same as picturing a vacuum in the act of turning a
backward handspring, or nothing being distorted by a stomach-ache.
The whole gamut of metaphorical license has been used to befuddle
and confuse. Those who think clearly will talk and write clearly;
and it will take a wholesome naturalism to clean the Augean stables
of accumulated mysticism. As the late Dr. David Starr Jordan wrote
to the present writer, "Perhaps one virtue of the revival of
obscurantism is to wake scientific men up to popular statement of
the truths with which we deal."
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That astute Englishman, John Stuart Mill, ["The Idea of God in
Nature."] rightly pointed out that it is the "vastness" of the
universe which most impresses man. But "vastness" by itself is
nothing to admire: bigness counts for nothing unless it carries
with it substantial virtues. We may marvel at the towering strength
and muscular development of a brawly individual, but if he behaves
before us like a bully or a fool, his size is unimpressive. It
means nothing to a sea-anemone that it lives in the ocean, when its
movements are so circumscribed and it must thrive within such
narrow limits. An ocean of worlds spinning around us are as useful
as though they did not exist. Indeed, as Mill remarks, [Ibid.] in
speaking of the universe, "though the vast scale of these phenomena
may well excite wonder, and sets at defiance all idea of rivalry,
the feeling it inspires is of a totally different character from
admiration of excellence." It is the enormous power and "bigness"
of the universe that cause us to pause: its activities themselves
rival stupidity.
NO GLORY OF GOD, BUT APPALLING CELESTIAL WASTE
IT was the Psalmist who said, "The heavens declare the glory
of God." They proclaim nothing of the sort: what they really reveal
is nothing but extraordinary waste and ultimate futility. The
blindly-working nature of stellar activity is everywhere apparent.
Wherever we look in the starry expanse we are faced with
stupendous energy spent in the production of trivial "ends," which
are like their "beginnings." Vast stores of solar energy are
squandered throughout interstellar depths, while bodies needing
light and heat are left in darkness and cold. Wherever we turn we
are confronted with "means-to-ends" all out of proportion to the
"ends" achieved, and with a consumption of time and materials
which, measured by, intelligent standards, borders on the criminal.
Everywhere is prodigious activity wasted in boundless dissipation.
Untold billions of years are spent in the ceaseless revolutions of
orbs only to result in a small inhabited planet and a myriad of
barren and uninhabitable globes! An ocean of stars kept in endless
rotation -- for what? Vast continents or clusters of stars, too hot
for the sustenance of living forms, move in stupendous circles in
dreary monotony. Stars are born from nebulae only to pass through
successive degrees of temperature and end in death. One in every
three stars splits in two through excessive rotation and leads
itself a merry chase as double stars circling each other. The
endless grind of motion of going nowhere and arriving at nothing is
the supreme accomplishment of the universe. Everywhere is the
dismal picture of undirected energy spent in bat-blind futility.
"We find," writes Hugh Elliot, [Modern Science and Materialism, p.
39.] "nothing but unimaginable tracts of space and time, in which
move bodies by fixed laws towards ends which are wholly fortuitous,
and have not the smallest relation to the advantage and
requirements of man."
From the viewpoint of utility, the motions of heavenly bodies
are empty and meaningless. No one in his proper senses can discern
the slightest trace of design in stellar gyrations and the
ceaseless spinning of globes. Of what use is it to the human race
(the so-called "end-all" of existence) to be hurled through the
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
heavens at 18 miles a second? What good does it do any of us to be
catapulted through the skies and whirled at the same time? What
good does it do God's lesser masterpieces -- the toads, tarantulas
and typhus germs -- to participate in these celestial rides? Why
the silly goose-chase, the merry-go-round of the spheres over such
protracted periods of time?
To ascribe these aimless and senseless activities to
intelligence is to insult intelligence. Only a charitable sense of
humor can help one to overlook the stark stupidity of attributing
these motional futilities to a guiding mind.
Some find it difficult to conceive how a rotating cloud of
star dust could, without a god, evolve into our world, with all its
manifold forms of life, its complex structures, its Wagnerian
operas, and its Shakespearean dramas. Extremes are always striking,
and when seen without their intermediate steps, appear hopelessly
apart. Yet the connections between gaseous worlds and man and his
sometimes more than gaseous attainments are interwoven with time:
an evolution of billions of years. Man himself is an evolution from
the lowest specks of life, [The evolution of man from lowly forms
of life is a commonplace of biology. "Struggle as we may, be as
snobbish as we will," writes John M. Tyler, professor of biology,
Amherst College, "we cannot shake off these poor relations of ours.
.. If we appeal from adult anatomy to embryology the case becomes
all the worse for us. Our ear is lodged in the gill-slit of a fish,
our jaws are bronchial arches, our hyoid bone the rudiment of this
system of bones supporting the gills. Our circulation begins as a
veritable fish circulation; our earliest skeleton is a notochord;
Meckel's cartilage, from which our lower jaw and the bones of our
middle ear develop, is a whole genealogical tree of disagreeable
ancestors. Our glandula thyreoidea has, according to good
authorities, an origin so slimy that it should never be mentioned
in polite society." (The Whence and Whither of Man, p. 99.) and his
attainments have slowly emerged from the gropings of the jungle.
Music itself is a matter of evolution from the savage tom-tom, and
art in form and color finds its crude beginnings in scratches on
stone and mud-daubs made on the dripping walls of caves. After all,
it is not a far cry from a rotating nebula to musical notes, from
"dancing atoms" to music. In spite of pretty words, the sounds of
a violin are scrapings of horsehair on cat-gut: it is man, able to
distinguish between pleasing and offensive sounds, who has slowly
perfected melody. It does not require a miracle to develop the
universe from a gaseous beginning.
Anyone who has seen the two gases, oxygen and hydrogen, before
mixing would never suppose that they would produce a liquid like
water: yet a combination of these two elements will result in a
mixture that is distinctly different from either ingredient. If two
different kinds of atoms can do this, by mixing, in the space of a
moment, what can we not expect from the intermixture, and countless
combinations, of 90 or more different atoms over vast periods of
time? just as the richness of our language can be developed out of
26 letters, and includes every word in the dictionary, so can the
complexity of the universe be made out of the 90 or more atoms.
[Life itself is an assemblage of atoms. "There is," says Sir Edward
Thorpe, "no absolute distinction to be drawn between the chemistry
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
of the inorganic and organic worlds." And, again: "There can be no
reasonable doubt that the chemical processes of organic life are
essentially similar to those of the laboratory. History of
Chemistry, vol. 1, p. 128, and vol. 2, p. 134.] The facts speak for
themselves. Man, who himself is 75 per cent. water, can, being more
than a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, do what the ocean cannot do:
weigh the stars. A nebula could easily have contained the raw
material of all that exists. It was Tyndall himself who saw in
matter the promise and potency of all terrestrial life. [Prof. A.E.
Schafer, who succeeded Tyndall as president of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, made a similar
declaration: "Nothing stands between chemical elements and the
phenomenon called life but the knowledge of exactly how to combine
the elements." (Presidential Address, Dundee, Scotland.)]
"All the innumerable substances," writes Jeans, [The Universe
Around Us, p. 101.] "which occur on earth -- shoes, ships, sealing-
wax, cabbages, kings, carpenters, walruses, oysters, everything we
can think of -- can be analyzed into their constituent atoms. ...
It might be thought that a quite incredible number of different
kinds of atoms would emerge from the rich variety of substances we
find on earth. Actually the number is quite small. The same atoms
turn up again and again, and the great variety of substances we
find on earth result, not from any great variety of atoms entering
into their composition, but from the great variety of ways in which
a few types of atoms can be combined."
God-believers have assumed that because they see "order" in
the universe, an intelligence must have "ordained" this "order," or
"planned" things the way we see them. Our idea of "order" is
necessarily derived from the existing conditions, whatever these
happen to be; and no matter what arrangement might prevail, we
would be sure to observe "order." It is in the nature of the case
impossible for a thing, or even a group of things, not to bear
relationship to all other things, and whatever relationship exists
constitutes the "established order." No one can think of a thing
which would not stand, in all of its parts, in "orderly"
relationship to the whole. It is impossible to imagine a sequence
of events which would not constitute "order" or which would not
appear to us as "properly connected." If the sun revolved around
the earth, instead of the earth around the sun, or if the earth
were a disk spinning like a cart-wheel through space, instead of a
globe rotating on its axis, we would recognize this as the
"established order" of motion, even though it were the precise
opposite of what we observe now. In brief, any combination of
conditions or circumstances in which we might find ourselves would
appear "orderly" to our perception, because it is the existing
conditions which establish the "order."
The same, or similar, remarks hold good for the use of the
word "system." Astronomers speak of our solar aggregation as a
"system," not because it is intelligently laid out, but because the
term designates a group of bodies in space which are moving in a
particular formation, and whose activities, both individually and
collectively, follow a certain degree of regularity of movement.
These activities we note and tabulate under the word "system." Any
group of bodies moving with regularity and in definite formation
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
would constitute a "system," regardless of what motions they
pursued or what activities we observed. We would still be dealing
with a "system" if the planets trailed behind the sun, like a
company of soldiers marching in single-file formation. In fact, two
stars circling each other constitute a "system." The word "system"
does not denote intelligent guidance in the working of the cosmos.
[The atheist d'Holbach was once chided by Voltaire for writing a
book called the System of Nature. The sage of Ferney could not
perceive how a non-believer in God could speak of "system" in the
universe. It would have done Voltaire good if he could have
observed, under a microscope, the "systematic" growth of a
malignant tumor and the "systematic" break-down of living cells in
gangrenous affections. Nature is always "systematic," from the
spinning of stars to human putrefaction.]
Stars exist neither for themselves, nor for us, nor for the
"glory of God." They exist because billions of years ago a nebulous
ocean of matter broke up into parts and formed itself into stars.
What happened then, we see duplicated today on an almost parallel
scale in the star-forming nebulae of distant space. There is
nothing more supernatural in the occurrence than in the gradual
breaking up of rarified gases into globulous bodies by a process of
slow condensation. This occurs through the agency known as
"Gravitational Instability." "This causes any mass of chaotic gas
to break up into detached condensations," writes Jeans [The
Universe Around Us, p. 207.] -- a purely physical manifestation.
The "cause" of the stars is definitely known.
The universe, therefore, did not come into existence at the
command of a Ghost. It is, in its entirety, a self-contained, self-
determined, independent reality, consisting of matter in an endless
concatenation of physical and chemical changes. This is the message
of astrophysics and astronomy. Needless to say, it is in entire
conflict with the Aladdin-like nonsense taught by religion, in
which a cosmic Genius or celestial Magus performs miracles under
the name of God.
What we see around us in the heavens is the celestial media
called matter undergoing change. Stars, suns, planets, satellites,
comets, meteors are but temporary formations in the vast ocean of
space. Matter alone is eternal; it changes only its forms, and the
universe of heavenly bodies we see today is as surely destined to
destruction as is the tiniest of living forms.
The story of astronomy presents a most imposing refutation to
those who assume a supernatural origin of cosmic bodies, or who
insist that celestial activities are governed by intelligence. We
shall here review the evidence as it applies to stellar development
and decay, with particular reference to the idea of God. And in
pursuing our aim we shall keep before us the very stimulating
advice of John Dewey: [Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 140.] "The
first distinguishing characteristic of thinking is facing the facts
-- inquiry, minute and extensive scrutinizing, observation."
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CHAPTER II
STAR DUST LOOKS ABOUT
Our studies of the universe show the uniformity of its
chemical structure and generally of its physical laws. We are made
of the same stuff as the stars, so when we study astronomy we are
in a way only investigating our remote ancestry and our place in
the universe of star stuff. Our very bodies consist of the same
chemical elements found in the most distant nebulae, and our
activities are guided by the same universal rules.
-- HARLOW SHAPLEY.
['The Star Stuff that is Man,' N.Y. Times, Aug. 11, 1929.]
Just as the written life of some famous man properly commences
with a portrayal of his family antecedents, so any real history of
the earth should begin with the activities of the sun and the
origin of its present family of planets.
-- ROLLIN T. CHAMBERLAIN.
[The Origin, and Early Stages of the Earth (The Nature of the World
and of Man, p. 31).]
The eye of fabled Cyclops was not even prophetic of the great
telescope at Mt. Wilson, the pupil of whose eye, so to speak, is
100 inches in diameter.
-- FOREST RAY MOULTON.
[Astronomy (The Nature of the World and of Man, p. 1).
To understand what has happened, and even what will happen we
have only to examine what is happening.
-- G.L.L. BUFFON
[F. Mason's 'Creation by Evolution,' p. 326.]
THE study of the heavens dates back to remote antiquity and to
early periods of pagan culture. As far back as the third millennium
B.C., equinoxes and solstices were determined by the Chinese. This
we learn from the decrees promulgated by the Emperor Yao (2300
B.C.), as recorded in the "Shu Chung," a collection of documents
ancient even in the time of Confucius. In Egypt, as Agnes Mary
Clerke remarks, [Article "Astronomy," Ency. Brit.] "the curiously
precise orientation of the Pyramids affords a lasting demonstration
of the high degree of technical skill in watching the heavens
attained in the third millennium B.C." The orbital motions of the
planets were also known: "The Babylonian computers were not only
aware that Venus returns in almost exactly eight years to a given
starting-point in the sky, but they had established similar
periodic relations in 46, 59, 79 and 83 years severally for
Mercury, Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter."
The movement of celestial bodies was not unknown to the
ancient Greeks. Centuries before the so-called "Savior" of man came
to earth to teach his doctrines of demonology and the immediate
destruction of the world, the celestial bodies had been studied by
the Greeks, and a fair approximation had been reached as to the
motions, of the earth. Pythagoras (600 B.C.) and Philolaus (480
B.C.) taught the rotation of the earth on its axis once in every
twenty-four hours. Aristarchus, a famous Greek astronomer (250
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
B.C.) was the first to maintain that the earth moves around the
sun. "Leukippos and Demokritos," writes Sir Edward Thorpe, in his
'History of Chemistry,' "explained the creation of the world as due
solely to physical agencies without the intervention of a creative
intelligence." These teachings, the result of pagan culture, were
later obliterated by the corroding influence of Christian
authority, and by the sacred writings of Hebrew tradition in which
the Christians believed. "From the fourth to the thirteenth
century," writes Joseph McCabe, [The Truth About Galilee, p. 34.]
"Christendom had completely forgotten all that the race had already
learned about the stars."
The Church put every obstacle in the path of those opposed to
its teachings. Roger Bacon was imprisoned. Copernicus, in fear of
persecution, withheld, for twelve years, the publication of his
manuscript "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs." Bruno was
burned at the stake by the Catholic Inquisition, and the aged
Galileo was dragged before the Holy Tribunal to abjure, under
threat of torture, the propagation of a doctrine which the
Christian Church pronounced false and inimical to the faith. The
Aristotelian philosophy, which taught that the earth is the fixed
center of the universe, bore the sanction of the Church. To
question it was to go counter to papal decree and the God-inspired
wisdom of popes. Besides, had not Jehovah, the God of the Bible,
"made the stars also" as mere afterthoughts at the time of
creation? And were there not holy texts to show that the earth
existed before the sun?
Under priestly domination, ignorance abounded throughout
Christendom. [The ignorance of the saints was appalling. The
Catholic Encyclopedia (Article "Antipodes") quotes St. Augustine,
a distinguished ambassador of God, as stating: "As to the fable
that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side
of the earth ... men who walk with their feet opposite ours, there
is no reason for believing it." "Christianity," remarks Draper,
"had been in existence fifteen hundred years, and had not produced
a single astronomer." (Conflict Between Religion and Science, p.
