'Why does God need a Starship?' Religion in SciFi

I always found amusing the schtick in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land to the effect that the faithful go to whatever heaven they believe in . . .

In line with that, i once read a short about people in the theater business who realized it was the end of the world when God's stage hands began putting away the props--it really sank in with them when Connecticutt had been packed away . . .

I once authored a story about a time machine: It was set up to reach like a hand into the past, retrieving the lost objects of history. It did pretty well until it plucked Jesus from the tomb in the hour of his resurection. I abandoned the tale before its completion because of a nagging worry I may have subconsciously stolen the idea from another writer. Who or where I could never determine.

Try Sherri S. Tepper, "Grass". She examines the "sacredness" of human life from a feminist viewpoint. One of her characters postulates that God sees the human race as a virus.

It's a cookbook! It's a cookbook!

cav-

Well, of course there is CS Lewis' trilogy which is a sort of sci fi/fantasy christian treatise - "Out of the Silent Planet", "Voyage to Venus" (also published as "Perelandra") and "That Hideous Strength" - these are actually very interesting examinations of a number of ideas - though I have not read them for many years, so I am unsure if they are better in the eye of memory. I disagreed with a lot of his thinking but found it all interesting.

Philip K. Dick: The Divine Invasion. Also, I loved Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which Blade Runner was based on...lots of interesting stuff there about humans playing God....here is a link, which also mentions Valis, a precursor novel to The Divine Invasion:

http://www.philipkdick.com/divine.htm

There was a great short story that I read back in the 50's that I have talked about on dozens of occasions throughout the years.

It was about a guy who determines that time travel is possible -- but that the research and development costs to make the time travel machine would be astonomical.

So he gets an astronomical amount of money together -- and builds a time machine -- and on his first trip back to the past, he uses some gold he brought with him to finance investments that he knew would yield an astronomical amount of money in the future when he needed it.

Can't remember anything but the plot -- but if anyone knows who wrote the story -- I'd love to have that information.

1. UU's are cool. I flirted with that faith while I was in New Hampshire.

2. Can we expand this to cinema--if so "The Matrix" becomes fair game.

God is usually everywhere in Science Fiction.
This started when scientists replaced philosophers as the Askers of the Important Questions.

Solaris, the planet, may be God: or rather the sea-mother-Goddess, maker of all things and feelings.

Stranger in a Strange Land is an obvious analogy of the Second Coming.

Similar Christian analogies appear in "Do Androids Dream on Electric Sheep?" (mostly in the "other novel" that was not part of Blade Runner), and so do the big onthological problems of mankind (which is the central theme of the movie).

Okay... a days worth of responses...

yeah, Matrix. I'd thought of that once, but completely forgotten about it this morning before the second cuppa.

Stranger in a Strange Land, originally titled The Heretic. Another story of a guy condemned to death fro preaching without a licence. good, good. I grok.

Edgar, there was a short novel called The Man Who Folded Himself (author forgotten for now) where a time traveller encounters earlier and future versions of himself, but he (they) have never been able to exactly visit the ressurection.

'Any unexplained technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic' -Clarke
Any unexplained technology alos makes for miracles.


How about the Bene Gesserit seeding the universe with religious myth for the future emergancy needs of the sisters...?

Keep it up guys (and gals)! I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Let us know how it turns out boss, an' if ya work up a text, i think we'd be interested in seeing it, if you have no demure . . .

Okay Sent... this was what I wrote three years ago.

Why does God need a starship?

I was what you might call a Trekkie. I grew up on Star Trek. I remember watching the show when it was first on TV, then for years in syndication. By the time they started to make the Star Trek movies, I was ready.

Any past or present Trekkie can tell you that the movies can be quickly evaluated by their numbers. The even numbered Star Trek movies, Star Trek II the Wrath of Kahn, Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home, and especially Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country, were all pretty good. The odd numbered movies were all pretty bad.

The worst of the lot was number 5. I can't even remember the title. If you recall, Spock was the starship Enterprise's token alien. His is a race ruled by logic rather than emotion. At the beginning of the movie we find that he has a brother. Never trust a laughing Vulcan. Spock's brother thinks that he has discovered God on some remote planet. He hijacks the Enterprise because ?'God' has told him that he needs a ride. At the end of the movie, we meet this God, who resembles mostly the projected image of the Wizard of Oz, with more special effects. At the critical moment Spock asks his brother "Why does God need a starship?" Spock's brother cannot dispute the implied logic, and sacrifices himself in order to save the crew of the Enterprise, and justify more special effects, roll credits, raise the house lights.

