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Babylon 5: What the Atheist Taught Me About Christian Culture

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[ Originally written in 2003 ]

I’ve loved science fiction since childhood. Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise always captured my imagination by propelling me into strange new worlds full of adventure and the wonder of discovery. It didn’t stop with Star Trek, though. Over the years I’ve read an enormous amount of science fiction. Because there are very few Christian science fiction writers most of what I have read has been by non-Christians. Now while I always knew there were conflicts between my Christianity and unbelieving sci-fi, it wasn’t until I discovered the discipline of apologetics (particularly its emphasis on worldview thinking) in my early twenties that the deep nature of this conflict dawned on me. I soon learned to enjoy the books and shows for what they were but to critically watch for expressions of anti-Christian worldviews. Some of the best practical lessons I learned in this period were not from my Christian philosophy books, but from various episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation. The truism that in modern cultural products “God is utterly conspicuous by His absence” was never more evident to me than in my science fiction journeys during this period.

But while I critically enjoyed these cultural products of those outside my worldview, I gradually developed a deeper understanding of the very meaning of culture and of modern Christianity’s radical failure to sanctify modern life under Christ’s lordship. I can now appreciate the wisdom and profound sense of loss that Reformed author Douglas Wilson expresses in the pithy phrase, “We Christians used to build great cathedrals; now we toss Gospel-frisbees”. Culture is an inescapable reality of our existence. As creatures made in the image of an intensely creative God, we cannot help ourselves–we are inexorably driven to create, or rather, to “subcreate” (as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, both outstanding Christian authors, put it), and the products of our creative activities make up our culture. Culture is the spiritual and moral and intellectual air we breathe; we can no more successfully escape it than a fish can from water.

So far so good, but what does any this have to do with science fiction? Simply this: Modern culture lives and moves and has its being within a worldview that goes by various names–naturalism, secularism, modernism–but which has one central characteristic: its orientation towards things “scientific”. One reason why the popular imagination esteems science fiction is because we have all been conditioned to view ourselves as cogs in the vast impersonal Machine of “the Universe”, which obliviously grinds along crushing our hopes and dreams beneath its inexorable wheel. Our best and only hope is to master some small part of our environment through technology, and because our remarkable successes in the twentieth century show no signs of abating many atheists believe that we will one day (if we have not already) take control of our own evolution–our own fate–through technology. This is, in fact, a major theme of many science fiction universes.

Much of twentieth century science fiction revolved about just this sort of “Science as Divine Revelation of Reality” paradigm. Having no room for the harmonious Medieval vision of “the three faces of culture” (truth, beauty, and goodness) integrated under the personal governance of Christ, Enlightenment philosophy (particularly Kantian agnosticism and Lessing’s “ugly ditch” between religion and the real world) systematically reduced every aspect of human culture to an introspective, stoically defiant gaze into the stygian abyss of “existence”. Thus, while beauty and goodness have become the exclusive properties of “the eye of the beholder”, truth has been relegated to the sterility of “the scientific method”, which promises to produce technological mastery of every environment–and perhaps one day even of our very souls. Science fiction picked up on this theme and drove it home into the minds of generations of unreflective, rootless souls.

But the Enlightenment paradigm and the science fiction that feeds on it has an abiding problem–human life is not reducible to what can be analyzed and quantified in a laboratory. Any reflective human being (science-lover or no) knows this. Culture, the air we breathe, cannot be merely a function of “What Science Says”. The “human equation” must be elevated above the Machine. No matter what we think we are, we cannot escape what we actually are. And we are men, not machines. Much of the angst-ridden conflict between “Modernism” and “Postmodernism” has revolved around this realization. There are signs that although the latter did not win the battle to relativize all knowledge it has significantly altered the former’s brazen, sterile, technological triumphalism. Culture, especially in terms of the humanities, has made a comeback as increasing numbers of people have realized that for all the good Science gives us, it cannot give us the things that really matter. For at least the last fifteen years, science fiction has occupied a large portion of popular culture precisely because it has its fingers solidly on the pulse of our condition as men who feel we cannot escape the Modern, yet who realize that Modernism does not satisfy our souls.

Again, so far so good, but what does any of this have to do with “what the atheist taught me about Christian culture”? Two words: Babylon 5. I could have picked nearly any modern science fiction universe as the centerpiece of this essay, but I have chosen this one because to my mind it more accurately than others represents the deep angst we moderns feel because of our unthinking evisceration of the transcendent, and it was in part meant to be an atheistic mirror image of one of the greatest Christian cultural achievements of the twentieth century (Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings). For one who thinks in terms of worldviews and their complex relationship with the emotions and actions they inevitably inspire, there is one particular science fiction universe that stands head and shoulders above the rest: J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5.

From the start we knew that Babylon 5 was not meant to be just another science fiction show. Straczynski said he had a definite story to tell, and that the show would tell that story for as long as the ratings permitted it to be on the air. Straczynski’s plan was to do five seasons and no more. With some last minute intrigues and “fat out of the fire” machinations behind the scenes this was actually accomplished. No one had ever done this with science fiction, and no one has done it since (though it is yet very early since Babylon 5 as a series ended). Today there is every indication that like Star Trek before it, Babylon 5 has taken on a life all its own. In addition to several “canonically authorized” series of novels (some of which are quite good, I must admit 1) and two television spin offs (Crusade and Legend of the Rangers), there are comic books, toys, and numerous websites promoting everything from technical specifications of the spacecraft and weapons, biological and historical information about the alien races, music from the shows and TV movies, and original fanfiction. In short, Babylon 5 has become not only a culture in its own right, but a reflection of the prevailing culture that spawned it.

By itself this recognition of Babylon 5‘s achievement as a distinct modern atheist cultural product / culture-shaper would not be noteworthy, but when evaluated from the standpoint of a comparison with modern Christian cultural products / culture-shapers, it indeed becomes a profound lesson. This will require some extended discussion, and I beg the reader’s patience.

The Worldview and Mythology of Babylon 5

Understanding worldviews and story is critical to the theme of this essay. For all his atheism’s horrifying moral ambiguities (as is perhaps best expressed in the conclusion of the Shadow War in the fourth season episode “Into the Fire”), not only does Straczynski understand the incredible life-altering power of stories, but he tells his stories within a fully self-conscious, full-orbed, consistently-applied worldview. He is an atheist, but he is an atheist who knows what he believes, why he believes it, and how to go about making that plain to others in such a way that they are deeply, personally affected at all levels of their culture–art, science, religion, literature, politics, emotion, intellect. In Babylon 5 we see (oxymoronic as this may sound) the very soul of atheism, and we cannot help but react to it either positively or negatively. It either confirms our existing prejudices or challenges them with its subversive narratives–as all good stories do. The power of Babylon 5 is not in its special effects or its (frequently) well-written stories with pithy dialogue or (occasionally) well-acted part, but rather, in the basic worldview story it tells throughout its five seasons. Like all worldviews, including the Christian one, it is a complete mythology about man from his origin to his destiny.

And what is that story?

In the beginning was the Universe, and the Universe was conscious. Desiring to explore its own condition, it decides to generate a vast variety of sentient lifeforms who interact with each other in enormously complex ways. Races which would come to be known as the First Ones, races that begin when the Universe is relatively young, eventually reach through millions of years of evolution a state of existence that can only be likened to godhood. Having reached this exalted position, many of them “passed beyond the Rim [of the galaxy]” to explore “whatever lies in the vast darkness between galaxies”. Two of them, however, remain behind to help guide the Younger Races, to help them achieve all the potential that their own evolutionary paths allowed for.

