The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas

Starry, Starry Night

PHIL PLAIT

When I was a kid, I used to have a real problem with Christmas.

It’s true. These feelings took root in those deep, dark recesses of childhood where my memory is now dimmed, but I suspect it all started because I was raised Jewish. No doubt some jealousy was involved—I do remember trying to tell my friends how much better Hanukkah was than Christmas because it lasted eight days and not just one—but I suspect it was also just getting sick and tired of constantly hearing about something in which I wasn’t participating.

I’m also pretty sure Christmas music had something to do with it. Man, I still hate Christmas music.

So of course I was teased a lot by the other kids. I grew up in a suburb of Washington, DC, and while there were many Jewish families, we were definitely a minority. Most of my friends were Christian, and in the days leading up to the end of December, Christmas was all they could talk about. I never believed in Santa no matter how much they tried to persuade me of his existence. That made me a bit of an outcast, of course, but I took some consolation in being right.

Over time, things—as they tend to do—changed. I was never that big on anything in the Jewish religion, even when I was very young. By middle school I was for all practical purposes an atheist…and I suppose that has never changed since, come to think of it. But despite that, my attitude towards the holiday season evolved.

In secondary school, my best friend was Marc. His family was kinda sorta Jewish (the father) and some flavour of Christian (the mother), and they had long since decided to celebrate Christmas every year as a family event. Marc and I were pretty close, so I was over at their house a lot, including at Christmas time. When the holiday approached I would help them get their tree, set it up, string the beads or fake cranberries or whatever the heck they were—I remember one year we tried popcorn, but were less than successful getting it to stay on the fishing line—and then we’d decorate the tree.

On the night before Christmas, my non-Christian house would be business as usual—dinner, fool around, read, whatever. Even then I was the budding astronomer, so I might take out my telescope for some relaxing, but frigid, sky viewing. But eventually I’d go to bed, unhappy that every freaking TV and radio station (this was long before the web, kiddies) was either playing the dreaded jingles or was simply off the air.

Once I was up in the morning the long wait would begin. I knew Marc and his brother Dave would have been up early, opening presents, getting all kinds of awesome gifts. One year they both got Nikon cameras; we were heavily into photography then, with my bathroom at home being a makeshift darkroom complete with noxious chemicals that my mom was always giving me grief over. The Nikon camera Marc got was really nice, much better than my crappy Konica…but no, jealousy wasn’t an issue then. Of course not.

Finally, after a tortuous wait, Marc would call and invite me over, and I honestly had fun sharing in their celebration. His mom would make a Yule log cake, and we’d eat tons of chocolate and then go outside in the snow and have fun.

So for a while Christmas was really cool. Of course, in high school I was a band dork, and that meant every December concert I played Christmas music. So the barely restrained murderous impulse was still there, but mollified a bit.

In college, things died down somewhat because all the other students left to go home and be with their families for the holiday. It was great for me because I could stay behind and make good use of all the fallow computers. My software written to analyse and model astronomical data ran scads faster since the machines were otherwise idle. I always got a huge amount done during those weeks.

But it was lonely.

With one exception, for a few years Christmas was neither a joy nor a drag. The holiday was just something that happened, a few weeks of sales at the stores, barely tolerable jingles over half-shot speakers at the malls, and half-price chocolate bars the day after the holiday. The one exception that stands out was spent studying for my PhD qualifying exams. I was home with my parents but I hardly saw them; I was up every night until 2 or 3 a.m. studying and doing endless exercises in calculus, physics, and astronomy. That particular holiday is now blurry in my memory, difficult to distinguish from fiercely complicated equations, dozens of pages of algebraic computations and notes, and endlessly having to sharpen my pencils.

But this too did pass. As did I, as far as my exams went. But it wouldn’t be the last time I would associate Christmas and astronomy.

