You can learn a lot from certain atheists. I'm not being facetious. Jesse Ventura is a good example because the men behind the curtains are not invisible to him. Thomas Gold is another good example of the fact that while an atheist may be tragically blind in one category of life, it does not necessarily mean unbelief is blind in every category.
I came of age in the 1970's, and I remember when it was widely reported that the global supply of crude oil would be exhausted in just a matter of decades. Gold points out that this dire prediction failed to materialize because the mainstream scientific assumptions that undergirded that idea are flawed. Gold refutes the common belief that petroleum is of biogenic origin, but is instead derived from the initial materials that formed the earth. In other words, there's a domain of life down deep that produces oil and gas - it did not come from the remains of expired surface life that sank down under. Of course, if this theory of Gold (and the Russian researchers he mentioned in the book) is correct, the practical ramifications transcend the borders of science. If the deep, hot biosphere becomes an accepted reality, industrial searches for earth resources will gratefully adapt, and indeed, at least some momentum in that awakening commercial mode has already begun.
Along with Hermann Bondi in another book, Gold put forth the steady-state theory of the universe which sees Big Bangs as cyclical events that have always existed and always will. Of course, the need for a Creator is neatly dismissed by the steady-state theory. Gold also understands that the process of photosynthesis is too complex a process to have evolved by random mutation and natural selection among the complex life forms known on the surface of our planet. He clearly views the thesis of this book as being the best solution to that issue. The needed long ages of developmental evolution could have brewed underfoot long before there was a foot above. In a discussion of autocatalytic molecules inhabiting the subsurface of the earth, Gold attempts to rescue random chance from the inescapable dungeon of statistical improbability. Well, that arrow missed.
His chapter nine is about the origin of life. I know, I know, an atheist on the origin of life, but just wait. Some people evidently believe that panspermia means that sentient aliens intentionally seeded our planet with life from their spaceships or from some other unknown mode of interplanetary travel. I did not expect Gold to support such a dubious notion, and I was not disappointed. The panspermia Gold postulates is interplanetary microbial infection at random and by meteorites. And it was the deep, hot biosphere that was infected and evolved, not surface life. For Gold, the simpler life forms of the deep could much better evolve and develop with out direction and design. Only later could surface life develop - long after the simpler forms had gotten the evolutionary ball rolling.
These are not just wild ideas on Gold's part. He presents good logic and evidence to support all that he says short of his underlying left-turn assumption that there is no Creator. The next time I hear the term fossil fuels, I'll know better than to swallow that meme thanks to Gold. He is, I believe, right about the origin of oil and gas in one breath, despite the atheism of his next breath. This book is not about his unbelief, and since it is not, but is instead a well written book explaining a "deep" alternative of the origin of oil and various gases, I gave it 5 stars.
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