Atheist Genesis

Mark Shea:

In the Beginning, there was Nothing--and it Exploded

Gradually, over time, the explosion cooled into little bits that just acted the way they acted because they do. These bits combined into more and more complicated stuff. The stuff interacted according to physical laws that just happen to be fine tuned so that the stuff could manifest characteristics called life. At this point, the All Explaining Theory of Everything called Evolution kicked in, leading in short order to bacteria, jellyfish, trilobites, bony fish, amphibians, dinosaurs, mammal, homo erectus, homo sapiens, various stupid civilizations enslaved to the god meme that accidently evolved in our brains, and Me: Homo Rationalisticus, who has kicked down the ladder of prehistory and taken my place as a Truly True free being. Sooner or later, I will build a rocket and colonize the universe. Or, alternatively, I will be destroyed in an Armageddon ignited by human folly and die declaiming about the pointlessness and futility of the whole meaningless whirl of time space matter and energy. But one thing I will never do is consider the possibility that Nothing does not just explode and create everything, because that would bring me perilously close to suggesting the existence of You Know Who.

That's more or less the Creation Myth of the reader of popular science mags these days. I think of it because a reader writes...