April 12, 1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first person to orbit the earth and the first person in outer space. Gagarin is heralded across the world as an international hero.

It is rumored that Gagarin remarked upon reaching space that he didn’t “see any God up here.” This is probably not the actual case, but, tensions being what they were at the time, embedded in a cold war between a highly generalized Christian west and godless Soviet Union, the story sticks. The legend grows that Gagarin appears in western cities trumpeting boldly that he had entered outer space, looked for God, and found none. As the story goes, at one such press conference a reporter shouted out that had Gagarin opened the capsule door in space, he would have seen God rather quickly and clearly.

Given the American astronauts’ frequent reference to the wonder of God and His creation, taking communion in space, and the like, the space race is postured within the general tenor of the cold war: for right or wrong, true or false, among other things, the godless communists versus the Christian Americans. Things are seldom this simple.

The New Atheists have labored diligently to categorize this phenomenon as a result of the 1950’s red scare in America, and as a deliverance of McCarthyism, often citing 1950’s legislation of the National Motto In God We Trust and the inclusion of the motto on American currency as proof. In this view, America is thought of as largely a deist/enlightenment culture overrun in the 50’s by Christian fundamentalists, leading ultimately to the religious right neo-conservatism we see today. This is a deeply problematic view historically, however, but as I eschew politics, I mention it for the context only.

This is what interests me instead. Keeping in mind that things are ever near infinitely more complex than we imagine, the context of a godless materialism versus Christianity has implications when set within real world consequences. On October 24, 1960, a horrid explosion occurred which has come to be known as the Nedelin disaster. Due to Russian secrecy at the time, no one is certain of the death toll, but estimates put it in excess of one hundred. Perhaps this is footage of the disaster:

At any rate, reading the account of the disaster is difficult. But so is reading the account of the Apollo 1 fire.

What then are we to make of these tragedies within our context? There are two lines I’d like to consider briefly: one from each side of the context.

The response from the materialist/naturalist camp in light of these disasters is that God does not exist, founded on the problem of evil. How could God allow such a thing? Where was he when the fires started? Why didn’t he stop them?  It is a response founded on despair and meaninglessness. No greater force or power exists outside of this natural realm to make sense of the tragedy. What you see is what you get, and these tragedies quickly pass out of history into nothingness, as do their victims. The tragedy is final in its horridness as in its oblivion.

From the other side, a much different picture emerges. In it, there is a force working through the affairs of men. There is hope in the face of despair and tragedy. In this view, all is not lost, nor is a brief moment in history, or its victims, abandoned to the receding and fading tendrils of nothingness.

One is a foundation of sand; the other is a foundation of rock.