157). Man's "immortal soul" was everything, his body nothing.
Material things were of trifling significance. Stars, sun, and
earth would soon be blotted out by an infuriated God, who had once
drowned the world and who was now intent on judging man and
bringing everlasting punishment to those who had offended him.
Personal salvation alone mattered at the end of the world, when
vast hordes of human beings were to be cast into lakes of eternal
hell-fire and suffer with "gnashing of teeth." Here were the
tidings of great joy brought by the lowly Nazarene. It was the age
of faith, when thousands of angels danced on the point of a pin and
the heavens proclaimed the glory of God. It was the golden age of
priests.
It was not until 1608 -- a little over three centuries ago and
a mere yesterday in the life of our world -- that the first
telescope was constructed (the name of its maker -- Lippershey --
ought to be blazoned in the memory of every man). It was destined
to turn the world of traditional nonsense right-side up, and
establish man's true place in the universe of stars.
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
The coming of the telescope marks a pivotal point in the
history of human thought. Before this instrument was invented,
man's insight into the stellar world around him was narrowly
circumscribed by visual limitations. His eyesight was of extremely
feeble range, and not until he had increased his natural vision by
the aid of artificial lenses was he able to penetrate into the more
distant realms of space. By thus augmenting his supposed "God-
given" eyesight with powerful lenses of his own construction, he
has done more in three hundred years of telescopic development to
perfect his visual capacity than nature has done in all these
millions of years of organic evolution.
Today, with natural vision alone, man can see, in a perfectly
clear sky, only 3,000 stars. With a giant instrument of his own
construction he can observe and photograph 1,500 million stars,
This is half a million times as many stars as nature permits him to
see with the naked eye. This is because the lens in the telescope
is intelligently fashioned on scientific lines; and it has taken
man, to perfect it, only a fractional part of the time which nature
has taken, working blindly over millions of years, to evolve the
human eye, with all its inherent weaknesses and well-known optical
defects. [Helmholtz, an outstanding authority in the field of
optical science, in speaking of the human eye, remarked: "If an
optician sent it to me as an instrument, I would send it back with
reproaches for the carelessness of his work and demand the return
of my money." (See Prof. J.B. Bury's A History of Freedom of
Thought, p. 182).
The new door unlocked by science opened upon a vast domain of
unexplored space. Man's place in the universe began to shrivel to
its proper proportions. Slowly he began to realize that he and his
little earth were inconsequential things in the world of stars.
The priests, the witch-doctors, and the miracle-mongers of
religion had told him a different story. He was, they claimed, at
the center of the universe, and the aim and end of all creation.
Uncritical man believed. Providence watched over him; saints
preserved him if he did the bidding of the Church. Prayers would
alter events, and faith would move mountains. Had not a Jewish
patriarch once made the sun stand still, and had not a prophet
ascended into heaven? It was a pious pipe-dream, of course, in
which the vicious hand of priestcraft and crass ignorance were
everywhere in evidence.
The telescope shattered this illusion. Man shrank to the
impotence of an inconspicuous speck in space, and with him shrank
earth, and sun, and stars and "giant" constellations. Not one of
these relatively-tiny globules or Clusters in the vast ocean of the
sky, was really important in itself. As for the stellar universe as
a whole, it, too , has shriveled to a microscopic dot; and the
modern, high-powered reflector has, paradoxically as it may seem,
made the universe of stars appear to us at once extremely large as
well as extremely small.
It is because man is infinitesimally small that the stellar
universe seems immeasurably large. In its proper proportions it is
a trifling thing in itself. Measured in terms of space, or in
relation to nothingness, it shrivels to the vanishing point. "Empty
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
Waterloo Station of everything except six specks of dust," writes
Sir James Jeans, [The Universe Around Us, p. 87.] "and it is still
far more crowded with dust than space is with stars." Here briefly
we have a compact picture of the "glory" of the heavens as revealed
by the telescope.
Now, an "Intelligence" which could do no better than to "fill"
Waterloo Station with six specks of dust, after working for
countless billions of years, would not be entitled to a Nobel prize
for achievement; and we must look to purely blindly-working forces,
inherent in matter itself, for an interpretation of phenomena. The
universe is not the product of a mind.
It is estimated to have taken cosmic evolution somewhere
between 10,000,000 million and 20,000,000 million years to produce
our universe as we see it today, and this includes the entire
period of transition from nebulae to stars and from stars to earth.
It is an inconceivably vast stretch of time for the development of
that which is the equivalent proportionately of six specks of dust
in a great railroad terminal, and the wonder is that we look upon
the "result" as in any way striking or important. It is only
because we are living amid these tiny, floating specks, and that we
are star-dust ourselves, that the matter is of human interest
There is, in the religious meaning of the term, no
"harmony of the spheres." "Harmony" implies a close coordination of
parts and mutual interactions for common or beneficial ends. These
do not exist: collisions, conflagrations, explosions, catastrophes,
annihilations of cosmic bodies are of daily and hourly occurrence.
The stellar depths are strewn with the debris of larger bodies --
of wrecked planets and smashed satellites, of stars shattered by
rotating too fast. And headed for the celestial scrap-heap are the
myriads of meteors that shower the heavens like rain, and enormous-
tailed comets which dart aimlessly about, and burnt-out moons which
spin and spin as mute reminders of beginnings that end in spinning.
Added to these are the binary stars, caught by mutual attraction,
and forced forever to travel around each other in senseless
revolutions.
Nor is there the slightest indication of a general "plan" or
uniform pattern in the structure, shape, composition and motions of
heavenly bodies. There is no "uniformity" as to size, weight,
temperature, density, luminosity, or placement of the stars. [Thus
the huge star Sirius A, with a diameter fifty times that of its
dwarf companion Sirius B, weighs only three times as much as the
similar star: the latter being so densely packed that each cubic
inch contains nearly a ton of matter. These are extremes. In
general, the discrepancies are not so great. With temperature
nearly twice that of the sun, Sirius A stands out as the most
brilliant star in the sky. It is familiarly known as the Dog-star.]
They differ in every conceivable way, like a helter-skelter of odd
things thrown together in hopeless confusion. Large stars may, in
some cases, weigh less than even smaller ones. This, of course, is
due to their differences in density. Stars range in size from
super-giants like Antares (which occupies 90,000,000 times as much
space as the sun) to dwarf stars like van Maanen's, which is as
tiny as the earth. The distances between the stars and their
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
nearest neighbors vary from a few million to many millions of
miles. Some stars are young, some middle-aged, some old. There are
vast patches in the heavens where no stars exist; others where
mighty clusters are gathered, or where two lonely binary stars, far
removed from the rest, whirl out their hopeless destiny. Nebulae
have no well-defined outlines; and of the millions that exist there
are perhaps no two alike. Nor do they all give birth to stars.
Even the solar system itself is without complete motional
uniformity. The planets of our "system" are all moving in one
direction -- except Uranus, which moves from north to south. The
satellite of Neptune moves counter to the entire system of
satellites. "The most curious feature of this satellite," writes
Newcomb, [Astronomy for Everybody, p. 235.] "is that it moves from
east to west." Again, the planets differ greatly in the
eccentricities of their orbits, or in the ellipses they describe.
Some planets are hot, some cold. Two have nine satellites; one,
four; one, two; two, one; and two have no satellites. Some are more
flattened at the poles than others; each varies in respect to the
inclination of its axis to the plane of its orbit. Even the orbits
themselves are not placed on a level or horizontal plane with
respect to one another: if we regard the earth's orbit as
"horizontal," the orbits of the other planets are tipped at various
degrees. There is no "even keel" in the heavens. Even the earth's
axis is not stable but wobbles in its rotation. "The axis of the
earth does not preserve an invariable direction in space, but in a
certain time it describes a cone, in much the same manner as the
axis of a top spinning out of the vertical." [Article "Earth,"
Ency. Brit.]
The courses of the comets are most irregular, varying from
elliptical to parabolic and hyperbolic orbits, describing the most
eccentric curves in their wanderings through space. Sometimes a
comet is "captured" by one of our planets, or, by coming too close
to the sun, is split into fragments. Nowhere is there stability or
permanency in the heavens. Nor is there a "deign."
In sum, the universe as we see it is precisely what we might
expect under the circumstances: an aggregation of activities that
know not what they are doing nor where they are headed in their
mad-hatter pace -- a series of occurrences which block and trip
each other at every turn, by undoing, in a single instant, what
they laboriously did a moment ago: a game of building and
destroying without purpose or end. And behind it all there is no
sign of that ghostly being which is said to guide the Whole.
"Experience," writes Hugh Elliot, [Modern Science and Materialism,
p. 39.] "affords not the smallest trace of evidence for the
existence of any spiritual entity."
CHAPTER III
DAWN: NEBULAE AND STARS
The stately drama of stellar evolution turns out to be more
like the hair-breadth escapades of the films. The music of the
spheres has almost a suggestion of -- jazz.
-- Sir A.S. EDDINGTON. [Stars and Atona, p. 27.]
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
Each star may be considered to go through a series of changes
analogous to those of a human being from birth to old age. In its
infancy a star is simply a nebulous mass; it gradually condenses
into a smaller volume, growing hotter ... until a stage of maximum
temperature is reached, when it begins to cool off.
-- SIMON NEWCOMB. [The Stars, p. 220.]
The stillness of the heavens is, however, apparent only, for
commotion of the fiercest kind is raging on all sides. Stars are
suns, and the suns are spheres of fire blazing with fury
indescribable; scenes of activity so tremendous that no vehemence
of tempest or tornado on earth can give the slightest idea of their
fearfulness. -- J. STARK BROWNE. ["The Numbers and
Distances of the Stars," The Rationalist Annual, 1931.]
Nebulae are the birthplaces of the stars, so that each nebula
consists of stars born and stars not yet born.
-- Sir JAMES JEANS. [The Universe Around Us, p. 69..]
Matter, says the spectroscope, is essentially the same every
where, in the earth and the sun, in the comet that visits us once
in a thousand years, in the star whose distance is incalculable,
and in the great clouds of "fire mist" that we call nebulae.
-- The Outline of Science. [p. 37.]
THE ORIGIN OF THE STARS
"CHOOSE a point in space at random," writes Jeans, [The
Universe Around Us, p. 106.] "and the odds against its being
occupied by a star are enormous." This is because relatively empty
space itself makes up, by far, the major part of celestial
existence.
Stars are so distant from the earth that their movements in
the sky cannot be observed by the naked eye, and, it is only by the
aid of the most powerful telescopes that we can detect their change
of relative position. From one year to another, or even from
century to century, they appear as "fixed" points of light. No
wonder that many of the ancients thought them immovable. Yet move
they do, and at speeds that transcend the imagination. It may be
stated in general that stars travel at a speed equal to 1,000 times
that of an express train, one of them in particular reaching the
tremendous velocity of 150 miles per second. This is the star
Groombridge 1830, mentioned by Eddington. Why they should thus
speed through space when speeding will only bring them back to
where they were before, why they should pursue this ceaseless,
endless chase, is for the design-arguers to explain. If there is
any intelligence manifested in this useless expenditure of energy,
this mad pace, century after century, aeon after aeon, it is not
apparent; on the contrary, it indicates a response to the blind
urge of non-thinking necessity.
Everywhere in the heavens bodies are in motion; and they are
held to their orbits by the iron hand of gravitation, with all its
actions and interactions in the ever-changing field of stellar
movement and positions. Nowhere is there rest. Even the great
galactic system of which we form a part and which, according to
Shapley's estimate, contains 100,000 million stars, rotates one
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
revolution every 300 million years -- a vast pivoting mass of
incandescent bodies, whose outer rim moves at a speed of thousands
of miles a second. This rotating disk of stars has turned but
several times since the earth was born. What purpose, we may
inquire, do such motions serve in the life of man, the so-called
"end-all" and objective of existence? And how can we see in any
such movements the earmarks of "design"? A moving mass that gets
itself nowhere except where it was before, which takes unthinkable
ages to complete an entire circle, and knows not why it moves, is
undoubtedly moving by potentialities resident in the original
nebulae from which these bodies were born.
The familiar rate of speed at which light travels, 186,000
miles a second (which is, incidentally, about a million times the
speed of sound), gives us a faint but impressive picture of stellar
distances. A star is said to be so many "light-years" away -- this
meaning the number of years light must travel from that particular
star to reach our planet. The nearest fixed star -- Proxima
Centauri -- happens to be 4 1/4 "light-years" away, so we can see
how far our nearest stellar neighbor is removed from our little
earth. Four and a quarter years ago the light by which we see
Proxima Centauri left this star for its journey through space.
The nearest rim of stars is about a million times more distant
from the earth than the nearest planet. Venus, our next-door
planetary neighbor, never comes closer than 26,000,000 miles to
earth. Proxima Cdntauri, the nearest star, is approximately a
million times more distant, or, to be a little more exact,
25,000,000 million miles. It is difficult to visualize in these
figures the full significance of our petty position in space and
the futility of terrestrial existence and life when measured in
terms of stellar depths.
Let us take a still further jaunt into space. Far beyond
Proxima Centauri, past a series of star-cluster's and solitary
orbs, through a veritable wilderness of worlds and empty deserts of
space, lie the remote -- the extremely remote -- extra-galactic
nebulae. "The most distant of them," writes Jeans, [The Universe
Around Us, p. 69.] "is about 140 million light-years from us." It
is the furthermost point the human eye has seen.
The light which reaches us today from these very remote
regions of space started on its lightning-like journey millions of
years before Joshua is said to have made the sun stand still, or
Jesus is reputed to have ascended into heaven. [A "light-year" is
about 6,000,000,000,000 miles, so that any one who cares to may
calculate the distance which Jesus had to travel in order to reach
the nearest fixed star in his "ascension' into heaven] Indeed, it
is certain that the early ancestor of Joshua and Jesus -- the ape-
man, Pithecanthropus Erectus -- had not yet been born. In fact, the
very earth had not even given birth to the Thunder Reptile and the
mighty Tyrannosaurs. It was long before the coming of the
Dinosaurs, when God preferred the company of reptiles to that of
men. [According to Lucas (Am. Mus. of Nat. Hist. Guide Leaflet No.
70), the Dinosaurs first appeared on the earth "some 35,000,000
years ago." At that time, the light by which we now see the extra-
galactic nebulae had already traveled over 100 million years.]
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
Every schoolboy knows that the stars are much older than the
earth, and that our little globe is a mere infant in point of time.
It was, relatively speaking, born only yesterday, while the life of
the stars may be measured in figures which stagger the imagination.
"Time," as Jeans reminds us, [The Universe Around Us, p. 81.]
"leaves its mark, its wrinkles and its grey hairs, on the stars, so
that we can guess their ages tolerably well, and the evidence is
all in favor of stellar lives, not of thousands of millions, but of
millions of millions, of years." Our earth is probably not more
than 2,000 million years old, [This is Jeah's figure. Charles
Schuchert, professor of paleontology, Yale University, states: "No
geologist today thinks that the evolution of the earth and its life
could have taken place in less than 100,000,000 years. My own view
as a student of historical geology is that geologic time endured
about 800,000,000 years." The earth is, cosmologically considered,
very young.] a mere nothing in point of time when compared to the
life of the stars.
