My June/July 2021 essay on how the little-noticed mass death of billions of immature humans, as well as the endless suffering of animals, rips away any pretense that a god and his earthly creation could be benign and moral spent nearly all its time denouncing worship of a creator as fatally depraved. I briefly noted that nontheists too often over-praise natural creation as a source of profound awe and wonder for those who do not imagine a supernatural power is behind our existence. I intended to later address that also little-noted, albeit not-so-critical, issue. As it happened, in the same FI issue, an article on Phil Zuckerman’s unique secular studies department at Pitzer included the topic of secular awe. So here we go.

It’s a fairly common thesis. Many logically posit that one reason theism has been so popular is because the grandiose purpose-filled stories that are part of nearly all religions are pretty cool and inspiring. They seem to give a reason things are the way they are as they portray the power and majesty of the alleged creator and why it demands and deserves our thanks and fealty, while offering excuses for why we should pay little mind to the dark sides of living on Earth. It is probably no accident that the most popular religions—Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—all involve elaborate creation narratives.

This has led to a degree of atheist Big Origin Tale envy. One that many nontheists deal with for advocacy purposes and/or personal reasons by opting for the notion that we nontheists need our own origin tale, albeit a fact-based epic with its own thrilling storyline. Many times over the decades I have read claims by atheists that the scientific reality of the universe is at least as awe-inspiring as those old-fashioned fictional legends. No more Earth being a flat disc under celestial spheres merely thousands of miles across created just three hundred generations ago. Instead, a vast cosmos spanning billions of light years, containing trillions of stars and mind-boggling black holes in billions of galaxies, perhaps packed full of otherworldly life, some intelligent, that sprang into being almost fourteen billion years ago. Like, wow! And here on Earth all the creatures small and great were not created only a few thousand years ago ex nihilo pretty much as they are now but have evolved via the great Darwinian struggle of life over billions of orbits of the Sun from a few simple microbes to a spectacular flora and fauna. Like, way more cool. The likes of Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins have proffered the atheo-secular thesis that the natural formed universe matches if not exceeds the archaic myths.

From a more socio-psychological perspective, Phil Zuckerman—with whom I have collaborated in the past—formally proposes the concept of “aweism” (FI, April/May 2009). Not long after the Dover Trial put a legal bullet into the carcass of intelligent design creationism, a young reporter giving a talk on the event in Baltimore was in tears as she discussed the evolutionary marvel that was the birth of her child.

I certainly get the tendency to romanticize our universe and earthly life. In 1978, I was at the Cleveland-Lloyd dinosaur quarry that happens to be a few miles from the desert Utah town my grandmother grew up in. Sleeping in a bag, the Milky Way in the crystal desert night was so spectacularly clear that I felt I was looking out at it rather than up. The galaxy is amazing. Yet, it is a rather disorderly affair that gives no sign of clever design, and its immensity is an illusion of us being so teeny. I have been to Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone—which John Muir thought were the best examples of God’s works—but as pretty as they are, they are harsh lands rather hostile to the humans with whom the creator is supposedly obsessed.

Assume our planet was such a nice and safe place that animals suffered little and nearly all children grew up. Now that would be truly awesome. But a habitat so child-toxic that it has torturously murdered half of those ever born before their preteens is not close to splendid. Spectacular, amazing, often beautiful, yes—but such a cruel place cannot be worthy of deep admiring awe. To live in such a mental state risks narcissism; it pays too little attention to how only a minority of humans have enjoyed fulfilling lives.

The fact is, much of nature is very nasty—disease, droughts, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, famines. Natural selection operates by killing off most young creatures, humans included. It’s the law of the jungle. Evolution is like war. Both nature and war can create beauty—the Supermarine Spitfire fighter is a contender for the most graceful airplane ever, and the beginning of Pickett’s Charge was described as magnificent by the Union soldiers who then slaughtered thousands of the traitors. Some socio-historians posit that it was war that compelled societies to develop the organizational skills and technologies that made possible the civilizations that would eventually drive down juvenile mortality to a few percent (while wars have killed hundreds of millions total, modern medicine has saved billions of children). War is, however, too lethal and traumatizing to earn praise and wonder. Being even more deadly, nature for all its positives must not be over-lauded.

I have proposed The Demand that theists must at long last offer a convincing argument for why it is anywhere close to moral to worship a creator that has overseen the deaths of the fifty billion kids they have cynically ignored—similar to how many evangelicals oppose exposing American racism as “divisive”—or admit they are wrong. Being an equal-opportunity critic, I urge nontheists who propose we be in awe of our cosmos to directly address and explain why in the face of the Disasters of the Innocents to which those who propose the awe strategy have given so little consideration.

The grim situation on Earth is equal opportunity in proving that creation cannot be moral or truly beneficent, whether its cause is a supernatural mind or mindless nature. Exposing the impossibility of a good god is vital for secular humanism, because it promises to further damage the unjustified popularity of theism. The inability of nontheism to accurately urge nonbelievers to be in amazed wonder of our existence is a promotional frustration. But nontheists mustn’t parallel the theists in engaging in unwarranted propaganda. We must never again neglect the Holocaust of the Children; it should always be front and center.