Isaac Asimov's "The Tragedy of the Moon"

I found this great video on YouTube that lists several famous atheists:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdVucvo-kDU

I am often surprised that many scientists like Francis Collins and Michael Behe, with their knowledge of science, still cling to their belief in the supernatural Judeo-Christian god as the creator of the universe. Although I too believed in a god when I was a child, when I first learnt the scientific explanations for life and the universe, I realised that science offered a much more elegant and satisfying explanation for our being as compared to the religious explanations.

As a child, I had read the bible stories in my school library, and I felt that the stories were like fairy tales (Adam and Eve and a talking snake, Noah and his titanic boat, Moses and the killing of all first born children in Egypt etc). However, my adult teachers say these were facts that really happened as they are written in the bible. Luckily, I was also brought up on stories of Chinese and Hindu gods, and I immediately realised that all their creation stories of how the world was made conflicted with one another. By the time I was 13, I already knew that since none of these religious creation stories are the same, the religious explanations were probably all wrong, and the stories are really myths, just like all the other fairy tales I have read.

In 1979, I read a book by Isaac Asimov called "The Tragedy of the Moon", which was actually a collection of his science essays. The main essay, that is also the title of the book, gave Asimov's explanation on why he think it was a tragedy for Earth to have a Moon, and speculated on how much better it would have been for humankind if the Earth had no Moon.

The main premise of that essay is that because of the Moon, which does revolve around the Earth, the ancients were led to the belief that the Sun must also revolve around the Earth, and similarly for all the stars in the sky. Earth must be the centre of the universe, and humans are special and must be created by god since god has put humans to inhabit the Earth.

Asimov argued that if the Moon did not exist, humans would have realised much earlier that the Earth actually revolved around the Sun, and that science and astronomy would not have been set back by thousands of years because of the wrong belief of an Earth-centric solar system instead of the correct helio-centric solar system.

In that essay, I learnt about Christianity's horrible treatment of scientists like Galileo Galilei and Copernicus because they had dared to question the belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and to raise doubt that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. I subsequently learnt how harshly the Christians have treated scientists for speaking about science that conflicted with the bible, condemning innocent people for witchcraft, forcing people into slavery, or forcing religious conversions on people of other religions. Christianity certainly did not earn my admiration.

In the following year, I watched Carl Sagan's enormously fascinating "Cosmos" series on TV. By then, I realised that good scientific explanations could be offered for many questions on the aspects of life. There was no need for any recourse to a magical being for explaining why things were so. The religious explanations for life were so insufficient and lacking in so many ways.

From then onwards, I would reply my Christian friends who tell me that "man is made by god " that they were wrong, and that instead, it is god who is made by man.