The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas by Robin Harvie Read Free Book Online Page B

difficulty getting the chlorine right in his hot tub.”
    “I’ve heard that can be difficult,” Nathan said.
    “He knows of your anguish, Nathan Townsend. He wants your mind to be at ease.”
    “Thank you,” said Nathan.
    Huxley turned. “And Lou Pinto, he told me to tell you that your father loved you very much.”
    Tears formed in Lou’s eyes. It was the greatest gift anyone could have given him. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much.”
    But the ghost of Thomas Henry Huxley was already gone.
    When the fog lifted, Nathan felt as if an enormous weight had also been lifted from his own shoulders. It didn’t seem it should be so easy to secure peace of mind, but Huxley had given it to him. Now he had certainty and conviction, and this in turn made him buoyant. Nathan resumed their walk home with a spring in his step, and an unfamiliar sense of optimism.
    “You look like a new man,” Lou said, who felt a great sense of relief himself. “It’s a Christmas miracle.”
    Nathan corrected him. “A miracle event,” he said. “A Christmas miracle event.”
    Lou smiled, and together they walked into the holiday night.

SCIENCE
    I do not believe in a personal God and have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If there is something within me that can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
    —A LBERT E INSTEIN

Chapter 9
The Sound of Christmas
    S IMON S INGH
    While Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas, atheists may wonder if there is another birth 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, which 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 billionyears 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 colors, 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