On pages 108-9 of
The End of Faith, Sam Harris writes,
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It is a truism to say that people of faith have created almost everything of value in our world, because nearly every person who has ever swung a hammer or trimmed a sail has been a devout member of one or another religious culture. There has been simply no one else to do the job. We can also say that every human achievement prior to the twentieth century was accomplished by men and women who were perfectly ignorant of the molecular basis of life. Does this suggest that a nineteenth-century view of biology would have been worth maintaining? There is no telling what our world would now be like had some great kingdom of Reason emerged at the time of the Crusades and pacified the credulous multitudes of Europe and the Middle East. We might have had modern democracy and the Internet by the year 1600. The fact that religious faith has left its mark on every aspect of our civilization is not an argument in its favor, nor can any particular faith be exonerated simply because certain of its adherents made foundational contributions to human culture.
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Actually the television series
Stargate SG-1 hints at such an alternative civilization in its first season episode titled "Enigma," where the protagonists meet members of a human-offshoot society called the Tollans.
Two very interesting exchanges about the Tollans occur in this episode, one where the series' archaeologist character speculates about how the Tollans became so technologically advanced considering that their ancestors came from Earth:
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HAMMOND: You evacuated ten people from an alien planet, Colonel. Doctor Frasier says they're all human and it looks like they're going to live. This was one hell of a rescue operation.
O'NEILL: Thank you, Sir
HAMMOND: There were no buildings in the area of any kind?
CARTER: No sir. We don't know how far they walked, but it looked like they were trying to make it back to the Stargate.
HAMMOND: What do we know about these devices they were wearing?
CARTER: Well, they all emit low levels of radiation indicating an operative energy source, but there's no circuitry, moving parts or chips. We've never seen anything like it.
JACKSON: I thought at first that they were from a parallel culture but it looks like they might be way ahead of us.
HAMMOND: We've determined humans on other planets originated here on Earth, right?
JACKSON: Yes.
HAMMOND: Then given our present state of technology, could they be ahead of us?
JACKSON: Yes. Umm... we'd be colonising space right now if it hadn't been for the Dark Ages. There was a period of over eight hundred years where science was heresy and anathema. Maybe they didn't have that set-back.
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In a later scene, one of the Tollans, named Narim, explains to the series' physicist character, Samantha Carter, something of his society's intellectual evolution:
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NARIM: You know, back on Tollan, I thought I was dying. I heard your voice and managed to open my eyes, and, uh... when I saw you... uh ...
CARTER: What?
NARIM: An old superstition. There was a time before reason and science when my ancestors believed in all manner of nonsense. Like the Sher'mau. The story goes that if a Sher'mau appears at the moment of death, she would take you to her dwelling in the stars.
CARTER: Ah! We call them angels.
NARIM: Than you still believe in them?
CARTER: Some of us do.
NARIM: Ours were reported to be quite beautiful... and, when I saw you... well... you seemed to fit the description. (She smiles)
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Harris's conjecture about what a rational civilization could accomplish immediately reminded me of this episode, and its implicit criticism of religious faith. This and other anti-religion messages in
SG-1, which is way underappreciated, in my opinion, suggest that science fiction has the potential to show ordinary people the nonthreatening and in fact beneficial aspects of a rational, post-faith society. I'd like to see more efforts going into creating stories like this to spread the secular-humanist message Harris has endorsed in his book.
01-10-2005, 05:14 PM
21st Century Humanism: Becoming the Tollans?
