minister turns atheist dot org

A UNIVERSE UNFIT excerpt from "Pissing in the Primordial
Ooze"

By Joe Holman and J. L.Talley III

CHAPTER 1 A UNIVERSE UNFIT

I. Our Sun

With a surface temperature exceeding 11,000 degrees
Fahrenheit, our sun blazes away, providing light and heat to
the myriads of creatures on this mundane ellipsoid sphere
we call Earth. The sun is a hot mass of atoms called
hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the
universe. Being extremely available in even the darkest and
furthest reaches of space, timid hydrogen clouds are always
giving life to new stars. Anytime enough of these simple
elements gather together and collide, heat is generated.
From thence, it will not be long until this meager, swirling ball
of trapped gas begins to glow, radiating heat and light to be
seen for unthinkable distances. Now, the process of nuclear
fusion has begun and the humble protostar has become an
actual star just like our own sun, abiding some 93,000,000
miles from earth.

Below the surface, more towards the core of this mighty
reactor, temperatures will continue to soar to a
mind-boggling 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit! At such
temperatures, the strongest of metals would melt in under a
second. Moving now outward, to somewhere between a
thousand and a quarter of a million miles from the sun's
surface and out into space, we have the star's corona.
Because of the powerful gravitational rebound of the sun
and the convection process within it, much of the heat and
radiation emitted is recaptured, raising temperatures in this
area to about four million degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than
the surface and even the core of the sun! (I use the
Fahrenheit temperature scale because it is the most
common and easiest to relate to.) With a mass three
hundred and forty thousand times that of the earth, the sun
generates enough power to heat almost a billion worlds like
our own. Were it not for the sun, the earth could never have
evolved into the safe-haven of life as we know it today. Our
planet would be a spinning, watery rock, hurling through
space without the slightest hope of life, or even the
formation of the most humble seedling. Yet, the formation of
stars is not a pretty process; it is one of greed and survival.

Suns are the best examples of self-preservation in the
universe. Despite the cosmic riffraff of cold, collisions, and
calloused battles between protostars in nebulae, sucking the
hydrogen out and away from one another to feed
themselves, when the battles are over, shining stars in an
epic array of depiction are the result. This makes
spectacular viewing for us earthlings as we gaze into the
night sky and behold a universe much bigger and brighter
than we could ever imagine, a universe that begs to be
taken in. If we're not careful, we might start to think that we
are special and have a place and a divine purpose on this
big rock.

II. We Are Not Special

Are we and is our solar system the result of intelligent
design on the part of a god or some unknown cosmic
intelligence? With deep resolve and much contemplation, I
say no. The universe in which we live is not the result of
design by any intelligent causes whatever. To the
materialist, our universe qualifies as proof-positive that such
ideas are complete and utter nonsense. The planet upon
which we have come to draw breath is one that is built upon
a kill-or-be-killed process called evolution, in this discussion,
stellar evolution, as we are dealing with the material
make-up of the universe, all of which had its beginning deep
within the hearts of stars. We are quite literally children of
the stars and our planet is the palace they bequeathed to us.


We began with a gelled-down look at our sun because it is a
perfect example of natural design, not intelligent design.
Please distinguish between the two. Our sun was no more
designed by a creator than are any of the young stars we
are observing come to life in the Pleiades Cluster today, nor
was this god-absent disaster zone we call home designed,
upon which hapless creatures like ourselves eat, sleep.
procreate, and defecate. We kid ourselves into thinking that
life is more than these things.

As we have seen, suns form largely as a gravitational,
attractive process, together with heat and the process of
nuclear fusion, but planets also form in a similar way.
Headed back in time towards the big bang, after the first
several rounds of stars died, these dying stars spit out the
necessary elements to drift through space, along with
helium, and all the other elements of the periodic table.
Have you ever asked yourself why the inner planets
(Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), orbit closer to the sun,
as opposed to the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,
Neptune, and rocky little Pluto) which orbit far away from the
sun? The answer is simplistically stunning and provides the
clearest evidence of an evolutionary origin of the solar
system; the planets orbit with the heavier, iron/earth
elements gravitating towards the sun because of their
molecular composition, and likewise, the lighter gases drifted
away from the spiraling-inward debris as it plunged towards
our then-protostar.

These celestial bodies have settled in the orbits we observe
today, all the planets owing their orbital stability to the sun
that binds them closely. However, we ought not to think
positively or kindly when we speak of our sun. In truth, our
sun kills us as surely as it creates us. Whether it is by
bringing on heat strokes on people living in hot climates, or
by causing skin cancer, or by inducing the mass melting of
ice sheets, causing floods that result in deaths, the sun is
constantly killing the very people it warms and nurtures
under ideal circumstances. We cannot help but wonder why,
if a higher power designed the sun, it would be the same
agent responsible for massive death tolls, as it very often is
in our world.

