timeimmortal

John C. Wright speaks very slowly to an atheist who thinks that the Vatican’s recent annoumcement — that belief in the existence of aliens is not at variance with Christian faith — is merely a cover for some deeper conspiracy to save faith in the event that Earth is contacted by an extraterrestrial intelligence.

Not that the belief in non-human sapient beings is really a problem for Christians anyhow. As I noted previously, Christians already accept that two sapient, non-human species of creature already exist: angels and demons. Adding a third to the list doesn’t really change anything.

But some who follow the ways of atheism seem to have deluded themselves into thinking that the discovery that aliens do exist, should it ever happen, would change everything, and would strip away, once and for all, the human tendency to express religious belief. The assumption — an old assumption, mind you — is that the aliens would necessarily be secular beings who would laugh at the primitive “tribal god mentality” of humanity and then lead us away from Religion into a new, golden age of secular enlightenment.

Gene Roddenberry, and others before him, did a great disservice to the thought processes and categories of many, many people.

One final wry observation: Mr. [Tom Flynn] takes the time to quote with approval one Jill Tarter. She says this:

“If we get a message (from a superior culture) and it’s secular in nature, I think that says that they have no organized religion — that they’ve outgrown it.”

This type of casual arrogance is typical of the Brights.

Speaking as someone who outgrew his own atheism, and as someone who lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the adolescent belief-system called Communism collapsed under its own logical absurdities, and as someone who saw the flourishing of religion in Poland, as that nation grew, developed and evolved out of the backward barbarism of the primitive Communist thinking and into the civilized and ecumenical thinking characterized by Christianity, I have the most sincere doubts, nay, I meet with gales of laughter, the idea that signals from the Morlocks of Outer Space will show that evolution and progress always points in the direction of increasing spiritual ignorance.

The Morlocks, for those of you who do not catch the reference, in the romance of H. G. Wells, are the cannibal troglodytes of A.D. 802701. The vile beasties have the honor of being evolved from the descendants of modern man, the peak of progress. The are the posthumans; the supermen. Nietzsche and Marx and every other believer that human evolution necessarily means progress rather than regress or retardation, is well advised to read Darwin and to contemplate the hungry Morlock.

By no coincidence, I wrote an article for the Catholic Herald of the United Kingdom, prompted by my own thoughts and speculations about Father Jose Gabriel Funes comment (speculations no more grounded than reality than Mr. Flynn’s, I suspect; but then again, I am a science fiction writer, so I am allowed).

If we receive a message from aliens that is secular in nature, that doesn’t tell us that much about their religious viewpoints, if they have any. It may mean that they are secular, or it may mean that they are hesitant about approaching us on a religious level. “Hi there,” is a secular message, in that it is a simple greeting which makes no specific mention of any metaphysical concept…but it is nevertheless used by the religious and irreligious alike.

Besides, it is equally possible that the first alien we meet might step out of his spacecraft and say: “We have come to bring him homage, the great Illuvatar, whose star we observed at its rising over two thousand of your years ago. Tell us of how you welcomed him, and of his teachings to you!”

I believe it was Mark Shea who noted that in the event that we are greeted thusly, we would do well to hope that the alien weapons are not sufficiently powerful as to scour all life off the surface of the Earth.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

BeliefNet has an interview with Ron Moore, the mastermind behind the new iteration of Battlestar Galactica that I have been watching with avid interest. The topic of discussion is the Theology of the show, which is both a timely topic (given the intensifying religious debate that is shaping up as the show continues through its fourth, and last, broadcast season) and also a necessary discussion.

I’ve been trying to ferret out, for months, exactly where Moore is attempting to take the religion in the show, but one consistent thought I’ve had in all that time is that I really do want to applaud how he has handled the issue in its entirety. Outside of Babylon 5, very few science fiction series have ever really handled the issue of religion in any serious fashion (Deep Space Nine, which Moore also worked on, is the one exception I can think of), and indeed too much of science fiction seems predicated on the assumption that religion will go the way of the dodo by the time humanity well and truly takes to the stars.

I guess that’s why it’s called “fiction,” but still.

