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I grew up in Seattle in the 1970s, long before it became the tech-and-hipster boomtown it is today. Our city’s only real claim to fame in those days was the Space Needle, a 605-foot observation tower that had a revolving restaurant at the top and that had been built for the 1962 World’s Fair. The tower got its name from the fair’s theme: “Living in the Space Age.”
One of the most prominent visitors of the World’s Fair was the Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man to orbit the Earth. Asked by a reporter about his experience in space, his response made headlines. “Sometimes people are saying that God is out there,” Titov said. “I was looking around attentively all day but I didn’t find anybody there. I saw neither angels nor God.”
This was, of course, a way for Titov to promote his government’s official atheist position inside America—a little jab at the Soviet Union’s primitively religious Cold War foe. But it was of a piece with a very common viewpoint, Eastern and Western, then and now: If you don’t observe something and c
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