These two First One guardian races, the Vorlons and Shadows, soon discover that they have irreconcilable philosophical differences about how the Younger Races are to be shepherded. The Vorlons believe that order and obedience can smoothly control evolution with a minimum amount of suffering. The Shadows believe in helping evolution along by fomenting chaos and war so that strong races will survive and evolve while weaker ones will die out. At some point in the far distant past, the Vorlons and Shadows declare mutual war on each other’s messages and proceeded to literally use the Younger Races as pawns in their own selfish quests to prove the other wrong. For untold eons this war of the gods continues, going through roughly thousand-year cycles punctuated by apocalyptic battles that nearly always result in the apparent defeat and retreat of the Shadows. (“Apparent” defeat because even though the Shadows retreat, they do, ironically, achieve their goal of helping evolution wipe out weak races through war, leaving the Vorlons to guide the survivors for the next thousand years until the next big Battle).

It seems that for most of this long conflict, even though they do not themselves understand the real nature of the conflict most of the Younger Races generally believe the Vorlons to be “the good guys” and the Shadows the “bad guys”. Indeed, whereas the Vorlons are highly enigmatic and unapproachable, they do deign often to appear to the Younger Races as “angels of light”2, preaching goodness and order and peace, while the Shadows are by their very name and physical appearance (very much “spider” like) taken as incarnations of fear and evil. The Vorlons are generally associated with “Light” and the Shadows with “Darkness”, both terms that are highly charged with moral significance (especially to modern Western people who despite all their silly denials of and slanders against Christianity are nevertheless still very deeply influenced by seventeen hundred years of Christian cultural dominance prior to the onset of “Enlightenment” in the eighteenth century).

But as the story reaches its pivotal point (from the middle of Season 3 to the middle of Season 4), we discover through the intervention of the First One (quite literally the very first being in the history of the Universe to have achieved sentience, an alien named Lorien) the above truth about the Vorlon / Shadow conflict and their millennia of manipulation of the Younger Races. The force of the story, driven by its atheistic view of authority, simply asserts that it is time for this order of things to end because the Younger Races “have learned to stand on their own”. The theme announced in the opening monologue of Season 1, that “the Third Age of mankind” has arrived, reaches its zenith when, with an enormous fleet of ships from all the Younger Races surrounded by a death-dealing Shadow planetkiller, the Human leader of the entire Younger Race resistance against both the Vorlons and the Shadows imperiously orders the gods to “get the hell out of our galaxy”.

Amazingly (inexplicably!!) the gods obey their inferiors and simply, with chilling finality, depart, taking all their agendas with them and leaving behind a vast number of loose threads for the Younger Races to figure out how to weave into a coherent cloth. Indeed, this very episode of the story closes with the Human leader and his wife conversing about how with the departure of the First Ones the mystery has gone out of the Universe, so now all that is left is for the Younger Races to create their own mysteries as they fumble about making their own mistakes rather than someone else’s. The “children” have learned to stop their “parents’” foolish bickering by simply exiling the parents from reality. The fourth season’s closing episode, “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars”, gives us a panoramic view of the future of humanity–like the Vorlons and Shadows before the, Humans will eventually reach “First One status” and have their own period of guiding a new group of Younger Races–though hopefully the Humans will not make the same mistakes as their Vorlon and Shadow predecessors. Man began as simple “starstuff” (a reference to the idea that our bodies are made up of elements that were once blown out into the universe by supernovas and eventually, through planet formation and evolution found their way into us) and ends as a star-walking god, the true captain of his own soul and master of his own destiny.

Now anyone who is familiar with the power of story, particularly of story that purports to explain the whole of existence (what is properly identified as “myth”) can see that this is a compelling story. Essentially it taps into and thoroughly explores what might be called “the myth of growing up”–that profoundly disturbing experience we all must undergo. The power of mythology lies precisely in its ability to tap into such deep, fundamental aspects of human nature, and Babylon 5‘s vision of what it means for humanity to “grow up” is a bold (if ultimately hollow) retelling of this aspect of our existence. Its power lies in its radical faithfulness to its worldview–the story does not shrink, for instance, from the stark harshness of accepting that millions of years of murder and mayhem can be excused by simply noting that the murderers were right by their own standards but now it is time for someone else’s standards to take over.

In Babylon 5, truth, beauty, and goodness, the three faces of culture, are functions of social consensus, not loving, sovereign divine care. This is, of course, a profoundly irrational and self-defeating principle, but Babylon 5‘s redeeming virtue (so to speak) is that it is consistent with this premise of its worldview and so dramatically succeeds in telling its story. For those already disposed to accept a basically atheistic paradigm, Babylon 5 confirms their deepest convictions and encourages them to stare at the existential abyss and laugh–to make the absurd leap of faith from real ultimate meaningless to (supposed) real proximate meaning without batting an eyelash. For those hostile to atheism, Babylon 5 subversively challenges the non-atheistic worldview by sheer force of consistency to and honesty about its presuppositions. It “works” because it is not afraid to admit its biases and accept all the implications of them without fear or waffling or qualification of any kind.

Not so with modern Christian storytelling.

The Worldview and Mythology of Modern Christianity

Modern Christians by and large do not understand the concept of worldviews, or the profound ways in which the Bible’s worldview subversively challenges our very existence as moderns. Modern Christians are exactly that–mind-numbingly, heart-killingly modern. We presume to have All Truth, but we do not even understand our own worldview, the thing that makes our truth-claims possible in the first place. This central fact comes out in our cultural products. Recall Wilson’s aphorism: “We Christians used to build great cathedrals; now we toss Gospel-frisbees”. Is this not a true indictment of our failure to engage in any meaningful cultural activities? We mock the culture of non-Christian unbelief that we find ourselves in, but we have our own peculiar Christian versions of unbelief that we pursue with holy zeal. We fill the airwaves with the immature, emotional gushing of trite “ask-Jesus-into-your-heart” revivalism and “Holy Ghost laughter rallies”, adorn our cars with inane bumper sticker slogans, and assault the New York Times Bestseller list with poorly written “thrillers” about how Christians will escape this mean old world of evil matter and history by God’s equivalent of Scotty’s transporter (the “Rapture”) and let the world burn in the apocalyptic hell-on-earth predicted by our (foolishly) “literal” reading of biblical prophecy.

Our problem, in a nutshell is that we hate the world we live in and desire to escape from it into a pure “spiritual” realm where there are no nasty bodies, no messy history, and none of that irrelevant culture stuff. Past generations of Christians, on the contrary, understood that this world is our Father’s world, the theater in which His loving plan is being played out, the place for us to take His word and disciple the nations with the goal of seeing the whole earth filled with His glory. Our fathers in the faith took the Gospel to the nations and transformed them, creating what we in our boring, soulless modernity scoff at as “the Dark Ages” but which was really a magnificent (though quite flawed) incarnation of a theology that was really believed 24 / 7, not merely mouthed in church on Sunday.

The Enlightenment tells us (contrary to Scripture) that “faith” is a purely private and emotional affair, an individual’s own personal communion with the god of his choice, disconnected from all engagement with the world of matter and history. Amazingly, we believe this lie, and so we produce utterly irrelevant, baptized versions of the pop-culture that is all we know and all we love. We think that the disgusting mess of pottage represented by WWJD bracelets and Left Behind novels and cheesy “witness wear” and B movies with B actors is our last, best hope for answering the evil Secular Humanists who supposedly evicted us from the positions of real cultural power when they banned school prayer in 1962. Hating history as we do, we thus do not understand that those positions of real cultural power used to be ours by reason of the blood, sweat, and tears of generations of our faithful fathers, but that, ironically, we simply gave them up without a fight in our mass defection from a biblically powerful faith during the two centuries of decline beginning with eighteenth century Pietism, continued by the nineteenth century’s Second Great Awakening, and culminating with the twentieth century’s retreat of Christians into mindless, fideistic “Fundamentalism”. We rail against the culture of unbelief that at least produces consistently atheistic (but moving!) stories like Babylon 5, but all we offer in return is a culture of unbelief that produces inconsistently Christian (and shallow!) trinkets that are here today and in the landfill tomorrow.

