Category Archives: Technology and the Good

Strange New World

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Listening to Carl Truman’s Strange New World, I’ve been pondering an illustration he gives in one of the later chapters about the radical difference between his grandfather’s life and his own. Without going into the details, because you, reading this, can easily supply the details thinking about your own life and your own grandfather’s life, it’s immediately evident that the mental furniture, and therefore the entire approach to and horizons of life that our grandparents had, must of necessity have been radically different from our own.

Take the formative role that entertainment plays. When my grandfather was a young child, there was no such thing as the television. By the time the first television came out he would have been nearing his adulthood, which means all of his formative years and experiences had absolutely nothing to do with a visual broadcast medium that, the more you consume it, the more it is able to shape your entire perception of life on the basis of fast moving images and constantly changing angles on the same scenario.

The more TV you watch, especially if you do not also read a great deal, just of necessity the more fragmented your thoughts will become, and therefore the less able you will be to follow out extended, linear trains of thought, especially when they are presented to you in the form of inert blocks of text on a printed page. The more TV you watch and the less you read, especially the less really substantial material you read, the more reading will come to seem an entirely optional mode of presenting and engaging knowledge – not to mention in all likelihood the more boring a mode.

My grandfather was not raised in a world shaped by the television, and so of necessity he would have had an entirely different understanding of the world than I, just two generations later am able to have. This has given me a great deal of pause lately trying to parse it all out, and here’s what I have found out so far.

I watched a great deal of TV when I was a young child, and although my parents were very careful as a general rule to make sure I wasn’t watching whatever passed for trash back then (much of that relatively benign given the shocking and shameless filth that is all over “kids” TV nowadays), my young mind still was filled with thousands upon thousands of hours of simplistic idiocy in the form of cartoons, not to mention emotively connotative and manipulative oversimplifications of reality in the forms of action shows such as the A-Team and Knight Rider and Airwolf and Street Hawk.

There is no doubt in my mind that before I turned 15 I had seen literally thousands of simulated murders on television shows, literally thousands of frantic, fast-paced action sequences involving flipping cars and blazing explosions and rat-a-tat gunfire, and the constantly reinforced message of what is now being called “expressive individualism,” right down to the pervasive implication that institutions are always corrupt and only the individual is the source of true meaning and goodness.

I think it likely that the only thing that prevented me from becoming dull-minded and utterly derivative in a vulgar sense, like so many other avid young TV watchers, was the fact that throughout it all I was always a voracious reader and nearly everything I read was of a fairly wholesome imaginative or informative nature. (Well, if you discount the thousands of the comic books I consumed; although that would need a separate post to describe how most comic books when I was a kid at least had something approaching significant intellectual substance and were based on far clearer ethical norms than comic books today are.)

At any rate, trying to continue parsing out the distinction between my grandfather’s mental horizons and my own in terms of his complete lack of the TV and my deep immersion in it during our respective childhoods, Carl Truman’s extended remarks on how the Internet has changed everything for all of us connect to what I’ve already said. Without trying to summarize Truman, there’s a particularly weighty phrase that he uses when talking about the world we now all have thanks to the Internet: “plastic people, liquid world.”

Basically what this means is that our culture has devolved so far down the line of digital media-technological manipulation and control of external reality in terms of our own psychological preferences that there is scarcely anything truly in common that holds us all together.

As Truman puts it, thanks to the Internet we can instantly know things that are happening thousands of miles away in other countries, and feel very profoundly within ourselves that we have more in common with someone in a foreign nation who speaks a different language from us, lives under a different political system than us, and has ostensibly a different cultural background than us, than we do with our next door neighbor who speaks our language, lives under our the same political system, and has the same general cultural background as us.

It is entirely possible in this context that each and every one of us essentially lives next to people from another planet, since the imaginative world that they inhabit is likely extremely different from the imaginative world that we ourselves inhabit. This is why, as Truman has it, that our political disturbances, especially since 2016, are so shockingly immoderate and full of gross dehumanization of other people. Truman described how in his grandfather’s day in Britain, people who lived on the same street might come down on two different sides of a ongoing political disagreement, but both of them understood themselves to be part of a larger thing, Britain, that held them all together regardless of their differences.