The Jewish cosmologists who wrote their astronomy in days of
pious ignorance, and handed it along in the form of sacred
literature and as divinely inspired, failed utterly to grasp the
natural sequence of events. According to the so-called Mosaic
account of "creation," the earth was made before the sun; the stars
were a mere afterthought to the "creation" of the earth. "He made
the stars also" is as little valid in astronomy today as the story
of the fairy godmother in Cinderella, who turned a pumpkin into a
coach, is valid in chemistry. Stars were not "made" by a Jewish
Magician, nor is there any "he" involved in their development: they
evolve, and their emergence from nebulous matter, by natural means,
is wholly foreign to the pitiably-ignorant nursery tales hatched by
religion. The author of the article on "Genesis" in the
Encyclopedia Britannica, Stanley Arthur Cook, does well in stating
what all astronomers and geologists know, namely: "That the records
of the pre-historic ages in Genesis I-XI are at complete variance
with modern science and archaeological research is unquestionable."
With these facts before us, we can dismiss, as altogether
trivial, those teachings of religion which picture man as important
in the life of the universe or the stars as mere by-products of
existence. "We can say," writes Jeans, [The Universe Around Us, p.
326.] "that the stars have existed as such for from 5 to 10 million
million years, and that their atoms may have previously existed in
nebulae for at least a comparable, and possibly for a much longer,
time."
"As a general rule," writes Simon Newcomb, ["Astrophysics,"
Ency. Brit.] "the incandescent heavenly bodies are not masses of
solid or liquid matter, as formerly assumed, but mainly masses of
gas, or of substances gaseous in their nature."
The low density of the stars, due to their gaseous nature, is
another decisive factor against any concept of life on the stars.
["In many stars the material is so inflated," writes Eddington,
"that it is more tenuous than the air around us; for example, if
you were inside Capella you would not notice the material of
Capella any more than you notice the air in this room" (Stars and
Atoms, p. 31.)] The giant star Antares, with a diameter of
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
390,000,000 miles, is well suited in area for the maintenance of
life on a tremendous scale, but it is so tenuous in structure that
it may be compared almost to a huge vacuum. This mammoth globe of
rarefied gas is so large that the sun, to equal it in size, would
have to expand to more than the diameter of the earth's orbit
around the sun. Antares, in fact, occupies 90,000,000 times as much
space as the sun, yet offers not a single square inch of surface as
a foot-hold for life. Of what use is such a globe, seeing that it
cannot produce even a blade of grass? And it is but one of four
mammoth stars, the others being the super-giants, Hercules, Ceti,
and Betelgeux, all of which are gaseous and uninhabitable orbs.
Astronomers are thoroughly agreed as to the origin of the
stars. The primeval chaos, or nebular mist, out of which these huge
bodies evolved, must have been of extremely low density, since all
the matter now observable in the stars, if scattered evenly
throughout the known areas of space reached by the telescope, would
form only a thin veil of unthinkable rarity. This attenuated mass
of matter, representing the "batter" of future worlds, was the
substance out of which all things evolved. Here again we are
confronted with the great emptiness of space, in which all the
matter of the universe would then be spread out in a thin cloud of
star-mist. This gossamer mist would then be so thin that the
molecules in it, according to Jeans, would be from two to three
yards apart! How thinly these molecules would be scattered may be
judged by comparing them with the compactness of the molecules in
air, which, on the average, are about an eight-millionth of an inch
apart.
It is futile, therefore, for the theist to think of the stars
as possible abodes of life. They are terrifically hot bodies --
hotter, in general, than anything we can experience on earth, or of
which we can conceive. Stars range from as low as the temperature
of an ordinary coal fire (one may place one's hand in the open
grate if he wants to know how hot this is) up to 28,000 degrees,
the estimated temperature of Plackett's Star. Obviously, life
Cannot exist under these thermal conditions; and when we consider
the vast number of stars in the galactic system, computed by Sears
as 30,000 million and by Eddington as 300,000 million, we can see
the utter futility of these "burning" globes, as far as life is
related to stellar activity.
CELESTIAL MECHANICS
A GREAT landmark was reached when Pierre Laplace, in 1796,
published his Systeme du Monde. In this he set forth his famous
nebular hypothesis, in which the birth of stars and planets was
traced to a rotating nebula -- an hypothesis, by the way, which
entirely dispensed with God.
The nebular hypothesis of Laplace has been largely augmented
or modified, rather than entirely superseded, by subsequent
observation; yet to the great French astronomer is due the
formation of a theory which still holds good in part, and which
accounts for the formation of stars. "Apart from minor details,"
writes Jeans, [The Universe Around Us. p. 231.] "the process
imagined by Laplace explains the birth of suns out of nebulae; it
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
cannot explain the birth of planets out of suns." This is because
the sequence of events in the development of planets is distinct
from that formulated by Laplace in respect to suns. Nevertheless,
he was the Darwin of the skies, who first, in a masterly way and
with a grasp of mathematics which far transcended that of many of
his contemporaries, traced the evolution of heavenly bodies from a
simple and widely-diffused mist, or nebula, in a state of rotation,
up to the giant constellations and colossal star systems we see
today. His theory, which still forms the basic outline of present-
day cosmological development, falls short of explaining the origin
of planets from a sun, and here we come to the tidal theory
postulated by Jeans, which will be considered in due course.
Whatever particular process heavenly bodies pursued in their
evolution from nebulae up to mighty constellations, one thing is
tolerably certain. Stars came into existence, not at the command of
a ghost, nor by a few words spoken in Hebrew, but by a process of
slow condensation in the primeval chaos, consuming many billions of
years. The same process may be witnessed today in what are called
rotating nebulae, of which many millions exist, and is recorded on
photographic plates. "These photographs," says Jeans, [The Universe
Around Us, p. 230.] "exhibit a process taking place before our
eyes, which is essentially identical with that imagined by Laplace,
except for a colossal difference of scale. Everything happens
qualitatively as Laplace imagined, but on a scale incomparably
grander than he ever dreamed of. In these photographs the primitive
nebula is not a single sun in the making; it contains substance
sufficient to form hundreds of millions of suns; the condensations
do not form puny planets the size of our earth, but are themselves
suns." This is what we witness today, and it is in deadly conflict
with the theory of creation as pictured in the Bible.
Nor is there, in any concept of cosmic evolution, any need of
postulating a ghostly finger twirling the stars, or starting them
spinning in their orbits. No initial push, no divine "shove" is
required even in the earliest stages of stellar evolution. As Jeans
points out, [The Universe Around Us, p. 214.] "Stars, as soon as
they come into being, are endowed with rotations transmitted to
them by their parent nebula, in addition to the rotations resulting
from the currents set up in the process of condensation."
From chaos to nebulae, from nebulae to stars, and from stars
to planets and satellites, a steady procession of natural events
occurs, unattended by deities or demons. Stars move, not because of
some heavenly hand, but because of what is known as the
"conservation of angular momentum." This means, as Jeans explains,
[Ibid., p. 214.] that "rotation, like energy, cannot entirely
disappear. Its total amount is conserved, so that when a nebulae
breaks up into stars, the original rotation of the nebula must be
conserved in the rotations of the stars." And this rotary movement
is traceable to nothing more supernatural than "the existence of
currents in the primordial medium" which "endow the resulting
nebulae with varying amounts of rotation." Hence, by the inherent
properties of motion, with which matter is endowed, the entire
fabric of the universe is woven, and continues in a state of
motion. There is no time thinkable when matter was at rest, or
without the property of motion or of changing its position in
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
space, whether in the form of giant stars whirling through space at
a thousand times the speed of an express train or of a molecule of
air traversing a tiny space at 500 yards a second, the approximate
speed of a rifle bullet. Matter in motion is eternal: the vision of
"dead," inert, or motionless matter stirred to sudden activity by
a ghost belongs to the age of fables.
Unquestionably, motion is as much a quality or an attribute of
matter as form and extension, and is as inseparable from it as
either of these are from the basic substratum we call matter.
Those, therefore, who, in the interest of theism, insist that there
must have been a time when matter was not endowed with motion, do
not even understand the law of probability. There is no more reason
to suppose a time when matter was at rest, as a time when matter
did not possess the attributes of form and extension. Motion is as
old as matter itself, and matter is as old as time.
That matter was "originally" a dead, inert mass, incapable of
motion, and received its "first impetus" from some external agency,
usually thought to be intelligent, rests upon not a jot of
evidence. Even the nebula from which the stars came, rare and
extended as it was, must have been moved by inherent properties of
its own, quite the same as matter moves to-day, without the shadow
of aid from anything outside itself.
"There is no difficulty," writes Sir Robert S. Ball, [Article
"Nebular Theory," Ency. Brit.] Director of the Cambridge
Observatory, "in conceiving how a nebula, quite independently of
any internal motion of its parts, shall also have had as a whole a
movement of rotation. In fact a little consideration of the theory
of probabilities will show it to be infinitely probable that such
an object should really have some movement of rotation, no matter
by what causes the nebula may have originated. As this vast mass
cooled it must by the laws of heat have contracted towards the
center, and as it contracted it must, according to the law of
dynamics, rotate more rapidly."
The inherent property of matter observed in the law of
gravitation -- by which every particle of matter attracts every
other particle inversely as the square of the distance -- is the
fundamental keystone of physical astronomy. On it is based the
entire fabric of the heavens. The development of stars and sun, and
their suspension and movements in space rest on nothing more
complicated than this simple physical property of matter, which
extends from the atoms in a tiny speck of dust to mighty stars
weighing millions of millions of tons. The universal "law,"
discovered by Newton is apparent throughout the heavens as in the
world of the microscope.
The wonderment which the savage or the theologian might feel
in seeing heavenly bodies "hanging on nothing" or suspended midway
in the sky loses its glamour once the principle of gravitation is
understood. The "suspension" of bodies in a medium lighter than
themselves, and traveling through space at the tremendous speed of
18 miles a second, may be readily grasped once, we arrive at a
clear understanding of the agency responsible for the phenomenon.
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We are held to the earth, and the earth is held to the sun by this
property of matter; and the moon travels about the earth and is
held from a headlong plunge into space by the earth's attraction.
"There is not the slightest doubt," says Jeans, [The Universe
Around Us, pp.. 157, 158.] "as to what determines the motions of
the stars; it is the law of gravitation, every star attracting
every other star with a force which varies inversely as the square
of their distance apart ... the mere law of gravitation, together
with the supposition that the stars cannot exercise free-will as to
whether they obey it or not, are enough." In a word, these moving
orbs are not following an intelligent command, but are moving by
inner properties of their own, in response to the iron urge of
physical attraction.
NO GOD GUIDES THE STARS
MOST persons think of orbits as "nicely-planned" paths which
have been "properly spaced" apart, in order that moving bodies may
travel in "safety". For billions of years celestial bodies have
been moving in ever-changing orbits, many of which, through the
vast interplay of gravitational hold of one body on another, have
led to countless collisions and the elimination of bodies. Orbits
which now remain and which excite so much admiration and wonder in
the eyes of the theist, on account of their "proper placing" in the
heavens, are merely those which have survived the long play of time
-- orbits which were distant enough, and sufficiently isolated, not
to conflict or interfere with one another. The natural elimination
of intersecting orbits has resulted in preserving those bodies
whose orbits have not crossed.
It is easy to see that orbits were never "planned", because an
elliptical course is the least safe of paths, and it is this
irregularity which causes most collisions in the heavens. A
circular or nearly circular orbit is "safer" for a moving body to
travel in than elliptical orbit of large eccentricity, and most
orbits are of the latter type. If there were "intelligence" behind
the universe, all orbits would have been circular. "If all the
orbits were nearly circular," remarks Rolling T. Chamberlain, ["The
Origin and Early Stages of the Earth," in The Nature of the World
and of Man, p. 37.] "only a few of the separate bodies moving in
them would come into collision with one another. But since the
orbits are ellipses, differing much in shape and dimensions, many
of the particles have opportunities of collision." Those who admire
"nicely placed" orbits are simply looking at those of which the
natural spacing apart has preserved them from destruction and
extinction; the others have gone to the scrap-heap.
Our universe, as theistically conceived, is a wound-up piece
of mechanism, "made in the beginning" to go on forever or by an
occasional re-winding or adjustment of its parts. God is ever on
hand to give the stars and planets a fresh push if they lag in
their orbits, or restore them to their courses if they get out of
line and wander from their "appointed paths". It is a god-sized
job, but quite easy for one who has been at it for billions of
years.
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
All the talk of a supreme intelligence or "mind" planning the
orbits of the stars and then sitting back and watching them follow
their prescribed courses is idle chatter to the ears of the
scientist. There are no settled courses, no "fixed" orbits for
stars; and what seems a non-varying course is, in reality, subject
to the universal law of eternal change. Stars move in ever-changing
orbits due to their ceaseless loss of weight through radiation and
to the ever-changing "hold" which one body exerts on another. It is
not likely that a star ever actually returns to the same position
in space it occupied before, due to the continuous shift of
heavenly bodies, both in respect to individual and mass movements
and complex interplay of gravitational pull between bodies. As a
matter of fact, our universe is fast thinning out, spreading itself
out into interstellar space. Permanent orbits do not exist.
Nor can we, under any consideration, regard the stars and
planets, as we see them today, as individually etemal. The matter
of which they are composed will endure, but in different forms and
in different expressions of energy. The universe is slowly "running
down," exhausting itself by its tremendous outpouring of energy
through radiation. There is no replacement of stellar energy, and
while all matter that now exists will continue to exist in one form
or another, its powers will have been spent like so much water
which, having run over a mill wheel, lies dormant in the pond. Such
is Jean's picture of the ultimate fate of the universe of stars.
"We are left with a dead, although possibly a warm, universe -- a
'heat-death'", says Jeans. [The Universe Around Us, p. 320.] And
while the conservation of energy is a fundamental axiom of science,
it does not mean that energy cannot so alter its forms of activity
that it will not cease to exist in a particular form.
One thing is certain. Sun and stars cannot go on radiating
energy and reducing as they do now without coming to the end of
their individual existence. Eventually they must consume their
entire substance by dissipation and the expenditure of their latent
powers. Their energies will have then become scattered through
space, and stars themselves will have then been absorbed in the
vast tide of what Shapley calls the universal Drift. Man sees
"fixity" and "permanency" in the stars only because his own life is
so brief, because his existence, measured by the stars, is a mere
blink in the darkness, a feeble flash in an eternity of time. Were
he able to extend his span of life to a few billion years he would
realize that the apparent "unchangeable order" and "arrangement" of
the universe is a matter of never-ending change, and that there is
going on continuous revolutions in the form, structure, and
positions of heavenly bodies. "As eternal as the stars" is a
relative rather than an actual description, since we know, as well
as we know anything, that stars are born to die, Nowhere is there
an exception to the universal law of formation and annihilation,
birth and extinction.
It has been argued by the theist that the heavenly bodies are
so nicely "guided" in space that they never collide; that their
orbits are so "laid out" that each star keeps its appointed
distance from all the others; that, in a word, we are confronted
with the evidence of a "directing" agency keeping the stars in
their courses. This confounding of the situation arising from the
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
failure to note that the present "order" of motion in the system
has been reached only after the greatest "disorder" and counter-
play of opposing forces; bodies which have collided or been
absorbed by others, or whose motions were counter to the general
trend of motion are now no longer present or felt in the main tide
of dominant motion; billions of years have eliminated the weaker
modes of motion. The struggle for existence in the heavens, from
nebulae to stars, and from stars to planets, is quite as deadly as
anywhere else, and on a far more colossal scale. The survival of
the fittest exists in the heavens as well as on earth. Even after
the lapse of unspeakable billions of years, we are confronted with
the evidence of innumerable catastrophes in the skies: catastrophes
which upset every vestige of an "Ordained" order of motion and
movement. We have with us today the tell-ale wreckage of "burst"
stars, "mashed" planets and satellites, and the daily
"annihilation" of heavenly bodies.