Like God in secular stories, a real sense of the Christian worldview in modern Christian cultural products is conspicuous by its absence. In our haste to avoid worldliness we have abandoned the world itself to the atheists, but paradoxically all we can do is whine about the very evil we ourselves brought about through our unfaithfulness to the covenant of our God.

What the Atheist Taught Me About Christian Culture

Ironically, perhaps the greatest example in modern times of a truly Christian cultural product–one which even Straczynski the atheist acknowledges his debt to in everything from certain basic story elements to entire classes of characters–is one which the mass of we “true believers” revile as demonic simply because it has monsters and wizards in it–J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yet, any informed Christian (i.e., one who has bothered to actually read Tolkien’s works, especially his Letters and the Silmarillion) can readily see the profound Christianity of the Lord of the Rings and understand with minimal reflection that the story not only taps into all the deepest themes of the human condition that the Bible itself deals with, but also satisfyingly answers them by resolving them into the loving, providential governance of the God who is really there and who is not silent–the God who does not let us sit in isolated enclaves and whine about persecution and intolerance while we read our Bibles in complete isolation from all that has come before our day, but commands us to go forth in the power of His name and baptize the nations, making them disciples. This is the true story of Christianity, but we modern Christians have forgotten it.

Straczynski the atheist understands the provocative power of story. Atheist that he is, in writing Babylon 5 he also understood the enormous power of myth as it came out in the Lord of the Rings. Indeed, for all its flaws, Babylon 5 might justly be called “an atheist’s answer to Tolkien”. All the same themes are there: the dangers of power for both the mature and immature, the drive to grow up into what one can be by virtue of one’s nature, the inexpressibly moving human attempt to engage with realities that transcend all understanding, the epic, ages long conflict between right and wrong, the passing of one Age into another with deep, saddening loss of beauty but great hope for the future, noble heroes and baseborn traitors, fierce wars and faithful loves, courage and fear, wisdom and utter foolishness.

The difference, of course, is that Babylon 5 has no ultimate foundation for its presentations of these themes. It can at best merely borrow them from the very Christianity it subtly despises by making it just one more relativistic and ultimately futile attempt to grasp the ultimately unknown (and possibly nonexistent) numinous. As a cultural product of atheism, Babylon 5 “works” on one level because it is consistent with its worldview. This much, at least, is light years ahead of any contemporary Christian attempt to express the Christian worldview. But as noted above, worldviews are not self-contained–if they do not actually engage the reality they claim to explain, they cannot be said to succeed on the broadest possible level. Tolkien successfully resolves the epic war between good and evil because good and evil are objectively definable entities–they are held accountable to a standard beyond the Circles of the World, Iluvatar (=God). Babylon 5, on the other hand, cannot successfully resolve its own epic conflict between “good” and “evil” because good and evil do not objectively exist for atheism. At the climax of the Lord of the Rings, Sauron gets what he deserves for his millennia of murder and mayhem; at the climax of Babylon 5, the murderers and mayhem-makers get off scot-free, and to the rousing cheers of “Good riddance!” by the Younger Races.

As a bare story, Babylon 5 works because it is consistent with its worldview. As a realistic explanation of reality, however, it only works because it is tacitly relying on the small bit of remaining cultural capital from the now-defunct “Christendom” it pretends it has transcended. As a bare story, Tolkien’s saga also works because it is consistent with its worldview. But as a realistic explanation of reality, Tolkien’s saga works precisely because it is a legitimate, unashamed product of that Christendom, which itself gives the only really meaningful and finally defensible explanation of the human condition (original sin, gracious salvation initiated by God, redemption and transformation of the whole of the creation that was marred by sin).

The Lord of the Rings is anything but a sermon, but its incredible staying power in the minds of millions of people who would not touch the Bible itself with a ten-foot pole is a dramatic–and unanswerable!–testimony to what is wrong with modern evangelical Christianity. But then again, so is Babylon 5. Nothing like Tolkien exists in today’s Christian cultural enterprise, for we are too busy filling the shelves with absurd apocalyptic thrillers and the airwaves with absurd televangelism. When an atheist can produce better fiction than Christians, we all ought to see that we have been asleep and that we have lost something profound. People of all belief systems will watch and remember Babylon 5; only people within a very narrow, introverted slice of Christianity will watch and remember The Omega Code. The fact that modern Christianity’s “best” cultural products are all in the class of the latter signifies the humiliating recognition that sometimes we can even learn the truth from atheists.

Technology Can’t Save You From An Amoral Universe

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[ Originally posted March 9, 2004 ]

Lately I’ve been watching a bunch of episodes that I missed of the current Star Trek series, Enterprise. For the most part I’ve been pleased with the show’s pretty convincing “gap filling” between our own era and an era of sustained manned space exploration. Enterprise takes place in the 2150′s, which is really not the far away from us, and furthermore, it is set only a century after the discovery of the ability to travel faster-than-light in the 2050s–even closer to our own time.

Enterprise has greatly impressed me with its “realistic” approach to the “technical” aspect of manned space travel, and it’s done so mostly with “the little things”–stuff like all the computer screens being obviously “kinda next generation” flat panel monitors literally just hanging on the walls, and like a great deal of trouble communicating with new aliens precisely because the Universal Translator is still in its infancy and is literally being “debugged” by a language expert they brought along with them from Earth. Unlike every other Starfleet ship we’ve ever seen, this “primitive” Enterprise‘s doors don’t even have proximity sensors, but are opened via pushing buttons on the wall. The transporter, an absolutely indispensable tool of Picard’s era, is so new to this crew that even though it’s been successfully used on humans several times, mostly they shy away from it and actually physically hard dock with other ships. Enterprise is shown flying around doing things that you’d never in a million years have thought of a Starfleet ship having to do–such as the “mundane” chore of laying “subspace amplifier buoys” so that communication with distant Earth can actually take place as the ship gets farther and farther away. The ubiquitous “phasers” of later generations are here merely retractable “cannons” whose targeting sensors sometimes don’t work properly, and the equally ubiquitous for later generations “photon torpedoes” aren’t even invented until the end of season 2. Replicators don’t exist–the ship has a real live “Chef” who cooks for the whole crew. The state of interspecies medicine, so taken for granted by McCoy, is for this Enterprise so “Dark Ages”-like that the doctor actually prescribes alien leeches for some illnesses and makes various healing ointments and so forth from the droppings of alien beetles.

Now sure, they have this fantastic warp drive making use of exotic “subspace fields” and so forth, but in the last analysis they’re really a bunch of ignorant folks playing with fire. For instance, the show went 12 episodes in the first season before it finally occurred to the crew that they shouldn’t have left spacedock with only one of their three “phase cannons” operational–and they only figured this out because they happened to run into a very hostile species whom they could not bargain with and who very nearly destroyed the ship. Twelve episodes (roughly half a year of story time) before they figured out something as seemingly elementary as “Take more than a few big guns just in case.” The whole idea was “Hi, we’re from Earth and we’re here to get to know new people. Come on over and have dinner.” “Captain, they’re charging weapons!” “What, I just wanted to shake their hand!” Ah, the naivety of the newly “enlightened”.

Or consider their ramshackle “shuttle pods”. Those things are probably the most minimal spacecraft to appear in any Star Trek series (saving perhaps Zefram Cochrane’s first warp ship, the Phoenix). Several episodes have focused around serious difficulties arising from the shuttlepods’ severely limited capabilities–and Enterprise, traveling nearly one hundred light years away from Earth, only has two of them. And of course they haven’t even developed deflector shields yet, so they’re running around in deep space with nothing more than something called “polarized hull plating”–better than naked metal, but obviously not capable of a great deal of protective functionality.

