timeimmortal

James McGrath writes in to provide some alternative commentary on the issue of Battlestar Galactica’s Theology, which I discussed in this article.

I thought I’d draw attention to some of the posts on my blog about BSG and theology (I’m a religion professor who is also a fan), such as :

http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/2008/05/gospel- according-to-gaius.html

http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/2008/04/bartlestar- theodica.html

I’d welcome your comments!

While I could say more for Professor McGrath’s opinions regarding Bart Ehrman (my own views on the “problem” of evil and theodicy are well known; I don’t see the existence of evil and/or suffering in the world as any kind of challenge to the Christian conception of God, and regard those who use said issue(s) as an objection to Religion as being, shall we say, rather deluded themselves), some of his views on BSG and the theology of Gaius Baltar’s new religious movement (itself a derivation of the Cylon religion) are rather interesting.

For example, McGrath remarks thusly concerning the first episode of the latest, and final, season of BSG:

In the BSG Season 4 premiere, entitled “He That Believeth In Me“, a more relevant verse would seem to be “Whosoever seeks to save his life will lose it…” Gaius Baltar moves from an unwilling Messiah disgusted by the gaudy Hindu-style flashing votive lights surrounding his picture, to one who seems genuinely willing to give up his life to save another. The “one true God” has yet to be explored fully as a concept on the show, but in the mean time, interesting questions continue to be asked about how we live our lives and what matters most to us.

I observed to my wife, while we were watching the latest episode of the series to date, that Baltar seems unable to avoid some manner of beating in each and every episode he has been in this season. I’d have to go over all the episodes again (we have them on tape), but I can’t recall yet a time when Baltar has not been pistol-whipped, choked, or punched during the course of an episode since the fleet departed the Ionian Nebula

And in each and every case, Baltar’s personal sufferings have been intimately relevant to the narrative of the show. Indeed, through examples as varied as the knife attack on Baltar in the head to Galen Tyrol attempting to choke him, the series has demonstrated in almost every episode this season that the God whom Baltar is preaching effects His plan for humanity in part through human suffering.

One of Ehrman’s criticisms is that if God can be said to be standing beside us in our illness, but if God can do nothing to cure our illness, then God is not so much like a god at all — He is, if anything, rather like a mother or a friend…anything, or anyone, but a deity.

This is a fairly common “problem” of suffering-based objection to God, especially the Judeo-Christian God. Of course, it has at its core a fundamental flaw, which I was reminded of in a recent post of Mark Shea’s:

The other day, I linked a piece about somebody who was miraculously healed after seeking Venerable John Henry Newman’s intercession. It was really quite a remarkable healing: the guy was bent double with arthritis and now is just fine. In the comments on the news site, the Usual Suspects were heard from. They were utterly uninterested in this curious event. Instead of, “Why doesn’t God give a clear sign that he exists” they switched to Phase 2 and 3 of the atheist play book and a) either denied altogether that the thing had happened or b) demanded to know why God hadn’t likewise healed everybody in the world. There was simply no interest at all in the possibility that this healing was a *sign*: a thing meant to point to other things (especially to God himself and to the *real* healing of which this physical healing was simply an image). The problem, it seems to me, is in the will of such people. It’s not that they can’t see, it’s that they won’t. The will not take the elementary effort of soul to even consider the possibility that something supernatural occurred. They bat it away. It’s a pre-rational response. They sense in their gut that such an event offers them a choice to take a step toward, at least, the possibility of the supernatural and they knock it away with a sort of animal fury that is about a million miles away from the “reason” they pride themselves on.

This is another reason why I reject suffering/evil and the existence thereof as legitimate reasons to offer objection to the notion that God, in the Judeo-Christian conception, exists; often, our own categories of what constitutes suffering and healing, or evil and deliverance from it, are (to put it mildly) trite and simplistic, and not necessarily reflective of the divine realities before us. Physical ailments are not pleasant to deal with, but is it a sign of God’s powerlessness when He does not immediately cure us of them in some miraculous fashion?

In BSG, as in real life, God seems to act through His creation — not only humans, but through all aspects of creation in general. He acts through Baltar somewhat directly, but He acts through events, including sufferings, that transpire in Baltar’s life. Would the young boy, Jeanne’s son, have been healed had not Baltar embraced the possibility that Charlie Connor might just have slit his throat and left him dying on the floor of the head? Would Lee Adama have come running down the hall with the writ restoring the right to freedom of assembly had Baltar not stepped forward, prompting the marine to beat him to the ground? Would Tyrol have come around had not Baltar courted the possibility that the former Chief, a very strong gorilla of a man, might not act out violently?