To me, when I was younger, winter months always meant crisp, clean air, the sharp pinpoints of stars in the sky undimmed by the East Coast’s summer haze. In December especially, while my friends were dreaming of gifts and fun, my thoughts would turn to the brilliant colours of the stars in Orion as the constellation stood solidly over my southern horizon. I read everything I could about astronomy, and also practised what I read: I would haul my 80-kilo telescope to the end of the driveway and, shivering in the sub-freezing temperatures, patiently aim it at various objects in the sky. Jupiter, Venus, the Orion Nebula…these all became my friends as I spotted and studied them.

It was around that time of my life when it dawned on me that people generally misunderstood astronomy. I myself was a victim of this; when I was of a certain age I believed in all manner of nonsense, including UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle and astral projection (well, I didn’t actually believe in that last one, as even then I was a budding skeptic and decided to do some experimental testing; I tried to project my mind using a book I found at the library, but, sadly, the girl I had a crush on showed no signs the next day that I had spent an hour trying to communicate with her from a higher plane).

The more I read about astronomy, the more instances I found of people misapplying it. Horoscopes were hugely popular, of course, as was the idea of aliens having visited humans, teaching us how to draw really long straight lines in the desert and paint confusing imagery on our stone walls.

And, of course, every year in December, the newspapers would have articles about the Christmas Star. You know the story: a star appears in the sky to guide the three wise men to the birthplace of Jesus. From the King James Version:

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,

Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.

A lot of folks in America like to interpret the Bible literally, so this passage is clear enough: an actual new Star appeared in the sky that guided the wise men to Jesus. Ignoring for a moment that if they lived to the east, and followed the Star to the east, they’d get further from Bethlehem rather than closer, and that while Matthew makes a big deal of the Star, Luke doesn’t even mention it—which already makes a literal interpretation of the Bible somewhat dicey—what we have here is an obvious astronomical tie-in with Christmas.

It’s a star, after all.

Even as a lad I could see the implications of this story, and certainly every Christmas special on TV has some variation of a brilliant star in the sky as a symbol for Christmas. Really, my getting involved once again with Christmas was unavoidable.

So I thought this legend over. Was the Star real? A lot of people thought so. That meant I had to look at the evidence.

It’s thought that the wise men were astrologers, so they would’ve had some familiarity with the sky; back then astronomy and astrology were pretty much the same thing, even if today they are as different as real medicine and homeopathy, or stage magicians and psychics, or…well, you get the point.

The point is, these guys would know the sky pretty well. If we take the Star at face value, then it must’ve been something amazing, because these three guys wouldn’t have dropped everything to make a long trek over some mundane star. The obvious conclusion is that it must have been very bright.

What astronomical objects are bright, can appear in the east, and disappear after some amount of time?

While there are lots of potential candidates, to an astronomer the answer is obvious: a supernova—a star that explodes at the end of its lifetime—is a perfect fit. So all we need to do for proof of this idea is to look for a 2,000-year-old supernova remnant, the expanding gas from such an explosion.

And lo, some do exist! But it turns out they wouldn’t have been in the east, or wouldn’t have been bright enough.

Certainly none fit the story well enough, and it’s doubtful any would’ve been enough to suddenly inspire a trio of men to get a hankering for a road trip in the desert.

If it wasn’t a supernova, then what was it? Another bright astronomical event is a conjunction, when two planets pass near each other in the sky. Jupiter and Venus are both astonishingly bright, and when they pass very close to each other would make a spectacular scene. And they can also both be in the east!

Were there any conjunctions like that around that time?

In fact, there were. Recently, an astronomer, using computer programs to map the positions of the planets in the sky, discovered that in 2 BC Venus and Jupiter passed very close to each other; so close in fact that to the eye they would have appeared as a single star! So have we found the Star?

Not so fast. First off, the planets move relative to each other, so even two days earlier or later they would’ve been seen as two separate objects. The wise men would never have mistaken that for a single star.

And oh, did I mention this apparition occurred in June? The wise men certainly took their time getting to Bethlehem!

Okay, so a planetary alignment doesn’t fit our Biblical bill either. And you can keep looking for other objects that might represent what the wise men are claimed to have seen, but at some point I think you have to realise that you’re grasping at cosmic straws. No real cosmic event matches the description in the Bible well enough to inspire the story.