There is, on physical ground alone, nothing surprising in the
fact that stars rarely collide -- there are so few of them in
space. And they are so thinly scattered, that the chance of their
colliding or of even closely approaching each other is practically
nil. If every star were reduced by scale to the size of a grain of
dust, the distance between each one and its nearest neighbor would
average 80 miles. The chance of stellar collision under these
circumstances is at once apparent. It is because they are separated
by such vast distances, and not because a celestial mind directs
them where to go, that stars move in relative safety, The picture
of these celestial bodies being pushed about by angels, under the
watchful eye of an unseen being, is medieval nonsense. The wonder
is, not that the stars do not frequently collide, but that they
ever do. Yet collisions do occasionally occur, in spite of the vast
distances between the stars. The number of collisions is of course
relatively small, but just what one might expect in the nature of
the case. ["Calculation shows that any one star may expect to move
for something of the order of a million million million years
before colliding with a second star." -- Jeans, The Universe Around
Us, p. 88.] And it is only by the "side-wiping" or grazing of two
stars that planets are born.
if it be urged by the theist that stars were thus "wisely"
distributed at great distances apart, "in order" that they may not
collide, it can be shown that this arrangement is a direct
hindrance to the birth of planets. Planets (as we shall see later)
come into existence only by the near approach of two stars, and
stars, as Jeans points out, [The Universe Around Us, p. 332.] "are
so sparsely scattered in space that it is an inconceivably rare
event for one to pass near to a neighbor." As a consequence,
planets are exceedingly rare, for the precise reason that the
chance of two stars meeting in space is so prevented by distance.
The "arrangement" is bad for the production of planets.
THE ALMOST LIFELESS UNIVERSE.
NOTHING is more certain than that the stars are lifeless
globes, It is as unthinkable that any of them should be inhabited
as that our own sun -- a blazing cauldron of heat -- should have
human beings living upon it. Life in the universe is as nothing at
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all. Even in our own planetary system, tiny as it is, life is of
less than pin-point significance. Of the nine planets of our system
only one bears life, and that planet is among the "minor" or
smaller members of the group. The larger planets, with surface
areas many times that of the earth, are known to be lifeless orbs.
If a mentality had anything to do with the formation of the solar
system with a view to producing life, it is a mentality of a very
low order. It is as though a theatrical producer or showman were to
build a stage as large as the American continent to exhibit a few
fleas.
Jupiter, the largest planet of our system, is about twice as
massive as all the other planets put together. Yet it is devoid of
life. With a diameter about eleven times that of the earth, its
surface area is far more extensive than that of our little globe,
and it offers itself, in point of size, as the most suitable of
planets for the production of life on an enormous scale. But the
"divine designer" behind it all forgot to make the planet solid
enough: its density is not far from that of water. And he forgot to
put this giant body close enough to the sun to keep its surface
warm. From a God-believer's viewpoint the arrangement is
unfortunate.
The same for Saturn, the second planet of our system in point
of size, which is five times as large as all the other planets,
excepting Jupiter, put together. It is of very slight density: its
barrenness cannot be questioned. Its tenuity is particularly,
striking when we consider that Titan itself, a mere satellite of
Saturn, has greater density than the huge planet around which it
revolves. It is better conditioned for life, in the matter of
density and solidity, than its mother planet. But Titan is small
and much colder than the moon.
Obviously, these striking mal-arrangements cannot be
reconciled with the idea that the universe was "made" for life;
life is a mere incidental and trifling occurrence: an occurrence
which has not been prearranged or led up to by intelligent means,
but which has been introduced only at one point among billions of
barren orbs. Planets are rare exceptions in the life of the stars;
an inhabited planet is a rare exception in the life of the planets,
and our earth is a solitary exception among trillions of lifeless
orbs. The universe, as a totality, is almost a lifeless affair.
What life it has borders on zero. There is nothing here that
reflects a means to an end.
Even though it could be proved that all the planets of the
solar system were inhabited, it would weigh as nothing against the
billions of uninhabited stars: life in the universe would still
constitute but an infinitesimal part of the whole. Life, in any
event, shrinks to microscopic proportions, and is like a grain of
dust in a great desert sandstorm.
The barrenness of this wilderness of worlds is only too
apparent to the student of astronomy. "Apart from the certain
knowledge," writes Jeans, [The Universe Around Us, p. 335.] "that
life exists on earth, we have no definite knowledge whatever except
that, at the best, life must be limited to a tiny fraction of the
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
universe. Millions of millions of stars exist which support no
life, which have never done so and never will do so. Of the rare
planetary system in the sky, many must be entirely lifeless, and in
others life, if it exists at all, is probably limited to a few
planets."
How the God-believer would rejoice if he could point to
300,000 million inhabited worlds! How he would argue that life on
them showed the "wisdom" and forethought of the Creator, in thus
populating the universe! Instead, the facts are all against him: he
is left with a universe composed largely of 300,000 million
lifeless orbs. What "purpose" can he assign to these dead worlds?
"The old view that every point of light in the sky represented
a possible home for life is quite foreign to modern astronomy,"
says Jeans. [The Universe Around Us, p. 331.] "The stars themselves
have surface temperatures ranging from 1650 degrees to 30,000
degrees or more, and are of course at far higher temperatures
inside. By far the greater part of the matter of the universe is at
a temperature of millions of degrees, so that its molecules are
broken up into atoms, and the atoms are broken up, partially at
least, into their constituent parts. Now the very concept of life
implies duration in time; there can be no life where atoms change
their make-up millions of times a second and no pair of atoms can
ever stay joined together."
It is only by forgetting his place in stellar space that man
can find the urge to continue his interest in things here below,
for all his labors on earth are destined to be wiped out in the
crash of things. Indeed, the picture drawn by the astronomer is of
worlds growing, developing, and decaying before our eyes. Nothing
is permanent, nothing eternal in the celestial Drift but the star-
dust from which man came. [So ludicrous is the idea that man
survives death, or lives on in a conscious state by "going to
heaven," that it is well to quote here a few lines from Sir John
Lubbock, Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man,
pp. 245, 246: "A friend of Mr. Lang tried long and patiently to
make a very intelligent, docile Australian black understand his
existence without a body, but the black never could keep his
countenance and generally made an excuse to get away. One day the
teacher watched and found that he went to have a hearty fit of
laughter at the absurdity of the idea of a man living and going
about without arms, legs, or mouth to eat; for a long time he could
not believe that the gentleman was serious, and when he did realize
it, the more serious the teacher was the more ludicrous the whole
affair appeared to the black." Elie Metchnikoff, past director of
the Pasteur Institute in Paris, soberly remarks: "The idea of a
future life is supported by not a single fact, while there is much
evidence against it. ... It is easy to see why the advance of
knowledge has diminished the number of believers in the persistence
of consciousness after death, and that complete annihilation at
death is the conception accepted by the vast majority of
enlightened persons." (The Nature of Man, p. 161.)] And while the
tide of time rolls on:
"The stars shall fade away, the sun
Himself grow dim with age, and nature sink
In years." -- ADDISON.
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Regardless of crumbling worlds, no one who believes in
personal extinction need lack a proper incentive for life. In spite
of the fact that he does not expect to live again, Mr. H.G. Wells
goes on working more steadily than some who believe that they will
receive manifold blessings in the sky. Few have done more than
Wells for the entertainment and enlightenment of his fellow beings,
yet, says he, [First and Lost Things, p. 110.] "I do not believe I
have any personal immortality." He simply takes the common-sense
viewpoint of many if the world's benefactors from Democritus and
Lucretius to Burbank and Edison.
Nor will men who are men fail to conduct themselves decently
because neither they nor the stars can live forever, or because
there is no place of future rewards and punishments. Nobility of
character can suffer nothing from a realization of facts. As Karl
Vogt remarks, [Lectures on Man, p. 469.] "There are priests who,
while defrauding the state of taxes, mount the pulpit and preach
that when materialists and Darwinists do not commit all sorts of
crimes, it is not from righteousness but from hypocrisy. Let them
rage! They require the fear of punishment, the hope of reward in a
dreamt-of beyond, to keep in the right path -- for us suffices the
consciousness of being men amongst men."
CHAPTER IV
DAYLIGHT: THE SOLAR SYSTEM
A star journeying through space casually overtook the sun, not
indeed colliding with it, but approaching so close as to raise a
great tidal wave. By this disturbance jets of matter spurted out of
the sun; being carried round by their angular momentum they did not
fall back again but condensed into small globes -- the planets.
Sir ARTHUR S. EDDINGTON. [The Nature of the Physical
World, p. 176.]
We know of no type of astronomical body in which the
conditions can be favorable to life except planets like our own
revolving round a sun. ... Only an infinitesimally small corner of
the universe can be in the least suited to form an abode of life.
-- Sir JAMES JEANS. [The Universe Around Us, pp. 332, 333.]
If matter exists in the universe for the purpose of life,
nature would seem to tip a hogshead to fill a wine-glass, when it
makes life possible only on a little planet. -- Sir JOHN HERSCHEL.
[W.H. Thomson's Some Wonders of Biology, p. 176.]
If the sun were created expressly to light and heat the earth,
what a waste of energy! -- FOREST RAY MOULTON. ["Astronomy," The
Nature of the World and of Man, p. 17.]
The solar system is not the typical product of development of
a star; it is not even a common variety of development; it is a
freak. -- Sir ARTHUR S. EDDINGTON. [Swarthmore Lecture,
1929, Science and the Unseen World, p. 12.]
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WHOEVER has sunned oneself at the seashore or basked under the
intense glare of a tropical sky is probably willing to admit that
our solar orb is hot. Yet it is not long ago that a religiously-
minded scientist thought that the sun might be an inhabited body,
in much the same way as some persons today imagine the stars are
inhabited worlds. "But little more than a century ago," writes
Archibald Henderson, "a distinguished astronomer, William Herschel,
actually believed it possible that the sun might be a habitable
planet!" A close scrutiny of the sun helps us to understand not
only the nature of this star, which is the one nearest the earth,
but the constitution and make-up of many other stars in general.
From our study of the sun we can picture the impossibility of life
on a star.
Although the sun is nearly 93,000,000 miles from the earth, it
is a quarter of a million times nearer to us than any other star;
it has therefore been photographed to better advantage than any of
the others; its "close-ups" reveal something more tangible than
mere points of light. In dealing with the sun we are dealing with
a body which is nearer to us than some of the planets and whose
size transcends them all. It is the brightest and most conspicuous
of all celestial objects. Photographs of the sun reveal a
stupendous mass of incandescent matter in a high state of
agitation, pitted with great cavernous openings into any of which
our little earth could be thrust and instantly consumed.
The time is past when the sun was thought to be inhabited. It
is now classed as a typical star, with a temperature at its surface
of 10,000 deg. F. Its absolute temperature is 6000 deg. [The sun's
surface temperature is relatively "luke-warm." The internal
temperature is calculated by Emden and Eddington to be about
31,500,000 degrees; by Jeans, 55,000,000 degrees.] Solar
prominences, or giant jets of gas, shoot up like mountainous flame
of fire from its surface. The average altitude of these tongues of
gas is thought to be 20,000 miles. Yet, on occasion, they reach far
greater heights; we are told by R.A. Sampson, [Article "Sun," Ency.
Brit.] Astronomer Royal for Scotland, that "Young records one which
reached an elevation of 350,000 miles." This altitude is a distance
equal to over 43 times the diameter of the earth. The surface of
the sun is in a continuous state of convulsion due to these
eruptive prominences and its boiling seas of gas. The poet Dante
could well have pictured his Inferno on the sun.
The sun has been computed by Jeans to be about 8 million
million years old. About 7,600,000,000,000 years ago (the figure is
not fanciful, but is derived from a mathematical calculation based
on solar radiation) our sun could have weighed a hundred times what
it does now. It has spent, in all these aeons of time, enough
energy to light and heat a billion planets like our own, had its
energy been intelligently directed. But like other massive stars
which "radiate away their energy, and therefore also their weight,
with extraordinary rapidity" (Jeans) [The Universe Around Us, p.
178.] the sun has been a celestial spendthrift. Millions upon
millions of tons of solar energy are poured daily into desert
space, and wasted in the yawning abyss of outer darkness and cold,
when they could well be distributed to nearby planets. ["The amount
of the sun's heat has been estimated," says Sir Robert S. Ball,
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"but we receive on the earth less than one two-thousand-millionth
part of the whole radiation." ("Nebular Theory," Ency. Brit.). And
as Proctor observes in his Our Place Among Infinities, "all the
planets together receive less than 230 millionth part; the rest is
seemingly scattered uselessly through interstellar depth."] "Our
own sun, which is a star," writes Harlow Shapley, [The New York
Times Magazine, Aug. 11, 1929.] "radiates away 360,000 million tons
of energy every day, of which only 160 tons reach our planet." How
much better it would be for our earth if a tiny fraction of this
squandered heat were poured into the polar regions of our globe and
less heat on the African and Mongolian deserts. And how the outer
planets of our system now intensely cold, might benefit from a
proper distribution of solar radiation.
Naturally, such an expenditure of energy without a
corresponding replacement cannot go on forever, and we must look to
the time when the sun's supply of heat and light will have become
completely exhausted. Far distant as that time may be, it is as
certain as tomorrow's sundown, and calls for the cessation of all
earthly life.
Our solar system is slowly "running down". The energy of the
sun is not being replaced from any source of power known to
science, and the sun may be likened to a gigantic furnace into
which the last shovelful of fuel was stored when it evolved from a
primal fire-mist. Glow it must until it has burned itself out and
spent its last erg of energy in a wild debauch of cosmic
recklessness and unbridled dissipation.
THE CRIMINAL WASTE OF ENERGY
THERE is nothing in this ghastly waste of energy to suggest a
Supreme Stoker or Chief Engineer. Such misdirection as we see in
the radiation of the sun does not reflect guidance, in any sense of
the word, and would be regarded as criminal in an intelligent
being.
The enormous shrinkage In the weight of the sun naturally
carries with it a corresponding reduction in the gravitational hold
which this body exerts on the planets of our system, and all are
slowly slipping from the sun. As the hold diminishes, each planet
moves a step further out into space. Our own place in the system is
in no way secure, and we are actually moving away from the sun at
the rate of approximately three feet every hundred years. Little as
this may seem in point of terrestrial time, it spells disaster to
the earth in the ticking of the cosmic clock. No angel guides the
planets nor holds them to "appointed paths".
Nothing is "fixed" in the universe -- not even the orbit of
the earth. It is known with mathematical certainty that we are
receding from the sun, due to the latter's loss of weight by
radiation and its diminishing hold on our own spinning globe. As
the sun loses weight at the rate of more than 4 million tons a
second, its gravitational hold is rapidly decreasing, and we are
each year headed, in an ever-increasing spiral course, toward the
great, yawning abyss beyond. While there is no immediate danger of
our being swept into oblivion, the time will arrive when all
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earthly things will be doomed to perish, when the earth will be too
cold to sustain life, and the finest of human thoughts will have
been lost forever. Then our earth, like all things else, will have
joined the billions of lifeless globes.
No one can assign the slightest reason for the rotation of the
sun. By turning on its axis it cannot have "days" and "nights" like
the earth, nor can its sidereal motion in space mean anything to
the retinue of planets traveling with it. Whether we ever reach the
remote region in space toward which the sun is headed is of no
moment to the inhabitants of the earth: our earth will carry on it
nothing but the frozen remains of what were once living beings.
By means of spectral analysis we are able to determine the
chemical constitution of the sun as accurately as if this huge
globe had been lifted bodily into a gigantic laboratory and
examined in a test-tube. Each element in a gaseous state emits its
own wave of light, and by examining the solar spectrum, we are able
to determine the precise character of the sun's constitution. The
presence of such elements as carbon, oxygen, sodium, calcium,
hydrogen, helium, iron, nickel, copper, and zinc in the sun
indicates the close affinity of solar and terrestrial compositions.
