The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas

A Christmas Miracle

RICHARD HERRING

Even as an atheist, it’s cool to celebrate Christmas. I like Jesus and think that there’s a lot of sense in the stuff that he might have said or that has at least been ascribed to him. For my money his philosophy and his sacrifice mean very little if he was actually a god. Who cares about him being crucified then?

He knew he was all powerful and that he’d rise again and get his revenge on those pesky Romans or Jews (delete depending on your own prejudices). But if he was a man, then the stuff he said and the fact that he actually properly died for it (not just for thirty-six hours—that’s a hangover, not a death) is much more impressive.

Anyway, I’m not having a go. I’m a Christite. Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged. Bang on!

One particular Christmas, I was staying at my sister’s house in Cheddar. It is a house packed with people: my sister, her husband, their three practically totally grown-up children, with various boyfriends or girlfriends in tow. But there’s also a menagerie of cats and dogs and who knows what other pets hidden round every corner.

They woke me up early for Christmas breakfast, which wasn’t totally appreciated, as I’d had a late Christmas Eve in the pub with my old school friends and was feeling a little delicate. But I managed to rouse myself for another day of drinking and gorging and then drinking and gorging some more—it’s what Jesus would have wanted.

That night I was pretty glad to excuse myself from my parents’ house and head round the corner to my sister’s for an early night. The rest of the family stayed where they were to eat and drink some more.

I went into the bathroom to rid myself of waste and was surprised to see one of the family cats sitting in the bath tub. I couldn’t be bothered to chase it out into the house. If it wanted to watch me have a poo then that was up to it. Neither of us, I am sure, was remotely turned on by the idea of a cat watching a man defecate. And anyone who says that I am turned on by a cat watching me defecate is lying.

The cat seemed to be trying to drink some water out of the tap and was licking at it hopefully, but there was hardly any moisture there at all. So in an act of generosity which I am sure would have made Jesus happy if he was watching, I leant over from my seat and gently turned the cold tap in the hope of making more of a dribble of water come out to quench the thirst of this destitute Christmas cat. I could already see the children’s book being written about this act of charity. It was a beautiful scene and for me summed up the whole festival.

But the tap moved quite a bit without any more water coming out and I was concerned that if I turned the dial too far, too fast then a deluge would occur, soaking the cat below, sending it into a tornado of wet cat rage, which would ruin the story. How would kids respond to the sight of a fat naked man on a toilet being bitten in the face by a drenched moggy? Badly. Book sales would plummet.

The taps gurgled and a small stream of water started coming out. The cat licked away at the tap with all its might, sucking on the tap for what seemed like ages. It got its fur slightly wet, but it didn’t seem to care. It must have been really thirsty. I am not saying that my sister is not looking after her animals and is failing to give them drink. You must draw your own conclusions on this and only phone the RSPCA if you are sure she is guilty.

I have to say that from where I was sitting this was one of the funniest sights I have seen all year. To appreciate the humour, you might have to find a thirsty cat and put it in a bath and then get it under a drizzle of water, but I laughed as much at this as I have at anything in ages. It seemed to me the cat was laughing too. But then I suppose he had quite a funny view as well.

But surely Jesus got the best view, getting the hilarity of both the drinking cat and the fat defecating man, which I am pleased about because it’s nice that he should have something to make him laugh on his birthday. Especially when he’s the only person who doesn’t get loads of presents today, which seems a bit rich, but we all have our cross to bear.

The Sound of Christmas

SIMON SINGH

While Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas, atheists may wonder if there is another birth which they might be able to commemorate. One possibility is to give thanks for the arrival of Isaac Newton, who was born on Christmas Day 1642 according to the Julian calendar that was still in use in England at the time. Another possibility, and probably my preference, is to use Christmas Day as an excuse to celebrate the biggest birth of all, namely the creation of the entire universe.

For tens of thousands of years, humans have stared up into the heavens and wondered about the origin of the universe. Up until now every culture, society and religion has had nothing else to turn to except its creation myths, fables or religious scriptures. Today, by contrast, we have the extraordinary privilege of being the first generation of our species to have access to a scientific theory of the universe that explains its origin and evolution. The Big Bang model is elegant, magnificent, rational and (most importantly of all) verifiable. It explains how roughly 13.7 billion years ago matter exploded into being and was blown out into an expanding universe. Over time this matter gradually coalesced and evolved into the galaxies, stars and planets we see today.

