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

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 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.]

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 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

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 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 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. 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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.]

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, "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

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 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 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

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:

"Making the earth a slaughter-house"