That thing, the national consciousness, was a shared reality that had significant weight and which transcended all of their differences and allowed them to navigate those differences without destroying everything around them. But largely thanks to the Internet, which fragments consciousness and culture in a way very much worse than the TV did, this type of substantial commonality doesn’t exist anymore.

So now my thoughts turn to the great fissure that has existed for about the last 70 years or so called “the generation gap.”

My own father’s life, growing up with the then newly-established TV, was already because of that vastly different than his father’s life growing up without it. And my life, growing up with a much more firmly established and variegated TV life than my father, was already because of that vastly different than his.

And although like my own parents, I have been very careful for the most part to limit my own children’s exposure to popular entertainment via movies, music, and websites, and although they are all voracious readers like I and my wife were, there are still many tell-tale signs in them that their lives and expectations of life have been very differently formed than mine or my father’s or my grandfather’s simply because they have never lived in a world without the Internet, let alone one without a TV. (The three youngest have never lived in a world without smartphones, and even though they don’t have one, everyone they know does and that has certainly impacted their view of life.)

Obviously this post could go on and on trying to parse out these distinctions, they’ve really been driven home to me for about the last 5 years as I’ve paid close attention to the entertainment that young people are constantly surrounded with and which forms their tastes and desires and perceptions of what is true and good and beautiful.

For instance, there have always been kids who thought it was funny to talk about their teachers being physically harmed. After all, when you’re young and hormonal and have no real perspective on anything, it might seem pretty funny to imagine that hopelessly boring math teacher who’s making you do a bunch of stuff that you don’t want to do because you’d rather be outside playing or aimlessly bantering with your friends about trivial nothingnesses, getting killed, so now you’re free of all that stupid stuff. Even when I was in about the 6th grade I remember kids on the bus singing a send up of “Glory, glory, hallelujah” in which their “teacher got shot in the face with a loaded 44 “so she ain’t my teacher anymore.”

Utterly horrific from the standpoint of any rational person, but even if you might be inclined to say “Kids will be kids and they’ll grow out of it,” look around you at the kids nowadays and, no, they have not only not grown out of it but have simply descended even deeper into that kind of malicious darkness because of what they’ve been exposed to in the movies and music to which they’ve been given largely unfettered access – modes of content and content itself that even kids of my youth would scarcely have been able to conceive in our worst nightmares.

Just watch some of the stuff they watch. Read some of the books they read – if such vulgar verbal bilge can even be called “a book.” The vastly multiplied desensitizing effect that has come from CGI movies and overly realistic video games, not to mention the insane explosion of the ability of anyone with a phone and an Internet connection to become an instant viral video star no matter how shockingly asinine the content they produce, combined with the aforementioned lack of perspective that’s just a part of being young, really can make it seem quite hilarious to joke about teachers getting shot or dying from fatal diseases that they contracted from eating too much spicy chicken at KFC, and so forth.

And that’s before you get to their lack of real heroes. My grandfather’s generation would have had the veterans of World War I to talk to them about valor and perseverance and honesty and integrity and giving up your life for other people even at the cost of great personal pain. My father’s generation would have had that with the World War II veterans. I had that to some extent since my dad was a Vietnam veteran and some of my other uncles had served in the military.

On top of all of that I had Colonel Hannibal Smith (The A-Team) and Michael Knight (Knight Rider) and Jesse Mach (Street Hawk) and Stringfellow Hawke (Airwolf), not to mention Superman (“Truth, Justice, and the American Way”)and Spider-Man (“With great power comes great responsibility.”)

I’d like to say I had Justin Martyr and Augustine and King Alfred and so on, great heroes of the Faith, but I didn’t, since the Christianity I was raised with was anti- historical and anti-intellectual. (But that too is another long story, and I’m trying to write a different chapter of that by making sure my own kids have all of those Faith heroes as their own models.)

