Sep 17 2008
Four millennia after Abraham fathered Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and 150,000 years after hominids introduced burial rituals to the Mediterranean, religion will finally be made compatible with science on September 27, 2008. From that day forward, a two-story downtown Berkeley building dubbed the Atheon will provide a spiritual home for rational people in California, and guidance to acolytes worldwide.
Establishment of an Atheon has been a high priority in the scientific community for the past several years, rivaling even enthusiasm for the new Large Hadron Collider. "When you listen to people like Nobel-laureate cosmologist Steven Weinberg, or Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, you hear a lot of talk about how god-based religion is out-of-date," says conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, founder of the Atheon. "The leading minds believe that science can and should provide a spiritually satisfying replacement. But until recently no one bothered to consider what form that alternative might take."
Mr. Keats recognized that this was a role for an artist. "Renaissance masters such as Michelangelo did so much to make Christianity palatable to the masses," he observes. While Mr. Keats himself can neither paint nor sculpt, leading institutions including the Berkeley Art Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts have affirmed his ability to think artistically, featuring his conceptual work in multiple recent exhibitions. Moreover, he's the only living artist to take an interest in building a temple to science. "I'm hardly the best person for the job," he admits, "but if I didn't take it on, nobody would."
Late last year, Mr. Keats approached the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley with the idea of temporarily installing a prototype Atheon in their newly-acquired downtown building, which was slated for major overhaul. "The building has fourteen-foot-high cathedral-style windows," says chief curator Alla Efimova, "and frankly nothing was planned there during restoration when Jonathon came along." With a grant from UC Berkeley's Chancellor's Community Partnership Fund -- alleged to be considerably less than the $10 billion spent on the Large Hadron Collider -- construction of the Atheon began.
This week, Mr. Keats goes public with his plans. "The essence of religion is stained glass and song," he says. In the case of the Atheon, the stained glass is patterned to show the cosmic microwave background radiation -- capturing the universe in the first several hundred thousand years of creation -- using NASA's new WMAP satellite data. "The cosmic microwave background is the sky's natural stained glass, our origin story imprinted on the cosmos," explains Mr. Keats. "And now it's visible to us for the first time, glowing through the windows of the Atheon."
The song composed for the Atheon is equally scientific, a canon for three cosmic voices titled "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" The canon is comprised of sounds pulsating through several hypothetical universes as well as our own living cosmos, musically arranged by Mr. Keats using audio files produced by University of Virginia astronomer Mark Whittle. According to Mr. Keats, "these universes don't provide any answers. If people are to find spirituality in science, it's likely to be by immersing themselves in questions."
For the foreseeable future, disciples will have to do so on the sidewalk. Due to construction work inside the new Magnes Museum building, the Atheon will be visible only from the exterior, at the corner of Harold Way and Kittredge Street. The windows will be illuminated nightly until February 1, 2009, and the canon will be audible by cellphone, as well as on a special website devoted to the Atheon: http://www.magnes.org/atheon. The Atheon website, now live, also glows with the cosmic microwave background radiation, so that people everywhere can turn off their lights and set up a miniature shrine to science on their home computer.
"Eventually there will be an Atheon in every town," anticipates Mr. Keats, who's organizing a synod at UC Berkeley in December to consider this eventuality. "There will be many different architectures and diverse liturgies. Science will make a fine religion," he predicts. "What remains to be determined is whether this religion will be good science."