As NASA superstar Commander Hadfield was delivering his final homily from the International Space Station, I overheard two young people discussing if it was possible to believe in Genesis and Darwinism at the same time?
In other words, can the scientific explanation of evolution easily sit with that of a religious one?
I left the youngsters wrestling with creation and pondered on the vanishing point at which physics and religiousness become one, a horizon where no words suffice.
It struck me that Science Fiction has often employed quasi-religious metaphors to suggest a deeper meaning to the Universe. Clark/ Kubrick's seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey combined mystical imagery and stark science seamlessly: the monolith at the dawn of Man, the ghost in the machine/ computer HAL and the final foetal revelation where death and birth are one in the same in a universe of infinite depth.
This may not be the best example of what is after all a tricky area. Can you think of works of Sci-Fi which tackle God and Science well?
Well there is CS Lewis's Space Trilogy, "Out of the Silent Planet", "Perelandra" and "That Hideous Strength". Though they have a more religious element than scientific. Elements of "That Hideous Strength" I think are particularly apt today though.
ReplyDeleteOf course there is also 2010 Odyssey Two.
Star Trek, the Motion Picture had the original Title "In Thine Own Image" and although re-written for the film still had significant religious elements, also "The Final Frontier" as well as many episodes from the various series.
ReplyDeleteBabylon Five too.
Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris is deeply seated in religious mysticism, along with all his oeuvre. The scientist's deceased wife whom the planet replicates and makes into a self-learning entity, gradually becoming human, is the very image of creation, with Solaris itself as its "divine" progenitor.
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