Before explaining how you might celebrate the birth of the universe, let me quickly explain why we are convinced that there was a Big Bang. First of all, telescope observations made back in the 1920s seemed to show that all the distant galaxies in the universe were redder than they should have been. Red light has a longer wavelength than all the other colours, so it was as if the light from the galaxies was being stretched. One way to explain this stretching of galactic light (otherwise known as the ‘red shift’) was to assume that space itself was expanding. Expanding space is a bizarre concept, but it is exactly how we would expect space to behave in the aftermath of a Big Bang explosion.

However, this single piece of evidence was not enough to convince the scientific establishment that the Big Bang had really happened, particularly as the observations were open to interpretation. For example, the Bulgarian-born astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky pointed out the redness of the galaxies was merely an illusion caused by the scattering of light by dust and gas as it passed through the cosmos.

By the way, as well as being a critic of the Big Bang and the data that seemed to support it, Zwicky was also responsible for inventing a beautiful insult. If a colleague annoyed him, Zwicky would scream out ‘spherical bastard’. Just as a sphere looks the same from every direction, a spherical bastard was someone who was a bastard whatever way you looked at them.

A second pillar was needed to support the Big Bang model and this time the crucial evidence relied on measuring the ingredients of the universe, most importantly hydrogen and helium. These are smallest atoms in the Periodic Table and the most common in the universe, accounting for 74% and 24% of all the atoms. Crucially, the only way to create such large amounts of hydrogen and helium is in the wake of the Big Bang. In particular, the pressure, density and temperature of the early universe would have cooked exactly the right amount of hydrogen and fused it into exactly the right amount of helium. In other words, the Big Bang is the best (and probably the only) way to explain the abundances of these light elements.

Nearly all the other elements were made later in collapsing stars. These stars provided the perfect environment for the nuclear reactions that give rise to the heavier elements that are essential for life. Marcus Chown, author of The Magic Furnace, highlighted the startling significance of stellar alchemy: ‘In order that we might live, stars in their billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions even, have died. The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the oxygen that fills our lungs each time we take a breath—all were cooked in the furnaces of the stars which expired long before the Earth was born.’

Because we are made from the debris of nuclear reactions that took place in exploding stars, the romantics among you might like to think of yourselves as being composed of stardust. On the other hand, cynics might prefer to think of yourselves as nuclear waste.

The third, and even sturdier, pillar to support the Big Bang model is the afterglow that should have followed a creation event, which can still be seen today. The theory behind the Big Bang suggests that intense short-wave radiation was released just a few hundred thousand years after the initial expansion. This radiation would have been stretched as the universe expanded, meaning that it would exist today in the form of microwave radiation. These microwaves from the Big Bang should still exist in all parts of the universe at all times and are therefore an excellent ‘make-or-break’ test for whether or not the universe did start 13.7 billion years ago.

Although the Big Bang microwaves were predicted in 1948, they were soon forgotten because astronomers did not have any technology that was sensitive enough to detect microwaves from outer space. However, in 1964 two American radio astronomers discovered them in an episode of pure serendipity. (Serendipity is the art of making fortunate discoveries by accident, or as one anonymous male scientist put it: ‘Serendipity means looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the farmer’s daughter.’)

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using something called a radio telescope to study galaxies. A radio telescope is like an ordinary telescope, except it is a large dish or cone and it detects radio waves instead of visible light waves. Annoyingly, the astronomers noticed that they were picking up unexpected radio waves coming all the time from all directions. Initially, they thought the signal might be an error caused by a component within the telescope, so they began to check every single element of the equipment. They searched for dodgy contacts, sloppy wiring, faulty electronics, misalignments in the cone and so on.

When they climbed inside the cone they discovered a pair of nesting pigeons that had deposited a ‘white dielectric material’. Thinking that this pigeon poo was somehow causing the spurious signal, they trapped the birds, placed them in a delivery van and had them released thirty miles away. The astronomers then scrubbed and polished the cone, but the pigeons obeyed their homing instinct, flew back to the telescope and started depositing white dielectric material all over again. When I met Arno Penzias in 2003, he described to me what happened when he recaptured the pigeons: ‘There was a pigeon fancier who was willing to strangle them for us, but I figured the most humane thing was just to open the cage and shoot them.’

Of course, even without the pigeons and their pigeon poo, the microwaves still kept coming and after several weeks Penzias and Wilson eventually realised that they had discovered the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. This was one of the most sensationally serendipitous discoveries in the history of science, and a decade later the lucky duo were rewarded with the Nobel Prize for essentially proving that the Big Bang had really happened.

