Gods and Spaceships: Religion in Science Fiction

Science fiction, at its best, explores human nature, our place in the cosmos, etc - life, the universe, and everything - in a way that rivals the myths of the traditional religions. As rationalism wore away at belief in gods, as science started illuminating the mysteries of the universe, as technology changed the world, something was needed to fill the humanity's need for myths. SF was one of the substitutes that arose. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, arguably the first SF novel, is explicitly about humans having the power of gods: creating life. The myths of the old religions told of the past; SF gives us a mythology of the coming future. Like the best religious myths, the best SF stories last not because they are literally true (SF is awful at accurate prediction), but because they seem to awaken you to greater percipience of who we are, of what we have become, of where we were, of wherein we are hastening, etc.

I can easily see myself being deeply religious - in the traditional sense, of being a devout believer in a deity - had I been born earlier, or had my life gone in another direction. I find religion fascinating. I once loved science, but I was scienced out by the time I graduated from university. I still love science fiction. Observing SF writers and fans, I can't help but imagine them as prophets and adherents of of a modern pseudo-religion, with its own rituals, jargon, pilgrimages, canon disputes, divisions, etc.

Given the origins of SF as a substitute for religious myths, it is unsurprising that SF stories are often hostile towards the traditional religions. When SF author explore religious themes positively, they tend to be rather unorthodox in their conclusions.

Arthur C. Clake, the 'Prophet of the Space Age', described himself as an atheist 'fascinated by the concept of God'; he left very specific instructions for his funeral: "Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral." In his work, he often displayed contempt for religion:

The City and The Stars (1956) - my favourite of Clarke's novels - is set on a dried-up Earth one billion years in the future, where the last remnants of humanity live under a giant dome in the city of Diaspar. About halfway through, Clarke lets you know what he thinks about religion:

'Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the universe revealed. Some of them succeeded in establishing religions which survived for many generations and influenced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths.

The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, nor the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken.'

In his later novel The Fountains of Paradise (1979) Clarke is even more anti-religious. The novel's 22nd century hero demolishes an ancient monastery to build a space elevator: the old faiths are to be swept away to make room for the splendors of science:

'Already, it was the greatest wonder of the world. Until Morgan put his foot down and restricted the site to essential engineering staff, there was a continual flood of visitors - "pilgrims", someone had ironically called them - paying homage to the sacred mountain's last miracle.'

Just in case the reader is in any doubt about who the hero is, Clarke includes a small subplot about humanity's first encounter with an alien intelligence having a devastating effect on religion ('It had put an end to the billions of words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries.'). After absorbing the entire Encyclopedia Terrae, the alien intelligence informs humanity that the 'God hypothesis' only arises among species with two-parent reproduction...

(Clarke also quotes Freud:

'While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded... If one attempts to assign religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis  which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.' )

... And proceeds to demolish it in the manner of Dawkins, Grayling, or Hitchens:

'The hypothesis you refer to as God, though not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason.
If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organisation than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues.'

But TFOP also features a scientist character who says "Now that Starglider has effectively destroyed all traditional religions, we can at last pay serious attention to the concept of God".

Clarke named Olaf Stapledon as his biggest influence. Stapledon's Star Maker (1937) is perhaps the ultimate science fiction novel dealing with religious themes. The narrator astral projects into space and travels across the entire history of the universe, witnessing civilizations rise and fall, culminating in a meeting with the titular Star Maker, the creator of the universe, God. In an early draft of Star Maker, posthumously published as Nebula Maker (1976), Stapledon referred to the maker as God throughout: I expect, in the later drafts, he decided against this in order to distance himself from the traditional religions.

Stapledon advocated 'agnostic mysticism': he found theistic religion too obviously false, but scientific materialism did not satisfy his religious yearnings. If you find yourself torn between skepticism and mysticism, as I do, then reading Star Maker might be, like it was for me, a conversionary religious experience - turning me into a Stapledonian evangelist, going on about Star Maker until my friends were sick of it.

'Overhead, obscurity unveiled a star. One tremulous arrow of light, projected how many thousands of years ago, now stung my nerves with vision, and my heart with fear. For in such a universe as this what significance could there be in our fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?

But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified, but of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.'

Star Maker is perhaps the most ambitious book you will ever read: billions of years of universal history condensed into less than 300 pages. Stapledon shows you things that you would never have imagined yourself: that is his power.

