Science Fiction and Religion: A Spectrum of Views

Some science fiction stories imagine a future without religion and without any belief in the supernatural, thereby expressing the secularist's dream that humanity will outgrow such things. Is science fiction the enemy of religion? Other sf is more friendly to religion, making room for priests and gods along with robots and aliens. As I've suggested before, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica is one case in point. But what do religious folks think about science fiction? Opinions vary.

First, a representative from the alarmist camp.

A more thoughtful reflection, but still very much a cautionary tale -- and one that seems not to take notice of the genre's wide sweep. (I've mentioned this one before.)

A balanced view, perhaps?

And for a couple of suggestions that the relationship may be a rather promising one, consider...

Margaret Atwood meets Karen Armstrong on NPR.

How Science Fiction Found Religion

What do you think? Is there some kind of tension between (a certain kind of) speculative fiction and (a certain kind of) religious belief?

Caprica and Religion

Tragically, Battlestar Galactica’s four-season narrative is now complete; the Galactica has guided the remnants of humanity to their final destination. Thankfully, in this case Love and Rockets is mistaken: there are new tales to tell!

Sometime in the near future we’ll be treated to The Plan, which will relate some familiar BSG incidents from a Cylon perspective. Remember: “…and they have a plan!”

And then, of course, we’ve already been given Caprica, the pilot for a 2010 prequel series on Sci Fi (soon to be renamed Syfy, sadly). Set some fifty years prior to the events depicted in BSG, this series will tell the tale of the creation of the Cylons. If you’re already a fan of BSG, or if you’re a fan of sf that makes you think, I strongly encourage you to check out this pilot (now available on DVD or from Netflix, iTunes, or whatever). In this post, I'll talk a little about Caprica's religious themes; in a future post I'll spend some time exploring what it suggests about personal identity.

One of the revelations in Caprica is that the Cylon's monotheistic faith seems to have its roots in a very human heresy. In the polytheistic chaos of Caprican society, rife with racism, uncertainty, and complacency, the One True God offers a path to follow, a way to tell the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. Yet to the faithful followers of the many gods, such talk is dangerous. Consider the following exchange, also discussed over at SF Gospel:

It doesn’t concern you, Sister, that kind of absolutist view of the universe? Right and Wrong determined solely by a single all-knowing, all-powerful being whose judgment cannot be questioned, and in whose name the most horrendous of acts can be sanctioned without appeal?

You seem to know a great deal about the subject.

Know your enemy, Sister Clarice.

Love your enemy, Agent Duram.

Throughout BSG's arc, a mix of good and evil, wisdom and foolishness, have been on display both in traditional polytheism and in the monotheism espoused by the Cylons and later by Baltar and his disciples. That seems the case here, too. Zoe's belief in the One God seems to have animated her and galvanized her into action. Her friend says this God gave Zoe the gift of creating life itself, and indeed Zoe has created an avatar of herself that's much more than a mere avatar. Yet one of Zoe's classmates, also a follower of the One God, strapped explosives to his chest and caused the blast that killed a train full of people, including himself and Zoe. Agent Duram is worried about this religious sect for good reason.

Yet it's not clear to me that his worries really have all that much to do with the fact that this new heresy is monotheistic rather than polytheistic. What's troubling, and dangerous, is the bomber's blind certitude that he's right and others are wrong and his willingness to follow a god that (he thinks) approves of the massacre of innocents. But these tendencies can be present (or absent!) in a worshipper of one god among many as well as in a follower of a single god. Religion of any kind is a powerful force. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and other so-called "new atheists" paint all religion as a force for evil. Unsurprisingly, religious folks have had plenty to say in response. The writers of BSG and Caprica wisely refuse to take sides. As for me, well, I'm not a fan of religion in general. But I am a follower of a certain criminal who was crucified by the powers of religion some two thousand years ago.

Exploring New Frontiers

The philosophically inclined sf author Robert J. Sawyer recently appeared on Listen Up, a Canadian religion news program, along with Robert Charles Wilson, author of Darwinia, The Chronoliths, etc., Gabriel McKee, author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction, and others.

You might want to take a look!

Part 1 (Mainly Sawyer)
Part 2 (Mainly McKee)
Part 3
Part 4

And if you want to think some more about sf and religion, I'll refer you to an earlier post linking to a couple of intriguing short stories as well as this this post that excerpts a more cautionary perspective.

Touched by an Angel?

In this post I'm going to reflect on "Daybreak," the two-part series finale of Battlestar Galactica. That's your cue to run for the exit if you're trying to avoid spoilers. Of course, you're probably used to having to do so by now, since there's plenty of talk about the end of BSG in the sf blogosphere.