Today’s young people have almost nothing but anti-heroes, or else “heroes” who are essentially exactly like them: self-absorbed, overly-emotional, and completely unable to distinguish between their own personal desires and what is true, good, and beautiful.

In the first generation of the Marvel movies, they at least had a pretty decent portrayal of Spider-Man and a pretty decent portrayal of Captain America. But as those movies have devolved along with everything else, now they have Doctor Strange navigating an absolutely chaotic and meaningless multiverse and explicitly deciding in one of the most recent movies that evil is simply too physically and metaphysically powerful to be beaten by good, so the only way to beat it is to become evil oneself by using evil means. Even when it’s not like that, evil is more often beaten not by superior character but by superior firepower.

Lacking proper heroes, what today’s youth have is a world that is run only in terms of Power: there are the Haves, and the Have-Nots, and what you want to make sure you are, almost regardless of how you have to make it happen, is one of the Haves. And it all costs, absolutely at all costs, make sure that no one calling himself an adult is ever able to tell you “who you really are” or expect, as if it is really a good thing and not simply his own personal preference backed up by force, a certain code of behavior or a certain code of dress from you.

TV and the Internet did not create this way of thinking, of course. Growing up just does involve some level of divergence from parents and teachers as one becomes a mature and self-directing individual. But because these visually and digitally manipulative technologies have served up to several generations an incessant diet of emotive preference-based and intellectually vacuous “fun” entirely aimed at maximizing individualistic perception and expression, can anyone blame today’s youth for feeling an uncrossable divide between themselves and their elders?

To bring this back around to Carl Truman with whom I started, as he puts it, the world he himself lives in would have been just about incomprehensible to his grandfather. And in much the same way, the world my generation lives in is just about incomprehensible to the current one, and the gap only seems to be widening every day. The crisis of meaning, the crisis of trust between the generations, the crisis of whether there can be any meaningful future involving anything remotely identifiable as “the common good” is a very weighty and currently unresolved set of questions.

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.

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.” [↩]

Is Technology Morally Neutral?

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Over the last few years I’ve become fascinated with the issue of the relationship between human nature / destiny and technology. As children of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, we take for granted the idea that technological advancement is a good thing. In some ways it surely is – indoor plumbing, antibiotics, dentistry, insights into health that have dramatically reduced infant mortality rates and made for longer lifespans and a far better quality of life over those spans, and reliable long-term food preservation come easily to mind.

It is often said that technology is morally neutral, that whether it is good or bad has to do with whether the person using it is good or bad. “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” is one popular expression of this idea. It is not computers and the Internet that are bad, but bad people who misuse them to plague others with spam and viruses, or who live lives of virtual immorality on porn sites, and so forth. Television and video games are not malum in se; only people who sit in front of them for 14 hours a day and minimize the concerns of embodied and communal life.

These considerations show that in the midst of our general celebration of technological advance, we do recognize that technological progress has serious downsides. But again, we tend to think that the downsides are all related to how the technology is used, not with what it fundamentally is. I used to agree with this reasoning, but I confess that I’m starting to suspect that the downsides of technology are often built right into the technology itself, which has a definite shaping influence on the character of those who use it. In other words, technology and the morality of its use are not separable issues, but are fundamentally wrapped up with each other in complicated ways that we need to contemplate.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death develops a convincing argument that television watching itself, what kind of thing it is, creates an entirely different cast of mind than reading. Postman argues that television itself almost necessarily encourages mental passivity. You sit and just watch, and as a result you take things in just whatever manner someone, whose person and agenda you don’t know, decides to present it. Television programs exhibit the inchoate organizational feature of constantly shifting perspectives and frames of reference, and by a nearly seamless shifting of subject matter from serious subjects (the news) to trivial ones (commercials).

As Postman sees it, all this tends to break down rational thought and encourage purely emotional reactions and uncritical acceptance of a disorganized, de-moralized, and de-centered perspective on the world. It tends to make mental slaves, not mental free men.


