What follows is TL;DR, 1700 words. That's just how it emerged. It sets forth what kept me from becoming atheist for some time. It omits all of what made me skeptical of religion; that's been rehashed by all of us ad nauseum. This is what stayed my change of mind.
In my late teens I believed whatever god was would protect personalities who would make significant contributions to humanity. Ernest Gann was a famous author in the mid 20th century who, among many books, wrote Fate Is the Hunter, a chronicle of events he’d survived as an airline pilot, where the degree of coincidence in each event appeared exceedingly improbable (hence the title). I read that book straight through cover to cover, absolutely gripped by it, and thought at the time that of course Gann survived all those hair raising escapes because god was protecting an important author. Gann did not express a similar view; he quit his airline career because the cumulative narrow escapes made him think his number was imminent if he kept tempting fate.
Likewise another author I admired was Richard Bach, who had the incredible luck to write Jonathan Livingston Seagull at the height of the 1960s self-actualization craze and made millions. I thought that book was sub-par for Bach; the writings I really admired were his escapades as a pilot. His book Nothing by Chance, chronicling his months of barnstorming across the Midwest in the mid 60s in a rare Detroit Parks biplane he treated like a beat up VW Bug, was another recounting of belief that, like his title, nothing happened randomly. He was another author I imagined god was shielding from actual disaster.
One day at age 14 I peeked into a hangar with the skeletons of wooden wings on sawhorses and asked the man there if I could help. He said pick up that coffee can of varnish and start varnishing the wings. Brushing happily, I made a private vow they would never get rid of me. The restoration took two years and in that two years my involvement in flying, pardon the expression, took off. The owner of the biplane, a Waco UPF-7, was president of the Flying 10 flying club, and in exchange for working on the restoration I was taught to fly, soloing on my 16th birthday in October 1970.
In that year I’d become friends with a prominent plastic surgeon who owned a Cessna 336 Skymaster with two other partners. Dr. Jerry Jacobsen (Doc) would allow me to fly the 336 from the left seat, even before I’d soloed. I spent many afternoons and evenings helping him maintain the airplane.
In December 1970 I hadn’t seen Doc for awhile and wondered where he’d gone. I still washed and polished the 336 so wherever he was, he was still nearby.
On December 30 I happened to be on the airport’s west side, which I seldom visited, and there was Doc, preflighting a Twin Comanche. The 336 was down for annual so he was spending the down time getting his unrestricted multi-engine rating (the 336 had its twin engines in-line in the fuselage, so the rating to fly it was restricted to in-line configurations only). He invited me along for the next lesson. Afterward he invited me to join him the next day for that day’s lesson.
That evening at home my mom reminded me I’d promised to go with the family to visit family friends for the new year celebration. I was disappointed to miss the flight but a promise is a promise.
Arriving home at 1:30 in the morning our telephone was ringing. My sister answered and then handed me the phone. A friend who was also learning to fly said “Doc’s dead”. He’d crashed with his instructor and another passenger, killing all aboard.
It was only chance I wasn’t that 3rd passenger. I still had the hubris of youth and imagined that someday I’d be famous and important so thought (with an embarrassing casualness) that, like for Gann and Bach, god had kept me out of that airplane.
Meanwhile the Waco was finished and ready to be taken to airshows. It had been acquired as a derelict that had spent a decade outside neglected, and its engine had not been run in all that time. The mechanics involved in the restoration at one point ran the engine, which sounded fine, so the decision was made to not disassemble it.
Its pilot for its first trip to an airshow had just been checked out in it, his introduction to taildraggers. When we departed for the airshow he had perhaps 3 hours of flying time in it. During the flight to the airshow the engine would occasionally backfire.