Despite their breath-taking age, suns are not eternal. They
are impermanent and, like us, will die some day. In perhaps
less than 2,000,000,000 years, our life-giving star will swell
up into a red giant, engulfing Mercury, Venus, and nearing
Earth. Our oceans will boil and all life, plant or otherwise, will
die a sweltering death by oppressive, unrelenting heat. The
earth itself will be the next victim of the sun. Once it has
swelled up to its max, our former life-giving orb, having been
force-fed a diet of helium after eating away all her hydrogen,
will burn hotter and hotter until she fades into a white dwarf,
and finally, into a burned-out cinder in the empty reaches of
icy cold space. Though scientists differ as to an exact time
for this event (usual estimates are from 2 to 5 billion years
from now), the fact remains that it will occur. A once proud
world teeming with life, industry, and activity will float
aimlessly in the dead, cold regions of space. The earth is
doomed. That is the word of science.

III. The Rest of the Cosmos

Our universe is massive to the point of staggering the
imagination and confounding the intellect. To get a general
idea of just how far our sun is from the closest star, picture
two unpopped kernels of corn. Now separate them from
each other about 150 miles and you have the approximate
distance between our sun and our nearest neighboring star,
Proxima Centauri, over 4.5 light years away. One large bowl
of sugar in Amarillo, Texas compared to another such bowl
in London (over 4,800 miles' distant) would be a good
comparison of the distance between our isolated Milky Way
Galaxy from neighboring galaxies like Andromeda, NGC 205,
and the Sagittarius Dwarf. This comparison is roughly
accurate only when comparing the Milky Way to other local
galaxies which astronomers have come to call The Local
Group. If you want to get an idea of the relationships of
galaxies that are not so local, galaxies like M104 (the
Sombrero Galaxy), almost fifty million light years from us,
you would have to compare the distance between the
nucleus of a cell on earth (representing our galaxy) to a dust
particle orbiting Pluto (representing M104) 15,000,000,000
miles away, and even then, this comparison is still just
crudely accurate.

Keep in mind, there are still a great many galaxies much
further away than these are! So suffice it to say our universe
is big, mouth-droppingly huge on the most grandiose of
scales. Turning our attention to the other celestial bodies,
we get the same message as that of our sun; our universe is
"extraordinary waste and complete futility" as atheist
astronomer Woolsey Teller put it.(1) The stars that fill our
sky are gluttons and thieves, constantly robbing their
neighboring stars of gases who would gladly do the same to
them if given the proper chance. Some stars, like old
married couples angrily arguing, are binary stars (two
revolving stars orbiting each other), spitting heat, radiation,
and star debris in each other's faces!

While dying, many of the blue super-giant stars are far too
big to simply fade away as white dwarfs, so they collapse
inward on themselves and become masses of condensed
matter about the size of a well-populated city. With immense
gravity, they steal light from nearby, surrounding stars.
These are called neutron stars. In the case of the largest of
stars, these have too much mass and go beyond the
neutron star stage to become black holes, which increase in
size and power the more space matter they consume,
destroying all in their wake. Even light itself cannot escape
from these ravenous cosmic kidnappers.(2) These
"winner-take-all" conquests for mass in space teach us the
savage and merciless nature of our universe. In less than
200,000,000,000 years, all of the hydrogen in the universe
will be used up and converted to helium. This will be a
depressing time should any stargazers exist in that far off
era--there will be no stars left to gaze upon!

Whatever can we say of planets? They are less honorable
than stars. Chemistry and physics tell us much about the
nature of all the elements on the periodic table. Very simply,
they are forged in the bellies of dying stars and vomited out
as the transformed products of superheated helium, having
progressed into successively heavier elements that litter
empty space with dust and chemicals that make life
possible.(3) Possible though it may be, it is the absence of
life that really helps us to see the barren and hostile nature
of the universe. This star dust contains water and the
diverse elements on the periodic table that every chemistry
class drop-out has heard of and can intelligently put to use
in his world. Not so with the universe! These same elements
are scattered out through space in a mind-numbingly idiotic
manner. When the generation of humans finally arises that
wants to take on space travel at the speed of light, they will
have a serious problem created by this scattering of
material--at light speed, any vessel to run into these small
particles would be punctured like an ice pick through an
empty soda can. These same particles will create friction,
yes, even in space, thus complicating matters further. Much
must be discovered if the problem is ever to be solved.

