Natalie Angier, brilliant science and medicine writer, spoke recently here at New York’s own Ethical Culture Society about the fact that she and her husband, both atheists, are raising their daughter with an atheist outlook.

She had ‘em in stitches:

though I don’t go in for terribly many rituals, I did start the holiday season with the ritual viewing of the atheist’s favorite Christmas movie, “Coincidence on 34th Street.”

This is also the time of year, of course, when Jesus invariably screws up and commits some sort of felony. How else to explain why so many people seem to find him in jail?

But she had some thoughtful things to say about what it means to raise a child without religious indoctrination:

I’m here to talk about why my husband and I are raising our daughter as an atheist. The short, snappy answer is, We don’t believe in god. The longer, self-exculpating answer that is the theme du noir is, We believe it is the right thing to do. . . .

And so, to me, atheism means what it says – without god or gods, living your life without recourse to a large chiaroscuro of a supreme being to credit or to explain or to excuse. Now I’ll be the proud mother and say that my daughter understands this. A couple of days ago, in preparation for this talk, I was interviewing her, asking her a few questions about how she viewed her heathen heritage. First I asked her if she believed in god. She crinkled up her nose at me like I had mentioned something distasteful, like spinach and liver, or kissing a boy, and said, No! I asked her if she was sorry she’d been raised as an atheist, and she said no, she liked it. I asked why. First, she said, you don’t have to waste Sundays going to pray. Also I’d rather do things myself than have somebody else do them for me. If somebody gets sick, I wouldn’t just pray to god he or she gets better, I would try to buy some medicine for them, to help them get better.

Oh, I liked that answer. I couldn’t help it. This sounded to me like, what do you call it, a value system. She also said that she likes to see things for herself before believing in them. If a friend told me, guess what, I’ve got a flying dog, I’d say, can I see it. Katherine said she has friends who claim they’ve seen god. One of her close friends told her she’s seen bright lights in the middle of the night that she knows were signs from Jesus. So Katherine asked her if she could do a sleepover, to check out the light for herself. Oh, you’d never see it, her friend replied. Only people who believe in god can see it.

As Richard Dawkins has said, “With religion, there’s always an escape clause.” . . .

A couple of times she’s been told she’s going to go to hell – or, as she phrased it, the opposite of heaven; she’s remarkably curse-averse – but she says she doesn’t care because she doesn’t believe in either destination anyway. . . .

I’m a science writer. I’m fond of evidence, and I’m a serious devotee of the scientific method, and the entire scientific enterprise. Let me tell you, scientists as individuals can be as petty, insecure, vain, arrogant and opinionated as the rest of us. The myth of the noble, self-sacrificing scientist should never have been allowed to grow beyond the embryonic stem cell stage, and most scientists will tell you as much. But science as a discipline weeds out most of the bluster and blarmy, because it asks for proof. “One of the first things you learn in science,” one Caltech biologist told me, “is that how you want it to be doesn’t make any difference.” This is a powerful principle, and a very good thing, even a beautiful thing. This is something we should embrace as the best part of ourselves, our willingness to see the world as it is, not as we’re told it is, nor as our confectionary fantasies might wish it to be. Science is also extraordinarily unifying. You go to a great lab or to a scientific meeting, and you will see scientists from around the world, talking to each other and forming international collaborations. This is something we should be proud of, even if we ourselves are not scientists – that our species, our collective minds, our heads knocked together, are capable of making sense of the universe. So to me, this, more than anything, is what being an atheist means, an ongoing devotion to exploration, a giving of pride of place to evidence. And much to my dismay, religion often is at odds with the evidence-based portrait of reality that science has begun, yes, only just begun, fleshing out. The biggest example of this is in the ongoing debate over evolution. This is like Rasputin, or the character from the horror movie Halloween – it refuses to die. The statistics are appalling. This year, according to the Washington Post, some 40 states are dealing with new or ongoing challenges to the teaching of evolution in the schools. Four-fifths of our states. According to a recent CBS poll, 55 percent of Americans believe that god created humans in their present form – and that includes, I’m sorry to say, 47 percent of Kerry voters. Only 13 percent of Americans say that humans evolved from ancestral species, no god involved. Only 13 percent. The evidence that humans evolved from prehominid primates, and they from earlier mammals, and so on back to the first cell on earth some 3.8 billion years ago is incontrovertible, is based on a Himalayan chain’s worth of data. The evidence for divine intervention is, to date, non-existent. Yet here we have people talking about it as though they were discussing whether they prefer chocolate praline ice cream or rocky road, as though it were a matter of taste.

To me, this borders on being, well, unethical. And to me, instilling in my daughter an appreciation for the difference between evidence and opinion is a critical part of childrearing. So when I tell my daughter why I’m an atheist, I explain it is because I see no evidence for a god, a divinity, a big bearded mega-king in the sky. And you know something – she gets that. She got it way back when, and I think once you get it, it’s pretty hard to lose it. . . .

Ah, but what of values, of learning the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? What about tradition, what about ritual, what about the holidays that children love so much? How will a child learn to be good without religious training? Well, damn. Do you really need formal religion to teach a child to be good, to be honest, to try not to hurt other people’s feelings, to care about something other than yourself? These are all variants on the golden rule, and there is nothing more powerful, in my experience, than sitting down with your kid and saying, how would you feel if somebody did that to you? There is a growing body of scientific research that demonstrates we are by nature inclined to cooperate, to trust others, even strangers, to an extraordinary degree. Even strangers we can’t see, over the internet, and even strangers that we’ll never meet again. None of this owes anything to the ten commandments. . . .