The day of departure after the show was windy, across the runway. On the takeoff roll the pilot, still not actually proficient with a big ol’ biplane taildragger with two sets of wings full of surface area for the crosswind to grab, was too timid with the rudder as the airplane started to swing. Unable to stop the swing, he pulled the airplane off the ground. It leaped up and immediately out of ground effect dropped a wing in a stall. The pilot managed to get it straight just as we touched back down, but it instantly began another more violent groundloop, and the pilot heaved it back into the air. And it stalled again once out of ground effect. I remember, sitting in the front cockpit, looking straight ahead at the runway in front of us rising up to smash us, calmly thinking “people sometimes get hurt when things like this happen”.
Striking the runway tore off a gear leg and smashed up two wings. The propellor didn’t survive; I still have one of its demolished tips as a memento (I keep planning to have it engraved “Maintain thine airspeed lest the earth rise up and smite thee” but after all these years it still resides on my mantle undefaced). We were unscathed.
The next weekend the disassembled wreck was trucked back for restoration.
The decision to disassemble the engine was no longer discretionary. The law mandates full teardown if the propellor is struck.
During disassembly pieces of metal came out too damaged to have been damaged by the crash; they had failed prior to that attempted takeoff. The fragments were the corroded remains of the ball cages of the main crankshaft ball bearings. When the bearing itself was taken out several balls were missing.
Had the takeoff proceeded without mishap, the engine would likely have lost all its oil shortly after takeoff and quit running, right about at a point in the flight where the route crossed a forested mountain range with no place to make an emergency landing. The ineptitude of the pilot smashing it on takeoff probably saved both our lives.
And again, my youthful hubris had me believing the hand of providence was saving me for saving the world itself at some later date. If looking at the state of the world today indicates its savior is late in showing up, my only excuse 50 years on is I’ve been distracted, but now you know whom to blame.
All of the foregoing is to show that I had lots of strong reason to think that a god was acting as an overseer, and were the most difficult to let go of when my accumulating skepticism finally pushed me to being full atheist. I recall that day – not the calendar moment – just that it was the day I made the mental leap. It gave me a cold feeling, recognizing that there was NO protection, NO overseer, that we were totally on our own, as humankind, to solve our problems by ourselves. But as a matter of reason, it’s what made more sense than all the hollow desires and prayers of religion.
It’s what, finally, gave me the greatest comfort.
In my late teens I believed whatever god was would protect personalities who would make significant contributions to humanity. Ernest Gann was a famous author in the mid 20th century who, among many books, wrote Fate Is the Hunter, a chronicle of events he’d survived as an airline pilot, where the degree of coincidence in each event appeared exceedingly improbable (hence the title). I read that book straight through cover to cover, absolutely gripped by it, and thought at the time that of course Gann survived all those hair raising escapes because god was protecting an important author. Gann did not express a similar view; he quit his airline career because the cumulative narrow escapes made him think his number was imminent if he kept tempting fate.
Likewise another author I admired was Richard Bach, who had the incredible luck to write Jonathan Livingston Seagull at the height of the 1960s self-actualization craze and made millions. I thought that book was sub-par for Bach; the writings I really admired were his escapades as a pilot. His book Nothing by Chance, chronicling his months of barnstorming across the Midwest in the mid 60s in a rare Detroit Parks biplane he treated like a beat up VW Bug, was another recounting of belief that, like his title, nothing happened randomly. He was another author I imagined god was shielding from actual disaster.
One day at age 14 I peeked into a hangar with the skeletons of wooden wings on sawhorses and asked the man there if I could help. He said pick up that coffee can of varnish and start varnishing the wings. Brushing happily, I made a private vow they would never get rid of me. The restoration took two years and in that two years my involvement in flying, pardon the expression, took off. The owner of the biplane, a Waco UPF-7, was president of the Flying 10 flying club, and in exchange for working on the restoration I was taught to fly, soloing on my 16th birthday in October 1970.
In that year I’d become friends with a prominent plastic surgeon who owned a Cessna 336 Skymaster with two other partners. Dr. Jerry Jacobsen (Doc) would allow me to fly the 336 from the left seat, even before I’d soloed. I spent many afternoons and evenings helping him maintain the airplane.
In December 1970 I hadn’t seen Doc for awhile and wondered where he’d gone. I still washed and polished the 336 so wherever he was, he was still nearby.
On December 30 I happened to be on the airport’s west side, which I seldom visited, and there was Doc, preflighting a Twin Comanche. The 336 was down for annual so he was spending the down time getting his unrestricted multi-engine rating (the 336 had its twin engines in-line in the fuselage, so the rating to fly it was restricted to in-line configurations only). He invited me along for the next lesson. Afterward he invited me to join him the next day for that day’s lesson.
That evening at home my mom reminded me I’d promised to go with the family to visit family friends for the new year celebration. I was disappointed to miss the flight but a promise is a promise.
Arriving home at 1:30 in the morning our telephone was ringing. My sister answered and then handed me the phone. A friend who was also learning to fly said “Doc’s dead”. He’d crashed with his instructor and another passenger, killing all aboard.
It was only chance I wasn’t that 3rd passenger. I still had the hubris of youth and imagined that someday I’d be famous and important so thought (with an embarrassing casualness) that, like for Gann and Bach, god had kept me out of that airplane.
Meanwhile the Waco was finished and ready to be taken to airshows. It had been acquired as a derelict that had spent a decade outside neglected, and its engine had not been run in all that time. The mechanics involved in the restoration at one point ran the engine, which sounded fine, so the decision was made to not disassemble it.
Its pilot for its first trip to an airshow had just been checked out in it, his introduction to taildraggers. When we departed for the airshow he had perhaps 3 hours of flying time in it. During the flight to the airshow the engine would occasionally backfire.
The day of departure after the show was windy, across the runway. On the takeoff roll the pilot, still not actually proficient with a big ol’ biplane taildragger with two sets of wings full of surface area for the crosswind to grab, was too timid with the rudder as the airplane started to swing. Unable to stop the swing, he pulled the airplane off the ground. It leaped up and immediately out of ground effect dropped a wing in a stall. The pilot managed to get it straight just as we touched back down, but it instantly began another more violent groundloop, and the pilot heaved it back into the air. And it stalled again once out of ground effect. I remember, sitting in the front cockpit, looking straight ahead at the runway in front of us rising up to smash us, calmly thinking “people sometimes get hurt when things like this happen”.
Striking the runway tore off a gear leg and smashed up two wings. The propellor didn’t survive; I still have one of its demolished tips as a memento (I keep planning to have it engraved “Maintain thine airspeed lest the earth rise up and smite thee” but after all these years it still resides on my mantle undefaced). We were unscathed.
The next weekend the disassembled wreck was trucked back for restoration.
The decision to disassemble the engine was no longer discretionary. The law mandates full teardown if the propellor is struck.
During disassembly pieces of metal came out too damaged to have been damaged by the crash; they had failed prior to that attempted takeoff. The fragments were the corroded remains of the ball cages of the main crankshaft ball bearings. When the bearing itself was taken out several balls were missing.
Had the takeoff proceeded without mishap, the engine would likely have lost all its oil shortly after takeoff and quit running, right about at a point in the flight where the route crossed a forested mountain range with no place to make an emergency landing. The ineptitude of the pilot smashing it on takeoff probably saved both our lives.
And again, my youthful hubris had me believing the hand of providence was saving me for saving the world itself at some later date. If looking at the state of the world today indicates its savior is late in showing up, my only excuse 50 years on is I’ve been distracted, but now you know whom to blame.
All of the foregoing is to show that I had lots of strong reason to think that a god was acting as an overseer, and were the most difficult to let go of when my accumulating skepticism finally pushed me to being full atheist. I recall that day – not the calendar moment – just that it was the day I made the mental leap. It gave me a cold feeling, recognizing that there was NO protection, NO overseer, that we were totally on our own, as humankind, to solve our problems by ourselves. But as a matter of reason, it’s what made more sense than all the hollow desires and prayers of religion.
It’s what, finally, gave me the greatest comfort.