By the end of the first season they had, as their disgruntled Vulcan advisors tallied it, engaged in armed conflicts with over a dozen species and broke so many rules of “civilized” spacefaring that the mission nearly got cancelled. In the early second season they successively managed to hit a cloaked mine that blew out a huge chunk of the hull (thus reducing their engine capability to a level that would require something like 15 years to reach a repair station in Earth’s system), and then got in serious trouble with some locals that they had to barter with (!) for supplies to fix the ship. Later in the second season they met the Borg–and if you thought that Picard and Co. had a hard time handling the Borg, just imagine how Starfleet technology two centuries less-developed than Picard’s fared against the Borg! And all of this on mankind’s first “peaceful” mission of deep space exploration.

At any rate, I’ve been chugging along just fine with most aspects of Enterprise (barring the usual constant undertone of secularism that is the staple of all Star Trek)….And then last night I watched the second season episode “Stigma”. Long story short, this episode allegorically explored the sociopolitical ramifications of various sexual agendas of our own era–namely, the present brouhaha about homosexuality and the continuing push for the legitimization of just about all forms of “private” sexual behavior between “consenting adults”.

The first issue was explored via having Enterprise‘s science officer, a Vulcan woman named T’Pol, contract a neurological disease from a mind meld that was forced upon her earlier in the second season by some renegade Vulcans. As it turns out, at this point in Star Trek history, mind melds (so often performed by Spock a hundred years later without negative comment from anyone at all) are considered socially-subversive behavior by the Vulcans. Any Vulcans who are able and willing to indulge in mind melding–and they are comparatively few on account of “being born that way”–are considered radicals and ostracized as an “unacceptable minority”. Anyone found with the disease that sometimes results from mind melding is then stigmatized as somehow “abnormal”. The conflict that the Enterprise crew faces on this score results from three Vulcan doctors who discover that T’Pol has the disease and who then attempt to have her removed from her post on Enterprise and sent home in disgrace. It doesn’t matter to these doctors how T’Pol got the disease; it only matters that she has it and that it is apparently utterly socially necessary to stigmatize her rather than being “open minded” about the whole thing.

Through a great deal of very clever dialogue and appropriately emotional musical score, the viewer is drawn into the “plight” of “unacceptable-and-downtrodden-minorities-who-sometimes-unfortunately-contract-yucky-diseases” and then forced to swallow a boatload of utterly transparent propaganda about “not being a bigot” and “accepting diversity” and “not judging people’s private practices” that come from “the way they were born”. The philosophical capstone of the propaganda comes when Captain Archer confronts the bigoted Vulcan doctors and reminds them that for 100 years the Vulcans have been riding humans hard to get rid of their “preconceptions” about life and the universe before going out to the stars to meet other races, but then ironically, it is the Vulcans themselves who are found to be saddled with “intolerance”–something that the humans “gave up” when they met the Vulcans and found out they they truly weren’t alone in the universe. The message could not be clearer: Judge not…unless the one you’re judging is being judgmental, in which case it’s morally required to be judgmental yourself.

The second theme of this episode concerned the hedonistic sexuality of the race to which the ship’s doctor, Phlox, belongs: the Denobulans. Other episodes have revealed that Denobulans are rather excessively polygamous, but this episode pushed the envelope much farther than that. For it seems that the Denobulan concept of “marriage” is a very vague thing, susceptible to all manner of “creative” experimentation which none of the multiple parties involved in such relationships ever have any sort of second thought about. This fact comes out when Phlox’s third wife visits Enterprise and spends the whole episode trying to seduce Commander Tucker, whom she finds exceedingly attractive. Tucker, a good Southern gentleman (but not good enough, as other episodes have intimated, to confine his sexual activities to one woman within the bond of marriage) refuses to sleep with “another man’s wife” since he was “raised not to do that”.

Ultimately the adulterous advances of Phlox’s wife send Tucker to confront the doctor himself in an attempt to obtain some relief by having Phlox rein the lusty creature in. But Phlox does nothing of the sort. Instead, he encourages Tucker to sleep with his wife precisely because the Denobulan concept of marriage is not the human one, and actually encourages a maximum of behavior that humans consider “adulterous”. Tucker is dumbfounded, but sticks to his guns and refuses to violate his own personal moral code (hey, a man has to have standards, right?). But the radical assault upon the viewer completes itself when toward the end of the episode (just as the Vulcan “bigots” are elsewhere being challenged to rethink their “intolerance”) Phlox and his wife share a moment of high mutual amusement at Tucker’s expense, finding it utterly bizarre that the man would refuse the advances of Phlox’s wife. Thus, the viewer is assaulted one final time by the two Denobulans cuddling up to each other as a man and wife should do, but offset by Phlox’s grinning remark “Humans!” and the joyful laughter of his “liberated” wife. The moral is again plain: You don’t have to sleep with someone if you don’t want to, but just make sure that you understand your objections to doing so are relative only to yourself and your own personal culture.

As Enterprise progresses I’m noticing more and more items like these cropping up all over the place. As if the above offenses weren’t enough, an earlier episode had featured an encounter with a pre-warp drive civilization–the usual fodder for Trek’s disgusting “Prime Directive” mentality. This species, suffering from a horrible epidemic that their science could not cure, had managed to get some non-warp spacecraft out far enough from their system that they actually discovered warp-capable species on their own–thus relieving Enterprise‘s crew of the usual Prime Directive “dilemma” of “interfering with their culture”.

However, the episode features Dr. Phlox actually discovering a cure for the disease that is afflicting the aliens…and then withholding it from them on the absolutely immoral basis that “evolution is an undeniable fact of the universe, and evolution may be sending this species to extinction.” It seems that on this planet there are two species, the “superior” one with the illness and another one that they consider “inferior” but which does not catch the illness. Phlox discovers that the “inferior” species appears to be in the midst of an “evolutionary awakening” that, while possibly still millennia away nevertheless has the potential to make the “inferior” race the dominant one via natural selection killing off the presently “superior” race. Phlox decrees Evolution to be an established fact of the universe and observes that he would not be speaking to his human friends if, 35,000 prior some alien race had interfered with Evolution on earth and prevented the Neanderthals from being supplanted by Homo sapiens. It seems to Phlox the scientist that the humans’ “compassion for these people” is “affecting their judgment”, clouding their objectivity.

The perverted logic was spelled out more subtly in the episode’s dialogue, but the connection of capital-e Evolution to the dogma of “non interference” was made explicit. So explicit, in fact, that Captain Archer, who begins by officially ordering Phlox to share the cure with the aliens is eventually won over to Phlox’s side by the evil “logic” that whatever humans have come out into deep space to do, it is not “to play God with the destiny of other species.” As if withholding a desperately needed medical solution and thus potentially condemning an entire race to extinction is not “playing God”! But of course it isn’t, since in Star Trek’s universe there is no God and the impersonal forces of time and chance conspire to make capital-e Evolution rule all.

Now this is the problem with unbelieving culture and the plan to take it off this planet and spread it abroad into the cosmos. Unbelievers live in an amoral universe–a universe with no standards beyond the finite conditions of the radically disconnected cultures that have all randomly evolved on so many different worlds under so many different conditions, a universe of ultimate philosophical incoherence and ultimate metaphysical randomness, a universe where tolerance is intolerant, morality is immorality, and truth is only true if you have been genetically and socially predisposed to believe that it is. As the more “enlightened” Vulcans of Spock’s day (a century after Enterprise) will say, one should embrace infinite diversity in infinite combination. You don’t know what you’re depriving yourself of, otherwise.