There is indeed no element on the earth that has not been found in
the sun, or from which all earthly substances are not derivatives.
The earth's kinship to the gaseous body about which it revolves,
and from which it was extracted long ago, is as complete as our own
bodily kinship to the inorganic substances of which the earth is
composed. Both earth and man are made of matter from the sun, and
our very bodies contain atoms that once existed in the sun. We are,
as Shapley points out, children of a star. The spectroscope has
established our "blood-relationship" to the sun.
Astronomy has helped to establish the entire chemical unity of
the universe. Light from the most distant stars shows us that the
matter which composes them is identical with that which we find
near at hand. Iron in the blood and phosphorus in the bones are the
same as those found on distant worlds. By means of the spectroscope
the element helium was first discovered on the sun; twenty-seven
years afterward it was discovered on the earth. When, in 1868, the
astronomer Lockyer made the initial discovery, the element was
appropriately named from the Greek word "helios", meaning sun; its
discovery over a quarter of a century later by Sir William Ramsay,
a Scottish chemist, showed it to be a terrestrial element as well.
The element extracted from a rare mineral of the earth was the same
as that which Lockyer detected on the rim of the sun.
The fact that the planets of our system, as well as their
attending satellites, travel in orbits which do not cross or
overlap one another has frequently been cited as evidence of a
presiding "intelligence". Only a god, says the theist, could have
assigned these bodies to their "appointed" paths. The argument is
amusing to the atheist. Intersecting orbits are in the nature of
things impermanent, since they could not possibly survive a
collision of bodies traveling in these orbits. What we see in the
heavens today are those bodies in motion which time has spared from
the countless collisions of the past, and whose orbits did not
conflict by overlapping one another. Orbits which did intersect
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have perished long since in the crash of colliding bodies. In our
own system today we have the telltale remains of a smashed planet
(the asteroids) and a smashed satellite (the rings or Saturn), each
of which, by describing an orbit too near a larger body, was
smashed to bits in the early days of the solar system, when the
orbits of the planets and the satellites were not as regular or as
highly stabilized as they are now. Even the orbits existing today,
after 200 million years or so since our planetary system was born,
are not entirely stabilized, and tiny bodies like the asteroids are
still wandering far afield from the areas where they properly
belong. Two of the asteroids, Delporte and Reinmuth, are so far out
of their natural places in the swarm, that the latter wanders close
to the earth, and is sometimes nearer to us than Venus itself.
When we come to the smaller members of the system, the
meteors, which describe very definite orbits around the sun, we
meet with actual collision and the breaking of poorly "established"
orbits. "A great many meteors," writes Prof. Palmer H. Graham of
New York University, "have been shown to move in swarms around the
sun in elliptical orbits very similar to those of comets.
Occasionally the earth in its orbit crosses the path of one of
these swarms and we see a so-called meteoric shower." Here before
our eyes is an actual meeting of bodies through the crossing of two
orbits: the earth and the meteors have met in collision.
The fact that the planets of the system are not traveling in
the same orbital plane as the sun -- the planetary orbits are
slightly tilted with respect to one another and greatly tilted with
respect to the equatorial plane of the sun -- has called forth
admiring comments from believers in God, yet no one explains why.
The fact that the orbits of the planets are tipped at slightly
different angles from one another means nothing to the solar
system; the planets themselves would still receive the same amount
of light and heat if they traveled in the same plane. The truth of
the matter is that the tipping of these orbits is without
significance, except as it throws light on the tidal origin of
planets. The difference in the general orbital plane of the planets
and the orbital plane of the sun is due to natural circumstances
rather than to the wisdom of God: the planets as a group are still
traveling in the same orbital plane as the tidal arm which was
extracted from the sun when the planets were formed. Were the
orbital planes of the sun and planets symmetrical, or identical,
religionists would still credit their deity with wisdom. God
receives praise for making things alike and for making them
different.
THE PLANETS TESTIFY AGAINST THEISM
PLANETS are born, not from nebulae, as are the stars, but from
the stars themselves. In the Tidal Theory postulated by Jeans, they
come into existence by the passing of two stars within three
diameters' distance of each other. The larger of the two passing
bodies exerts a gravitational pull or wrench on the gaseous surface
of the smaller star, and, by thus causing a tidal eruption, draws
out a long, cigar-shaped filament of gas. This in time condenses
into globes, each of which becomes a planet revolving about the
star from which it was drawn. Our earth is a planet, and so are the
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other members of the solar system, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, all of which were literally
yanked from the sun 2,000 million years ago.
Now planets are extremely few in number, and their scarcity is
due to the fact that stars seldom approach to within the required
distance to produce a group of planets. ["Collisions, or even tidal
encounter, between two stars must be a rare event. A star in its
motion is likely to have a collision with another star about once
in a million million million years." Harold Jeffreys, The New York
Times, May 3, 1931.] Shapley [The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 11,
1929.] calls the formation of our solar system "a lucky accident,"
while Eddington, no less than he, recognizes the purely fortuitous
nature of the occurrence. "Even in the long life of a star," says
he, [The Nature of the Physical World, p. 177.] "encounters of this
kind must be extremely rare. The density of distribution of stars
in space has been compared to that of twenty tennis balls roaming
the whole interior of the earth. The accident that gave birth to
the solar system may be compared to the casual approach of two of
these balls within a few yards of one another. The data are too
vague to give any definite estimate of the odds against the
occurrence, but I should judge that perhaps not one in a hundred
millions of stars can have undergone this experience in the right
stage and conditions to result in the formation of a system of
planets."
The facts, for those who believe in "design," ought to be
quite otherwise. Life, if "planned" for the earth, has been reached
by the most round-about and time-wasting process, and has depended,
for its inception, on the casual encounter of two out of 300,000
millions of stars. The process does not resemble a carefully laid
out course of action; and an engineer working in this haphazard
manner to reach a desired end would be examined for sanity.
Planets, from a God-believer's attitude, ought to be more
numerous than the stars, since they are the only bodies in space
(other than satellites) which cool and solidify to a point where
life becomes possible. The stars, as we have already seen, are
intensely hot, incandescent bodies, gaseous at the surface and
perhaps liquid at the center, and wholly incapable of sustaining
life. Only a trifling number of planets have evolved from the
stars, and of the nine planets within our system, only one is
definitely known to possess life. Here, it seems, we have a single
life-bearing body in a super galaxy of 300,000 million dead orbs.
Obviously, life in the universe is restricted to a microscopic
point in space, and is as important to the cosmic wastes as a
pope's bull is to the solar system, or the ravings of a maniac are
to the distant nebulae in Orion.
Considering, therefore, the round-about "means-to-an-end" by
which the earth came into existence, we can do nothing else save
smile at the absurdity of the idea that a celestial being first
formed the sun, in order that, millions of years after, he might
leisurely extract a tiny world like ours, with all its teeming
forms of life pulsating and breeding only that they may continue
their pitiless slaughter of one another. The battle of life is not
a Quakers' meeting or a child's picnic. Shelley's picture of blood-
stained priests:
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"Making the earth a slaughter-house"
is as nothing compared to the ruthless slaughter by tooth and claw
now going on in all parts of the world, and which the theist
asserts was instituted by intelligence. [A butcher-bird impaling
its victim on a thorn, or a lion killing a gazelle, or a cat
clawing a mouse, or a tick feeding on the eye of a fowl, or an
intestinal worm eating in the entrails of a priest are as much a
part of the cosmic "order" as stars moving in space, and are a part
of the "divine plan" which theists say exists.] If theism were
true, God would be more cruel than Moloch himself, and lower in the
scale of mental depravity than the monster Frankenstein. The
astronomer, gazing at billions of lifeless globes, can "thank his
stars" that these make up the bulk of celestial existence. It is
fortunate that the planets are few.
"If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can," wrote
Schopenhauer, [Studies in Pessimism, p. 3.] "what an amount of
misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its
course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the
earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the
phenomena of life; and if, here as there the surface were still in
a crystalline state."
It is not alone the world of living things which the cosmic
"order" tramples under foot and ruthlessly neglects; the sun in its
course looks down with stolid indifference on the slow abandonment
of its planetary dependents, each of which is slowly slipping away;
and drags with it its helpless brood of young ones, which even now,
after millions of years of solar radiation, are as ill-kept and
undernourished as the poorest of offsprings. Planets are stricken
with either chronic heat-strokes or chronic chilblains -- too much
sunlight or not enough -- until one wonders whether the calorific
powers of the sun are not something which is flaunted in mockery by
the sun to make sport of the malnutrition and rickets of its
children. The planetary system is far from being a well-cared-for
whole, or one in which the integral workings are suitably
arranged."
One can readily satisfy oneself on this point. Whether we
examine the planets in respect to their individual characteristics
as to suitability (or unsuitability) for life; whether in respect
to orbits, distances, motions, or the like, we are at once struck
with the disorderly arrangement of the system. There is an "order"
of motion only in the sense that the same disorderly movements
repeat themselves. The same bunglings occur again and again.
Whoever examines our solar system with a view to finding
"fitness," in the arrangement will soon discover that it is
anything but "fit." Indeed, it would be difficult to rearrange the
planets with the idea to greater unfitness. Their positions in
space are bad. So are their rotations and revolutions, and the
general "lay-out" of their orbits.
Take, for example, the "placing" of the planets in regard to
their distances from the sun. Most of them are either too near or
too far away to sustain life. The inner planets are too hot, the
outer planets too cold. The Divine Wisdom which placed Mercury
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
"smack-up" against the sun and left Pluto far out in the cold must
have been actuated by a sardonic (or satanic) sense of humor.
Either this or he was inexcusably indifferent to the consequences
which these positions impose. The sunny side of Mercury has a
temperature which no life could stand; that of Pluto a temperature
at which air and other gases would be frozen solid.
So poorly "timed" is the rotation of Mercury on its axis with
its revolution around the sun that this planet forever presents the
same face to the sun. As a consequence, there is an eternal "day"
of intense heat on the one side and an eternal "night" of intense
cold on the other: one side blistered forever under the direct
blast of the sun, the other left in complete darkness and cold. If
there were inhabitants on the planet, they would have to choose
between scorching to death on the sunward side and freezing to
death on the other.
Most planets of our system travel in such extended, orbits
that their "years" are many times our own. It takes Pluto, for
example, 250 years to make a complete trip around the sun. This
planet has not yet made an entire revolution of the sun since the
United States was born. It is impossible to find in this
arrangement anything that savors of "design." A planet so far
removed from its solar luminary, or central source of heat, cannot,
by any stretch of the imagination, be traveling in an orbit "laid
down" by intelligence. It is traveling in that far-flung orbit
because it was the outmost condensation in the tidal-arm extracted
from the sun when our system of planets was formed. Its position in
space is not due to design.
Even the earth itself, which is the only life-Sustaining
sphere in our system, travels in an orbit which is poorly "laid
out" for a planet bearing life: its source of heat is not at the
center of the orbit, but at one foci. As a consequence, the earth,
in making its annual circuit of the sun, does not travel at a
uniform distance from the sun, the distance between perihelion and
aphelion being about 3,000,000 miles. The result is an irregular
distribution of heat in the course of the year. This variation in
the heat supply to the earth, apart from causing temperature
upsets, is responsible for many meteorological disturbances.
Again, in their rotations on their axes, planets display the
most striking departures from anything resembling "purpose" in
their movements. The farther a planet is located from the sun the
faster it rotates -- a fact which is wholly out of keeping with the
best results to be obtained for the reception of solar radiation
and the heating of the planet. Venus, a planet very close to the
sun, rotates so slowly that each of its "days" and "nights" is
several weeks long; Saturn and Uranus, both distant planets and
therefore very cold, rotate so rapidly that each has "days" and
"nights" of only ten hours' duration. The long "days" of the nearby
planets and the short "days" of the distant planets are the very
reverse of what they should be: the outer, or distant, planets
ought to rotate more slowly than the inner planets. With slower
rotations, the colder planets would be able to absorb more heat
during the course of a longer "day," and those close to the sun, by
rotating more rapidly and thereby having shorter "days," would not
be exposed, for entire weeks as is Venus, to the concentrated rays
of the sun.
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Of the nine planets of our system, only one is heated with a
moderate degree of uniformity to life; yet who can say that our
earth is to be admired for a sensible adjustment in the matter of
temperature? As a lighting and heating system our sun has all the
potentialities to take care of billions of planets: it cannot,
because of mal-arrangements external to itself, take care of even
the present group of nine. A furnace which has the stupendous power
of the sun and yet fails so dismally in properly distributing its
heat cannot be regarded as the work of an engineer.
NO ARCHITECT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
TELEOLOGISTS, a class of word-juggling mystics who are forever
seeing "wisdom" where there is none and who try to explain the
universe in terms of a presiding intelligence, have sought to show
that while eight out of nine of our planets support no life, some
of them may later do so, when they have moved to more suitable
distances away from the sun. In a word, God, while neglecting them
now, is looking to the future habitability of these planets. Kant
advocated the idea, and it has been preached ever since by a whole
host of the defenders of God.
The entire argument puts the deity in a ridiculous light, for
Mercury, which is the hottest and most insufferable of all planets,
is moving away from the sun at the painfully slow rate of not more
than a few feet a century, and at this less-than-snail-like pace
would hardly be conditioned for life in several billion years. A
comet can travel through space at the rate of hundreds of miles a
second; and a presiding mind interested in the development of life
on Mercury, ought to be able to accelerate the speed of the planet
better than this. The obvious conclusion is that there is no "mind"
interested in the matter.
As for Venus, it is mathematically certain that this planet,
at the rate it is going, would have to keep moving away from the
sun for the next one to two million years, before it would have a
mean temperature equal to that of the earth. This is rather slow
moving for a planet guided by "intelligence," or an agency which is
supposedly aware of what it is doing.
Nor is there any hope for Mars. ["Even at the equator the
temperature falls below freezing point at sunset. If we accepted
the present determinations as definitive we should have some doubt
as to whether life could endure the conditions." -- A.S. Eddington,
The Nature of the Physical World, p. 173.] Even now, the
temperature of this planet is much lower than that of the earth and
it is becoming colder with each passing year. If there is no life
there now -- and the evidence is distinctly against it -- what
chance is there of its surface becoming habitable as the planet
grows colder in its movement away from the sun?
As for the outer or more distant members of the system, these
are yearly becoming more frigid, and the expectation that Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto will ever support life is as
hopeless as that of a cake of ice floating toward the arctic region
will ever bring forth rose bushes or orange blossoms. They are
already intensely cold worlds, and destined to become still colder
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as they move away from the sun. "There can be neither seas nor
rivers on their surfaces," writes Jeans, [The Universe Around Us,
p. 21.] "since all water must be frozen into ice, neither can there
be rain or water-vapor in their atmospheres."
There is no evidence that life exists on any planet other than
our own, and there is much evidence of a definite character that
life, as we know it here, does not exist elsewhere in the universe.
[The author is not discussing here the possibility of plant life
existing on Mars or on some other planet. Theists are not primarily
concerned as to whether or not God reserved a whole planet for the
raising of vegetation. If he did, he probably made enough
grasshoppers and plaint-lice to go with it.] By life we mean, of
course, life as it is embodied in red-blooded men and women and
life in its familiar higher forms -- not hypothetical beings who
thrive in white heat temperatures and flaming furnaces of gas, or
who build churches and thank God at hundreds of degrees below zero.
We are concerned here with neither asbestos-skinned beings nor
fanciful ones composed of ice.