That is not to say that the God of either BSG or reality desires that suffering and acts of evil take place, of course, but it is to observe that God does not wrest from humanity their ability to make conscious, free decisions — and rather than manipulate all creation as mere puppetry, God instead acts through that creation even to the point of acting through the decisions we make, good or bad. And the way in which God acts speaks to the reality of our own actions.

Had Baltar backed down rather than confronted the marine, Lee Adama’s intervention wouldn’t have been necessary, and the Quorum of Twelve’s writ restoring the right of assembly similarly superfluous — and it wouldn’t have happened as a result, because the God of BSG would have acted in kind with Baltar’s actions. The same is true of how our own God acts in the world, and the fact that He doesn’t always reach down to life away our moral ailments is not in any way indicative of his inadequacy, powerlessness, or malevolence.

God demonstrates, at various times, the ease with which He can strip away our physical impairments and illnesses; many miraculous healings attest to this fact. And as Mark Shea notes, the typical response of the skeptic or atheist to these healings is to either attempt to deny the event its full magnitude, or to wonder at why God did not heal everyone else who suffers. The same could be asked of the God in BSG — why does He heal Jeanne’s son and not Laura Roslin? But to ask that would be to miss the point. The question is not whether God can heal — certainly, He can. The question is what healing really means.

Too often, our thinking gets bogged down in what could be termed “empirical” categories; we see “healing” as being merely the cessation of physical impairment or ailment. But even if we have AIDS or cancer, even if we have broken bones or torn ligaments, are those sufferings what truly ails us? Or are they different facets of creation played out against each other? Is not what truly ails us the sinfulness which grips each and every one of us, the doubt that claws at the heart of each and every one of us?

God heals that, consistently and constantly. Occasionally, He will even heal physical ailments. But by comparison, the physical stuff is paltry and small, and shouldn’t be our primary concern when we ask whether, or what, God can heal.

And what’s refreshing about BSG is that at times, it comes perilously close to communicating that truth. Oh, Baltar’s sermon about God only loving that which is perfect, and his teaching that those who belong to the cult of Baltar are perfect, is wrong on several levels, and as I have previously noted is actually an inversion of Christianity’s understanding of God (It’s not that God only loves that which is perfect; it’s that God perfects that which He loves). I suspect, going forward from this point, that Baltar’s view of the perfection of his flock will be reversed somewhere in the future*.

But at the same time, it seems rather clear in BSG that God acts out to reach His people — and when I say “His people,” I am referring to a much wider chunk of humanity than just those who follow Baltar — not only through the agentic actions of a few different individuals, but through all of creation itself. The Leoben Conoy Cylon models hint at this reality when they talk about reality itself as being like a stream flowing out before them; God works through each and every ripple in the water.

McGrath also remarks thusly, concerning his view of the direction the show is headed in:

The show looks forward to a “new Heaven and a new Earth“. But what will that future hold? Will it be paradisical? It is hard to imagine such a trite ending to a series like BSG. Perhaps it will turn out that BSG is offering a myth for our age. The humans and Cylons seeking Earth will turn out to be our ancestors. And the challenge of the story will not be to believe that we really did come from elsewhere, but to embody in our present existence the hope of a better tomorrow, in which it doesn’t matter whether one is evolved or intelligently designed. What matters is valuing people as such.

Before I get started again, a quick warning for Grace and others:

I would agree that BSG ending with humanity reaching paradise would be something of a let-down, if handled improperly, and while I think the conclusion of the series will be related to the idea of Paradise, I don’t think the series itself will portray paradise. I’m something of a spoiler-whore, and rather enjoy reading the all-too-plausible BSG speculation at, in particular, The Patriot Resource. I don’t think Earth will be a paradise when it is found; I think it will be a massive let-down. I don’t think the season, and the series, will end in paradise; I think it will end in fire.

(Full disclosure: I suspect this because that’s what all the known spoilers thus far seem to point to. The Patriot Resource’s predictions have so far borne out rather handily as far as the progression of the current season of the show is concerned, and the rumours that are floating around suggest that the fleet will find Earth somewhere in the middle of the season (just before the mid-season, WGA strike-lengthened break), but that either the Thirteenth Tribe will not be very advanced, or else the planet itself will be abandoned/post-apocalyptic in some way. Also, the effects team for the show have apparently been saying that the last two episodes of the season will feature some intense, “never before seen” battle effects sequences.)

