Anyway, I’m not having a go. I’m a Christite. Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged. Bang on!
One particular Christmas, I was staying at my sister’s house in Cheddar. It is a house packed with people: my sister, her husband, their three practically totally grown-up children, with various boyfriends or girlfriends in tow. But there’s also a menagerie of cats and dogs and who knows what other pets hidden round every corner.
They woke me up early for Christmas breakfast, which wasn’t totally appreciated, as I’d had a late Christmas Eve in the pub with my old school friends and was feeling a little delicate. But I managed to rouse myself for another day of drinking and gorging and then drinking and gorging some more—it’s what Jesus would have wanted.
That night I was pretty glad to excuse myself from my parents’ house and head round the corner to my sister’s for an early night. The rest of the family stayed where they were to eat and drink some more.
I went into the bathroom to rid myself of waste and was surprised to see one of the family cats sitting in the bath tub. I couldn’t be bothered to chase it out into the house. If it wanted to watch me have a poo then that was up to it. Neither of us, I am sure, was remotely turned on by the idea of a cat watching a man defecate. And anyone who says that I am turned on by a cat watching me defecate is lying.
The cat seemed to be trying to drink some water out of the tap and was licking at it hopefully, but there was hardly any moisture there at all. So in an act of generosity which I am sure would have made Jesus happy if he was watching, I leant over from my seat and gently turned the cold tap in the hope of making more of a dribble of water come out to quench the thirst of this destitute Christmas cat. I could already see the children’s book being written about this act of charity. It was a beautiful scene and for me summed up the whole festival.
But the tap moved quite a bit without any more water coming out and I was concerned that if I turned the dial too far, too fast then a deluge would occur, soaking the cat below, sending it into a tornado of wet cat rage, which would ruin the story. How would kids respond to the sight of a fat naked man on a toilet being bitten in the face by a drenched moggy? Badly. Book sales would plummet.
The taps gurgled and a small stream of water started coming out. The cat licked away at the tap with all its might, sucking on the tap for what seemed like ages. It got its fur slightly wet, but it didn’t seem to care. It must have been really thirsty. I am not saying that my sister is not looking after her animals and is failing to give them drink. You must draw your own conclusions on this and only phone the RSPCA if you are sure she is guilty.
I have to say that from where I was sitting this was one of the funniest sights I have seen all year. To appreciate the humour, you might have to find a thirsty cat and put it in a bath and then get it under a drizzle of water, but I laughed as much at this as I have at anything in ages. It seemed to me the cat was laughing too. But then I suppose he had quite a funny view as well.
But surely Jesus got the best view, getting the hilarity of both the drinking cat and the fat defecating man, which I am pleased about because it’s nice that he should have something to make him laugh on his birthday. Especially when he’s the only person who doesn’t get loads of presents today, which seems a bit rich, but we all have our cross to bear.
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.
SIMON SINGH
While Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas, atheists may wonder if there is another birth which 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 that 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 billion years 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 colours, 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 inventing a beautiful insult. If a colleague annoyed him, Zwicky would scream out ‘spherical bastard’. Just as a sphere looks the same from every direction, a spherical bastard was someone who was a bastard whatever way you looked at them.
A second pillar was needed to support the Big Bang model and this time the crucial evidence relied on measuring the ingredients of the universe, most importantly hydrogen and helium. These are smallest atoms in the Periodic Table and the most common in the universe, accounting for 74% and 24% of all the atoms. Crucially, the only way to create such large amounts of hydrogen and helium is in the wake of the Big Bang. In particular, the pressure, density and temperature of the early universe would have cooked exactly the right amount of hydrogen and fused it into exactly the right amount of helium. In other words, the Big Bang is the best (and probably the only) way to explain the abundances of these light elements.
Nearly all the other elements were made later in collapsing stars. These stars provided the perfect environment for the nuclear reactions that give rise to the heavier elements that are essential for life. Marcus Chown, author of The Magic Furnace, highlighted the startling significance of stellar alchemy: ‘In order that we might live, stars in their billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions even, have died. The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the oxygen that fills our lungs each time we take a breath—all were cooked in the furnaces of the stars which expired long before the Earth was born.’
Because we are made from the debris of nuclear reactions that took place in exploding stars, the romantics among you might like to think of yourselves as being composed of stardust. On the other hand, cynics might prefer to think of yourselves as nuclear waste.
The