Isaac Asimov

In the spring of 1982 the philosopher Paul Kurtz sat with Isaac Asimov in his penthouse above Manhattan and asked him whether he was an agnostic, an atheist, a rationalist or a humanist. Asimov, by then the author of more than two hundred books and, the editors noted, the first subscriber to Kurtz's magazine Free Inquiry, answered that he was an atheist, outright. Then he explained why it had taken him so long to say so.¹²

He had been an atheist for years and years, he said, but he had thought the word intellectually unrespectable, because it claimed a knowledge he did not have; it had seemed better to call himself a humanist or an agnostic. In the end he decided he was a creature of emotion as well as reason. He had no proof that God did not exist, but he strongly suspected it, and he did not want to waste his time on the question.²

This chapter asks where that unbelief came from, why a man who wrote about almost everything waited so long to name it, and what it meant to him at the end.

Petrovichi and Brooklyn

He was born in Russia, in the village of Petrovichi in the Smolensk region, in 1920; the exact day is uncertain.³⁴ The family emigrated to the United States when he was three, and in Brooklyn his parents kept candy stores.⁵⁶ His parents were Orthodox Jews, but by the accounts drawn from his memoirs they did not press their religion on their children.⁷ Wikipedia, citing those memoirs, says that he declined a bar mitzvah at thirteen, and that he came to see the Torah as Hebrew mythology in the same way the Iliad is Greek mythology.⁸ This chapter has not yet checked those memoir pages, which are in copyright and could only be read in a borrowed copy, so the childhood crack, if there was one, is told here at second hand. In later life, by the same account, he wrote that he attended no services and had had no bar mitzvah, but that he was Jewish.⁹

A chemist who wrote

He entered Columbia at fifteen, took a doctorate in chemistry there in 1948, and from 1949 taught biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine.¹⁰¹¹ Meanwhile he wrote. His first letter appeared in Amazing Stories in November 1938, and his first story sold to the same magazine the next year.¹²¹³ In 1977 he told a reporter that he had led a quiet life, that he had done no original research of importance after 1958, and that his heart was in writing.¹⁴ By then he lived in a penthouse on West 66th Street, worked by artificial light with the blinds down, and had 188 books to his name, among them guides to Shakespeare and to the Bible.¹⁵¹⁶ He wrote about the Bible as a scholar of words, in Words in Genesis (1962) and Words from the Exodus (1963).¹⁷

His stories touched on creation without preaching. In "The Last Question" (1956) a computer asked how to reverse the death of the universe can answer only that the data are insufficient, until, at the end of everything, it repeats the first words of Genesis, and there is light.¹⁸ In 1983, lecturing for NASA, he said he had grown tired of the old robot plot in which a scientist who makes life has trespassed on the creator's ground, and had decided that robots ought to be machines with safeguards built in.¹⁹²⁰²¹ The lecture's foreword said that science changes how we live and what we believe.²²

The declaration

In the 1982 interview with Kurtz he went further than the label. The Bible, he said, was a human document, and he did not think anything was divinely inspired; its account of creation was wrong in almost every respect. He would not object if someone said God had started the big bang and then let the laws of nature run, but he did not believe it, and saw no evidence for a superhuman "Let it be." He had articles of faith of his own, he admitted, chief among them that the universe makes sense.²³ Eternal reward and punishment gave him no comfort: he was against punishment, he could not grasp an eternity of anything, and nothingness after death was the only prospect he found worth accepting.²⁴ Morality did not need God, he argued; one could be good simply because goodness makes the world run smoothly, and many people still thought an upright atheist was wicked. A fuss over his atheism, he said, might hurt the sale of his books, but something in him would not trade his opinions for a few extra dollars.²⁵ On the belief timeline, this is where his declaration falls.

In 1984 the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year.²⁶ Wikipedia, citing his memoir, says he was the association's honorary president from 1985 until his death; the association's own pages, as far as they were checked, do not name the office.²⁷

The last word

Near the end of his life a believer published an essay called "The Trouble with Atheists Is that They Don't Want to Believe." Its author named Asimov and Carl Sagan as scientists of shallow mind who clung to believing in nothing, and cited a Yale physicist as saying that leading scientists were open to religion. The critic's essay has not been found; his argument is known here only in Asimov's summary.²⁸ Asimov answered in "On Religiosity," written in 1991 and printed in the spring of 1992. He believed in science, he wrote, and nothing had ever led him to think that a God watched over him. The time of his death was approaching; he expected it to be nothingness, and he was thankful to atheism for taking away his fear of it. He called the Flood, Eden and Lot's wife myths and fairy tales, and ended by accusing the television preachers of caring only about sexual sin.²⁹ That essay is the last mark on his timeline. He died in New York in April 1992.³⁰

Did his unbelief change shape?

Hardly in substance. If the memoir accounts are right, he left his parents' religion as a boy without a struggle, and by his own account he was an atheist for years before he would use the word. What changed was the label: humanist and agnostic while he thought honesty required them, atheist once he decided that he was allowed to say what he strongly suspected. At the end, with death close, the word did the work he wanted from it, and took away the fear.

Kurt Vonnegut, who by Wikipedia's account followed him at the head of the American Humanist Association, has his own chapter in this book.