This shallow worldview is frequently hailed as the solution to the “problem” of such things as religious dogmatism, and yet it turns out that in the end the dogmatism of the non-dogmatic is far more dogmatic than anything the dogmatists could ever have dreamed up. The secularist inquisition of Star Trek doesn’t tie its heretics to a stake and physically burn them, but it does make sure they never leave the fringes of the city and can do no more than toss foam rubber rocks at the “enlightened” souls passing them by on the great evolutionary journey to the great big undefined Whatever.

The sheer amorality of the unbeliever’s universe is upon reflection graphically startling. And they want to take it out into space, “the final frontier”! The problem is, of course, that in reality we don’t live in the amoral universe that they wish we did. Perhaps if we ever do encounter an alien race our representatives will be men who live in that amoral universe and find out, as C.S. Lewis observed fifty years ago, that creatures more righteous than ourselves have no choice but to destroy us lest we inflict our disgusting sinful rebellion against our common Creator upon them, as well.

A Review of Poul Anderson’s “The High Crusade”

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[ Originally posted Dec. 29, 2003 ]

I had never read a book by Poul Anderson before reading The High Crusade (1960). Though I had known the man was considered a master sci-fi writer, I was beyond impressed by this book.

The High Crusade is the story of what happens when the inhabitants of a fourteenth century English village, Ansby, are attacked by a scout ship for the conquest-driven Wersgorix race. From the moment the Wersgorix scouting party disembarks from their ship, confident in their supposed overwhelming technological superiority over the English “barbarians”, all the usual stereotypes about religion and science are cleverly and dramatically reversed with great rhetorical and storial effect.

The story is told largely through the eyes and quill of “Brother Parvus” (literally “Little Brother”), an unassuming and quite ordinary fourteenth century monk, with all the biases one might expect in a man of that period. For instance, there are frequent references to Holy Scripture and the authority of the Church Fathers and the present (14th century) Pope in spiritual matters, frequent mention of the Mass and its spiritual benefits, and tremendous concern for how warfare against the Wersgorix should be mediated by explicitly biblical concerns. As well the story is made all the more charming and believable by simple conventions that one actually finds in real Medieval literature-such as the interesting (and probably disconcerting for Moderns) reckoning of historical matters according to a scheme of “in the year of grace 1345…”, and so forth.

Most interesting, indeed, is the way the story uses such pious Christianity to completely overturn the entire substructure of contempt for Medieval Christendom that so many Moderns-even Modern Christians!-are so facilely taken with. For instance, contrary to the superficial Modern belief that religious biases (particularly Christian ones) contribute only to ignorance, superstition, and repression of true “progress”, the Medievals of little English Ansby demonstrate the true power of a life lived in devotion to Jehovah, the God of Battles. As well they manage to reveal the true, synthesizing power of the Medieval vision, which, far from being repressive of knowledge and advance, simply operated according to a very different scheme of how human beings know things and was quite able to handle new ways of thinking (within reason, of course).

Now it is true that the Medieval vision was for a long time hindered by its received Platonism from making the sorts of immense advances in purely natural and applied science that began to happen after the seventeenth century. But all Modern misinformation aside, that vision was very much capable of taking new knowledge (such as the possibility of space travel and the existence of alien races) and incorporating it into the existing scheme of submission to God’s revelation. Thus we find the Ansby-ites, under their lord Roger de Tourneville and the careful, sometimes humorous spiritual guidance of Brother Parvus, not only wrestling with (and triumphing over) the implications for their religion of the largely religion-less Wersgor race, but also fairly easily incorporating into their worldview and practice the “scientific” mindset that shallow Moderns believe is entirely incompatible with “religion”. Set this side-by-side with, say, the propagandistic storial device found in many episodes of Star Trek to the effect that anytime “primitives” encounter “advanced” thinking, they will necessarily have their entire way of life completely upended and be forced to abandon or radically transform their religion to the standards set down by the “advanced” knowledge, and one has a rather large possibility of experiencing severe cognitive dissonance. Not that this would be a bad thing for the reader soaked in Modernism (as we all are to some degree or another) to experience.

Much more could be said about The High Crusade, but the story is simply so thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking that I do not wish to spoil it for anyone else. Get Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade. It is well worth your time and reading effort.

“Chariots of the gods”, and Other Pseudo-Rational Myths

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[Originally written July 24, 2007]

I have always enjoyed science fiction, and the genre has comprised most of my fiction reading for years. However, I think sometimes I get too deep into it, reading so much of it that it begins to oppress rather than entertain. For example, about six months ago I read in rapid succession the six Dune prequels, each over 500 pages in length. I came away from them feeling “raw” from what amounted to a sustained deluge of anti-supernatural propaganda centered on the notion that all religion is fundamentally irrational and emotional. I do not believe this, of course, but reading so much material at such a fast rate containing this message did have an emotional effect on me, and not a good one.

A similar feeling has prompted this blog entry, because a few months ago I watched the entire 9th season of Stargate SG-1 over a period of only two weeks. Before talking about that, let me offer a few remarks on Stargate itself and my experiences watching it.

For those who may not know, the series revolves around an alien device called a “stargate,” which creates and channels “wormholes,” interdimensional tunnels, between planets and sometimes even between galaxies. People may travel through these wormholes, achieving nearly instantaneous translocation.

The basic religious-philosophical premise of the Stargate series may be summed up by borrowing Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but adding the qualification that there is no such thing as magic because everything that is thought to be magic is simply misunderstood advanced technology.

The main inspiration, however, is surely Erich von Daniken’s 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. This work put forward the idea that ancient Earth civilizations were visited repeatedly by advanced aliens, and, since ancient people were primitive and unenlightened these aliens were mistaken for gods. Advanced technology was thought by the ignorant to be supernatural magic, and religions sprung up around their wielders.

Obviously this premise could not be accepted by a Christian, and I have always rejected it just as I reject the secularism of Star Trek and Babylon 5. Nevertheless, worldview filters firmly in place I watched Seasons 1-8 of Stargate SG-1 a few years ago. For the most part, the show focused its demythologization of religion upon ancient pagan religions, chiefly that of the Egyptians.

Throughout the show’s 10 season run, other pagan religious systems were revealed to be the products of alien influence, but in only one case that I recall–that of Norse mythology–were the aliens, “the Asgard,” benevolent. For the most part, the aliens involved in religious matters were malevolent, and their followers either blind fideists (“believe it just because”) or frightened slaves (“believe it or the god will incinerate you with his magical glove of power”).

In only one story arc that I can recall were any connections with Christianity mentioned, and that was the Season 3 arc concerning the entirely depraved alien Sokar who had, apparently, masqueraded as the Devil on many worlds. The key episode as far as concerns Christianity was “Demons,” in which the SG-1 team finds what looks like a Christian church on the planet they are exploring. Significantly, one of the characters states that in hundreds of missions through the stargate, this is the first time they’ve ever found Christians.1

Apparently peopled by the descendants of Medieval Christians removed from Earth by aliens, the religion of the village has degenerated over at least a thousand years into an outrageously gross caricature of Medieval Catholicism that no one who has more than a passing familiarity with Medieval history could possibly accept.

For instance, these “Christians” believe that the way to handle “the Devil” (really just a parasitical alien) who appears from time to time demanding “sacrifices” (really just host bodies for the parasite) is to offer innocent victims to the monster. Predictably, since Sovereign Science has not arisen thanks to the predominance of Rustic Religion, the people are so ignorant of basic physical reality that they automatically attribute a case of chicken pox to “demon possession” and think it can only be cured by drilling holes in the sick person’s head to let the “spirits” escape. Equally predictably, all the religious power in the village is held by a corrupt bishop-like figure who uses a technological gadget on his finger to do such things as “magically” call down lightning from the sky to punish people he says have “unclean souls.”