"Judged by the standards of the novel, it is remarkably bad. In fact, it is no novel at all," Stapledon admitted in his preface to the first edition. This is no character driven plotted story, it is a tour of the universe, a sacred pilgrimage through time and space:

'The sustaining motive of our pilgrimage had been the hunger which formerly drove men on Earth in search of God. Yes, we had one and all left our native planets in order to discover whether, regarding the cosmos as a whole, the spirit which we all in our hearts obscurely knew and haltingly prized, the spirit which on Earth we sometimes call humane, was Lord of the Universe, or outlaw; almighty, or crucified. And now it was becoming clear to us that if the cosmos had any lord at all, he was not that spirit but some other, whose purpose in creating the endless fountain of worlds was not fatherly toward the beings that he had made, but alien, inhuman, dark.

Yet while we felt dismay, we felt also increasingly the hunger to see and to face fearlessly whatever spirit was indeed the spirit of this cosmos. For as we pursued our pilgrimage, passing again and again from tragedy to farce, from farce to glory, from glory often to final tragedy, we felt increasingly the sense that some terrible, some holy, yet at the same time unimaginably outrageous and lethal, secret lay just beyond our reach. Again and again we were torn between horror and fascination, between moral rage against the universe (or the Star Maker) and unreasonable worship.

This same conflict was to be observed in all those worlds that were of our own mental stature. Observing these worlds and the phases of their past growth, and groping as best we might toward the next plane of spiritual development, we came at last to see plainly the first stages of any world's pilgrimage. Even in the most primitive ages of every normal intelligent world there existed in some minds the impulse to seek and to praise some universal thing. At first this impulse was confused with the craving for protection by some mighty power. Inevitably the beings theorized that the admired thing must be Power, and that worship was mere propitiation. Thus they came to conceive the almighty tyrant of the universe, with themselves as his favored children. But in time it became clear to their prophets that mere Power was not what the praiseful heart adored. Then theory enthroned Wisdom, or Law, or Righteousness. And after an age of obedience to some phantom lawgiver, or to divine legality itself, the beings found that these concepts too were inadequate to describe the indescribable glory that the heart confronted in all things, and mutely prized in all things.'

One of the worlds visited is the 'Other Earth', whose inhabitants are basically weird-looking humans with poor vision and hearing ('Music, such as we know, never developed in this world.'), but enhanced scent and taste ('These beings tasted not only with their mouths, but with their moist black hands and with their feet. Thus they were afforded an extraordinarily rich and intimate experience of their planet.') This, of course, means that their cultures place greater emphasis on scent and taste than ours do, and so with their theology:

'Tribal gods had of course been endowed with the taste-characters most moving to the tribe's own members. Later, when monotheisms arose, descriptions of God's power, his wisdom, his justice,
his benevolence, were accompanied by descriptions of his taste. In mystical literature God was often likened to an ancient and mellow wine; and some reports of religious experience suggested that this gustatory-ecstasy was in many ways akin to the reverent zest of our own wine-tasters, savoring some rare vintage.

Unfortunately, owing to the diversity of gustatory human types, there had seldom been any widespread agreement as to the taste of God. Religious wars had been waged to decide whether he was in the main sweet or salt, or whether his preponderant flavor was one of the many gustatory characters which my own race cannot conceive. Some teachers insisted that only the feet could taste him, others only the hands or the mouth, others that he could be experienced only in the subtle complex of gustatory flavors known as the immaculate union, which was a sensual, and mainly sexual, ecstasy induced by contemplation of intercourse with the deity.

Other teachers declared that, though God was indeed tasty, it was not through any bodily instrument but to the naked spirit that his essence was revealed; and that his was a flavor more subtle and delicious than the flavor of the beloved, since it included all that was most fragrant and spiritual in man, and infinitely more. Some went so far as to declare that God should be thought of not as a person at all but as actually being this flavor...

Though all were devout, and blasphemy was regarded with horror, the general attitude to the deity was one of blasphemous commercialism. Men assumed that the flavor of deity could be bought for all eternity with money or with ritual. Further, the God whom they worshiped with the superb and heart-searching language of an earlier age was now conceived either as a just but jealous employer or as an indulgent parent, or else as sheer physical energy. The crowning vulgarity was the conviction that in no earlier age had religion been so widespread and so enlightened. It was almost universally agreed that the profound teachings of the prophetic era were only now being understood in the sense in which they had originally been intended by the prophets themselves.'