From the beginning of the series, Ron Moore has said that he is committed to telling a story from within the framework of naturalistic science fiction, which means that the show more or less conforms to the scientific realities that we, the viewers, should know and be familiar with (apart from a set of core assumptions concerning Macguffin-esque technology that is necessary to drive the plot forward).

In other words: jump drives and artificial gravity are in. Aliens, transporters, replicators, phasers, and all the rest are out.

Because the show is built around a naturalistic sci-fi framework, its purpose won’t be to tell an “origins story” — the Colonial fleet will not be the “latest new Ark,” and its people will not be the “latest new Adam and Eve.” The emergence of humanity as a product of millions of years of evolution is reasonably well-documented, and it would defy Ron Moore’s stated commitment to that naturalistic framework were he to suddenly pull back the curtain and reveal, say, Adama and Roslin, or Lee and Starbuck, to be the real Adam and Eve.

If anything, I think it will be revealed that humanity initially came from Earth and that BSG is set many thousands of years in the future. I think it will be revealed that at some point, pace Firefly, humanity fled Earth and found Kobol, and that centuries or millennia later they were forced to flee Kobol as well. I’m not sure if, or how, the Lords of Kobol will play into the story as the season progresses, and whether or not any revelations will be made about who, exactly, these beings were (if indeed they existed).

The arrival at Earth, then, will not be a discovery so much as it will be a return.

BSG has always struck me not as an “origins myth” for our times as much as it has seemed to be an “eschatological myth” for our times. It’s not a story about humanity’s beginning, but about humanity’s end. The cyclical nature of history has been a recurring theme in the show; I think, before the end of the show, the cycle will be broken, and history “as it is known” will come to an end — and then, quite possibly a fiery, sudden end. The show is not so much a re-working of the Book of Genesis as it is a re-working of the Book of Revelation.

I’m rather reminded of Cortana’s defiant line at the end of the Halo 3 announcement trailer: “This is the way the world ends.” Of course, she’s invoking Eliot, but what the casual fan of Halo might not realize is that she is also invoking the Cortana letters, which were the first hints of Bungie’s epic series that fans of their previous offering, the Marathon trilogy, got.

In particular, the first Cortana letter read thusly:

I have walked the edge of the Abyss.
I have governed the unwilling.
I have witnessed countless empires break before me.
I have seen the most courageous soldiers fall away in fear.
[I was there with the Angel at the tomb]

I have seen your future.
And I have learned.

There will be no more Sadness. No more Anger. No more Envy.

I HAVE WON.

Oh, and your poet Eliot had it all wrong:
THIS is the way the world ends.

T. S. Eliot’s poem ends with the assertion that the way the world ends is not with a bang, but with a whimper. Cortana, both in the first letter and in the Halo 3 announce trailer, refutes that notion specifically; the world ends with one hell of a bang. And I think that BSG, like the Halo series, is intended as an end-of-the-world story rather than as an origins tale. It is a new Ragnarok, a new set of trumpets and seals: the final cataclysmic battle, and what follows in its wake.

It may sound, O Reader, like I don’t much agree with James McGrath’s theological analysis and conclusions, and I think it would be fair to say that I note several differences between his opinions and mine. To be fair, though, I do agree with one observation he makes regarding some of the peculiarities of evangelical Christianity and its surprisingly close relationship to Baltar’s religion of perfect people:

• Your wealth is the result of divine blessing and has nothing to do with how much you keep for yourself vs. how much you pay your employees. You and your business are perfect - just as you are!
• You don’t need to read scholarly books to understand the Bible, or educate yourself, or know things about the historical and cultural context. You understand the Bible perfectly - just as you are!
• God has predestined you to salvation, and all things are as they were determined to be by God’s perfect sovereign will. You can only change if God wills it, and you aren’t changing, and so that means (you guessed it) you’re perfect - just as you are!
• The book of Revelation (as you premillenial dispensationalists understand it) says that everything will get worse before the end, so there is no point in trying to help the environment, change policies, or be a good Samaritan towards our neighbors and the world. How convenient that your self-serving policies and gas-guzzling SUVs are perfect - just as they are!
• The way you interpret and express your faith most likely suggests you are suffering from mental illness, but rather than try to get you help, but we’ll blame demons, or praise you for your exuberant faith as a “spiritual warrior”, because you’re perfect - just as you are!