So we live in a universe where the raw materials for life
everywhere abound, but not so much as one extraterrestrial
life-form, not a trace of bacteria, not even a seedling or
slime is to be found, thus far. This is exactly what evolution
predicts; in a vast universe of hundreds of trillions of stars,
only a few (if not just one) intelligent life form has arisen,
showing us that the universe is not conducive to life. It is
chaotic, purposeless, mindless, and a terribly depressing
waste of space and materials. If the theological hypothesis
were true, in a universe as big and as rich as ours, we
should see a cosmos teeming with life as is our earth, but
instead, we see just the opposite: barrenness, extreme cold,
deforming heat, and lifelessness for unbelievably distant
stretches. This does not suggest design in the least. In a
universe with so many solar systems, our own is a prime
example of a stable one. That is, the planets circling our sun
follow elliptical, though almost circular orbits, rather than
wildly irregular ones where one big gas giant like our Jupiter
consumes all the smaller bodies of rock like Earth (as some
nearby star systems are believed to operate). Ours is one of
9 (if Pluto is counted as a planet) stably orbiting planets
around the sun, with one big exception--earth has life on it
and the remaining 8 are about as useful to earth as the Big
Dipper is to the tidal control of earth's oceans!

Furthermore, the earth is tilted at a 23.5 degree angle.
Having a large moon like we do that can stabilize our planet,
what sense does it make to put the earth at a tilt, when by
setting it straight upon its axis, we would enjoy a little more
tropical of a climate and the absence of storms and erratic
weather (though even this solution would not be perfect)?
Valuable light that could regularly warm and brighten the
long, dark months at the poles would be a much more logical
use of the sun's energy than the flawed way that it is set up
now where precious light is wasted in empty voids of space.
Another major flaw is that earth wobbles on its axis. A .5
degree wobble on the 23.5 degree tilt of our planet may not
seem like much, but it makes all the difference to us lowly life
forms that live here. When earth wobbles on its axis, ice
ages are the result, ravaging our world and making life
needlessly more difficult for man.(4) A spherically shaped
planet-sun design is not a good way to operate an
acclimatized system because you cannot heat and light all
areas of the globe at once. Bothering me no end is the fact
that much of Earth's land is buried under miles of ice, and
much of it sits useless in deserts and stretches of
grasslands across the equator, scorching under intense,
searing heat. So much of our planet is simply unusable to us.

IV. Bad Design

All of these facts pose serious problems for intelligent
design theorists to explain, who expect us to believe that the
earth is a heavenly masterpiece designed by a god. Can
you imagine a creator who knowingly chooses to create an
earth that wobbles on its axis, much like an incompetent
carpenter might create a chair with wheels and one of them
doesn't quite touch the floor? Can you imagine a landlord
who owns an apartment complex and chooses to roast
tenants in the left wing and freeze tenants on the right wing
of the building, like our earth does those who live near or
around the equator, and those who live in the far north or
south poles?

What deity in his right mind would create needless balls of
gas like Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, and give
them insignificant moons that have no chance of exerting
even a fraction of the pull necessary to stabilize those
worlds into normal axis rotations? Useless planets,
incapable of producing or sustaining life, offering no help to
man in the struggles of his existence, abide for no purpose
at all except to spin and circle their sun, accomplishing
nothing but to arrive back at the places from which they
began! The contention of theistic evolutionists that the Gas
Giants were created to protect earth from asteroids and
space debris is astoundingly laughable--now theists have
only moved the problem back to the question, why did god
create asteroids and debris that could harm the earth? Two
major chemicals on the gaseous worlds are ammonia and
methane, both especially lethal to almost all forms of life on
earth, save a few microbes here and there.

Even the orbits of our solar system's dead planets are not
consistent with each other. Looking down from above the
solar system, from what we would call the "north pole," all
the planets in our solar system rotate counterclockwise
except for Venus and Uranus. A sunrise on Venus would be
from west to east instead of vice versa, the way it is on our
planet. The ridiculous, vainly spinning planet Uranus rolls on
its side with its South Pole continually facing the sun! What
for? This is hardly evidence of good design. One planet with
life on it in the midst of eight dead ones, why? Even planets
like Mars that could almost be viewed as potentially
habitable lack a necessary magnetic field that is needed to
protect any prospective inhabitants against lethal solar
radiation which would kill any life present in only a few
month's exposure. Many, if not most, of the galaxies known
to exist (including our own) contain super-massive black
holes at their centers, making yet more space uninhabitable
and unapproachable.(5)