All of this is such a gross caricature of Christianity in general, and of Catholicism in particular, that it’s difficult to know where to begin unraveling it. But unraveling the problems with seasons 1-8 or SG-1 is not my point here. Season 9 dares to go “where no Stargate has gone before.” That is, having at last disposed of all the “false gods” they were battling in seasons 1-8, the brave humanistic heroes of Stargate Command accidentally find a new enemy in season 9: incorporeal “ascended beings” called the Ori. “Ascended beings” are, in Stargate physics2 just beings who have reached such a high state of evolution that their physical forms can no longer contain their essences, and so they “ascend” to a realm of pure energy, where, we are told, they become more or less omniscient and omnipotent.

Throughout seasons 1-8 the team was aware of ascended beings, for they had encountered references in various ruins to “the Ancients,” once corporeal and very human-like beings who, after thousands and thousands of years of technological achievement, managed to ascend to the energy realm. When they ascended, the Ancients dropped all corporeal matters into the wastebin of evolution, and in the process, left their relics all over the galaxy in the form of usually still functioning advanced technology.3 The Ancients seemed basically indifferent to the plight of lower beings, and had strict rules in place forbidding interference in the lower realm. However, from time to time an Ancient would disobey the rules and help lower beings on the path to ascension–Stargate‘s version of salvation.

Well, in season 9 the team learns that the Ancients were just one philosophical school of a larger group originating in another galaxy, and that there was another philosophical school, the Ori, who believed quite differently than the Ancients. The philosophical dispute between the groups turned on Religion (the Ori) versus Science (the Ancients). As it turns out, the Ori are power-mad manipulators who can suck energy from people who worship them, thus increasing their own ascended powers. Accordingly, they have created a religion, Origin, to enslave the billions of people in their own galaxy. At some point during the controversy, the Ancients left their own galaxy and came to ours so that they could be free to practice Scientific advancement without interference by the Ori’s Religious intolerance.

This is where season 9 diverges from the first eight seasons, which scarcely ever mentioned, or even implied, anything about Christianity. Unlike, say, the crass superstitions of ancient Egyptian religion, Origin is a Holy Book religion. Extracts from the Book of Origin cited by various characters throughout the season sound like cheap, moralistic imitations of the Bible–but that a “false religion” sounds like the Bible at all, even in caricature, is a new thing for the Stargate series.

Origin comes complete with evangelistic “Priors” who quote the Book of Origin chapter-and-verse and use its precepts to control ignorant, superstitious followers. The Priors also possess staffs which give them “miraculous” powers, such as healing wounds, projecting force fields, calling fire down from the sky, and telekinetic manipulation of external objects. As usual, this is all merely hyper-advanced technology which the untutored sycophants of “the gods” take to be “magic.”

The goal of Origin is for the worshipers to hallow the Ori with such mind-numbing obedience that they will literally do anything the Priors command, including killing all who do not believe in the Ori and the Book of Origin. By hallowing the Ori in this manner, the Book of Origin leads its followers to believe that upon their deaths their gods, the Ori, will ascend them. In reality, as an Ancient tells the SG-1 team during one episode, what awaits the Ori’s worshipers is not ascension but the most pointless sort of death imaginable. The Ori are apparently jealous of their ascended status and will have no other “gods” before them.

And so the stage is set for a replaying in season 9 of Scientific Modernity’s epic battle with the forces of repressive false religion. When the Ori learn of the Milky Way Galaxy at the beginning of the season they immediately see it as a new mission field of “unbelievers” and declare a “crusade” to convert it. Priors begin coming through stargates all over the galaxy, preaching Origin and demanding surrender to its dictates. All who resist are summarily punished, for punishment and death is all that can be given to the hapless followers of the “evil” Ancients who will not embrace “the Truth” of Origin and chant with blind devotion, “Hallowed are the Ori!”

Now, usually blatant secularism in sci-fi doesn’t bother me all that much. I’ve long been innoculated against it, and have a pretty well developed set of “worldview filters” to rely upon as I watch or read various sci-fi universes. Star Trek‘s explicit evolutionary naturalism usually just bores me, Isaac Asimov’s scientific reductionism merely makes me wonder at the capacity of very intelligent men to blind themselves, and Arthur C. Clarke’s attempt to shock people of faith by writing “The doctrine that God made man in his own image is ticking like a time bomb at the heart of every revealed religion,” just makes me laugh. However, by the time I was done watching Stargate Season 9, I felt like I had been rolling around in thick, gooey mud and needed a long hot shower to clean the muck off. The only other time I can recall ever feeling this way after a sci-fi “binge” was, as I mentioned above, the time I read the six Dune prequels back-to-back.

It’s difficult to know where to begin hacking up the stupidity of the premises which made Stargate Season 9 go–there are so many. For one thing, the idea that anyone not already acquainted with advanced technology is, upon encountering an advanced technological product, going to instantly assume it’s “magic” and develop a completely irrational religious fixation upon it is just simply bizarre–the kind of thing you’d only believe, ironically, if you actually were a critical-thought challenged, blitheringly idiotic religious zealot.

Most people–especially most religious people–do not think this way. As C.S. Lewis points out somewhere, St. Joseph was quite aware of how babies were made and therefore, he was naturally skeptical at Mary’s claim to have been divinely-impregnated. He assumed, as most ordinary people would when confronted with a bare claim like Mary’s, that there was a natural explanation. It took quite extraordinary, non-natural means to convince him otherwise. In other words, Joseph, though devoutly religious, was not a mindless moron ready to believe just whatever fantastic claim came down the turnpike.

Normally, religious people are not people who have taken complete leave of their rational faculties and simply jumped off the deep end. Stargate, and all productions that rely on similar assumptions, is not only profoundly wrong about religious people, but also incredibly insulting to them. Poul Anderson’s excellent sci-fi novel The High Crusade, which I reviewed here, much more accurately reveals how religious people, and Christians in particular, think about the world.

On the contrary, as Lewis also excellently points out (in his book Miracles), real miracles are not things which are contrary to Nature and which thus require goofy leaps of irrational pseudo-logic in order to justify. Miracles are, rather, interventions into the ordinary course of things from beyond the ordinary course of things, and they are almost always immediately taken up into the ordinary course of things. As Lewis puts it, miraculously-produced bread still rots, inspired books still undergo all the normal degenerating processes of textual transmission, and resurrected bodies still die again. “Miracle” is not a meaningless concept you reach for when you see a tornado and it scares you because you just don’t know how it works; “miracle” is the thing which, in an appropriate context, gives the tornado meaning in the first place. As Lewis has one character in put it, knowing how a thing works is not the same thing as knowing what the thing is–or, I would add, why it is.

Now, religious people may sometimes see miracles under every rock and behind every tree, but they are not ordinarily so credulous as to believe that just anything which defies immediate explanation in terms of whatever underdeveloped categories they have at hand must be relegated to the unexplainable realm of the supernatural and be fanatically and irrationally worshiped. On the contrary, it was religious people–and Christian theists at that–who first developed the basic distinction between the ordinary and extraordinary actions of God, such that the physical world is basically intelligible because God ordinarily does things in this way.

The normal religious person does not look at a thunderstorm and go, as the atheist scientist years ago mocked, “The gods must be angry” and then refuse to look at how wind and lightning work. No, the normal religious person is not prevented from inquiring into the workings of the thunderstorm merely because he believes that God made it. Instead, the religious person could be like that great scientist and Christian Kepler, who, when looking through his telescope and making observations, piously said, “O God, I am thinking Your thoughts after you.”

And anyway, as “superstitions” go it’s probably much healthier (though potentially scarier) to believe that a rational person controls lightning than that blind, stupid chance controls it. You might be able, like Abraham, to reason with the Person. You can’t reason with Fate, but only resignedly bow, like the pagan Tashtego in the closing scene of Moby Dick, to its immutable, inscrutable, irrational whim.