As you can see, Stapledon uses the Other Earth to critique Our Earth. Stapledon's descriptions of the Star Maker bring to mind the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who wrote that God was so ineffable that all descriptions of God must be negative. God is not great, God is not love, God is not truth, God is not power, God is not life, God is not divine. We cannot even say that God 'exists', because our experience of existence is based solely on individual, finite beings whose mode of being bears no relation to being itself. God is not one of the things that are; God is all things in everything and nothing in anything:

'I was indeed confronted by the Star Maker, but the Star Maker was now revealed as more than the creative and therefore finite spirit. He now appeared as the eternal and perfect spirit which comprises all things and all times, and contemplates timelessly the infinitely diverse host which it comprises. The illumination which flooded in on me and struck me down to blind worship was a glimmer, so it seemed to me, of the eternal spirit's own all-penetrating experience. 

It was with anguish and horror, and yet with acquiescence, even with praise, that I felt or seemed to feel something of the eternal spirit's temper as it apprehended in one intuitive and timeless vision all our lives. Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy. Our broken lives, our loves, our follies, our betrayals, our forlorn and gallant defenses, were one and all calmly anatomized, assessed, and placed. True, they were one and all lived through with complete understanding, with insight and full sympathy, even with passion. But sympathy was not ultimate in the temper of the eternal spirit; contemplation was. Love was not absolute; contemplation was. And though there was love, there was also hate comprised within the spirit's temper, for there was cruel delight in the contemplation of every horror, and glee in the downfall of the virtuous. All passions, it seemed, were comprised within the spirit's temper; but mastered, icily gripped within the cold, clear, crystal ecstasy of contemplation.

But this was not the worst. For in saying that the spirit's temper was contemplation, I imputed to it a finite human experience, and an emotion; thereby comforting myself, even though with cold comfort. But in truth the eternal spirit was ineffable. Nothing whatever could be truly said about it. Even to name it "spirit" was perhaps to say more than was justified. Yet to deny it that name would be no less mistaken; for whatever it was, it was more, not less, than spirit, more, not less, than any possible human meaning of that word. And from the human level, even from the level of a cosmical mind, this "more," obscurely and agonizingly glimpsed, was a dread mystery, compelling adoration.'

C.S. Lewis called Star Maker 'sheer devil worship', and wrote an entire trilogy of SF novels in response. Lewis was getting annoyed that space stories were generally anti-religious:

'I like the whole interplanetary ideas as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) point of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side.'

- Lewis, in a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green

I have not yet ready any of the Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945). I am interested in Lewis' take on Christian SF, but have forbidden myself from purchasing any more books until my current to-read pile has been exhausted. 

It is worth pointing out that, despite his hostility towards religion, Stapledon accepted that Christianity was a positive force for a lot of people. The first encounter of Four Encounters (1976), 'A Christian', ends with Stapledon deciding not to argue back:

'I was preparing to do battle against his proselytizing, and to conquer his faith. But his eyes checked me. For his Christ had indeed saved him from his self-loving despair; and without his Christ he might be lost. In his present state of partial waking (so I told myself, perhaps complacently) he could not endure the severer vision.

So I said, "You have been very good to me, and very patient. But the upshot is that your way is not mine. You need belief; for me it is unnecessary. Without it I travel lighter, yes and perhaps farther. Strangely, in my unbelief I gain full peace, the peace that passes understanding. And joy too. I have found joy in the sheer given reality, with all its dark-bright beauty. Light has come to you in one way, to me in another. And though you have not won me, I am grateful to you. Let neither of us grudge the other his vision."

He was silent for some time. Then in a low voice he said, "I think you do not fully know what suffering is, and the illumination that it brings. May God take all joy from you, may he torment you as he tormented me, so that at last your eyes may be opened, and the true light may save you."'

I consider that a rather dickish response from the Christian, but that's me.

From one unconventional encounter with the divine to another: VALIS (1981) by Philip K. Dick. Starting in 1974, Dick underwent a period of revelation/mental breakdown, during which he thought that God, or an artificial intelligence from the future, was sending him messages using a beam of pink light. VALIS is a third-person fictionalized account of this period, with the Dick character being called Horselover Fat. As Dick/Fat tried to make sense of his experiences, he found the usual view of God - the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-seeing king of the universe - unsatisfying:

'You cannot say that an encounter with God is to mental illness what death is to cancer: the logical outcome of a deteriorating illness process. The technical term - theological technical term, not psychiatric - is theophany. A theophany consists of a self-disclosure from the divine. It does not consist of something the percipient does; it consists of something the divine - the God or gods, the higher power - does. How are we to distinguish a genuine theophany from a mere hallucination on the part of the percipient?
...
If you grant the possibility of a divine entity, you cannot deny it the power of self-disclosure; obviously any entity or being worthy of the term 'god' would possess, without effort, that ability. The real question (as I see it) is not, Why theophanies? but, Why aren't there more? The key concept to account for this is the idea of the deus absconditus, the hidden, concealed, secret or unknown god.... if God exists, he must be a deus absconditus - with the exception of his rare theophanies, or else he does not exist at all. The latter view makes more sense, except for the theophanies, rare though they be. All that is required is one absolutely verified theophany and the latter view is voided... The vividness of the impression which a supposed theophany makes on the percipient is no proof of authenticity.'

And was irritated by the hypocrisy of the traditional religions:

'It took hours to find the citation in Luke; finally he had it, to set before Sherri.
"I'll ask Larry if that's one of the corrupt parts of the Bible," Sherri said.
Pissed off, Fat said, "Sherri, why don't you cut out all the sections of the Bible you agree with and paste them together? And not have to deal with the rest."'

Dick wrote hundred of thousands of words of exegesis, theorizing about the nature of God, developing his own cosmology. He moved further away from traditional views of God towards Gnosticism, and further into madness. Entry #51 from his exegesis:

'#51. The primordial source of all religions lies with the ancestors of the Dogon tribe, who got their cosmogony and cosmology directly from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago. The three-eyed invaders are mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breathe in our atmosphere, had the elongated misshapen skull of Ikhnaton and emanated from a planet in the star-system Sirius. Although they had no hands but had, instead, pincer claws such as a crab has, they were great builders. They covertly influence our history towards a fruitful end.

By now Fat had totally lost touch with reality.'

There are several competing theories about when and how Gnosticism originated. Some argue that it is pre-Christian, having its roots in ancient shamanism, others argue that it began with Christianity. In Christianity's early years, there was no established canon, literacy rates were low, and the Gentile Christians - often from poor backgrounds - had almost no knowledge of the Jewish scriptures that their beliefs were supposed to be continuing. When some early Christians got round to reading the Hebrew scriptures, they were very confused. Why was the loving God of love, as represented by Jesus, being such a prick? Why was he advocating and committing genocide? Why had he not fixed the world, if he was supposedly all-powerful? Why was there so much evil in the world? Gnostic Christians resolved these gaping plot chasms in what became mainstream Christianity. The true God was immaterial and had no power over the material world. During the creation of the material world, the true God was broken, with parts of God being imprisoned in material bodies. The material world is ruled over by an insane false god who believes that he is the One True God. The true, immaterial God is in conflict with material creator, trying to be re-united with the God-fragments trapped in material bodies. It's a fun mythology.

Dick explored Gnosticism in two further novels (which I haven't read): The Divine Invasion (1980) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1981). An earlier novel, A Maze of Death (1970), is set in a future with an entirely fictional theology. Dick's words:

'The theology in this novel is not an analogue of any known religion. It stems from an attempt made by William Sarill and myself to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists.'

This post is getting rather long. My theory is that SF, with notable exceptions, is anti-religious or advocates an unorthodox. Clarke thought that science would supplant religion, but found the idea of God fascinating. Stapledon thought orthodox theology was obviously false, but advocated an 'agnostic mysticism' with similarities to the apophatic theologies of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Moses Maimonides, and other mystical theologians (apophatic theology is arguably more traditional than imagining God as an anthropomorphic divine dictator). Dick underwent a religious experience, gradually losing touch with reality, and arrived at a Gnostic theology which slammed together various religious traditions and SF ideas.

Hopefully I will write a sequel to this post. There are many other works I would like to look at to further explore this theory, for example:

• The Christian SF novels of C.S. Lewis
• The other two Gnostic novels of Philip K. Dick
• A Canticle For Leibowitz (1960) by Walter M. Miller, about a Catholic monastery in a post-apocalyptic world
• Behold The Man (1969) by Michael Moorcock, about a time-traveller who meets Jesus of Nazareth, and is very disappointed
• The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood, about a totalitarian Christian theocracy in near-future America
• Lord of Light (1967) by Roger Zelazny, about a human colony ruled by Hindu deities
• Hard To Be A God (1964) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, about a human observing a primitive alien society, and struggling not to intervene to prevent suffering
• Wandering Stars (1974) and More Wandering Stars (1981), anthologies of Jewish SF

And, of course, Jesus On Mars (1979) by Philip José Farmer: