The following Op-Ed is from the February-March issue of Free Inquiry
I am a meteorologist and an atheist. The second description often leads
my colleagues to the assumption that I must have been a morose and
recalcitrant teenager given to substance abuse and fruitless
existential wanderings or that I arrived, despondent, at this
conclusion after a dictatorial religious rearing.
On the contrary, I was raised by a pantheistic scientist mother and an
atheist father who introduced me to evolution and Darwinian natural
selection when I was six years old. I am told that I announced my grasp
of the material with the triumphant declaration that my father did
indeed "look a little bit more like a monkey than I do."
In later years (and with a more mature understanding of our simian
ancestry), my mother, an entomologist, took me with her to dig fire-ant
mounds. On Sundays, while my young cohorts sat in church, my mother
showed me strange and wonderful pictures from a scanning electron
microscope. While my friends learned about the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost, I learned about the Head, the Thorax, and the Abdomen. From
the beginning, I knew, with however little sophistication, that
salvation was to be found in the natural world.
So, when I began to study meteorology, I was already a sort of
biologist-by-proxy, and my transference to another branch of natural
science should have been smooth. Instead, it was a paradigm shift of
the highest order. Science, as I understood it, required a myopic eye.
It was about tiny things with tiny parts and elaborate relationships.
Meteorology, it seemed, required one to look up and out, to blur the
world intentionally. The leap from the microworld of biology to the
macroworld of meteorology was a difficult one at first, but, once I
made it, I began to see the striking similarities.
When I first saw infrared, water vapor, and satellite pictures, I was
reminded of those electron-microscope photographs of cells my mother
had shown me. Whether reduced or expanded to a size more accessible to
the human eye, there was an almost artistic correlation. Both worlds
seemed comprised of circles and those circles of intricate chains. Both
worlds followed rules and had recognizable cycles. Both the cellular
world and the world of meteorology had patterns.
Early in my studies, I had to wonder: was there, perhaps, some
critical, exquisite moment when the earliest sky-gazers grasped that
very pattern? Was there a sudden revelation, a lifting of a veil that
exposed, ironically, the pattern that was there all along in the fluid
and colorful skies?
We know that science has parented a large and able brood, and that
meteorology is but one of science's many children-albeit one with many
faltering starts, from Aristotle's Meteorologica to the advent of
weather satellites. Meteorology could even have been the firstborn, in
terms of primogeniture, as it were, for looking up would produce the
very first itch of scientific questioning. After all, up and out are
always accessible and on permanent, unavoidable exhibition. There,
ancient students would seek divine signs, but, in time, they would see
signs of a different sort-signs written in the language of clouds, a
language that would eventually be codified and put to use. With so
grand a template for natural patterns, the smaller-scale patterns would
become more obvious.
I suppose the order in which our intellectual forebears looked (first
up, then down, then in?) is at this point of little importance. The
point is, they looked. When evil spirits were replaced with viruses and
bacteria, biology cultivated a new regard for the body. Likewise,
meteorology cultivated a new regard for the sky, not as a playground
for a capricious deity but as a page upon which important messages were
being written. What was once the whim of an elusive god is now the
decipherable code of scientific laws in a changing atmosphere. This
code has allowed us to predict and to plan for disasters, to sow and to
harvest, and to find associations between climate and disease. It has
made possible less lofty pursuits as well. It has told us how to dress
and has facilitated expert preparation for bad-hair days.
I am a meteorologist and an atheist. I am also a grateful beneficiary
of science and all its trappings. Thank you, science, for a cured
kidney infection. Thank you, science, for my straight, white teeth that
have undoubtedly advanced my career in television. Thank you, science,
for extending the lives of beloved pets, for computers, for air
conditioning, for SPF-15 moisturizer, and for waterproof mascara. Thank
you, science, for the many forms of birth control that have freed women
from the tyranny of our own bodies, the tyranny once attributed either
to a brutish, male god or to a fickle and domineering mother-goddess.
Thank you, science, for the very freedom we have to study science in
the first place.
Katrina Voss holds bachelor's degrees in Spanish literature and
geosciences and meteorology. She currently works as a meteorologist and
can be seen mornings on CNBC's "Wake-Up Call", "Squawk Box", and
"Morning Call", as well as on AccuWeather.com and numerous English- and
Spanish-language stations, including Univision's San Francisco, Fresno,
and Monterey, California, stations. She writes an online column for
AccuWeather.com called "The Extra-Meteorological Affair."
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