On the subject of the “irrationality” of belief in the supernatural, you do not have to look far even in so-called “scientific” and “rational” literature to find men seemingly utterly abandoning their senses and embracing bizarrely wild conjectures and utterly unprovable theories about all manner of things. One thinks of Daniel Dennet’s silly theories about the brute, naturalistic rise of consciousness, or Richard Dawkins’ unswervable faith in “the selfish gene,” or Stephen Jay Gould’s whole cloth invention of “punctuated equilibrium” to save the appearance of mechanistic evolution or the chaos theoretician Kauffman’s childishly enthusiastic glee at his own mental creation of “auto-catalytic sets” of chemical reactions as the explanation for how life began. Holy Book religions haven’t got anything on men like this in terms of fostering superstitious mania for intellectually-blinding prejudices.

There is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Who Watches the Watchers,” which amply exemplifies the stupidity of the “religion as stupid people’s reaction to technology” premise. In that episode, one character informs a fanatical member of a “primitive” race who has misinterpreted advanced medical techniques as “magic” wielded by “gods” that the problem with believing in gods is that you never know what they want. Well, could not a similar thing be said of believing in primordial soup or common ancestors or the inevitability of a “rational explanation”? T

hese are the quacks who write learned articles for reputable scientific journals about how adultery is morally acceptable because evolution dictates that the more women a man has sex with the better his chances of passing his genes down the line so that Natural Selection can operate upon them and potentially evolve them into something better.

So then, “The problem with believing in evolution is that you never know where it’s going.” Maybe it’s good to murder your neighbor in his sleep so you can have better access to the resources in your area, thus better ensuring your own survival. And while you’re at it, hey, maybe nobody can tell you otherwise since the unguided collocations of atoms that, billions of years ago in the Big Bang, randomly determined what their thoughts would be also randomly determined what yours would be. It’s all random, so who’s to say this is good and that is bad?

This brings up another way to point out the stupidity of the Stargate assumptions about religion. Since there can be no right or wrong in a world of constant evolutionary change, from whence to the brave warriors of Stargate Command derive the quaint moral notions that the Ori are “evil” and that killing others in the name of religion is atrocious? By subjugating and even killing others, the Ori are merely ensuring the continued propagation of their species–a perfectly acceptable, and quite necessary, activity in, to use Darwin’s memorable phrase, Nature that is “red in tooth and claw.”

It does not matter that they are not really gods, but merely hyper-advanced aliens. All that matters is that they have evolved to a higher state than others and are simply taking care to ensure that they continue to evolve higher than others. Natural Selection by its very nature weeds out those not able to compete, so if 10 million primitives on some backwater world refuse to bow to Origin and the Ori exterminate them, what of it? The gene pool does need a little chlorine every now and then, so why be mad at the pool men? Who died and made Lieutenant Mitchell or Teal’c or Samantha Carter the moral judges of the universe? I thought they believed in chance and evolution.

Beyond such obvious critiques as these, much could be said about the shockingly puerile attempt to mock revealed religion in Stargate Season 9. As I noted, followers of the Ori frequently cite “Scripture” (the Book of Origin) in ways that, I guess, are supposed to make the average semi-religious TV viewer remember how uncomfortable he felt growing up sitting captive every week in the First Self-Righteous Church listening to his ignorant Bible-thumping preacher, mouth flecked with foam, thundering again about “hellfire and brimstone” and the necessity to be “pure” if one wished to “be saved.”

I can feel sorry for folks who grew up with that kind of craziness, but the reality is that it’s not Christianity, so if one wants to mock Christianity one is going to have come up with something a lot better. And certainly if you’re trying to mock the Bible you need to do a lot better than the bowdlerized mish-mash of moralism, mythology, and muddle-headed muckraking that is the Book of Origin. Consider these gems of Ori-inspired wisdom:

“Those who seek the path to enlightenment must not be led astray!”

“Glorious are the Ori, who lead us to salvation, who did fight the evil that would doom us all to mortal sin. Did they defeat the old spirits and cast them out? And now, with the strength of our will, they do call upon us to prevail against the corruption of all unbelievers.”

“Pity not the blind man, for he is hindered not by the visions of this world, but rather pity yourselves, for he will see the light before you do.”

“…then did Tilius say to the people of the low plains: seek not the wickedness amongst your neighbors, lest it find purchase in your own house.”

“So it came to pass that Ver Omesh was gripped by a great famine. So Markon went to the Prophet Articus and asked to go to the forest for food. The prophet bade him be patient, for the Ori provide for all who have faith. But Markon did not believe. So the prophet drew a line in the sand and told him, ‘step across and you may do as you wish.’ So Markon did and left the village and feasted on wild berries.The fruit was bitter. It did not satisfy him. He longed to return to the village, but found that the line had widened to a great chasm. He called out to the Prophet in fear, but the Prophet said, ‘The line has not changed; it is you who have changed. Step across if you truly believe’ So Markon prayed for forgiveness and took the first step and the hands of the Ori enveloped all those who welcomed him back.”

Ooh, ahh, powerful and profound stuff, that. No wonder “rational” people reject “religion,” eh? But perhaps this is one reason why Stargate Season 9 struck me as hard as it did. The deceptions are present on so many levels, and are aimed at an audience that quite likely has very little, if any, ability to critically think through crack-brained pseudo-philosophies presented in television dramas. It takes an ability to think to see through this stuff, but as Neil Postman pointed out years ago in Amusing Ourselves to Death TV has increasingly eroded the ability of its average viewer to think.

How can you stop and think about the nonsense about religion and science that you’re listening to Daniel Jackson feed you when the scenes and perspectives constantly shift from camera to camera and site to site, all the dialogue is in clipped, conversational snippets suitable for hour-long programs, and, at any moment–probably at a most pivotal one–the screen will fade out for a “And now this…” word from the sponsors. And besides, the special effects, especially the space battles, are way cool. It’s just a TV show, Tim. Stop analyzing it so much.

I could keep going, but personally, I think Tolkien’s explanation of ancient non-scientific beliefs is best. In the Silmarillion he describes how the Numenoreans, at the height of their Valar-granted power and wisdom, visited Middle Earth and “left many rumors in the myths and legends of men.” In Tolkien, there’s no need to find a “natural explanation” or a “logical explanation” for strange goings-on. Strange goings-on simply permeate the very nature of reality, and are taken for granted by all the characters as evidence of things both beyond their ken and yet also fully reasonable in their own right, not requiring reduction to purely natural(istic) categories. Aragorn sagely reminds several people that “old wives’ tales” may contain much wisdom that even those who are widely thought today to be “wise” have forgotten. In fact, in a not entirely unjustified reversal of Modern stereotypes, in Tolkien it is Science, particularly in the form of the mechanistic machinations of Mordor and Isengard, that causes the greatest evils to occur.

Similarly, C.S. Lewis magnificently satirizes the stupidity of naturalistic Science in his Space Trilogy. Few things are more humorous, and more hard-hitting, than the scene of that paragon of “rational” men, the scientist Weston, hopping about maniacally before the superbly intelligent and wise angel-like Oyarsa of Mars (whom Weston thinks is an ignorant “witch doctor”) while holding out trinkets and chanting “Pretty, pretty!” and threatening to bring “Puff bangs” (guns) to make the “primitives” do what he wants. In the world of Stargate you’d never encounter an Oyarsa-like being, and so you’d never have to face your own limitations like Weston does.

So instead of simply recognizing a different order of being made by the same God as you and equally beholden to Him, you’d have nothing but vain, speculative babbling about the advanced technology that lets the “evolved alien” Oyarsa seem to exist just on the periphery of your senses, and about how wonderful it would be if you could just determine what sort of “fields” and “particles” he was emitting so that you could master them too and be a “god” just like him. What an impoverished worldview. It makes you wonder if “science” is really all that different from “superstition.”