Science Fiction has been called by some authors speculative fiction. What might happen if… where does this lead…? What if I, the author, ran the universe? Some of these authors have definite ideas of how they'd like the big questions answered. Why are we here, where did we come from, who's running the show. Since SciFi is part of my education, and since I am up here supposedly being spiritual, I thought I'd give a personal review of Science Fiction theology. This is certainly not a complete and sweeping scholarly review of the entire genre. I've long since stopped being a Trekkie and have gotten a life. Nevertheless, this is a second attempt.

When I was in prep school, one of the rites of passage was to give a chapel talk. My subject was a comparison of two ?'churches' mentioned in novels by Kurt Vonnugut. I do not remember (and did not research) too many of the details of ?'Bokononism' from ?'Cat's Cradle'. I do remember that one of the tenets of this ?'church' is that all churches are founded on fraud. Including Bokononism. The other example came from, I think, ?'The Sirens of Titan'. ?'The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent'. ?'The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent'… I liked that very much during my adolescence. It reminds me of a line from Robert Heinlein's ?'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'. "I don't know Who is cranking; I'm pleased He doesn't stop." I never did come to a successful conclusion in my talk about Vonnugut. That may be because Vonnugut never seems to come to a successful conclusion. His famous book ?'Slaughterhouse Five', based upon his own experience of being a prisoner of war during the fire bombing of Dresden has a simple phrase that is repeated ad nauseum, ad absurdum. Every death in the book is announced "So it goes." A friend dies in a traffic accident, So it goes. Billy Pilgrim dies of old age, So it goes. Dresden is fire bombed and tens of thousands perish, So it goes.

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force." That is how Obi Wan Kenobi describes the feeling that comes over him when an entire planet is destroyed light years away in Star Wars. The joke says that it has a dark side, it has a good side, and it holds the universe together; it's either the force, or duct tape. Not too much is said overtly in the Star Wars saga about what make the universe go, but the Jedi have a very mystical view on how to interact with their surroundings. There must be something to it all if Roger Paine has a quote from the Jedi Master Yoda prominently posted in his office.

I've tried to recall all of the Gods, or Godlike beings encountered in the Star Trek television series. There is a race known collectivly as the Q, who are a shining example of absolute power corrupting absolutly. One member of this race enjoys the company of the Enterprise D (from Star Trek The Next Generation), but it seems that mostly what he wants to do is play. More interesting is the episode from the original series, ?'Who Mourns for Adonis?' Our intrepid explorers are hijacked by Apollo and Diana and a few other of the second tier Greek Gods. Apparently when Gods are no longer worshipped, they retire. This batch of Gods wants the crew of the Enterprise to create a new race of believers, so the Gods may come out of retirement and regain their ascendancy in Olympus.

Another episode in STNG deals with the origin of the species. Apparently, all of the major Star Trek races, Klingon, Romulan, Vulcan, Cardassian, Ferengi, and Human, stem from some original space faring race from antiquity. This would go a long way to explain why all Star Trek aliens look like normal human beings encased in makeup.

The author Larry Niven has offered a similar explanation in his series of books dealing with ?'Known Space'. What we call adult humans are the breeders of a race of supermen called Protectors. When a breeder reaches the end of fertility, he or she is attracted to eat a certain plant that causes physical and mental changes. The Protector is stronger, faster, healthier, uglier, than the breeder (us), and is motivated only to protect its descendants. This leads to war and expansion. Unfortunately, the tree of life, the plant catalyst of the change, cannot grow on Earth, so our ancestors were marooned here without Protectors. After many generations, however, we evolved intelligence, and were able to develop spaceflight and colonize our part of the galaxy and etc. Darwinism eat your heart out.

Niven and co-author Jerry Pournelle had a little more to say about God in their book ?'Inferno'. ?'Inferno' is a transliteration of the first canto of Dante's ?'Divine Comedy'. A SciFi writer dies and wakes up in hell. A guide helps him through the circles of hell to the center, and escape. Through most of the book the narrator is unbelieving. It's too much like someone had made a theme park out of Dante's work: Infernoland. As in the original, the narrator seems to run into many people he had known in life. In one place there is a giant mausoleum, with a section reserved for those who would found their own religion. Our hero comes across a tomb with a neon sign out front flashing the words ?'So it Goes… So it Goes…". He finally comes to believe that he is in Hell, and has a short talk with Lucifer, although Lucifer cannot speak long or clearly since his mouth is full, Judas and the like… As a youth I was impressed when I read this book to find that part of hell is already frozen over.