Ours is a universe where suns brightly and brilliantly shine
across empty stretches of space and nebulae to be seen by
no one except modern humans with the aide of very
powerful telescopes. These suns shined long before the
days of Archyopteryx and Triceratops, but faded into stellar
oblivion, no one having beheld their glory, only their distant
afterglows. Ours is a universe where larger planets consume
the smaller ones that venture too close. Like drunken frat
house gluttons, they never quit eating. Ours is a universe
where crashing satellites bombard featureless planet
surfaces, leaving gaping craters, scars of a violent past.
Ours is a universe where comets and meteors fly through
space in wild and unbecoming orbits, crossing the sun and
leaving a trail of melted ice and gases for no one to follow,
eventually being torn apart in the cruel thrashing of entering
a planet's atmosphere. Our universe shows us an
unforgiving picture of matter in motion, a barren wasteland
of indifference and loneliness.

An unkempt country side graveyard is more personable than
the domain that houses our solar system. Junkyards and
toxic waste dumping grounds are much happier and
meaningful places than the enormous expanses of
nothingness that surround us. The universe is fleeting and
changing, constantly moving from one form of worthlessness
into another. The day will come when both moons of Mars
will crash into the surface of that world. Some fifty thousand
years from now, Saturn's rings will become a part of Saturn
once again, leaving behind a less beautiful view. The cosmic
show-off will have nothing more to show! The future of earth
too is every bit as bleak as that of any other world. Our
moon drifts four feet away from earth each year. In less than
ten million years, an eclipse will not look near as spectacular
as it does today. Drifting away from the sun, earth will
become colder and colder and then hotter and hotter as the
sun begins to die, swelling up to meet the earth in a fiery,
thoughtless death.

V. The Meaning of It All

We look around our natural world and find beauty in much of
what we see. We do this, in large part, because of the
massive size of the universe and the ever-illusive aspects of
trying to explore it and figure it out. When we begin to feel
divinely chosen, cosmically important, or in some way,
non-expendable, it is simply the result of evolved arrogance
that we give ourselves such an honorary place in the
scheme of things.

Coming from the days of primitive hunter-gatherers who
surmised that because their tent blew down, the great
invisible sky warriors were mad at them, we are predisposed
by our culture to adopt extraneous and unwarranted
explanations for the things we see around us. All
superstitions and naivety aside, the awe of the universe
quickly takes on a more negative meaning when we realize
our true place in it. Man is an animal, a transcendent rock, a
lively assemblage of atoms, elements, and minerals from
three and a half billion savage years of playing the
kill-or-be-killed game of evolution, Survival of the Fittest. We
are, in every aspect, children of the stars, upon which we
fixate in the night sky.

As Sir Arthur Eddington described it, we are "bits of a star
gone wrong."(6) The minerals that course through my body
were once forged in the heart of a behemoth hydrogen
reactor that came and went long before our sun was born.
With these facts in mind, it is with somber and grave
observation that I accept my place as a cosmically
unimportant being, a finite conglomeration of proteins,
protoplasm, and water. On a purely physical scale, I am
about as important to the universe as a teaspoon full of
trapped, condensed matter inside a distant pulsar on the
outer confines of the known universe, some thirteen billion
light years away from us. It is in the presence of the universe
as a whole that man fades into the sea of disheartening
insignificance.

In all of his ability to imagine, create, and mentally transcend
his environment, man finds himself out of place, like a fish in
a mud puddle, in a lonely universe that doesn't give a damn
about his hurt or his well being, either way. Our
ever-changing universe has existed for an eternity without
the approval or knowledge of man, and will continue to do so
for longer than even the mighty cockroach will be around to
see! A new world is upon us, one where man must readjust
and accept his lower rank in the grand scheme of existence.
Along with the gods, man is dethroned to a lesser seat.
Indeed, it will be hard for him to adjust to his new inferior
position, having once sat at the center of the universe. (JH)




________

WORKS CITED

1. Woolsey Teller, "The Atheism of Astronomy" The Truth
Seeker Company, 1938, p. 9

2. Jay M. Pasachoff. "Guide to Astronomy" Houghton Milton,
1997, p. 76-77

3. Mark Garlic. "The Expanding Universe" DK Publishing,
Inc. 2002, p. 38-40

4. Tufte, E. "What Turns On and Off Ice Ages?" 2005
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/. 1998.

5. Wikipedia Encyclopedia "Supermassive Black Holes."
2005 http://en.wikipedia.org/. 2003

6. Sir Authur Eddington. October 9, 1932. Article in New
York Times Magazine as quoted by Woolsey teller in "The
Atheism of Astronomy." 1938 The Truth Seeker Company, p.
3.