🧠 The Atheist Who Wrote 1,300 Pages Explaining The Bible | Isaac Asimov

In 1967, in an attic room with the shades pulled down, a man who had flown twice in his life and hated both flights sat at a manual typewriter and began a book explaining the Bible chapter by chapter.

He did not believe a word of it. It ran to thirteen hundred pages. Isaac Asimov published around five hundred books, ran the American Humanist Association, and signed the statement that told the world astrology governs nothing. Carl Sagan refused to sign that same statement, and the reason he refused is more interesting than the statement itself. This is what Asimov actually argued: why he avoided the word atheist for decades and then used it flatly in 1982, what he told the creationists who wanted equal time in Arkansas classrooms, and the essay he wrote in 1989 that still answers the most common argument on the internet.

Science was wrong before, so my claim is as good as yours. Asimov measured exactly how wrong, with a school ruler. The story he wrote at twenty-one, in the back of his father’s candy store, is about a civilization that is told the truth in advance and burns its own cities anyway.

He died in 1992. The real cause was hidden for ten years. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. SOURCES

• Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, Vol. I and II (1968-1969)
• Isaac Asimov, “Nightfall”, Astounding Science Fiction, September 1941
• Isaac Asimov, interview in Free Inquiry, Spring 1982
• Isaac Asimov, “The ‘Threat’ of Creationism”, The New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981
• Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance”, Newsweek, 21 January 1980
• Isaac Asimov, “The Relativity of Wrong”, The Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1989
• “Objections to Astrology”, The Humanist, September/October 1975
• Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995), on why he declined to sign it
• McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, ruling of Judge William Overton, 5 January 1982
• Edwards v. Aguillard, US Supreme Court, 1987
• Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 2005
• Gallup, Evolution and Creationism polling series, 1982 to date
• Janet Jeppson Asimov, epilogue to It’s Been a Good Life (2002)

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