Some people sneer at the accidental nature of this discovery and question whether it deserved the Nobel Prize. Such folk would do well to remember the words of Winston Churchill: ‘Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.’ Indeed, it seems likely that other astronomers probably detected the microwave radiation from the Big Bang before 1964, but it was so faint that they ignored it and carried on regardless.

In fact, you have probably witnessed this Big Bang radiation yourself without realising it, because most old radios are capable of picking up microwaves. And because a radio can act as a very, very, very primitive radio telescope I suggest that you use one as the focus for your Christmas celebration of the birth of the universe. Here’s what you need to do:

At some point over the Christmas period switch on an analogue radio and retune it so that you are not on any station. Instead of ‘Jingle Bells’ or ‘Away in a Manger’, all you should be able to hear is white noise. This gentle, calming hiss is the audible output caused by all sorts of random electromagnetic waves being picked up by your radio aerial. You cannot single them out, but can rest assured that about 1% or 2% of these waves are due to microwaves from the Big Bang. In other words, your humble radio is capable of detecting energy waves that were created over 13 billion years ago.

While everyone else is pulling crackers or arguing over the last chocolate orange segment, you can simply close your eyes and listen to the sound of the universe. You are experiencing the echo of the Big Bang, a relic of creation, the most ancient fossil in the universe.

The Great Bus Mystery

RICHARD DAWKINS

I was hoofing it down Regent Street, admiring the Christmas decorations, when I saw the bus. One of those bendy buses that mayors keep threatening with the old heave-ho. As it drove by, I looked up and got the message square in the monocle. You could have knocked me down with the proverbial. Another of the blighters nearly did knock me down as I set a course for the Dregs Club, where it was my purpose to inhale a festive snifter, and I saw the same thing on the side. There are some pretty deep thinkers to be found at the Dregs, as my regular readers know, but none of them could make a dent on the vexed question of the buses when I bowled it their way. Not even Swotty Postlethwaite, the club’s tame intellectual. So I decided to put my trust in a higher power.

‘Jarvis,’ I sang out, as I latchkeyed self into the old headquarters, shedding hat and stick on my way through the hall to consult the oracle. ‘I say, Jarvis, what about these buses?’

‘Sir?’

‘You know, Jarvis, the buses, the “What is this that roareth thus?” brigade, the bendy buses, the conveyances with the kink amidships. What’s going on, Jarvis? What price the bendy bus campaign?’

‘Well, sir, I understand that, while flexibility is often considered a virtue, these particular omnibuses have not given uniform satisfaction. Mayor Johnson…’

‘Never mind Mayor Johnson, Jarvis. Consign Boris to the back burner and bend the bean to the buses. I’m not referring to their bendiness per se, if that is the right expression.’ ‘Perfectly correct, sir. The Latin phrase might be literally construed…’

‘That’ll do for the Latin phrase Jarvis. Never mind their bendiness. Fix the attention on the slogan on the side. The orange-and-pink apparition that flashes by before you have a chance to read it properly. Something like “There’s no bally God, so put a sock in it and have a gargle with the lads.” That was the gist of it, anyway, although I may have foozled the fine print.’

‘Oh yes, sir, I am familiar with the admonition: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”’

‘That’s the baby, Jarvis. Probably no God. What’s it all about? Isn’t there a God, Jarvis?’

‘Well, sir, some would say it depends upon what you mean. All things which follow from the absolute nature of any attribute of God must always exist and be infinite, or, in other words, are eternal and infinite through the said attribute. Spinoza.’

‘Thank you, Jarvis, I don’t mind if I do. Not one I’ve heard of, but anything from your shaker, Jarvis, always hits the spot and reaches the parts other cocktails can’t. I’ll have a large Spinoza, shaken not stirred.’

‘No, sir, my allusion was to the philosopher Spinoza, the father of pantheism, although some prefer to speak of panentheism.’

‘Oh, that Spinoza. Yes, I remember he was a friend of yours. Seen much of him lately?’

‘No, sir, I was not present in the seventeenth century. Spinoza was a great favourite of Einstein, sir.’

‘Einstein, Jarvis? You mean the one with the hair and no socks?’

‘Yes, sir, arguably the greatest physicist of all time.’

‘Well, Jarvis, you can’t do better than that. Did Einstein believe in God?’

‘Not in the conventional sense of a personal God, sir, he was most emphatic on the point. Einstein believed in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.’

‘Gosh, Jarvis, bit of a googly there, but I think I get your drift. God’s just another word for the great outdoors, so we’re wasting our time lobbing prayers and worship in his general direction, what?’