It is certain that all the other planets of the solar system
-- with the possible exceptions of Venus and Mars -- are either too
hot or too cold to sustain life, or are governed by conditions that
would preclude the possibility of life, We shall here examine each
planet in turn.
Mercury is so close to the solar orb that lead would melt on
its surface. The temperature on the side facing the sun has been
figured at 662 degrees Fahrenheit. "The other half of the planet's
surface," says Jeans, [The Universe Around Us, p. 22.] "eternally
dark and unwarmed, is probably colder than anything we can
imagine."
Venus, with each of its days and nights several weeks long,
alternates between bitterly cold turns at night and roasting
temperature by day. "At present no reasonable ground exists,"
writes S.H. Parkes, [Unfinished World.5, p. 74.] "for the
supposition that Venus is an inhabited globe." And Jeans asserts
[The Universe Around Us p. 335.] that "The evidence, for what it is
worth, goes to suggest that Venus, the only planet in the solar
system outside Mars and the earth on which life could possibly
exist, possesses no vegetation and no oxygen for higher forms of
life to breathe."
As for Mars, its possibilities for the sustenance of life are
largely nullified by a variety of unfavorable conditions, among
which is the matter of atmosphere. Atmosphere it has, but its
oxygen content is about 15 per cent of ours. Temperature, drops to
below freezing point at the equator, following sundown. Its general
temperature is colder than ours. The alleged "canals" on Mars,
supposed by the astronomers Schiaparelli and Lowell to have been
the work of Martian engineers, turn out to be not canals at all. As
Jeans puts it, [The Universe Around Us, p. 334.] they "have not
survived the test of being photographed." And again: "There is no
definite evidence of life, and certainly no evidence of conscious
life, on Mars -- or indeed anywhere else in the universe."
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All the outer planets, of course, are intensely frigid orbs.
Neptune is wrapped in eternal cold, with an estimated temperature
of -220 degrees Centigrade. Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, with
respective temperatures of -150, -150, and -170 degrees, have
extremely low temperatures. In fact, as Jeans points out, [The
Universe Around Us, p. 21.] "all the major planets are very cold
indeed." "These planets," writes F.R. Moulton, ["Astronomy" in The
Nature of the World md of Man, p. 12] "are all very tenuous,
probably being entirely in a gaseous state, and therefore not in a
condition to support life."
"We have reason to believe," says H. Spencer Jones, Astronomer
Royal of England ("The Listener," June 16, 1938), "that Jupiter is
entirely covered with an ice-layer several thousands of miles
thick. Outside this is the dense poisonous atmosphere, a few
thousand miles in depth.... The clouds in the upper layers of
atmosphere consist probably of droplets of liquid ammonia."
As for Pluto, the furthermost planet from the sun, it is
necessarily a bitterly-cold world -- far colder even than Neptune
itself. Its immense distance from the sun (calculated to be at
aphelion 4,620,240,000 miles) permits it to receive only 1/2500 as
much solar heat as that received by the earth. "The temperature,"
writes Simon Newcomb, [Astronomy for Everybody, p. 201.] "must be
very low there -- too low for life to exist. From Pluto the sun
would appear only as a point of light." "It is at least certain,"
remarks Prof. Lucien Rudaux, [The American Weekly, Feb. 7, 1932.]
"that on this globe lost in the frozen solitudes of outer space the
temperature must be near absolute zero, which is 459 degrees below
the zero of our family thermometer, so low that certain gases, like
oxygen and nitrogen (the air we breathe), would be changed to a
solid state." Any thought of life existing under these thermal
conditions is out of the question.
The attempt of religionists to link the existence of these
frozen worlds with a heavenly "plan" or "design" is drivel to a
scientist. The five outer planets of our system, Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, comprise by far the greater surface area
of the entire system of planets. If ever, in religious language,
there were "god-forsaken" worlds, they are these planets left in
outer cold; and the theist presents a God with five out of the nine
planets of the solar system freezing on his hands. Of the four
other planets, one, as we have seen, is blistering under the full
blast of the sun, two possess little or no oxygen for the higher
forms of life to breathe, and one, our earth, may occasion a smile
when considered in the light of "design." Under every kind of
evidence, the entire solar system is a first-class "flunk."
Carefully considered, the universe is anything but "well put
together." There is hardly a third-rate mentality which could not,
after a few minutes' thought, devise a plan for the better working
of the cosmos.
The tremendous wastage of solar energy would be stopped, and
the conserved energy of the sun would be made to do service where
it is now badly needed. Billions of sunbeams would not be wasted on
the Gobi and Sahara deserts, but would be diverted to the polar
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
regions instead. Light would be so placed in the heavens that it
would illuminate all parts of the earth at once. Our globe would be
evenly heated, and a mild temperature would prevail from pole to
pole. There would be no extremes of heat and cold: no equatorial
Africa sweltering under the terrific heat of the sun nor polar
regions locked in eternal ice. [Rear-Admiral Richard R. Byrd, in
describing the desolate character of the two polar regions, writes:
"The Arctic Ocean, monotonously flat, treacherous in its power and
shifting surface; the Antarctic, immobile, appalling in its
grandeur and silence, a mighty mausoleum for the dead land hidden
beneath its snow. ... Here [in the Antarctic] is a vast area as big
as the United States and Mexico combined that has never sustained
a human race, as far as we know." (New York Times, June 8, 1930.)]
Planets would be so "placed" in their distances from the sun that
they would be neither too hot nor too cold to support life. Mercury
and Venus, now too close to the sun, would be moved further out;
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto would be moved further
in. Mercury would be so timed in rotating on its axis that it would
not forever present the same side to the sun. The major, or larger,
planets of our system would not be abandoned as cold, barren orbs,
but their surface areas cultivated. Energy would not be wasted in
shooting comets and meteors through space, or in spinning the whole
galactic system like a huge merry-go-round once in every
300,000,000 years. In a word, all the senseless, time-wasting play
of cosmic motion would be stopped. Energy, of which there is enough
to turn galactic systems around, would be put to useful purposes.
And what would intelligence not do in respect to correcting
the faulty tilting of the world's axis? "In the well-known
inclination of the axis of the earth towards the plane of its
orbit, known by the name of the angle of the ecliptic, which is the
cause of the change of the seasons, many perceive a design of
heaven intended for our welfare," writes Ludwig Buchner. [Force and
Matter, p. 111.] "But they do not consider that they are
confounding effect and cause, and that our organization would most
probably be different were the inclination of the ecliptic
different or non-existent. Besides, this very angle of the
ecliptic, the object of such mistaken praise, does not even seem to
be in any way conducive to our advantage; and if it were in our
power to change this slope of the axis of the earth towards the
plane of the earth's orbit, we should most certainly do it and
thereby bring about a greater equality in the seasons. For if the
earth's axis were perpendicular to its orbit, there would be in our
latitude, for instance, a perpetual spring, calculated in all
probability to lengthen human life."
Our little earth now remains to be considered as a place of
habitation. Two-thirds of its surface is covered with water, and,
as some one has jocosely remarked, is more suitable for raising
fish than human beings. Only two strips of temperate zone encircle
the earth; the rest of its surface is divided between two wide
expanses of polar region and a burning equatorial belt. Man either
freezes or swelters, or lives in fluctuating temperatures of
dangerous extremes. Nowhere is there a celestial thermostat at work
to give us a decent average temperature throughout the globe. In a
thermatic sense there is no intelligence manifested in the way our
earth is heated.
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SATELLITES DISPROVE DESIGN
WHAT may be said for the heating, may also be said for the
lighting system of our planet. Only half the earth's surface can be
lighted by the sun at one time. According to the Bible, the moon
was made to "rule" the night. Imagine your own city, or town, or
your own reading-room at night depending on the illumination of the
moon. Without Edison's electric light, our nights would be long,
dreary affairs, spent either in complete darkness or in the feeble
light of the moon. As for the sun, with candle power enough to
light a billion worlds, it cannot even reach the so-called "ends"
of the earth and give the Eskimo light for more than six months of
the year, let alone, through its stupendous power, melt the great
ice-packs and snow-barriers of the polar regions.
As an abode for life, our earth is, by the nature of its
rotundity, a poorly shaped body. On account of the curvature of its
surface, only one side of it can be illuminated at a time, and,
even though it rotates on its axis, it is impossible for the sun to
warm and illuminate the entire half exposed to its rays. The direct
rays of the sun are unnecessarily severe at points on and near the
equator, where men must swelter and slave under the burning heat of
a tropical sky, while the Eskimo must be content with the few
glancing sun-rays which reach the polar areas. While vast regions
of land around the south pole are buried under perpetual deposits
of ice from 2,000 to 10,000 feet thick (report of the Byrd
Expedition), the Sahara and Gobi deserts must wilt under the
terrific heat of the sun. In such an arrangement there are no signs
of an intelligent distribution of light and heat. If the
superintendent of a building were to freeze tenants in one part of
the structure and roast others almost to death, he would not be
praised for his handling of the heating plant, nor would he be
thought particularly intelligent if he kept some of them in total
darkness half the year.
The alternations of day and night or of light and darkness,
which are believed by some to be beneficial to man, are really
detrimental in part, since they shorten, by many years, the narrow
span of his conscious existence. A man of sixty who has slept an
average of eight hours daily will have lived only forty years of
his life in a conscious condition. The alternations of day and
night reduce man's wakeful moments considerably: a third of his
life is spent in mental oblivion. It is quite easy to conceive an
arrangement by which our world might be properly lighted and
heated, where there would be no lost years spent in unconsciousness
and where man would be safe from the horrible visitations of floods
and cyclones and the other cruel hazards of life. [Referring to the
earthquake of Lisbon in 1775, Edward Hull, in his Volcanoes: Past
and Present, p. 221, states: "The inhabitants had no warning of the
coming danger. ... In the course of about 6 minutes, 60,000 persons
perished." Edward Greenly (The Earth, Its Nature and History, p.
23) writes: "The destructiveness of volcanoes to man and his works
is well known. ... On May, 8, 1902, at 7:50 A.M., the Pelee volcano
in Martinique broke out with a roar which was heard 100 miles away,
and an avalanche of red hot dust wiped out the city of St. Pierre,
with its 30,000 inhabitants, in less than one minute."] But none of
these things are considered in the birth and formation of worlds.
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Our satellite, the moon, is a cold, barren orb, which shines
by the reflected light of the sun. Nearer to us than any other
body, it has been photographed to excellent advantage. Without
rivers or seas, it is a burnt-out cinder in space. Volcanic craters
are plainly visible, but there are no signs of those conditions
which are essential to the maintenance of life. "No trace of water
or of an atmosphere," writes George Forbes, [Astronomy, p. 109.]
"has been found on the moon. It is possible that the temperature is
too low ... the moon seems to be dead." Its habitability is out of
the question. "Life," remarks Simon Newcomb, [Astronomy for
Everybody, p. 127.] "in the form in which it exists on our earth,
requires water at least for its support, and in all its higher
forms air also. We can hardly conceive of a living thing made of
mere sand or other dry matter such as forms the lunar surface." The
fantastic stories of life on the moon belong to the realm of pure
fiction. "We cannot suppose it to be inhabited," writes Garrett P.
Serviss, [Astronomy in a Nutshell, p. 154.] "at least by any forms
of life familiar to us on the earth."
Of what use, then, is this cold, dismal world, with its
volcanic craters fifty miles wide and its bleak mountain ranges,
moving perpetually around us? And why should there be phases of the
moon, varying by degrees from a thin, crescent-shaped strip of
light reflected on its surface to an occasional "full" moon
thirteen times a year? If the moon, as God-believers insist, was
"intended" to illuminate the night, it is a distinct failure, since
the greater part of its time is consumed in reflecting only narrow
strips of feeble light and sometimes no light at all! An arc light
which varied as much in intensity as the moon could not be depended
upon to light a back alley. The teleologist who sees "design" where
there is none should explain what "purpose" is served by the moon
other than to raise huge tidal waves on the earth and drown people
in floods. The moon is a mere "drag" on the earth. It does not
support life itself, and its senseless revolutions around us are
quite in keeping with the whole futility of cosmic movement.
Again, why, if its movements in space are guided by
intelligence, should the moon eclipse the sun? Why should its
orbital "adjustment" be so badly timed as to bring this satellite
between the earth and its luminary and blot out light? A total, or
even partial eclipse of the sun is a mere case of the moon "getting
in the way."
The earth is a better "moon" to its own satellite than the
moon is to us. As a reflector of sunlight, the earth gives to the
moon better illumination at night than we receive from the moon.
Earthlight is ten times brighter than moonlight, and an observer on
the moon would see the earth as a "moon" possessing ten times the
surface and ten times the brilliancy of the lunar orb. But as there
are no observers on the moon, our earthlight shines to no advantage
and is lost on a dead world -- another example of reverse order in
the "scheme" of celestial "intelligence." The feeble character of
moonlight may be realized by recalling that full moonlight is only
1/500,000 that of sunlight.
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As with the moon, so with the other satellites of our system,
all of which are equally useless. Not one in all the twenty-six
which encircle the planets is known to be inhabited. Their sole
"function" in space is to whirl incessantly around their parent
bodies in aimless revolutions. If there is "wisdom" in this, and in
the general character of satellites, it is for some one to explain.
Why should Mars be attended by two ridiculously small
satellites, each of which has a diameter of seven miles (Newcomb),
[Astronomy for Everybody, p. 188.] and which are as useless to Mars
as two apples would be hovering over the city of Boston? Why,
should Saturn be attended by flattened rings -- the remains of a
shattered satellite? Why should Jupiter and Saturn have nine moons
each, and Neptune only one? Why this uneven distribution if
satellites are essential to planets? Indeed, why should there be
any satellites at all, seeing that planets which do not possess
them get along the same as those that do? And where, in the
"placing" of these bodies, is the so-called "harmony" of the
spheres about which we hear so much? Jupiter itself has more
satellites than Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Uranus and Neptune put
together. And two of these planets have none at all.
Of what use, it may be asked, are the asteroids -- that group
of midget planets, or tiny worlds -- that lie scattered midway
between the minor and major planets of the solar system, or at a
point where, under Bode's law, a planet ought to be? They number
thousands, and only four of the entire aggregation are known to
have greater diameters than 100 miles. This swarm of miniature
worlds revolving around the sun are mere globules in comparison to
the size of the earth, the largest being Ceres, with a diameter of
only 480 miles.
Their origin is well known. They are the shattered remains of
a single giant body, or, as Jeans puts it, [The Universe Around Us
p. 242.] "the broken fragments of a primeval planet." Why a planet
with a celestial engineer in charge should have broken into
thousands of pieces is something for the theists to explain. The
asteroids are the floating debris of a shipwrecked planet which, in
all probability, moved too close to the danger zone of the giant
planet Jupiter, and was shattered to bits under the law of Roche's
Limit. "Physically," writes Garrett P. Serviss, [Curiosities of the
Sky, p. 256.] "they are most insignificant bodies, their average
diameter probably not exceeding 20 miles, and some are believed not
to exceed ten." Their bulk, as Serviss points out, would hardly
furnish enough gravitational pull to hold a man to the surface, and
one might at will step off lightly into space. The thought of any
of these globes being inhabited by human-like beings may be readily
dismissed.
COMETS AND ASTEROIDS SERVE NO PURPOSE
NO one in his proper senses can ascribe the slightest use to
the existence of comets. For ages they have served no other
conceivable "purpose" than to frighten people out of their wits.
