atheism and the eclipse

      I was raised—thank you mom and dad—without any thought that the universe harbored, let alone required, a supernatural being. Many of my heroes—Denis Diderot, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Ernestine Rose (look her up)—were nonbelievers. Some years ago, I published a book on human awareness of the lack of existence of God: Imagine There’s No Heaven: A History of Atheism. And, of course, an atheist I remain.

      And, no, I don’t believe my disbelief leaves me deficient in wonder at or appreciation for the universe, the earth, humankind or the existence of existence.

      But if I were looking for an occurrence that fits somewhat awkwardly into my lack-of-belief system it would be the event I witnessed from a small hill outside of Valladolid, Spain, on the evening of August 12th: a total eclipse of the sun.

      This was my third total solar eclipse. All three have been, literally, awe inspiring. (Partial eclipses don’t compare.) I love the dramatic reminder the sudden and complete disappearance of the sun provides that we are living on one object racing through space in proximity to others. I value the caution that something as basic to our existence, as the warmth of the sun can, on occasion, switch off. I love the reminder that our science is robust enough to be able to predict and understand such anomalous phenomenon.

      But there is one thing—the very thing that makes a solar eclipse here on earth so spectacular—that I find perplexing: it is the fact that our moon happens, just happens, to be the exact size—no larger, no smaller—necessary to blot out the sun, though not its spectacular corona, for some minutes.

      In fact, the earth’s one and only moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, but it is also 400 times further away from the earth than the sun. So, as a result, those two round objects occupy the exact same amount of space in the earth’s sky. Quite a coincidence, no?

      Maybe it is no coincidence that we live on a planet with an unusually large moon. Moons create tides, and tides have been conducive to the development of life.

      But a moon occupying exactly as much sky as the sun? I have come upon no scientific theory explaining that it had to be thus or that similar matches are common elsewhere in the solar system or the universe.

      Is this unexpected concordance enough for me to imagine the existence of some much-more-inexplicable supernatural being? Of course not. And our whole existence being a “simulation,” would, of course, raise all sorts of other problems. Maybe some law of physics is involved that we do not yet understand.

      Or, more likely, the sun and the moon appearing equally large in the earth’s sky is a random occurrence in this one of many billions of planetary systems in the universe. Just luck—for human eclipse junkies.

      This post originally appeared in Mitchell Stephens’ Substack, Ideas on Ideas. You can read it here.