I still do get lots of letters from creationists. Their general tone is usually one of smugness: they’ve got a “gotcha” question they can’t wait to unload on an evilutionist.

dear prof pz myers

can an explosion(big bang)+time= a car?

yours

א ב

Why do you ask a yes/no question about something as complex as the origin of the universe? I can tell from how you chose to ask this question that you aren’t actually interested in the answer, but only want a binary response in which you can either get a “no,” in which case you’ll preen and claim you’ve got me to agree that natural causes are impossible, or you’ll get a “yes,” in which case you’ll fall back on your ignorant intuition and tell me that that is impossible. You aren’t sincere, and you aren’t curious, and you are not an honest seeker after the truth.

Your question is also badly formed; I can’t answer yes or no because it’s phrased in such a way as to reveal your false assumptions. You are equating your colloquial understanding of an explosion to a cosmological event, the Big Bang, and also making an implied demand for a complete causal chain covering a period of 13.8 billion years. A bit presumptuous, don’t you think, that you feel you can dash off a thoughtless question and expect a persuasive answer on a difficult topic?

It’s a commonplace cliche that a teacher will tell a class that there’s no such thing as a stupid question. The teacher is lying. I’ve run across many stupid questions, and you, sir, have written one. It’s not even amazingly stupid or creatively stupid or newly stupid; it’s mundanely stupid. It’s the stupidity of a parrot squawking what, to it, are nonsense syllables, and expecting a cracker for its effort. Further, it’s not a parrot repeating fragments of the speech of great philosophers or scientists, but a parrot fed on nothing but an aural diet of the mumblings of benighted fools.

So, I’m sorry, but I’m unimpressed. Try harder. Try thinking for a change.

As for the meat of your question, the cosmological expansion of the universe in the first instant of its beginning was something a little more profound and substantial than an “explosion”. The phrase “Big Bang” is shorthand, a metaphor, for a process that is seen in a rich data set of observations and that can be encapsulated in the language of physics and math. You’re clearly a religious person: ask your rabbi about “metaphors”. They’re used even in your holy books, and you’ll find yourself led to even more ridiculous conclusions about the nature of the universe if you follow every one of them strictly literally.

But if we generalize your question and ask whether explosions can lead to greater complexity and even greater organization, the answer is yes. A better example of such a phenomenon that better fits your casual understanding of the meaning of the word “explosion” is the aftermath of supernovae. The reactions that occur in the hearts of stars are part of a process called nucleosynthesis, in which smaller atoms are fused (it’s why these are called fusion reactions) to produce larger atoms; from a starting point of hydrogen stars build up larger atoms, like carbon and iron. And then at the end of their lifetime, the stars literally explode, dispersing those large elements in vast clouds that condense under the influence of gravity to form new stars and planets.

So yes, the iron in your car was forged in a star and scattered to our planet in an explosion. The carbon of which automotive engineers and factory workers are made was also assembled in a star that exploded.

The second term in your equation, time, is also an attempt to trivialize a phenomenon. Yes, “time” built us. But by time, of course, more sensible people mean a complex set of historical interactions and natural processes that were necessary for change to occur. Why do you regard it as something insignificant? We could say that you were the product of a messy eruption of fluids and cells from your mother and father plus “time”…but do you consider your embryonic development, your growth as a child and adolescent, your education (which, I’m sorry to say, was actually where you were shortchanged), your experiences and years of thoughts (shallow as they were), are simply reducible to a four-letter word?

Can ovulation/ejaculation+time=you?

Only in the most trivial and unhelpful sense. Just like your question.

Here’s something that really, really annoys me: clueless idiots who blame atheism for creationism.

I don’t have stats but I strongly suspect that the strenghtening of creationism with the simultaneous rise of public atheism is not a coincidence.

That isn’t just ahistorical ignorance: it requires such short-sightedness that they aren’t able to look back even a decade.

The major events in creationism that led to their expansion were the publications of the Scofield Reference Bible and The Fundamentals in the early years of the 20th century, and the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961. Neither periods were associated with a rise in atheism. The first actually coincides with the third Great Awakening; I don’t want to diminish the importance of Robert Ingersoll and the Golden Age of Freethought, but lets not pretend that these were serious challenges to the ubiquitous association of the church with morality and political power. They were promises of secularism that didn’t threaten the status quo all that much, yet. If you wanted something that was scaring many conservatives of that time, look to the Suffrage Movement. I don’t see many people arguing that women’s rights were responsible for creationism, but I expect they are out there.

The second major event in creationism came after the entrenchment of Christianity in the 1950s as part of the Cold War. Our money was splattered with “in God we trust” and “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance in the 1950s; where, pray tell, were the loud aggressive atheists who prompted those religious actions in that period? Is anyone seriously going to argue that the era of the gray flannel suit and Ward Cleaver and the Red Menace was a time of high atheist activity?

Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s lawsuit to end the reading of the Bible in public schools was settled by the Supreme Court in 1963. It was not a trigger for widespread public piety, but was a response to that association of patriotism and civil life and religiosity that had been brewing in this country since the end of World War II. American Atheists was founded after “in God we trust”. Finding a causal relationship that pins the blame on atheism has a few temporal difficulties.

The Institute for Creation Research was founded in 1972. Answers in Genesis was founded in 1980. The NCSE was established in 1983, in response to the rising influence of creationism in the schools (and it is explicitly NOT an atheist organization). No one was trying to insert atheism into the schools in the 1960s. No one is trying to do that even now, but we’ve been dealing with efforts to push Genesis crap and faith-based bullshit in the schools for at least 60 years.

The Moral Majority was big news in the early 1980s, and was founded in 1979. I was wide awake and politically aware in the 1980s; there were no big atheist role models making a noise in the public sphere, they were still little more than a despised minority at the time, and most people were surprised to learn that atheists even existed in America.

The recent rise of public atheism can be traced to a number of influential books. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, by Susan Jacoby, published in 2004. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason in 2004 and Letter to a Christian Nation in 2006, by Sam Harris. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins in 2006.

It’s been less than ten goddamned years.

And we’ve still got idiots claiming they see a correlation between creationism/public religiosity and outspoken atheists.

Listen, whenever you see someone making that claim, you know you’ve found an idiot talking out of their ass. Give them a look of contempt and walk away.