History records the terror-stricken condition of whole populace at
the approach of these "ominous" visitors in the sky. [When Halley's
comet appeared in 1456, "it struck terror into all people," wrote
John W. Draper. "From his seat, invisible to it, in Italy, the
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
sovereign pontiff, Calixtus III, issued his ecclesiastical
fulminations; ... in vain were all the bells in Europe ordered to
be rung to scare it away; in vain was it anathematized; in vain
were prayers put up in all directions to stop it." (History of the
Intellectual Development of Europe, vol. II, p. 253-254.)] They
are, in themselves, disintegrating bodies, which, according to
Newcomb, are wasting themselves away through progressive
dissipation. Entire dissolution has been reached by several well-
known comets.
One might reasonably inquire why comets possess tails hundreds
of millions of miles long. ["The great comet of 1843 had a tail
200,000,000 miles long." (The Outline of Science, vol. I, p. 36).]
And why should these celestial visitants carry a dangerous stream
of particles often resulting in meteoric showers? There is no
answer here but that found in the blind urge of undirected forces.
It would be difficult to conceive of anything more lacking in
"purpose" than these bodies burning up their substance in an age-
long grind of skyrocketing through space.
The eccentric behavior of comets offers very clear proof
against the thought that they are pursuing "fixed" or predetermined
courses laid down by intelligence. These sensitive bodies are so
low in density that they are frequently deflected from their paths,
and switch violently into new orbits. The curves which they
describe are anything but "orderly"; they vary from time to time,
and it is not infrequent for a comet to be captured by passing too
near a larger body. In such cases the old orbit ceases to exist and
the comet starts out afresh in a new orbit. If it comes too close
to a larger body, its fate is sealed: it is disrupted into
fragments. Two comets have been actually seen to break into two,
and a third to divide into four, parts. The breaking up of these
bodies by sudden and violent action does not bespeak an intelligent
control.
Were we really to believe in a heavenly engineer, there would
be no need to speak of stellar cataclysms. All would be serene and
in good working order. The facts are the reverse.
He who thinks there are no catastrophes in the skies knows
little of stellar activities. The flattened rings of Saturn and the
tiny asteroids are the respective remains of a damaged moon and a
smashed planet. A star which rotates too rapidly will burst, as
Jeans put it, [The Universe Around Us, p. 228.] "like an overdriven
fly-wheel, into parts of nearly equal size." Why this should happen
under the "guiding hand" of a Celestial Engineer is for some one
other than the atheist to explain. "Spectroscopic binary and
multiple systems are the relics of stars which have broken up
through excess of rotation, and they do not in the least resemble
the solar system." This "excess of rotation" spoken of by Jeans
ends in nothing more imposing than the split-up of a star and the
two parts circling each other. "Apart from this," says Eddington,
[Swarthmore Lecture, 1929, Science and the Unseen World, p 11.] "no
regular plan of further development is known." The two stars are
simply left to carry on the "god-planned" process of chasing each
other.
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The heavens are strewn with the wreckage of stellar wastage
and conflagrations. The vast ocean of the sky is filled with
derelicts, not in twos and threes, or even in baker's dozens, but
by the billions. Meteorites are the rubbish of larger bodies. They
swarm like fish in the sea, and on a clear summer's night may be.
seen as "shooting-stars." "It is estimated," says the "Outline of
Science," [Vol. 1, p. 35.] "that between ten and a hundred million
meteorites enter our atmosphere and are cremated every day."
Not all meteorites are cremated by passing through our
atmosphere, but fall as huge stones from the sky. The largest of
these plunge headlong to earth and bury themselves in deep pits.
One which has been recovered weighs 363/2 tons. [This is
"Ahnighito," the largest meteorite in the world, brought from
Greenland by Commander Peary in 1897.] Others, splintered into
fragments, fall as showers of stones. There are on exhibit in the
American Museum of Natural History in New York specimens from some
500 of the 700 meteorites which are known to have fallen throughout
the world. Among the principal features of the collection are 2000
or more individual masses from the stone shower which occurred when
a large meteorite exploded near Holbrook, Arizona, in 1912.
The hurling of these "rocks" from heaven, either as single
pieces or as showers of stones, does not reflect the slightest
consideration for the safety of life; it is hardly conceivable that
such barrages as these can be construed as the gentle "love-taps"
of a heavenly Father. It is only another incident of the blind-
working activities of outer space. No one in his right mind would
think of throwing confetti like this around.
Nor are meteoritic showers particular as to when or where they
strike. "They occur," writes Lazarus Fletcher, [Article
"Meteorite," Ency. Brit.] keeper of minerals, British Museum, "at
all hours of the day and night, and at all seasons of the year;
they favor no particular latitudes. The number of stones which
reach the ground from one fireball is very variable. In each of the
two Yorkshire falls only one stone was found; the Guemsey County
meteor yielded 30; at Toulouse, as many as 350 are estimated to
have fallen; at Hessle, over 500; at Knyasinya, more than 1000; at
L'Aigle, from 1000 to 2000; at both Pultusk and Mocs no fewer than
100,000 are estimated to have reached the earth's surface. The
largest single mass seen to fall is one of those which came down at
Knyahinya, Hungary, in 1866, and weighed 547 pounds."
Doubtless unnumbered trillions of these stones fall into the
seas and on desert and forest wastes, but this is not out of
consideration for man, but rather because barren tracts of water
and land make up the larger areas of the globe. It is equally true
they fall in inhabited portions of the world. But whether on
sparsely- or densely-populated centers, it is certain that these
"pot-shots" from heaven are not guided by intelligence. They are as
little "directed" in their courses as the stars and planets
themselves. And these of course are not "guided" at all.
It would be superfluous to enter further into a consideration
of conflagrations: they are sweeping the skies daily and on a far
more stupendous scale than is generally supposed. Enough has been
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
said to indicate the torrential storm of iron that sweeps through
outer space and bombards our atmosphere daily with the fury of a
thousand whirlwinds.
We hear much of what is called the "music of the spheres," but
this music, as Eddington points out, more closely resembles "jazz."
It is anything but harmonious or symphonic in result and has all
the blind-staggers and jerkiness, and even the harsh raspings of an
instrument out of tune. To some of us the "melody" of the universe
is more like the squealing of pigs
The rotation of Uranus is all out of harmony with that of
other members of the system. This planet turns, not from west to
east, but in a north-to-south motion. As a consequence the planet,
if it had life on it, would offer the most abominable conditions in
the matter of seasons. The tipping of its axis is all out of
alignment with the rest. Not only is this planet askew, but the two
outer satellites of Jupiter "are unlike the great majority of the
members of our system in that they revolve from east to west."
(Newcomb). [Astronomy for Everybody, p. 175.] And, as if this were
not enough, we find two of the satellites of Uranus traveling in
orbits which "are nearly perpendicular to the orbit of the planet."
(Newcomb). [Ibid. p. 191.]
Lastly, consider the orbital abnormalities of our own
satellite, the moon. So poorly "timed" is it, in its rotation on
its axis with its revolution around the earth, that it always
presents the same face to us. The same may be said of the planet
Mercury, one face of which is eternally facing the sun, and whose
inhabitants, if it had any, would have to swelter forever under the
scorching beams of the sun. And what may be said about those
erratic wanderers, the comets, whose orbits cover such staggering
distances in space? It is the contention of the theist that these
bodies were "made" to be admired. Yet Donati's Comet, which was
last seen in 1858, will not return till about 2000 years. If any
reader missed seeing it then, he may simply wait until it comes
again.
Truly, as Buchner remarks, [Force and Matter, p. 105.] "never
has been found the slightest trace of an arbitrary finger ordaining
the spheres of the heavens and appointing the courses of the earth,
the suns, and the comets."
CHAPTER V
DARKNESS: THE ETERNAL DRIFT
Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the
slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil,
reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless
way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself
to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish,
ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little
day, disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate.
-- BERTRAND RUSSELL. [Mysticism and Logic, p. 56.]
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When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon
what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There
is no God." It is not the works of some God that I see there. ...
I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy
upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles.
-- JOHN BURROUGHS. [The Light of Day, p. 164.]
If we turn from contemplating the world as a whole, and, in
particular, the generations of men as they live their little hour
of mock-existence and then are swept away in rapid succession; if
we turn from this, and look at life in its small details, as
presented, say, in a comedy, how ridiculous it all seems! It is
like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop
teeming with infusoria; or a speck of cheese full of mites
invisible to the naked eye. How we laugh as they bustle about so
eagerly, and struggle with one another in so tiny a space! And
whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible
activity produces a comic effect.
-- ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER. [Studies in Pessimism, p. 24.]
The world is a comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those
who feel.
-- HORACE WALPOLE. [Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, p. 375.]
THE MYTH OF THE PRESIDING MIND
JEANS assures us [The Mysterious Universe.] that "nature
abhors accuracy and precision in all things," yet in the face of
this rational declaration tells us that "the Great Architect of the
Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician." The remark
itself could conveniently serve as a sop for the religious. It is
difficult to conceive a pure "mathematician" who would be so stupid
as to abhor "accuracy" and "precision" in his work, since these are
the first requirements of a mathematical mind. And an "architect"
whose work showed as much abhorrence of "accuracy" and "precision"
as nature does could be neither a "great" architect nor a "pure"
mathematician. Jeans is wrong: there is no Mathematician nor
Architect in the clouds.
Dr. Herbert Dingle, [Science and Human Experience.]
honorary secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society of England,
quite properly takes Jeans to task: "It would not be difficult to
show, I think, that in some respects his metaphysical conclusions
are actually at variance with his scientific beliefs." Dr. Dingle
is a bit too conservative. Jeans' metaphysical beliefs, in every
respect, are hopelessly at odds with his scientific conclusions.
[The fault is not Jeans' but belongs to metaphysics. Michelet
describes metaphysics as "the art of befuddling one's self
methodically." (Durant's The Story of Philosophy, p. 397) This
definition has never been surpassed.]
One must be careful at all times to distinguish between the
scientific knowledge and the religious utterances of men of
science. Even some of our most brilliant workers in the field of
knowledge frequently carry around with them, not only rudimentary
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
organs, but rudimentary thoughts. The fact that a man is an
illustrious authority in the field of science is no guarantee that
he cannot utter at times his fair share of unmitigated nonsense.
Thus Sir James Jeans -- whose astronomical facts and figures
are freely referred to in the course of this work, and for whom the
author entertains a lively respect -- sees behind the phenomena of
the universe a presiding mind, or a cosmic Mathematician. Being an
excellent mathematician, Sir James easily endows his deity with the
attributes of his own profession. It is an understandable procedure
for one who believes in God. The pious artist, with pallet and
brush, who looks at a rainbow or a glorious sunset, will no doubt
see these things as the work of a Great Landscape Painter. The poet
hears rhythm in the ripple of the brook, the musician the music of
the breeze. Each, according to his vocational training and his
inherent nature, endows what he sees with ideas associated with his
particular activities. It is probable that the gardener or tiller
of the soil imagines his god as a Great Agriculturist. The
physician, in daily contact with the miseries and agonies of the
world, might well look upon God as the Divine Torturer who
strangles babies with diphtheria germs or who breaks their backs
with the bacillus of infantile paralysis. Indeed, once we place a
thinking being behind the phenomena of the universe there is no end
to the attributes with which he can be endowed. God can be looked
upon as anything from a Dispenser of Sunshine to a Dispenser of
Cholera Germs; from a Maker of Stars to a Manufacturer of Tapeworms
and Lice.
Happily, no one but the theologians and the ignoramuses take
the religious rumblings of scientists seriously; and Jeans'
departure into the world of ghosts would not be mentioned here
except as a typical instance of such departures.
Sir James is too well informed and far too able a reasoner not
himself to distinguish between his own scientific knowledge and his
religious fancies, and so he has prefixed his remarks with a
qualifying admission: "I would say, as a speculation, not as a
scientific fact, that the universe and all the material objects in
it -- atoms, stars, and nebulae -- are merely creations of thought
-- of course not of your individual mind, but of some great
universal mind underlying and coordinating all our minds." How
admirably this "universal mind" is "coordinating all our minds" may
be seen in the diverse opinions held by Sir James and Dr. Millikan,
each of whom holds an opposite view as to the ultimate end of the
universe, To Millikan, God is "still on the job" building up; to
Jeans he is tearing down; to the atheist "he" is doing neither one
thing nor the other, since no god exists. The coordination of our
thoughts by a Supreme Thought is metaphysical twaddle.
Were there really a Cosmic Mathematician at work behind the
universe, we might reasonably expect results in keeping with
mathematical precision, and a Vacuum Calculator in the skies whose
ultimate aim is the "heat-death" of the universe -- an extinction
taught by Sir James -- might well have spared himself the trouble
of getting busy at all, or of engaging in abstruse mathematical
formulae in order to get nowhere. A mathematician who worked toward
such empty endings as the smash-up of his work would be a fit
subject for a padded cell.
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The "heat-death" of the universe predicted by Jeans consists
of the annihilation of every star through radiation, until there
will be nothing left but an ocean of energy at its lowest ebb. It
is an "end" hardly in keeping with his belief in a presiding mind.
Literally, it is the smash-up of things without the semblance of a
"come-back". "Many, giving rein to their fancy", writes Jeans, [The
Universe Around Us, p. 322.] "have speculated that this low-level
heat energy may in due course reform itself into new electrons and
protons. As the existing universe dissolves away into radiation,
their imagination sees new heavens and a new earth coming into
being out of the ashes of the old. But science can give no support
to such fancies." In a word, the plan behind the universe believed
in by Jeans is the destruction of the universe! And the plan was
devised, adopted and put into motion by a Supreme Mathematician
some 10,000,000 million or more years before the stars emerged from
nebulae! Such is the fantastic nonsense taught by those who muddle
their science.
To think as Jeans does, is to imagine a super-mathematical
genius -- a sort of Celestial Jeans -- sitting up nights,
calculating how billions, of stellar bodies should be moved, in
order that, a few billion years later, one of their number might
closely approach the sun and thereby produce the earth; and how
that particular globe should be slowly condensed, in order that on
May 23rd, 1999, at six o'clock in the morning (Daylight Saving
Time), a particular bird should be at a particular spot in order to
pick up a particular worm for breakfast. Were the universe operated
by a Supreme Mathematician, as Jeans thinks it is, we should have
to believe that every event and detail of our lives entered the
calculation -- which means that God knew every outcome from the
"beginning." We should have to believe that God knew a cancer would
grow here, [The "Mathematician" who, billions of years ago,
"figured out" so accurately where cancers should grow cannot be
admired for his amiability. "We do not condemn our worst
criminals," remarks Prof. J.B.S. Haldane, "to anything as bad as an
inoperable cancer involving a nerve trunk." ("God-Makers," The
Rationalist Annual, 1931)] and a world war would occur there; [In
his Mr. Btitling Sees It Through, H.G. Wells makes his leading
character exclaim: "Why! if I thought there was an omnipotent God
who looked down on battles and deaths and all the waste and horror
of this war -- able to prevent these things -- doing them to amuse
himself -- I would spit in his empty face."] that a mass of
rotating gas would eventually evolve influenza germs and the
priests of the Spanish Inquisition. In a word, the vast mistakes,
follies, blunders and brutalities of existence all arose from
mathematical formulae and well-planned "design". "I see," remarks
the distinguished mathematician, Bertrand Russell, [The Scientific
Outlook, p. 118.] "no comfort to be derived from the supposition
that this very unpleasing universe was manufactured of set
purpose."