I liked a lot of things about these three hours of one of the best tv series of all time. I enjoyed watching the Galactica slug it out with the Cylon Colony and it's high time we got to see some real Cylon on Cylon combat. Unlike some folks, I appreciated (most of) the flashback sequences and I'm glad that Ron Moore et al crafted a closing narrative that focused on the characters we love (or hate) rather than merely trying to pick up every loose plot thread.

Yet a couple of things have been bothering me. I'll begin at the end, with the astonishing dissolution of the community of people who have somehow managed to overcome seemingly unsurmountable obstacles and have finally, after a long and painful journey punctuated by the disappointments of New Caprica and the previous Earth, found their way to a beautiful new planet where they can make a home for themselves. "At last!" we should be thinking and feeling. But what are we given? Tyrol by himself on an island? Adama and Lee forever separated after a brief and inadequate goodbye? Starbuck disappearing into thin air? Helo, Athena, and Hera making their own way, apart from everyone else? All this is ultimately unsatisfying.

Now, I get that this last remnant of the Colonies must disappear so that this new planet can be our very own Earth, but from my point of view this cute gimmick isn't worth what it costs in narrative terms. So much drama between the Admiral and his son, and it ends like this? Hera's prophesied significance turns out to be that she's the mitochondrial Eve. Okay, again that's kind of cute, but we've been led to believe that she would play some key role in the life of this community of humans and Cylons--the one that's so quickly done away with by the show's writers. I'm more troubled by this than I am by the rejection of technology that others have talked about.

The other thing, as you can probably guess from the title of the post, is the revelation that the Six and Baltar that have been secretly appearing to Gaius and to Caprica Six for so long are... drum roll... angels. Apparently the writers have been reading Genesis 6. Let's add to this Starbuck's miraculous disappearance, implying that she's an angel, too, or some other kind of supernatural creature. All I can do about all this is sigh. Really?

Some have objected to this development because they want to keep their science fiction and their supernatural fiction in separate compartments. That's not my point, and I'm all for desegregation here. I've enjoyed the way that BSG has involved religion and the supernatural in its ongoing story very much. Strikingly, the Cylons are religious, and have a very different conception of the divine than humans do. People take up various positions about the legitimacy of prophecy, with Adama dismissing Roslin early on as a quack and then later coming to have some sort of faith in her visions. The show clearly wants us to think that there's something to all this religious talk. I'm delighted about that, and I wasn't at all hoping for a debunking explanation of all of the apparently supernatural happenings to which we've been witness.

But I wasn't ready for a series finale that in some ways reminded me of an episode of Touched by an Angel or some other sappy show. One of the things I've always deeply appreciated about BSG is the way the show leaves its viewers in the gray, unsure what to make of its characters and plot developments and wondering what to think about morality, politics, and religion. Thus, I'm unhappy that this finale filled in certain blanks so decisively. Moore says in this interview about Starbuck's finale that "there was more in the ambiguity and mystery of it than there was in trying to give it more definition in the end." From my point of view, her disincarnation doesn't leave enough room for such mystery. Moore has also said that one of his prime concerns is that BSG be relevant to our world and our lives. Yet for most of us, such obvious and unequivocal contact with supernatural beings isn't part of our lives. In the finale, it seems to me that BSG explicitly becomes a religious story about divine agents on a mission rather than remaining a story about beings like us who don't quite know what to make of such stories but perhaps trust and hope that some of them are true. And this shift makes it less relevant, I think, and less like the show I still love in spite of these objections to the way it leaves us.

Chimps and Robots Get Religion

A new story -- Mike Resnick's "Article of Faith."

And a classic one -- Robert Silverberg's "The Pope of the Chimps."

Dangerous Visions?

The cover story of the February issue of Christianity Today is entitled "Sci-Fi's Brave New World," by James Herrick. Herrick's piece is essentially a warning to Christians that sf smuggles anti-Christian myths into our culture. Here's a bit of it:

The spiritual messages conveyed by our most popular television, movie, and literary products are often questionable and sometimes dangerously misleading. We are not the center of the cosmos, nor are we (or extraterrestrials) evolving toward divinity. Evolution is not the benevolent operating principle of the entire universe, and technological transformation of our species is not spiritual rebirth. Ignorance is not our predicament, progress is not redemption, the future is not salvation, and space is not our destiny... the church must attend more diligently to the presentation of her true myth in public settings. The biblical account of human origins and purpose, of our predicament as well as our redemption, and of the nature and purpose of the cosmos we inhabit, is emotionally, spiritually, and rationally more satisfying than modern myths featuring aliens, starships, divine evolution, hidden knowledge, and biomechanical post-humanity.

What do you make of Herrick's diatribe against sf? A couple of Christian sf scholar-bloggers criticize Herrick's book Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious Beliefs (which seems to make the same basic argument as this briefer and more popular article) here and here.

A footnote: Ironically, this post shares its title with a seminal anthology of sf edited by the legendary Harlan Ellison in the late 60s.