From Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, a new book of essays by Paul Chaat Smith. Regarding eclipses, nuclear weapons, and human unluckiness as evidence for—well, if not a fair and just God, at least a God with a sense of humor:

There's the Great Barrier Reef, paintings by Vermeer, The Simpsons during the mid-1990s—miracles for sure but not necessarily proof of divine existence.

A solar eclipse, on the other hand, isn’t simply fabulous. It is a precisely engineered—okay, everyone knows what it is: the moon slides in front of the sun, and if it’s a total eclipse then day becomes night. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know, but only in the past few years have I finally appreciated how the entire trick depends on the most unlikely of coincidences. Here it is: if you live on earth, the sun, which is a star ninety million miles away, appears to be exactly the same size as the moon. Which is 250,000 miles away. The sun is a fairly unremarkable star, but it is still gigantic, vastly larger than earth, and the moon is basically a rock out there, a piece of dust compared with the sun. What are the odds that these two utterly dissimilar bodies would end up in a perfect rendezvous, the grey rock exactly blocking out the distant star, with the over-the-top demonstration (showing off, really) of the corona, the thin, blazing edge of light that surrounds the moon?

Everyone talks about the darkness at noon aspect, which is certainly impressive, but it would happen just the same if the moon appeared to be, say, 30 percent larger than the sun. It would be interesting if the moon appeared to be only half as large, a big dot in the middle of the sun. Or maybe their orbits never intersected, or hardly ever intersected. Instead, we get a stunning, perfect alignment, and for a few minutes the moon and the sun are proved to be the same size. You know, that’s how people figured out there were mountains on the moon, seeing their ridges and peaks in the solar backlight.

Exactly the same size.

I happen to believe this is convincing, compelling evidence of a supreme deity, of a creator, but whether or not you buy that I don’t see how anyone could dispute that solar eclipses prove schoolteachers and reporters are simply brilliant at missing the point.

The other reason is that for more than sixty years there have been at first a few, then dozens, and soon hundreds, and for the last thirty years tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and since 1945 none has ever been used in warfare or produced a nuclear explosion accident tally.

Possibly they somehow don’t actually work, except that there are all those tests documented on film and by eyewitnesses. Maybe once the weapons are left alone in their silos the plutonium starts to rust, and that’s why the tests aren’t affected. If it isn’t that, then I have to conclude that god is the reason. What is more accident prone than the military? Everything that can go wrong does go wrong, usually pretty often. Soldiers shoot or bomb their own men, planes crash, boats sink, radar and computer systems fail, rockets explode at the launch pad, or just after being launched, or before the launch while the rocket is being fueled right in front of visiting dignitaries who are also blown up. The gun jams, in every war. You can look it up.

It is true that dropping a nuke from a tall building isn’t enough to vaporize the building and the city the building is in. Many extremely complicated things must happen within millionths of a second to get the mushroom cloud. Still, all these things are set to happen if the right buttons are pushed, to happen without fail, and every single day for fifty years people like Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, leaders demonstrably lacking in sound judgment, could have pushed the buttons and didn’t.

Dumb luck? Since when have humans ever been particularly lucky? Maybe, but I don’t think so.