VAIN IMAGININGS OF THE THEOLOGIANS
WERE we to take seriously the loose-end thinking of some of
our scientific benefactors, we should be obliged to become Quakers
because Eddington is, or Sandemanians because Faraday was, or
perhaps even Catholics like Pasteur or Mendel. Or we might even
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write pious rubbish about the Book of Revelation because Newton
did, or swallow mediumistic gibberish after the manner of Lodge and
Lombroso. What really counts is not the religious drivel which men
of science write, but their solid demonstrations, and Jeans' Cosmic
Mathematician is as much a myth as the bewhiskered god of the Jews.
Thinking no more existed before the stars than did breathing
or walking, or digesting one's dinner. "If we say, as was said long
ago, 'In the beginning was Mind,' we may be expressing or trying to
express a great truth, but we have gone beyond science." [The
Outline of Science, p. 57,]
Not only have we "gone beyond science," but we have slunk back into
the realm of nursery-tale non-sense, where cows jump over moons and
dishes run away with spoons. So far as astronomy is concerned, the
primeval chaos from which stars were born may have been created by
anything at all, from Jehovah himself to Simple Simon or Puss in
Boots -- there is no limit to the stretch of one's imagination --
but sober reflection leads us to conclude that the primeval mist
existed on its own account and gave birth to the stars by inherent
properties of its own. All attempts to read a mind into nature, to
see in stellar activities the work of an invisible being, have
hopelessly failed, and the real naturalist of the heavens looks to
no other causes than those resident in matter itself. As Dr. Harlow
Shapley observes, [Harper's, May, 1923.] "The rise and decay of
massive stars, the birth of planets, the organization of stellar
systems" exclude anything "more supernatural than obedience to the
laws of gravitational astronomy and physical chemistry."
The "crude imagery," as Jeans calls it, [The Universe Around
Us, p. 328.] which pictures "the finger of God agitating the ether"
may be set aside "by insisting on space, time and matter being
treated together and inseparably as a single system, so that it
becomes meaningless to speak of space and time as existing at all
before matter existed." Matter, therefore, is coexistent and co-
eternal with space and time, and from it all things arise. This is
materialism, and beside it all metaphysical utterances are fit only
for the waste-basket.
"So far as science is concerned," wrote the distinguished
astronomer, Richard A. Proctor, [Our Place Among Infinities.] "the
idea of a personal God is inconceivable." The idea of a personal
god is conceivable, but wholly unbelievable. Personal or
impersonal, God is a delusion. It is a delusion because the very
concept of the universe being guided by intelligence is obviously
and probably false. From every domain of science there is a wealth
of evidence which shows the blind urge and senseless activities of
natural phenomena.
The whole rank absurdity of theism finds its most ludicrous
aspects in its rejuvenated form, where God is represented as a sort
of brainless personality hovering over the elements and telling
them what to do. An "intelligence" thus running around loose in the
universe, without body or brain and directing the course of the
stars, is quite as ridiculous as the anthropomorphic concept of the
deity as a Jewish patriarch with a long beard, who commands stars
to come into existence by the power of his will. As a "spirit," God
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
is a ghost -- and ghosts exist for science only in the distorted
brain cells of mentally feeble persons. As a "refined" abstraction
of metaphysics, it may be classed with the smile of the Cheshire
Cat which Alice of Wonderland saw, and which obligingly remained
after the cat was gone. In a word, neither in astronomy nor in any
other branch of science is there need to postulate a cosmic "mind"
behind or within phenomena. Stars are not fashioned by a ghost any
more than waves are made by Father Neptune or babies are brought by
storks.
The heavens no more proclaim the "glory of God" than they
proclaim the glory of Mumbo Jumbo or the Sultan of Sulu. What they
do proclaim is a ceaseless round of time-consuming movements which
ends in the annihilation of stars. Eddington himself, Quaker reared
and pious though he is, repudiates, with some trepidation, the
silly attitude of the Psalmist's creed. "Probably most
astronomers," says he [Swarthmore Lecture, 1929. Science and the
Unseen World, 17.] "if they were to speak frankly, would confess to
some chafing when they are reminded of the psalm 'The heavens
proclaim the glory of God.'" But not all astronomers "speak
frankly" in dealing with religion.
There is something really pathetic in the statement that the
universe was made for man. There is something even more pathetic in
the belief that it was made for the "glory of God."
The small-dimensional world hatched by superstition gives way
before astronomy: the further we peer into space, the smaller does
our earth become, and the more we are removed from anything
resembling heavenly solicitude. Stellar activities are neither
moral nor immoral: they do not think, do not know what they are
about. Everywhere there is the blind sequence of physical activity.
The sun no more exists to warm us than it does to scorch the
Arizona desert or stunt life in equatorial Africa; stars are not
"made" in order that mariners may find their way at sea; they exist
on their own account, and have existed for billions of years before
the earth emerged from the sun; the moon is no more interested in
the happy crooning of sweethearts than the floods and devastating
tidal waves it causes on earth. Everywhere in the heavens are non-
planned forces at work, behind which there is no celestial being,
no God.
There is no eternal justice in the heaven, no helping hand.
The stellar depths are silent as the grave to human misery and
want. The vast abyss of space is both our womb and our tomb. It
cares neither for our coming nor our going, our arrival or
dismissal. ["A single hurricane," says John Stuart Mill, "destroys
the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts, or an inundation,
desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root
starves a million of people. The waves of the sea, like banditti,
seize and appropriate the wealth of the rich and the little all of
the poor with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding, and
killing as their human ante-types. Everything, in short, which the
worst men commit either against life or property is perpetrated on
a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has noyades more fatal
than those of Carrier; her explosions of firedamp are as
destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass
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the poison-cups of the Borgias." (The Idea of God in Nature) "If,
indeed, there were a judgment-day," writes Winwood Reade, in his
excellent work, 'The Martyrdom of Man,' p. 518, "it would be for
man to appear at the bar, not as a criminal, but as an accuser."
Man has never been an object of cosmic care. He must do things for
himself.
Only the ceaseless drive of nonthinking forces could be
responsible for such aimless and senseless gyrations as the stars
exhibit over protracted periods of time. No mentality above the
level of an idiot would devise such madhouse "schemes" as that of
spinning billions of globes for amusement or of tossing them around
aimlessly to prove itself intelligent. The debacle of the heavens
cannot be traced to design.
From the welter of lifeless globes our own little world
emerged through the chance encounter of two stars. It came into
existence as an exceptional occurrence in the life of the stars.
"Among so many myriads of stars," writes Eddington, [Swarthmore
Lecture, 1929, Science and the Unseen World, p. 11.] "there will be
a few which by some rare accident have a fate unlike the rest. In
the vast expanse of the heavens the traffic is so thin that a star
may reasonably count on traveling for the whole of its life without
serious risk of collision. The risk is negligible for any
individual star; but ten thousand million stars in our own system
and more in the systems beyond afford a wide play for chance. If
the risk is one in a hundred millions some unlucky victims are
doomed to play the role of 'one.' This rare accident must have
happened to our sun-an accident to the sun, but to us the cause of
our being here." There is no guidance here, no conscious cause at
work among the stars.
CHAPTER VI
THE FINAL IMPLICATIONS
Theism is doomed in all ages the advance of civilization to
its heights has brought about an increasing disbelief in all
religion. Now that, for the first time in history, we are
universalizing culture, the prospect is clear. No refinement of the
idea of God can save it from disappearance. --
JOSEPH McCABE [The Future of Religion, p. 60.]
If indeed the world in which we live has been produced in
accordance with a Plan, we shall have to reckon Nero a saint in
comparison with the Author of that Plan. Fortunately, however, the
evidence of Divine Purpose is non-existent; so at least one must
infer from the fact that no evidence is adduced by those who
believe in it. We are, therefore, spared the necessity for that
attitude of impotent hatred which every brave and humane man would
otherwise be called upon to adopt toward the Almighty Tyrant. --
BERTRAND LORD RUSSELL [The Scientific Outlook, p. 130.]
If you are in the habit of believing in special providences,
or of expecting to continue your romantic adventures in a second
life, materialism will dash your hopes most unpleasantly, and you
may think for a year or two that you have nothing to live for. But
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a thorough materialist, one born to the faith and not half plunged
into it by an unexpected christening in cold water, will be like
the Superb Democritus. a laughing philosopher. --
GEORGE SANTAYANA. [Reason in Science, pp. 89-90.]
Convinced that there is no eternal life awaiting him, he [man]
will strive all the more to brighten his life on earth and
rationally improve his condition in harmony with that of his
fellows. --
ERNST HAECKEL. [The Wonders of Life, p. 108.]
The belief in God may continue awhile in virtue of the lack of
intelligence of some, of the carelessness of others, and of the
conservative character of the mass. But no amount of apologizing
can make up for the absence of genuine knowledge, nor can the flow
of the finest eloquence do aught but clothe in regal raiment the
body of a corpse. --
CHAPMAN COHEN. [Theism or Atheism? p. 128.]
BRIEFLY summarized, the salient points of cosmic evolution
from nebulae to man are as follows: There are, on Eddington's
calculation, more than 300,000 million stars inside the sun's orbit
alone. These stars, weighed en masse, have a weight equal to about
270,000 million suns the size of our own. This is the raw material,
the amazing cosmic "batter", from which our planetary system came.
The relation between the amount of material used and the puny
result obtained is ludicrous in the extreme. It is like mixing a
batter of dough as big as the sun to bake a single crumb of bread.
A baker who worked on the basis of that much material as a means to
an end would be considered a dolt.
The time period consumed is equally deadly to the assumption
of an intelligent process. Stars, according to Jeans, [The Universe
Around Us, p. 326.] have existed for from five million million to
ten million million years, and the atoms that compose them "may
have previously existed in nebulae for at least a comparable, and
possibly for a much longer, time." This means roughly that the
universe in its transitional period from nebulae to man, has
consumed approximately between ten million million and twenty
million million years. This is the time it has taken the "Infinite
Intelligence" of the universe to reach the "desired" end. And the
end? It can be found in any good work on evolution depicting the
long, cruelly-drawn-out, ghastly struggle of life, from amoeba to
man. [Man's descent from a primitive anthropoid ape, resembling the
chimpanzee of today, is no longer a matter of dispute among leading
anthropologists. "All the evidence now at our disposal" said Sir
Arthur Keith, in his presidential address to the British
Association, Leeds, 1927, "supports the conclusion that man has
arisen, as Lamarek and Darwin suspected, from an anthropoid ape not
higher in the zoological scale than a chimpanzee." Our pre-ape
ancestry necessarily extends back to creatures even lower in the
scale of life than the long-tailed, tree-living monkeys from which
we are also descended. "60,000,000 years ago," writes J.B.S.
Haldane, "our ancestors were mammals, probably not unlike lemours;
300,000,000 years ago amphibians, somewhat resembling newts or mud-
puppies; and 500,000,000 years ago very primitive fish, combining
some of the characters of sharks and lampreys." ("Some Dates," The
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Rationalist Annual, 1928) And Darwin himself writes, Descent of
Man, p. 183: "At a still earlier period the progenitors of man must
have been aquatic in their habits. ... In the lunar or weekly
recurrent periods of some of our functions we apparently still
retain traces of our primordial birthplace, a shore washed by the
tides. ... These early ancestors of man, thus seen in the dim
recesses of time, must have been as simply, or even still more
simply, organized than the lancelot or amphioxus." Man's earlier
ancestors were worm, which themselves arose from still lower forms.
The "Adam" of the race was a microscopic speck.]
The process of planetary birth is exceedingly round-about, and
depends upon the most fortuitous circumstances. A nebula must first
of all rotate for aeons before it condenses into stars. Now stars
are intensely hot, gaseous bodies, and cannot bear life at any
stage of their existence; planets alone cool to a point where life
becomes possible. But planets, by a bad stroke of cosmic "wisdom,"
are exceedingly scarce. A star before it can give birth to a planet
must approach another star close enough to raise "tides" on its own
surface. The chance of any star doing this is infinitely small,
considering the vast distances which separate the stars. It is a
case of blind man's buff, in which a fortuitous meeting of stars is
like the drawing of a single prize from countless blanks. When, by
the merest chance, two stars do approach to within about three
diameters' distance of each other, a group of planets is born. "The
calculation shows," says Jeans, [The Universe Around Us, p. 332.]
"that even after a star has lived its life of millions of millions
of years, the chance is still about a hundred thousand to one
against its being a sun surrounded by planets." Now if life is
important to the universe, planets ought to be more numerous than
the stars, and their process of origin should depend upon something
more indicative of intelligence than a fortuitous meeting of stars.
A "hundred thousand to one" chance of anything occurring is not
reflective of "plan" or "design". The result is precisely what
might be expected in a blind and groping series of events. Even
when a planet is born it is not assured of life; and of the nine
planets of our system only one is an inhabited world. It is a
dismal picture of stellar "wisdom".
And even after a planet is born, it must, in order to be a
suitable abode for life, be neither too hot nor too cold, too near
nor too far away from its sun. If it is either of these it will
remain among the number of lifeless globes. Out of 300,000 million
stars only a handful of planets has been born, and of this handful
only one is known to possess life. The result is even less than
what might be expected under the laws of chance or in the spinning
of a roulette wheel.
Six specks of dust floating about Waterloo Station make up, in
bulk, the relative equivalent of the tiny substance which comprises
the stellar universe. Turn off, at midnight, the lights in Waterloo
Station and you have a fair idea of the blackness and dreariness of
interstellar space. Next, turn off the heat in the great railway
terminal, and allow the temperature to fall to the frigidity of
interstellar space, and you will have an entrancing picture of the
"glory" of the heavens at 4.690 below zero! "A thermometer," writes
Jeans," "placed out in interstellar space, far from any star, would
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THE ATHEISM OF ASTRONOMY
probably show a temperature of only about four degrees above
absolute zero, while still lower temperatures must be reached out
beyond the limits of the galactic system." Absolute zero, we must
remember, is not to be confused with that of either the Centigrade
or Fahrenheit scales, but is sufficient, as the same writer reminds
us, to freeze "air, hydrogen and even helium, the most refractory
gas of all, solid."
And what must we think of this alleged intelligence in the
skies, which, after toiling for billions of years, produces nothing
more imposing than the equivalent of six specks of dust in a great
railroad terminal? If there is "glory" in this, there is glory in
producing that which is next to nothing. "The extreme emptiness of
astronomical space," as Jeans calls it, [The Universe Around Us, p.
106.] really constitutes the chief item of celestial observation.
Our "star-filled" universe is a poverty-stricken affair.
In sum, the picture of the universe presented by astronomy is
one of dismal stretches of time and space and unparalleled
desolation. In the eternal abyss of space-bleak, cold, and dark --
are no signs of a Cosmic Consciousness.
Such is the message which astronomy brings: a message which is
more reassuring to man in his more contemplative moods, since it
proves that not even planets and world constellations can forever
endure. His extinction at the hands of the blind agencies
responsible for his existence will be followed in due time by the
extinction of every star. "With universes as with mortals," says
Jeans," "the only possible life is progress to the grave."
Out of star-dust man came, and into it he will sink again, as
oblivious of his own passing existence as he was before that
existence painfully and slowly evolved and separated him, for one
brief instant, from the blindly-groping Whole. Into the eternal
chasm of cosmic destruction all things flow. Matter, time and space
are the sole permanents of existence: the rest perish. What then
are kingdoms and scepters, miters and tiaras, honors and dishonors,
in the solitudes of space! With princes and beggars, loves and
hatreds, laughter and tears, ignorance and knowledge, they are
doomed to destruction in the eternal maelstrom of space as the
mightiest of suns!
Across the sky is written in blazing stars: waste,
extravagance, futility! Little wonder that, peering through his
telescope, the great astronomer Lalande [Buchner's Force and
Matter, p. 105.] could say: "I have searched through the heavens,
and nowhere have I found a trace of God."
**** ****
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