And yet, people keep looking. In December every year, without fail, some newspaper article breathlessly reports some astronomer has found another candidate for the Star, yet another as-it-turns-out weak explanation for a Biblical passage of dubious reality.

And every year I read these articles and wonder, why do they try so? What are these people really searching for?

In 1992, as I could just start to spy the PhD lurking murkily at the end of my graduate career, I started dating Marcella. Two years later I had my degree and a job, and the next year Marcella and I were married. After a decade or more of no real religious involvement, I found myself with a Catholic family, one that really celebrated Christmas every year. Food, the tree, midnight mass, reading ‘The Night Before Christmas’, and yes (sigh), singing the dreaded carols. A year after Marcella and I married, our daughter was born, and that cemented the celebrations; in my family Christmas is absolutely for kids.

Now, it’s not like I jumped right into this. Thirty years of secular winters is more than just a habit. At first I was reluctant to participate much. And in some ways this new rekindling reawakened the reasons I didn’t like it all those years before.

But then something funny happened: one year, I decided I liked the tree.

It was cool. I had a tree in my house. Pine trees smell good. They’re pretty. Hanging ornaments and lights, if done properly, is actually rather festive. And I found I liked going out and physically getting the tree. We even once went to a huge farm where trees were grown specifically for the purpose, and I cut one down for us using a bow saw and everything. It was very macho.

Ironically, my wife—raised with this holiday—prefers fake trees. But maybe that’s because she always winds up doing the decorating (I’m hopeless at it, and likely to set fire to something) and it takes her all day. However, I won’t stand for an ersatz tree. Every year we get a real tree and let it make our house smell piney and arboreal.

And, yes, Christmassy.

Now, after many years of celebrating this holiday, I’ve come to really enjoy it. I know my in-laws well enough to know what kinds of gifts to get, and my own daughter makes it clear what she wants (somehow, the video games we get for her are always the kind Marcella wants to play). I always get the same sort of gift from them: a big Toblerone bar (400 grams!), thermal socks (my office is cold even in the summer) and various computer doodads and gizmos.

And every year I’m happy. I mean, honestly happy. Some people say the gifts are not the reason for the holiday, but they’re wrong: of course it’s about the gifts. They’re the centre-piece of the holiday; it’s about giving them, and having fun getting them, and then playing with them (or wearing or eating them) afterwards. And not to be all TV Christmas special here, but it’s about being with family while you’re doing all that.

So here I sit. An atheist, a skeptic, a guy raised Jewish who hated Christmas has found the meaning of the holiday, and he wasn’t even searching for it.

And every year, when I read the blogs, the papers, and watch the news, I see that same story of the Christmas Star resurrected, an undead story that won’t stay down. And people keep looking for the evidence.

But they won’t find it. They can’t. It’s just a story.

So for me, just being with family, enjoying their company: it’s enough. And, of course, every winter I still go outside to observe the sky and look at the stars, the real stars. You don’t need to search for them—they’re there, festooned across the sky for everyone to see.

The Ironed Trouser: Why 93% of Scientists Are Atheists (Depending on Who You Ask)

ADAM RUTHERFORD

Atheism and science should make good, comfortable, spooning bedfellows. Even though they are totally separate types of thing, the former being a position, the latter a process, the casual assumption is that they should skip hand in hand through gloriously evolved fields of reason. Those who oppose either or both like to conflate the two for a convenient jab-swing combo to pulverise rational thought in favour of religious fervour. Science must be bad because it lies so comfortably with godlessness.

The term ‘scientific atheism’ is tossed around sometimes, but I don’t really understand what it means. Atheism exists fully independently of science. As the onus is on the faithful to demonstrate the existence of Yahweh, Allah, Thor, Hanuman or whoever, atheists need to do nothing at all to be devoted to their stance. ‘Scientific atheism’ is equivalent to saying ‘ironed trousers’. Like science, ironing is a process, which can be applied to all manner of items: dresses, shirts, even underpants, if one were so inclined. It straightens things out, makes them fit together nicely. Fortunately, trousers exist and function perfectly adequately without ironing. And atheism exists without back up from science. But it does make it look a bit smarter.

