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This, then, is the spirituality of an atheist. During clear, starry nights far from civilization, when I look up and up at the endless expanse and try to hold that entire vastness in my head, and discover anew that this is an impossible task - that is when I experience a genuine sense of awe. It is a breathtaking discovery every time to learn that the universe is a greater and more wonderful place than we imagine, or can imagine. The stars glowing like lanterns in the night, from ancient, swollen red giants to hot young blue suns. The misty stellar cradles of great nebulae. The unimaginably violent flares of supernovae that briefly outshine the entire rest of the cosmos combined. The spinning, flickering pulses of neutron stars and black holes that spew out jets of hot matter hundreds of light-years long. The headlong rush of the universal expansion and the stately revolutions of our own galaxy. The vast, cold, endless dark between stars. The many worlds scattered throughout the cosmos, at least one of which bears intelligent life that can trace its own beginnings all the way back to the Big Bang and the first emergence of self-replicating molecules from the primordial sea of the young Earth. When I contemplate these things, this is when I experience a sense of wonder. We are stardust, part of the cosmos that is our home. We are, in a sense, the universe examining itself. From our humble beginnings on this unassuming blue and green ball orbiting an ordinary yellow main-sequence star, our examination has peered across the light-years and back through the eons to unravel the very beginnings of time and space themselves, and along the way has seen enough beauty to pain the heart. The universe was not put here for us; our primeval terror at its vastness more than serves to show this. But we can appreciate it nonetheless, and to do so is both an uplifting and humbling experience, one that dwarfs us even as it touches and elevates us beyond measure.

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