There is much that could be done for science fiction with the frameworks that Tolkien and Lewis created. In fact, I was sufficiently worked up over Stargate Season 9 that I spent much of my free time for about a month seeing if I could create something similar enough to explore some of the same themes, yet not tainted with asinine naturalistic assumptions about reality. Whether or not it ever sees the light of day, I succeeded in my effort, and that by envisioning the entire enterprise of space exploration through the lens of concepts and categories found in Tolkien and Lewis. Narnia proved indispensable, as did the Silmarillion.

It can be done, and without all the so-called “spiritual” silliness that typically pervades Evangelical attempts to answer secular culture. Even though creations like mine would likely never achieve serious penetration in the sci-fi market, perhaps it’s enough to know it can be done. There’s no reason, then, to get overly worked up over stuff like Stargate Season 9.

  1. I say it is “significant” because I wonder if the writers weren’t aware that they had to tread carefully when dealing with a religion as widespread and culturally influential on probably most television viewers as Christianity has been. There are very few Ra worshipers in the world today, so it’s not quite so offensive to say that Ra was an alien as it would be to say that Jehovah is. [↩]
  2. I say “physics” and not metaphysics because there does not appear to be any metaphysics in Stargate. The highest beings anyone knows about are merely residents of a different sort of “continuum” which has different rules. Regardless of continuum, though, all things appear to be reducible to mere efficient causation–i.e., naturalistic mechanisms–that can be understood through the application of Reason and harnessed by Technology. [↩]
  3. This is where the stargates came from, along with many other devices and rumors and myths of “magic.” [↩]

“Voices in the Dark”: Babylon 5 and “Out of the Silent Planet”

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Babylon 5, though written by a skeptic, remains one of the better sci-fi shows in terms of exploring religion in an age of high science. Recently rewatching the episode “Voices in the Dark” has made me wonder whether sometimes skeptics really do “have our number” in how they formulate arguments.

To wit: Unable to deal with a seemingly actually demonically-possessed man by any means at their disposal, the crew of Babylon 5 calls in a priest to perform an exorcism. In discussion with the demon, the priest, who has earlier confided a deep crisis of faith based on the fact that for 200 years (the show is set in 2260) Christianity has steeply declined *because* man has found no evidence of God or angels in space and his or advanced aliens’ science seem poised to answer all “really important” questions, learns that in the very distant past God made Earth the prison of fallen angels such that they could never go to the stars. Finally, though, one demon has managed to escape earth via possessing a human space traveler, and is now trying to get himself exorcised *off Earth* so he can freely roam the stars again.

(I don’t have time to expand on it here, but this whole concept strikes me as profoundly thoughtful in the light of C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet.)

The episode is fascinating in many ways, but what got my attention most, in light of C.S. Lewis’ notation that scientific progress and and space travel tend to be fallaciously used to discredit Christianity, is that the priest himself struggles to understand why no traces of the supernatural have ever been found in 200 years of space travel. Shouldn’t there be, if not choirs of angels singing in the heavens, at least “a stray Seraphim left behind in the general evacuation”? How does God expect anyone to believe in him when fusion drives make the stars a hop, skip, and jump away and alien technology can reshape whole planets as was done in Genesis?

The questions no doubt seem silly to “really informed” believers, but again, I wonder if there isn’t a way in which this version of them actually does hit the common man’s faith. Growing up Evangelical, I remember hearing weird stories off and on about how scientists pointing instruments at the stars heard singing they couldn’t explain (presumably angelic choirs) or how miners delving too deep heard tortured screams (presumably from souls in hell). But if *Evangelicals* can find such stories credible, and spred them far and wide as “proof” of Christianity, then the skeptic writer of Babylon 5 is correct: the steady advance of science, and especially space travel, would cause a rapid decline in faith. Why?

Simply this: such a kind of faith is so crudely “cosmomorphic” and “geomorphic” that it really does think (albeit probably almost subconsciously) of God as some kind of exalted Sky Father inhabiting a super-stellar throne, and Hell as a sensorily-verifiable place under the ground. Therefore, once science finds out that “angels” are actually just hyper-evolved aliens, what place is left for faith?

Ultimately I think there are profound and satisfying answers to these questions of science and religion, and that Lewis is probably the best place to find them, but again, it’s fascinating to me to think that what is so easily (scoffingly) dismissed by triumphalistic modes of apologetics might actually hit closer to home than we like to admit.

Brief Reflections on Netflix’s “Jupiter’s Legacy”

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I had been wondering about the new superhero show “Jupiter’s Legacy,” so I watched a few episodes last night.

Some grittier-than-usual violence, but my sense was that it only served to underscore one of the major themes that has been increasingly appearing in pop-culture for some time: evildoers are getting more brutal, less restrained, leaving heroes struggling to cope with seriously shocking barbarism, a complete disregard for anything humane.

The main plot point seems to be that the first generation of superheroes hails from 1930, and consist mostly of men and women who believe in objective right and wrong so much that they form a “Code” of behavior to govern their use of power – a Code which is to remain inviolate as the heroes act only as moral guides, not formal leaders, lest by overmastering force they deprive ordinary people of free will.

By contrast, there is no small degree of consternation among this older generation about how today’s villains don’t seem to have even a vestige of moral awareness or restraint, but simply give free reign to destructive passions at every possible moment.

The heroes’ children (born 60-70 years later due to the original heroes’ longevity), however, live in our world of self-aggrandizing “follow your heart” subjectivism, and so the struggle among the heroes is developing as serious questions about whether the Code can survive the new world of increasing demand for merely forceful suppression of evildoers.

(At one point, a policeman nearly begs the son of the main hero to just line up the bad guys en masse and execute them, since both heroes and police are themselves being taken out without remorse. At another point, the main hero upbraids journalists for saying 78% of Americans want forceful action against the new breed of evil – he sharply responds that 78% of Americans need to decide what kind of world they’re prepared to live in should that visceral wish be taken up by the heroes.)

The Code (coming out of that older generation) stipulates that the heroes are never to take a life; the new generation increasingly wonders whether that’s even possible. At one high point, the up-and-coming young leader of the new generation as a last resort kills a supervillain to save his own parents and friends, and is harshly chastised by his father but later defended by his mother, who tells the dad, “If our son had followed the Code, we would be in boxes in the ground, too, like our friends.” The father has no answer.

The show has already been cancelled, so after the first season it will be all left hanging. But what has been most interesting to me so far is, again, the theme I’m seeing in much pop-culture of a resurgent, self-aware conflict between real morality and mere expediency.

Wrapped up in this is the all-too-common these days theme of a father who was so wrapped up in his Duty (saving others) that he wound up losing his childrens’ allegiance – raising the question, what is the value of following Duty if a man loses his own family in the process?

A different show had the hero say numerous times while fighting completely amoral bad guys, “Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing for the right reason.” Still other shows (stretching back into my childhood, in the 80s) were built on the premise that official guardians of justice can’t be trusted, so moral people always have to take the law into their own hands.

I think here of the 1980s TV show Knight Rider (“…a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law”). And of course, back of this, even in the 30s, you find Batman, and back of him, Zorro, and way farther back of him, Robin Hood. Bottom line: the Western tradition has always struggled with the sorts of issues highlighted in “Jupiter’s Legacy.”

I find it fascinating to compare the differences between older iterations of the theme and contemporary ones. Robin Hood, Zorro, Batman, Michael Knight, the first generation of heroes in “Jupiter’s Legacy” – all had the equivalent of a real moral code that distinguished them from the bad guys.

Today’s heroes (“heroes”?) live in a world where they themselves are perpetually conflicted at seeing innumerable fine shades of gray, while their opponents increasingly have zero sense of anything but simple black. But at least the questions are still being asked (in how ever a visceral form) – which shows that not everyone, even not every pop-culture maker, has surrendered to relativism and its associated humanity-rotting assumption that nobody could ever be about anything other than amoral quests for mere power.