From the Confession Booth to the Stars - An Essay

Ulriken Mountain in Bergen, Norway

In February of the year 1990, one of the most important photographs ever taken was shot.

It had the power to change lives and perspectives across the nation and around the globe. Its unpopularity stands as a testament to the scientific illiteracy prevalent in our nation, and the dullness of its color and form betray the insignificance of its subject. It is dark, it is distant, it is small. It is Earth. Pale Blue Dot was the result of NASA heeding scientist Carl Sagan’s advice to turn the camera of Voyager I back to Earth one final time before it continued past Pluto and out of our solar system. The resulting image revealed visually, for the first time, what scientists have been telling us ever since Copernicus first challenged Ptolemy’s geocentric view of the world: we don’t matter. For some, this realization brings with it fear, anger, and the desire to turn to religions which promise us otherwise. For others, this realization in itself becomes a religion. Everyone has different names for it; astronauts call it ‘the overview effect,’ while others simply ‘realizing your place in the universe.’ However, whatever you name it, science has somehow carried us in the past few centuries from an Earth-centered, divinely commanded universe, to a random, insignificant vacuum of energy. By describing my experience of wrestling with these issues, I’d like to use Darwin’s theory of evolution as a model for comparing both religion and science.

I can still remember the moment it hit me. I was sitting in the library, looking over my notes from biology class. It was the moment I realized that my world-view was incompatible with the career I was pursuing, and the moment I realized I would need to make a decision. Having been raised in a fundamentalist religious home, I’d been taught from a young age that religion was the only way to heaven, evolution was a lie, and the Earth was only 4,000 years old. I’d heard all the arguments from evolutionists, and I was convinced my rehearsed, biblical rebuttals were sufficient to cast doubt on their sinful worldview. Nevertheless, at that moment, for the first time, my views were being challenged. If Noah’s Flood truly did happen, how could the animals have spread to populate the globe so rapidly? If a divine force created everything, why was there so much genetic nonsense written into the DNA of life? Can we really disregard radiometric dating methods simply because they assume a constant rate of decay? These questions and more raced through my mind, and led me to begin what became the most transformative six months of my life as I read books, audited religion courses, and above all finally began asking the questions I’d been suppressing for so long. It was then, at the end of those six months, that I had another pivotal moment. I was back in the library, sitting at the same desk, facing the same window. It was the moment I realized I no longer believed what I’d been taught all my life. My newfound awareness excited me, but it also scared me. Just saying the word ‘atheist’ in the U.S. is practically taboo, and because of this I struggled greatly with sharing my journey with friends and family. Nevertheless, I felt awakened and critically thoughtful for the first time, and as such I began to think about evolution, that great Darwinian concept which, much like the idea of a non-geocentric universe centuries ago, had gone from a great lie to a fundamental truth.

For the first 18 years of my life, I’d been taught that evolution was incompatible with the Christian church, and that it only destroyed the romanticism of life by likening humans to monkeys. However, with my newly-awakened mind, I began to realize a truth quite different. Evolution, I began thinking, was quite compatible with the church; in fact, it could even explain the church! When you realize that natural selection has shaped the genes of every living entity, you begin to realize that selfishness and greed is written into our DNA. Nature is not peaceful and just. And neither are humans. From the Catholic Crusades of Spain to the radical Islam of the Middle-East, the church both historically and currently has used its power to control its people and mobilize them to further its own cause, often violently. Catholic indulgences, purchased to pay for the forgiveness of sins, only serve to emphasize the ways in which the church has used its power to manipulate and control its people. And what better way to control people than to offer them the thing they most desire—the assurance of life after death. Evolution has ingrained in us a psychological fear of death; Sigmund Freud went so far as to claim that this ‘death fear’ governed all of our psychological decisions. By suppressing critical thought and offering an antidote to the ‘death fear’, religion was able to bring people to do unspeakable things to their fellow man, and to disregard logical thought to an extreme degree.

Evolution, then, could clearly help explain the church, but what about its effect on the romanticism of life? Indeed, if everything was created randomly then why should I even care about my existence or the existence of others? It was at this point when I realized a profound truth. The theory of evolution not only didn’t lessen the romanticism of beauty and life, it actually increased it. Suddenly, the birds and insects amidst the forest weren’t foreign creatures; they were pieces of me, sharing large chunks of my DNA. The flowers became alive and relatable. Whales breaching off the coast whispered of their terrestrial roots and the days when they too knew the harshness of dirt and sun. Everything became connected, all tracing back to the stardust which started it all and remains within us to this day. But what of the greed, which evolution implicitly implies as governing nature? Well, it’s still there. But as conscious, cognitive beings we have a wonderful responsibility. As the first Earthly species to understand our origins, we have the opportunity to fight against it; to rage against the underlying greed of our genes and strive to preserve the beauty which billions of years of evolution has created. In the words of John Steinbeck, ‘now that we don’t have to be perfect, we can be great’.

Just as the scientific method has led science from the church to the stars, so has my own life journey taken me from a small, closed world to an infinitely open universe. Now, more than ever, is this perspective relevant for our nation. With our current political climate of science-denial, critical thinkers are needed desperately in this country, to continue fighting the greed of humans, to strive towards preserving our planet and the beauty within, and to continue to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’ (Dylan Thomas). Just this month, NASA has made our Earth a little smaller, telling us of the Earth-like planets which exist a mere 40 million light years away. As critical thinkers, as Earth-dwellers, as cognitively-evolved humans, it is our duty to continue doing science which takes us from the shackles of close-mindedness to the flowers of the field, from the confinement of a confession booth to the openness of the universe.

(Andrew Sandahl, 2017)