Forty-four years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to fly into space.

It’s been reported that after he returned, he said, “I looked and looked but I didn’t see God.”

Apparently he looked out the window, saw the curving horizon, the deep black sky above and the earth, blue and white, below. He watched the sun rise and set. And he thought, “Nope, no God here!”

That kind of blind certainty can come only from unquestioning faith, I think. Atheism was the official government-sanctioned religion of the Soviet Union, like Islam in Iran and Afghanistan, or Judaism in Israel. Gagarin, apparently, was a True Believer.

Space exploration has come a long way since Gagarin’s pioneering flight. Men have walked on the moon. Robotic explorers have visited every planet in our solar system except Pluto. We communicate via satellite; our weather reports include photos from orbiting spacecraft, and we take that all for granted. The Hubble Space Telescope has shown us astonishing images of the universe around us.

The Bush administration is cutting money for the Hubble telescope from the NASA budget, but they will include funds in the 2006 budget to de-orbit the telescope, sending it to a fiery death in the earth’s atmosphere. Many reasons have been given for that decision—the Hubble Telescope is too expensive, a maintenance mission is too dangerous, new technology will make better alternatives available. I can’t help wondering whether there’s another, unspoken reason.

Biblical literalists can find it difficult to reconcile images of things a billion light years from earth with their certainty that God created the heaven and the earth about 6,000 years ago. Blinded by certainty, they can look and look at the Hubble pictures, but they don’t see God. So, down with the Hubble telescope!

This administration embraces the literalists on many issues. Was Hubble, too, sacrificed to blind faith?

New York Times columnist Frank Rich watched the ’round-the-clock coverage of the papal funeral and saw A Culture of Death, Not Life:

Mortality — the more graphic, the merrier — is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we’ve feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV’s top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time “CSI.” To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness’s cortex with Ms. Schiavo’s.

…

What’s disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What’s unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul’s vision of a “culture of life.” This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 — some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties — all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, on the beauty of a flower:

I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. And he says, “You see, as I, as an artist, can see how beautiful this is, but you, as a scientist, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty.

First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people, and to me, too. I believe, although I may not be quite as refined esthetically as he is, that I can appreciate the beauty of the flower.

At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension—one centimeter—there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure.

Also the processes—the fact that the colors in the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting—it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this esthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it esthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which a science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

That was from a 1981 interview on the BBC program Horizon. The interview was broadcast in the United States in 1983, on the PBS science program Nova. That’s where I saw it. It’s hard to pick one favorite Feynman story, but I do enjoy the first chapter of his memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! The story is called “He Fixes Radios By Thinking!”

With science under attack from religious zealots, Feynman’s worldview is a breath of fresh air.