Ayn Rand Comments on Reading the Bible from Outer Space: The Triumph of Science vs. the “Moldy Nonsense” of Religion

A champion of reason critiques the smuggling of religious faith into an achievement of scientific rationality.

The first photographed Earthrise on Apollo 8. NASA.

Today, April 6, 2026, as the world watched the journey of Artemis II disappear around the far side of the moon — in America’s first manned mission to lunar space in over 50 years — Astronaut Victor Glover quoted scripture. He spoke of the mystery of love and quoted Jesus Christ’s commandment to “love God with all that you are.”

This was not the first stunt bringing religious faith into space. During the very first Apollo manned mission to orbit the moon on December 24, 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts read from the Book of Genesis. Ayn Rand, who was enthusiastic about the human achievement that the space program represented, published scathing criticisms of the incident in her periodical, The Objectivist. Here is an excerpt from these comments:

When, from the distance of the moon, from the height of the triumph of science, we expected to hear the astronauts’ message and heard, instead, a voice reciting the moldy nonsense which even a slum-corner evangelist would not have chosen as a text — reciting the Bible’s cosmology — I, for one, felt as if the capsule had disintegrated and we were left in the primordial darkness of empty space.

If you wonder what perpetuates the reign of irrationality on earth, you have seen a demonstration: it is not done by the worst among men, but by the best—not by the masses of the ignorant, but by the leaders who default on the responsibility of thought — not by witch doctors, but by scientists.

No witch doctor’s power to encourage mankind’s darkest superstitions is comparable to the power of an astronaut broadcasting from the moon.

There are two questions that should be asked: Would the astronauts treat the slightest malfunction of the least significant instrument aboard their spacecraft as carelessly and thoughtlessly as they treated the most important issues of philosophy? And, if not, doesn’t man’s spirit deserve the same disciplined, conscientious, rational attention that they gave to inanimate matter?

The flight of Apollo 8 was a condensed dramatization of mankind’s tragedy: a demonstration of man’s epistemological double standard in the fields of science and of the humanities.

Why this reaction? In her later essay on the occasion of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Rand made clear why the Apollo missions represented a triumph of human rationality:

One knew that this spectacle was not the product of inanimate nature, like some aurora borealis, nor of chance, nor of luck, that it was unmistakably human — with “human,” for once, meaning grandeur — that a purpose and a long, sustained, disciplined effort had gone to achieve this series of moments, and that man was succeeding, succeeding, succeeding!

She says “for once” because in the tradition inherited from religion, “human” has come to mean “imperfect,” “corrupted,” “sinful.” As a champion of the absolutism of reason, Rand saw religious faith as the historical enemy of all forms of human achievement. So it should come as no surprise that she saw the Bible reading as a throwback to the primitive ideas that had long undercut and persecuted the scientific achievement that made the space program possible.

Rand’s full comments are available in the November 1968 edition of The Objectivist (issues were frequently backdated), which can now be purchased in paperback. Between 1962 and 1976, Ayn Rand published a series of periodicals: The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter.

Students interested in learning more about Rand’s philosophy of reason, individualism, and capitalism can learn more by ordering free books like Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. They’ll see why, even though she was fascinated by space exploration, Rand advocated first and foremost “a philosophy for living on Earth.”

It is a philosophy that holds reason as an absolute, and holds that faith is an “only a short-circuit destroying the mind.” It was not “love” of some alleged God that brought man to the moon, but the rational love of truth.