‘Precisely, sir.’

‘If, indeed, he has a general direction,’ I added moodily, for I can spot a deep paradox as well as the next man, ask anyone at the Dregs. ‘But, Jarvis,’ I resumed, struck by a disturbing thought. ‘Does this mean I was also wasting my time when I won that prize for scripture knowledge at school? The one and only time I elicited so much as a murmur of praise from that prince of stinkers, the Rev. Aubrey Upcock? The high spot of my academic career, and it turns out to have been a dud, a washout, scrapped at the starting gate?’

‘Not entirely, sir. Parts of holy writ have great poetic merit, especially in the English translation known as the King James or Authorised Version of 1611. The cadences of the Book of Ecclesiastes and some of the prophets have seldom been surpassed, sir.’

‘You’ve said a mouthful there, Jarvis. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher. Who was the preacher, by the way, Jarvis?‘

‘That is not known, sir, but informed opinion agrees that he was wise. “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth.” He also evinced a haunting melancholy, sir. “When the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.” The New Testament too, sir, is not without its admirers. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…”’

‘Funny you should mention that, Jarvis. The passage was the very one I raised with the Rev. Aubrey, and it provoked a goodish bit of throat-clearing and shuffling of the trotters.’

‘Indeed, sir. What was the precise nature of the late headmaster’s discomfort?’

‘All that stuff about dying for our sins, redemption and atonement, Jarvis. All that “and with his stripes we are healed” carry-on. Being, in a modest way, no stranger to stripes administered by old Upcock, I put it to him straight: “When I’ve performed some misdemeanour”—or malfeasance, Jarvis?’

‘Either might be preferred, sir, depending on the gravity of the offence.’

‘So, as I was saying, when I was caught perpetrating some malfeasance or misdemeanour, I expected the swift retribution to land fairly and squarely on the Woofter trouser seat, not some other poor sap’s innocent derrière, if you get my meaning, Jarvis?’

‘Certainly, sir. The principle of the scapegoat has always been of dubious ethical and jurisprudential validity. Modern penal theory casts doubt on the very idea of retribution, even where it is the malefactor himself who is punished. It is correspondingly harder to justify vicarious punishment of an innocent substitute. I am pleased to hear that you received proper chastisement, sir.’

‘Quite, Jarvis.’

‘I am so sorry sir, I did not intend…’

‘Enough, Jarvis. This is not dudgeon. Umbrage has not been taken. We Woofters know when to move swiftly on. There’s more, Jarvis. I hadn’t finished my train of thought. Where was I?’

‘Your disquisition had just touched upon the injustice of vicarious punishment, sir.’

‘Yes, Jarvis, you put it very well. Injustice is right. Injustice hits the coconut with a crack that resounds around the shires. And it gets worse. Now, follow me like a puma here, Jarvis. Jesus was God, am I right?’

‘According to the Trinitarian doctrine promulgated by the early Church Fathers, sir, Jesus was the second person of the Triune God.’

‘Just as I thought, Jarvis. So God—the same God who made the world and was kitted out with enough nous to dive in and leave Einstein gasping at the shallow end, God the all-powerful and all-knowing creator of everything that opens and shuts, this paragon above the collarbone, this fount of wisdom and power—couldn’t think of a better way to forgive our sins than to turn himself over to the gendarmerie and have himself served up on toast. Jarvis, answer me this. If God wanted to forgive us, why didn’t he just forgive us? Why the torture, Jarvis? Whence the whips and scorpions, the nails and the agony? Why not just forgive us? Try that on your Victrola, Jarvis.’

‘Really, sir, you surpass yourself. That is most eloquently put. And if I might take the liberty, sir, you could even have gone further. According to many highly esteemed passages of traditional theological writing, the primary sin for which Jesus was atoning was the Original Sin of Adam.’

‘Dash it, Jarvis, you’re right. I remember making the point with some vim and élan. In fact, I rather think that may have been what tipped the scales in my favour and handed me the jackpot in that scripture knowledge fixture. But do go on, Jarvis, you interest me strangely. What was Adam’s sin? Something pretty fruity, I imagine. Something calculated to shake hell’s foundations?’

‘Tradition has it that he was apprehended eating an apple, sir.’

‘Scrumping, Jarvis? That was it? That was the sin that Jesus had to redeem—or atone according to choice? I’ve heard of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but a crucifixion for a scrumping? Jarvis, you’ve been at the cooking sherry. You are not serious, of course?’