In a way, I think it’s much easier for me to watch BSG, and to enjoy it as much as I do, because I’m Catholic, and because I try and apply Catholic categories to my analysis of the show and, especially, its theology. Were I of a more Protestant bent, I’d probably be way more offended by it.

And this brings us back to the discussion of what’s wrong with Baltar’s message. Obviously, at its core, it’s an inversion of the Christian ideal. But even more importantly, it’s something that Baltar actually consciously rejected for a time.

I marked a statement above with an (*), and this is what I wanted to say as a footnote to my statement above. I say this (”this” being my prediction of a reversal in Baltar’s teachings in some later episode of the series) because Baltar’s big “flip” to preaching a message of perfection only occurred in the wake of his affair with Tory Foster and the persecution launched against his cult by the Sons of Ares. As Foster herself has been getting progressively more, shall we say, “evil” as the season progresses (especially with her recent airlocking of Cally Tyrol and subsequent cover-up of the act), I am beginning to suspect that she is being set up to be discredited, and I think this will impact Baltar’s teachings in some way, perhaps even prompting a sort of quasi-Reformation within his movement.

Because if there is one thing the show has tried — and tried hard — to demonstrate, it is that humanity is damnably, critically flawed. In everything from the conduct of war to the conduct of marriages and romances, almost everyone in the show has made horrible, terrible mistakes that have negatively impacted their own life and the lives of all those around them. The three prior seasons of the show have been a constant, lengthy ledger of injustices and hurtful wrongdoings, and the key message behind it all has been the question that William Adama asked in the miniseries that began this crazy ride back in 2003: is humanity worth saving?

Barb Nicolosi has been observing the series with much the same in mind:

I’m getting a bit concerned about my beloved Battlestar Galactica. I’m finding Season 4 so dark, that I’m thinking it is going to be hard for there to be an ending that would leave the audience with a sense of hope and victory. It would be a hubristic dramatic blunder to lead the audience through four seasons of wandering in the extra-terrestial desert, only to have none of our beloved characters survive to see the promised land, earth, or to have the human race be so scarred and debased in their journey that they aren’t worth saving at the end for the audience, anyway.

(It has occurred to me at several points in the show’s progress that the whole series is trying to answer the musing posed by Commander Adama in the opening mini-series, “We only ever asked how to survive, but not if we had a right to survive.” Maybe the show is going to conclude that human beings don’t have any special right to survive? That would be a REAL dramatic blunder because it is a lie that the audience will reject. And it would be a shame if the wonder of BSG came down at the end to a well-crafted lie.)

I think that a perhaps unintentional truth that the series is nevertheless communicating is that there is no secular salvation; that humanity, left to its own devices and stripped of the inspiration or influence of the divine, has only one course and one outcome: destruction. It will be interesting to watch as the series shapes itself going forward from where it is at, because it can go in one of two directions. Humanity will either spiral down to its end or, and then possibly through a confrontation that directly involves the divine (the virtual beings — Head Six, Head Baltar, and Starbuck’s Leoben-but-not-Leoben — are significant somehow as guides toward this end, and indeed Head Six professes to be an “angel of God”), somehow be pulled from the fire, but only after passing through Hell itself.

Barb Nicolosi worries that the show will not end well, that whatever final victory (if any) it comes to will not “be greater than all the suffering that has purchased it.” She worries that by the time the show closes, the humanity it portrays will have so debased itself as to be unworthy, in the eyes of us, the audience, of the good end at which they arrive.

I think that’s the point. I think that underneath it all, there is an almost Catholic subtext to the show that demonstrates that what redeems BSG is that its characters are so unredeemable, that they are so catastrophically imperfect and so deliriously flawed that there is no possible way for they, themselves, to lift themselves out of the murky depths. I think the whole point of the show is that humanity is not worth saving, that humanity isn’t even worth the worst farce of an attempt at saving it…and that in spite of that, it will be saved.

And it will be saved because there is something bigger, something purer, something divine out there that loves humanity in spite of its relentless failures, and perceives things with a clarity that humanity cannot hope to achieve or exceed. And that something — that God — will act through even the most terrible moments of human (and Cylon) suffering to effect a good end, even if everyone through whom it acts honestly deserves only the worst possible outcome.

The show talks about the cyclical nature of history, and the people in the show will be saved by the one thing which is not cyclical: the genuine love and grace of God, against and before which humanity is powerless.

~ by Kenneth on May 6, 2008.