Reading, on the other hand, requires the mind to be constantly active, to pay attention to complex trains of ideas and to follow linear progressions of thought which encourage a critical, disciplined mindset. Reading opens up vistas on the world that require thoughtful interaction, not merely passive acceptance.  Postman’s analysis forms a basic, and I think helpful, foundation for thinking about the meaning of technology not in terms of what sort of person is using it, but rather the sort of person it creates.

This may seem like a fine distinction, but think about it. The common view of technology sees it as in and of itself having an amoral denotation. It only acquires a moral connotation when is put in the hands of a good or a bad person. The different sort of view of which Postman’s is a species sees technology as in and of itself having moral implications regardless of whose hands it is in. Technology, by the simple fact that it is made to be used, implies an ontology about the world (the world is to be used) and about human beings (our purpose is to use the world).

These are definite moral claims about human nature and standards of behavior. If technology says that the world can be used and that we are here to use it, then technology is prescribing a certain form of behavior. But if prescription of behavior is the definition of morality, it follows that technology is not morally neutral but is inherently laden with moral implications.

Of course, a number of positions about the use of technology have been generated throughout human history. Few, if any, groups of human beings have no technology. The most “backward” of savages – note the moral judgment implicit in the word “backward” – have technology to kill animals for food and clothing. Some cultures have stayed on a subsistence agriculture level for many centuries, rarely, if ever, developing implements beyond simple hand tools and simple contrivances for using animals to perform heavy labor.

The Ancient Greeks, who, despite popular conceptions about the “stupidity” of Ancient people in general, had the basic intellectual cast necessary for developing higher technology, but they chose to deliberately restrict technological advance to the realm of defense and war. (For a classic statement of this reasoning, see Plutarch’s Life of Marcellus, which I have looked at in my post “Archimedean Trifles.”)

Some thinkers, even Modern ones, have advocated such drastic “back to nature” ideas (movements away from technology) that they wound up celebrating the most primitive sort of life imaginable as the highest and best good of man. Our own “First World” culture is the child of the maxim of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) that a geometrical approach to everything will make us “the masters and possessors of Nature” and the idea of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) that inductive empiricism can create a “New Atlantis” governed by an Academy of Sciences.  As such, we seem to believe that the more technological advance we can make happen, the better everything will be.

This idea was summed up eloquently by the frontispiece of another of Bacon’s works, The Great Instauration (1620), which argued that his generation desperately needed to move past the artificial and repressive boundaries of the Ancients in terms of technological progress so as to help mankind become better than he had ever been before.

The frontispiece of the work, in fact, featured a ship boldly sailing through the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), which, for the Ancients was the very boundary of the known world and the limits of human endeavor. A Latin motto appeared under the ship, claiming biblical support (Dan. 12:4) for the Baconian project of inductive science overturning all Ancient standards: Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia: “Many will travel about and knowledge will be increased.” Bacon’s vision certainly has been implemented in the nearly four centuries since he articulated it. We live in a world in which the Baconian project of technological achievement has created a “New Atlantis.” Scientists and their Academy all but rule our culture with their pronouncements – and, of course, their ever-amazing gizmos.

In view of all this, what are our options as Christians for thinking about, developing, and using technology?

First it should be said that Scripture is not fundamentally opposed to technology and technological progress. Scripture commands man before the Fall to tend to the Garden (Gen. 2:15), and after the Fall to go to the earth and work it to make it produce things for man’s benefit (Gen. 3:17-19). Scripture does not disapprove of Jubal inventing musical instruments or of Tubal-Cain inventing metalworking (Gen. 4:21-22). God Himself tells Noah to build a ship, which implies that God Himself approves of ship-building technology. Moreover, the “cultural mandate” to subdue the earth is repeated after the Flood (Gen. 9:1).

All this surely implies the acceptability and even the necessity of technology, at least on the low level of shovels, plows, hoes, musical instruments, metalworks, and ships. On the other hand, God disapproved of the mentality of the builders at Babel, who, He said, would not be restricted from anything they wished to do if they were allowed to complete their technological Tower to heaven (Gen. 11). Evidently there are limits to technological advancement which God imposes on man, but what are they?