In the twentieth century, there were several attempts to quantify the overlap of eggheads who were godheads. In 1916, psychologist James Leuba found that out of 1,000 scientists, 60% were agnostic or atheist. Eighty years later, the experiment was repeated, and the results were virtually identical. Within a different sample, only 7% of the members of the American National Academy of Sciences indicated a belief in God. More recently, a survey of the fellows at the UK’s most august scientific body, the Royal Society, revealed only 3.3% who believed in God.

As with so many surveys, it depends on who you ask, and how you phrase the question. Is the Royal Society a representative sample of scientists? Oh Lord, Mary Mother of Jesus, heavens to Betsy, Christ on a bicycle, no. How so no? For starters, only 5% of Royal Society fellows are women, something like ten times lower than in the general scientific community. A recent survey* indicated that Royal Society fellows are 38% grumpier than other scientists. Many fellows are so old it’s difficult to ascertain if they are even alive, let alone God-fearing. It is possible that this gives them an inside track on the big answer, but one would have to untimely wrest them from their peace to find out.

But what is clear is that those of a science bent are more likely to also lack religious faith. Why should this be? Because the process by which scientific knowledge is revealed is one that requires logic and rational thought at every stage. Any researcher will tell you that there are plenty of moments that necessitate creative guesswork, or simply having a wild stab in the dark, but in general these moments are massively outnumbered by the grinding out of small incremental steps towards better theories. Science as a way of acquiring knowledge certainly predisposes one towards ruling out the inconsistencies and irrationality inherent in religion.

Furthermore, science explains how things are. There is a nonsensical variant of the argument from ignorance referred to as the ‘God of the Gaps’. Very simply, where there is a hole in knowledge, insert God as the explanatory force. It’s nonsensical because historically, it was gaps all the way down. What science does very well is fill them in. To those gappists, I say ‘just because you don’t understand something, doesn’t mean I can’t’.

So, there are two robust reasons why scientists are less likely to be religious. But a much more interesting question is why any scientists are religious. Opponents sometimes screech that scientists have to have faith in science itself. This is true in a sense, but at least the robustness of the scientific method is such that a belief that the system works is based on countless data points which show it to be reliable: where once there was ignorance, science has inserted knowledge. Having faith requires an absence or ignorance of scientific evidence, a belief that is not supported by a logical progression. That’s why it’s called faith.

One might be tempted to suggest that scientists who believe are not very good scientists. Empirically this is simply not true, and I’m not talking about the preachers of that creationist fig-leaf they call Intelligent Design. No, there are plenty of good scientists who are religious, who have faith, who see the laws of nature, evolution, gravity, the whole damned universe as a manifestation of a non-interventionalist divine force that now acts like an absentee landlord: he sets up the rules of the cosmos and then clears off for ever. These people are technically Deists.

I don’t really see the point of this stance, but I accept that the cultural trappings of religion can be hard to shake. It may be one of my own bountiful shortcomings, but I have not stumbled across a convincing argument for this apparent internal conflict that doesn’t rely on a form of compartmentalisation of one’s rational and irrational minds.

And that’s fine. Everyone, even the most hardline rationalist, behaves in absurdly irrational ways. It’s the nature of humankind. I couldn’t believe in God any less: it makes no sense to me, and more importantly, my trust in science’s extraordinary explanatory abilities renders the need for divine answers superfluous. All things are potentially explicable without recourse to the supernatural. But that doesn’t mean I exist in a purely rational way. I’ve spent the last twenty-eight years supporting a football team who in that time have won a grand total of two trophies, both before I was seven. All because of the random cosmic happenstance of having emerged into the world in a hospital lift in the small market town of Ipswich. And even so, I will be a ‘tractor boy’ till my cardiac myocytes twitch their last. Is that rational? No. It’s not even very much fun much of the time, Goddammit.