Niven and Pournelle also wrote a pair of books, ?'The Mote in God's Eye', and ?'The Gripping Hand', about an alien race called the Moties. The distinguishing physical characteristic of the Moties is that they generally resemble humans (bipeds), but they have three arms. A common saying; "on the one hand… on the other hand… on the Gripping hand…" The limiting feature of the Moties is that their life cycle demands that they get pregnant and bear a child every four or five years, or die. The population pressures are enormous. They have been locked for forgotten millennia in a cycle of war, primitivism, recovery and war. While not identified a target of religion, the Moties all have a common figure in folklore; Crazy Eddie. Crazy Eddie is the Motie that tries to break the cycle. Although he never succeeds, he is revered for trying. An example of a Crazy Eddie legend: in a city just barely coping with its size and infrastructure burdens, Crazy Eddie is the garbage man who leads a strike for better conditions.

Arthur C. Clarke has had some to say about why the universe works the way it does. From the introduction to his short story ?'The Nine Billion Names of God' in the anthology of the same name he writes "J.B.S (Haldane) also remarked of this story, and "The Star": ?'You are one of the very few living persons who has written anything original about God. You have in fact written several mutually incompatible things. If you had stuck to on theological hypothesis you might have been a serious public danger.' I am glad of my self-contradiction, preferring to remain a prophet with a small p." The story of ?'The Nine Billion Names of God' runs like this: back when computers were big, a lamasery in Tibet wishes to buy a computer.

"…We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God. … Call it ritual, if you like, but it's a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being - God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on - they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters we have been trying to list them all."

They buy the computer, and hire two engineers to run it (remember, this was written when computers were big!). One of the engineers has had a friendly conversation with the head lama, and is speaking to the other engineer. "Well, they believe that when the have listed all His names - and they reckon there about nine billion of them - God's purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won't be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy." This does not look good for our heroes. They perform a small piece of sabotage, so that the end of the nine billion name run will happen just after they have left for the airport, and the flight home.

"Should be there in about an hour," he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added in an afterthought: "Wonder if the computer's finished its run. It was due about now."
Chuck didn't reply, so George swung around in his saddle. He could just see Chuck's face, a white oval turned toward the sky.
"Look," whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a list time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

The other story mentioned, ?'The Star', is the story of a Jesuit priest accompanying an expedition to a solar system that had been blasted by a nova, an exploding star. On the ruined outermost planet, they find a sort of a memorial erected by the gentle race of beings that had inhabited the inner planets of that system. The priest recognizes the ?'humanity' of these people, and agonizes:
"There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?"

Many SciFi writers have tackled the question of what really went on in the mid-east two millennia past. Jesus was an alien. Jesus was a time-traveler. One or more of the Apostles was an alien or time-traveler. More than one book with a plot device of time travel states that the time/space around the crucifixion is unreachable. More than one other has stated that any visit there leads to changes in history that make current day (or whenever the story starts) unrecognizable. My favorite example of the Time Travel story is ?'The Man Who Folded Himself' by David Gerrold. Gerrold doesn't flinch from the paradox of one person visiting the same time/space twice. Our hero meets himself. A lot. Versions of himself from his own future often tell him to do or not do some history changing, depending on what results they see. The crucifixion is one of these. At one point he estimates that there are a dozen or more of himself at Golgatha. But he can not be present at the resurrection. Either he arrives too early, or a bit too late. So he tries again, and again. There are so many of himself lurking about the tomb, that the Roman guard is scared off, and there is no witness to the stone being rolled away.

I had originally wanted to make this talk about messiahs. To this end I re-read two stories from my late adolescence: ?'Dune' by Frank Herbert, and ?'Stranger in a Strange Land' by Robert Heinlein. Dune tells the story of a messiah coming to a desert planet. Paul Atriedes is the son of a sister of the Bene Gesserit, a group of female mystics that we come to learn is really a genetic breeding organization after political power. (It's a long story.) The Bene Gesserit, many generations ago, launched their Missonaria Protectiva, which seeded legends of a coming prophet born of a Bene Gesserit, in all of the backwater planets of the galaxy. This was meant to be a means to protect any sister that found herself stranded on one of these planets. Paul uses these legends to assume the mantle of messiah. Two volumes later in this six volume ?'trilogy', we learn that Paul did not quite go all the way to God-hood. His son assumes the form of the giant sand-worm, and thereby controls the mind altering spice that is the limiting factor of galactic commerce, etc. etc. (Okay, it's several long stories.)