Some viewers say the show stereotypes fundamentalist Christians as kind of robotic, while others are saying, “This is great…pagans are finally the good guys!”

The parallels between the Cylon beliefs and fundamentalist Christian beliefs, yeah, there are certain aspects of it there, but there’s also the roots of the drama, also contains things such as Al Qaeda’s use of its religious practice to justify what it does. That’s part of who the Cylons are too, they aren’t just really stalking horses for fundamentalist Christianity.

There also seem to be elements of Eastern religions in the show with Leoben Conoy, another Cylon, talking about consciousness and reincarnation. Does each of the different models of Cylons represent a different religious point of view?

I think that’s true. Part of the idea of Leobon was to separate it from easy stereotypes of Christian beliefs. There wasn’t really a hierarchical church, there wasn’t an easy notion of Heaven and Hell. Leoben was starting to talk about things that were more Buddhist — consciousness, Enlightenment and reincarnation. I thought it was interesting to marry those notions to the idea of one deity.

As to Moore’s own religious views:

Do your own religious views shape the story lines?

I’m an Irish Catholic, not practicing. It probably just reflects my interest in my movement from Catholicism to atheism to agnosticism to interest in Eastern religions. I think the show is a reflection of my acknowledgement that faith and Religion are a part of the human experience, even if I’m not quite clear on exactly what it all means and what I truly believe. The most direct reflection of me in the show is this idea that when the Cylons became self-aware, when they became sentient, when they became people, they began to ask themselves the existential questions: “Why am I here? What is this all about? Is this all that I am? Is there something more?”

My view is that that’s fundamental to a thinking person. And that inevitably leads you to questions of faith and religion and “what will happen to me when I die?”

…

There’s been a lot of chatter on the message boards about the spiritual character of the show, with many people saying they enjoy it.

It’s fun to do a science-fiction series that isn’t just dealing with secular matters. I’m really glad people are responding to it.

I might not agree with Ron Moore’s personal religious convictions, but I applaud him heartily for putting things in this way. The show sets up very nicely many religious discussions, and even in the last couple of episodes there is a great example that one could draw upon.

In looking at Gaius Baltar’s newfound zeal for preaching monotheism amongst the Colonial population, one can draw certain parallels between that monotheism and Christianity. And yet, at the core of the monotheistic sentiments is a doctrine which is actually a logical inversion of Christianity. For whereas Baltar teaches that…

God only loves that which is perfect and he loves you. He loves you because you are perfect. You are perfect. Just as you are.

…Christianity teaches that God loves us in spite of our imperfections, that God — through Jesus — perfects that which he loves.

Things like this motivate a lot of thought, I find, and I think that’s something to be applauded in a television show, especially a science fiction show. Religion is an inescapable part of the human condition, and always has been; it is folly to think, like Gene Roddenberry did, that religion will disappear in due time. It won’t, and more importantly will continue to serve as an impetus for human action and reason for all ages yet to come.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

Don’t get me wrong — I’m a Star Trek fan, especially since I married a hard-core Trekkie. I really loved Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, although that was admittedly because that show (more than any other Trek series) really tried to make the Federation into something more realistic, as opposed to this utopian paradise with seemingly no internal corruption or difficulties. DS9 added real grit to Gene Roddenberry’s perfect world, and tore at its seams a bit. And for that (and other reasons) it was, in this blogger’s opinion, the best damn Trek show ever made.

(For similar reasons, I rather enjoyed Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.)

At any rate, Mark Shea has an excellent two-part takedown of the “Prime Directive” — the first law, if you will, of the Federation of Trek fame. It’s a bit of a pointless thing, criticizing a belief held by characters of a television show. But at the same time, the same thinking that underpins the Prime Directive underpins a lot of the post-modern assumptions of our society, and the effects of that will be every bit as dangerous as the Prime Directive proved to be in those shows and Trek novels where it was at issue.

Update: Welcome, Five Feet of Fury readers! Nothing like a link from the Shaidle to blast a blog post’s view count through the roof! And since Kathy is right to point out the lack of money in the Trek universe, let me add one more thing about DS9 that I liked — gold-pressed latinum.