Consider agriculture. Granting that God told man to till the earth for his food, and granting that this implies the use of the artificial instruments of technology, the further question arises of how far should technology be pressed in the service of food production? Should men stay on a subsistence level of food production, or should they try to make nature produce more than they themselves need so that they can use the excess in trade or store it “for a rainy day”? Should farmers remain on the primitive level of ancient digging sticks, or is it alright for them to attach shaped pieces of metal to the sticks so as to better manipulate the dirt? Should they then stick with their primitive plows, or invent the harrow? Should they then experiment with modifying the harrow by adding spikes and teeth? Is there a moral limit to what sort of development farmers should pursue in the service of agricultural production? Surely we should not object to the technology of crop rotation, or of better mechanical means of harvesting and preserving more food. Should we?

What about areas beyond agriculture? What about medical science? Should we not be grateful to God for giving us the insight to create vaccines so that we do not have to die horrible deaths from the Black Plague or influenza or smallpox? Should we not be all for the process of research that led, just a few decades ago, to the ability to trick certain microbes into producing human insulin so that diabetics can live long, full lives like the rest of us? I am reminded here of an illustration one of my former teachers used about the coming revolution in genetics thanks to the Human Genome Project. He imagined parents in the not too distant future being told by a doctor that the bad news is that their unborn child has Down’s Syndrome, but the good news is that it can be fixed for fifty bucks. Is this a bad thing?

What about computers and the Internet? Online scholarly encyclopedias and the phenomenon of a Virtual “Republic of Letters” can be very illuminating and in its way humanizing. But is there a problem with the easy unconscious slide into seeing the real people on the other end of the electronic connection as “screennames” and “avatars”? This is not to mention what might happen as artificial intelligence gets more advanced. Whole virtual relationships might be created with “people” whom you never realize are really just sophisticated software programs. (Remember the 1980s movie Tron, recently upgraded as Tron Legacy?)

And then there is digital media, which seems truly an awesome achievement. Today, you can own a thousand books on a piece of metal and plastic the size of your thumbnail, and all of them cross-referenceable in just about any way you can think of based on words you type into the interface’s search engine. The dissemination of knowledge made possible by this technology is staggering, but if we think reflectively, surely we should wonder whether will it eventually cheapen books and knowledge by making them just as trivial as any other digitized commodity.

What about rapid transportation? On the one hand, it seems nice to be able to get in your car any time you like and go anywhere you like at a speed that is nothing short of amazing. But how many of us are satisfied with the incredible ability to lasso time and distance and to no small extent make them our slaves?  It seems the faster our technology gets, the more impatient we are with any kind of slowness.  (I’m reminded here of the train engineer in the movie Back to the Future III, who snorted “Can it go 90 miles an hour? Tarnation, son, who’d ever be in such a hurry?” Not to mention Sammy Hagar’s rebellious, but oh so relevant, song “I Can’t Drive 55!”)

A couple of years ago, my wife and I, then living in Idaho, visited family in North Carolina. We flew all the way, and upon stepping off the last plane it suddenly hit me that we had traveled three thousand miles without ever once being exposed to the world outside of metal and glass and plastic contrivances. What would have been fantastic magic to the ancients is a yawning commonplace to us. Is that a good thing?

The more advanced our transportation technology gets, in fact, the more it seems to isolate us from the limiting factors that remind us we are part of a world that is bigger than us and is really not in our control. It takes storms shutting down roads and airports to remind us of that, and even then we often act like the ancient Persian ruler Xerxes, furiously whipping the water of the Hellespont because it would not cooperate with his invasion plans.

More examples could be raised and more questions asked, but these seem enough to make the point. Technology is not morally neutral. It implies all kinds of things about the world and about ourselves, and even as I sit here writing this on my computer, and you sit there reading it on yours, the big assumptions and the big questions just hang in the air waiting to be addressed.