I heard that a recent survey found that the percentage of the U.S. population who believe in God is the lowest it’s been in seventy years, but more people believe in heaven than ever before. Of course, this makes no sense, but it goes to show how deeply addicted we are to hope: even if we conclude that there’s no deity, we’re still apt to cling to the belief that there must be more to existence than this.

Logically, if there’s no God, there’s no afterlife. No heaven. No hell. Nothing but nonexistence after death. After all, where would consciousness go? If it’s simply the result of biological processes in a finite organism, then when that organism dies the consciousness dies with it.

Unless the unseen, the unprovable, the type of unconquerable life our hearts long for is as real as the physical world our senses tell us is here.

Is there really more to life than life?

Atheists sometimes point to the vast expanse of the universe in their quest to find hope—there must be life out there somewhere—or maybe there was, or maybe there will be. After all, the idea that God doesn’t exist and that we’re alone on an insignificant and dying planet in a vast, lifeless universe is existentially almost unthinkable.

We’ve been graced with life on this earth, a tiny speck of dust in an endless sea of stars. And we are slowly, or, if you believe the growing number of alarmed scientists and environmentalists, shockingly quickly, destroying our home.

And when we do, we’ll have nowhere to go. An outpost on the moon or on Mars isn’t going to sustain our race for the long haul. To think that it would isn’t to embrace science or to believe in human potential but to live in denial.

We will die out.

And our planet will die as well.

Without the glorious intervention of a divine being, life will cease to be a meaningful word in the universe.

Regardless of what you think about God, from all the evidence astrophysicists have collected, it’s clear that life is the exception in the universe, not the norm.

There’s plenty of speculation that life outside our solar system exists, but no evidence that it does, and in my line of work, evidence is everything and speculation doesn’t get you anywhere useful at all.

The Drake Equation, which proposes that with this many planets in the universe life elsewhere is a veritable certainty, is simply conjecture masquerading as science. However, people will cling to the merest thread of hope wherever they can find it. For some, that’s God; for others, it’s aliens. And for an increasing number of Americans, the artifice of a Godless heaven.