?'Stranger in a Strange Land' tells of another self-made messiah. Michael Valentine Smith is born on a failed mission to Mars, and is the only survivor. He is, of course, raised by Martians. He is taught a large array of mind control tricks, and talks with the ancestors, the old ones, who have long since dis-corporated, and are the real power on the planet. Mike is ?'rescued' and brought to earth, where his real education begins. Toward the end of the book, he has formed a church, which is really nothing more than a Martian language school. One word of Martian: grok. To grok is to understand. Thoroughly, deeply, completely. A synonym is to drink. A passage from early in the book, while Mike is still just trying to figure out some of this new planet we call earth.

He had no clear idea how long it had been since he had shared water with this brother; not only was this place curiously distorted in times and shape, with sequence of sights and sounds not yet grokked, but also the culture of his nest took a different grasp of time from what was human. The difference lay not in longer lifetimes as counted in Earth years, but in basic attitude. "It's later than you think" could not be expressed in Martian - nor could "Haste makes waste," though for a different reason: the first notion was inconceivable while the latter was an unexpressed Martian basic, as unnecessary as telling a fish to bathe. But "As it was in the Beginning, is now and ever shall be" was so Martian in mood that it could be translated more easily than "two plus two equals four" - which was not a truism on Mars.

The turning point of the story comes when mike has the revelation: "Thou art god." You are God, I am God, they are God, all that grok in fullness is God.

At the end of the story Mike is given the same treatment as is given all those caught preaching without a license. There are parallels in the book with the Christian communion. On Mars death is regularly celebrated by cherishing and dining upon the remains of the dearly departed. Mike at one point makes the observation that real cannibalism has the same meaning, but less pretense, than the ritual cannibalism of the consecrated host. Since Martian death is merely moving on to the discorporate phase of life, there is no sorrow; it is a cause for celebration, for grokking. On Mars (as on Dune) water is scarce. Therefor it is of great importance to share water. Sharing water with one you grok is akin to marriage.

I had more to say on this subject, but I've run long as it is.

Why does God need a starship? I'd like to conclude with another reading by Arthur C. Clarke entitled God and Einstein. From the news of last week, perhaps some of what follows is obsolete… but I wouldn't bet on it.


God and Einstein
-Arthur C. Clarke


For some years I have been worried by the following astrotheological paradox. It is hard to believe that no one else has ever thought of it, yet I have never seen it discussed anywhere.
One of the most firmly established facts of modern physics and the basis of Einstein's theory of relativity is that the velocity of light is the speed limit of the material universe. No object, no signal, no influence, can travel any faster than this. Please don't ask why this should be; the universe just happens to be built that way. Or so it seems at the moment.
But light takes not millions, but billions of years to cross even the part of creation we can observe with our telescopes. So, if God obeys the laws He apparently established, as any given time He can have control over only an infinitesimal fraction of the universe. All hell might (literally?) be breaking loose ten light-years away, which is a mere stone's throw in interstellar space, and the bad news would take at least ten years to reach Him. And then it would be another ten years, at least, before He could get there to do anything about it….
You may answer that this is terribly naïve - that God is already "everywhere." Perhaps so, but that really comes to the same thing as saying that His thoughts and His influence can travel at an infinite velocity. And in this case, the Einstein speed limit is not absolute; it can be broken.
The implications of this are profound. From the human viewpoint it is no longer absurd - though it may be presumptuous - to hope that we may one day have knowledge of the most distant parts of the universe. The snail's pace of the velocity of light need not be an eternal limitation, and the remotest galaxies may one day lie within our reach.
But perhaps, on the other hand, God Himself is limited by the same laws that govern the movements of electrons and protons, stars and spaceships. And that may be the cause of all our troubles.
He's coming just as quickly as he can, but there's nothing that even He can do about that maddening 186,000 miles a second.
It's anybody's guess whether He'll be here in time.

(First published in Report on Planet Three, 1972)


Drink deep and never thirst. Thou art God.

-Xxxx Xxxxxxx (SealPoet)
First Parish, Xxxxx, Massachusetts
July 23, 2000

Solid, Seal.

I like it . . . somebody give that man a cee-gar . . .

File off the serial numbers... and I can use it again?

My mother was a navy brat. She tells of handing in the same school paper three years in a row at three different schools...