And as one who believes strongly in peace, I’ve taken her on march after march, before the Iraq war, during the republican convention. I had her miss her first day of third grade this year, so she could participate in a ceremony downtown, the reading of the names of people who have died in the Iraq war. She read the names of the children. I know I’m sounding pious here, and I’m sorry about that, but these are just some of the examples of things I’ve tried to do to make her a good person, to give her a sense of meaning larger than herself. And yes, we celebrate the holidays. We buy and decorate a Christmas tree, light the menorah, our house is encrusted with lights, including a big peace sign. I’ve told Katherine about how Christmas predates jesus, and how people have long felt the need, in the darkest, coldest time of the year, to battle the blackness with lights, music, family, the evergreen tree to symbolize life, and, oh, yes, presents. None of this seems like hypocrisy to me. It’s common sense. It is magic, it is ours, and godness has nothing to do with it. . . .

I’d like to make one final point, an admission of the biggest challenge we faced when we decided to go the godfree route: what to talk about when you talk about death. For a while, Katherine was terrified about death. We’d be driving along in the car, and all of a sudden she’d start screaming in the back seat. What’s wrong, what’s wrong? We’d ask, thinking we had to pull over for a medical emergency. I’ve just been thinking about death! She’d cry. I don’t want to just disappear! To die forever and that’s all, that’s the end. This happened a few times, each time, out of nowhere, she’d start to wail. We’d tell her whatever we could to comfort her, that she will live a long, long time, and that they’re inventing new drugs that will, by the time she grows up, help her live even longer, a couple of hundred years, who knows; she’d live until she was pig-sick of it. And we’d tell her that nothing really disappears, it just changes form, and that she could become part of a dolphin, or an eagle, or a cheetah, a praying mantis. She’d have none of it. She knew she wouldn’t be aware of her new incarnation. She knew she probably wouldn’t remember her life as Katherine, and that loss of self she found impossibly sad. As do I, the loss of her, the loss of myself. As do all of us. Learning how to die is one of the greatest tasks of life, and it’s one that most us never quite get the hang of, until we realize, whoops, not much of a trick here, is there. Not much of a choice, either.

Still, I didn’t go with the stories, of the angels, of the harps, the eternal reciting of that old Monty Python routine, “o lord you are so big, so absolutely huge. We’re all really impressed here, Lord, I can tell you that.” And lately Katherine seems to have gotten past those terror jags. She hasn’t had an outburst for the past year or two.

I don’t know the answer to fear of death, surprise surprise. But I find it interesting that religious people, who talk ceaselessly of finding in their religion a larger sense of purpose, a meaning greater than themselves, at the same time are the ones who insist their personal, copyrighted souls, presumably with their 70-odd years of memory intact, will survive in perpetuity. Maybe that’s the real ethic of atheism. By confronting the inevitability of your personal expiration date, you know there is a meaning much grander than yourself.

I think that about covers it. (I love her kid, too! That’s going to be one smart, well-grounded teenager.)

UPDATE:

By coincidence (unless Jesus did it), I noticed Joe Carter had commented on the same speech over at evangelical outpost. He remarks:

“By confronting the inevitability of your personal expiration date, you know there is a meaning much grander than yourself. The river of life will go on, as it has for nearly 4 billion years on our planet, and who knows for how long and how abundantly on others. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and we, as matter, will always matter, and the universe will forever be our home.” [Emphasis added]

In an attempt at profundity, Angier let slip one of the most absurd beliefs of Western-style atheism: that a purely physical world can be imbued with meaning.

I’m not entirely sure what Angier means by her statement, but I’m entirely unsure what Joe means by his. This business of “meaning” of entities other than mental concepts (”the meaning of life”, “the meaning of the universe”) always makes me uncomfortable, and I wish atheists wouldn’t traffic in such talk. It seems to me wooly-headed and, well, meaningless. But it seems clear enough what Angier is getting at: that one can take a sense of excitement and connectedness from knowing the truth of one’s place as a fascinating product of a fascinating universe. As Darwin so aptly said, in just the same context: “There is grandeur in this view of life.” The writings of Jacob Bronowski, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Jay Gould bubble with it.

Joe seems to take the line here that “meaning” - like so many other dictatorial absolutes of Christianity - comes only from being subject to (his) God. I see no reason to imagine this, even if one were a religious believer. I suppose God can give “meaning” to inanimate objects and natural events, assuming God has the power to do logically incoherent things, and indeed the Bible suggests he has done so: the “meaning” of pain in childbirth is original sin; the “meaning” of being bitten on the foot by a snake is original sin; the “meaning” of having a sweaty face is original sin; the “meaning” . . . wait a minute . . . OK, let’s move on. At any rate, none of that suggests that we, as intelligent creatures capable of embuing our mental processes with “meaning” in the real sense, cannot find meaning elsewhere.

If Joe takes “meaning” to be some sort of religiously predicated truth we are required to find in the natural world in defiance of what we actually do perceive there, then of course he is right that an atheistic perspective is not going to be receptive to such meaning. But if he merely means it in the informal sense of “value” or “importance,” his claim that atheists cannot find it is not only false, it is proven false by the statement that he quotes, asserting such value from an atheistic perspective. To make his claim to the contrary true, he can only define “meaning” as a religious term, which is not only bizarrely idiosyncratic but extremely narrow. All he has proven is that he does not see the value and significance of his true place in the world, and so has invented one for himself that he then criticizes others for not adopting. But there is a much broader, much more sweeping, much more fascinating sense of the world to be found by seeing it as it is. There is grandeur in that view of life.