advancedatheist

On page 37 of the July/August 2005 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, Carl Sagan's widow Ann Druyan writes in an essay titled "The Great Turning Away" about the apparent reversion to a new dark age:

I have to admit that I find this observation intriguing, though it also sounds like a grasping at straws. Unless you count the underlying (and exhausted) "hero's journey" myth as a form of religion, it does seem as if science fiction has reached a more or less secular-humanistic consensus about the future.

That aside, however, I would like something more substantial than certain individuals' published or filmed fantasy lives as a basis for hope for a more rational world.

Victoria Silverwolf

Interesting. This probably has more to do with the faith (or lack thereof) among creators of science fiction than anything else. There are certainly great works of science fiction that depict religion in the future in a more-or-less positive fashion. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a good example. However, I would suspect that SF authors tend to be a little more skeptical than the general population.

lpetrich

That is an exceptionally lame argument; it's not much more than wishful thinking.

I think that Ms. Druyan would have a better case if she had pointed to the discrediting of various forms of supersitition that had once been essentially universal; she could argue that that discrediting will continue as our knowledge improves.

Consider the fear of malicious sorcery. That used to be nearly universal; in some societies, it had been believed that death and other big misfortunes are due to malicious sorcery. Nowadays, we recognize that it's not something worth losing sleep over. The "need to believe" arguments often applied to religion can be applied here, but I've yet to see anyone argue that we have a fundamental need to fear malicious sorcery, that we cannot be happy or virtuous or sane or well-adjusted or whatever unless we have that fear.

Selsaral

Yeah I guess I don't understand. How can the writings of science fiction writers be used to predict the trend of religious belief among humans? Science fiction is just some crap people made up. It has the word 'fiction' in its very label.

Also both the Dune series and the Ender's Game series (two of the most brilliant sci-fi series written) feature a future that is soaked in religious belief, so even if you accept the idea that science fiction can predict the future (science fiction's Foundation?), I can't even accept the premise that the genre doesn't represent a future with religion.

Spherical Time

The Hyperion/Endymion series intimately involves the Catholic Church.

But I think Anne's point is related to the idea that the people looking ahead in our culture look ahead and see a world without religion. Her point accepts that science fiction writers are often non-religious and asks "Why is that?"

Her response is, because those that can look forward into the future understand that we have to grow up, and part of that is accepting the world for what it is and not what we want it to be.

I can't say that, as a science fiction writer (unpublished) I completely disagree.

advancedatheist

Considering how some conservative christians write and talk about homosexuality, you could replace their use of the words "gay," "homosexual" and "sodomite" with "sorcerer" and the rants would make about as much sense.

lpetrich

As to science fiction and religion, I had a thread on Where is the "Christian Science Fiction"? which featured someone wondering where is all the Xian science fiction. He had liked Isaac Asimov's science fiction and Babylon 5, but found them all to be essentially atheist in their overall worldview, presumably from their depicting the Universe as essentially impersonal. His main examples of Xian science fiction was CS Lewis's Space Trilogy and Wolfe's work. His articles got responses stating that Dune has a sacramentalized and messianic form of Islam, and that Star Wars is pagan.

I wonder if there was a thread in M&PC on the religious affiliations of science-fiction writers; I'll have to look for such a thread.

Also, there are several cases where the real world has differed significantly from the science-fiction imaginings of past decades. Progress in artificial intelligence has been much slower than had often been anticipated, and artificially-intelligent machines have had configurations very different from what SFers had typically imagined. Until the 1940's, they had almost always been imagined to be roughly human-shaped robots; the idea of body-less artificial brains (computers) was rare until real-life ones started appearing. And even then, they were often imagined on the mainframe model (single big ones) rather than the model that has emerged over the last few decades (lots of interconnected small ones). And though space travel has been a common science-fictional theme, it had not usually been imagined to be as computerized as real-life space travel has been.

Puck

Perhaps a part of what Ms Druyan was getting at is that the humans who have looked outward in their minds, didn't see room for gods out there, and as more and more of us turn our thoughts to space, more and more of us will come to the same conclusion.

Religion is an earthly construct. With there often being a 'heaven' 'up' there. But when one truely contemplates space, well, where the hell is it? It's left to the realm of invisible, of the imagination. It eludes the faithful, when in days past, many thought astronomy would reveal where heaven was. Thus, the more we explore space, the more of us become aware that there really isn't a heaven drifting about out there somehwere. The whole concept of heaven, or a god, doesn't fit in with what we know about the everything else out there.

The religious are faced with this evidence, or I should say lack of evidence. In their desperation to continue to believe, their beliefs must become more magical and fantastical to make up for the evidence showing what they had previously believed, can't be true. When 'true believers' are faced with truth, they tend to dig deeper, and get louder. And thus we are seeing the death throes of religion.

Just like a baloon is largest just before it bursts.

And I hope she's right. I hope this is indeed the last big surge of magical thinking, born in the panic of leaving it behind. Of living without a safety net. A guy wire to secure us from our own mistakes.

Zeda

Handmaiden's Tale

His Dark Materials Trilogy

There's plenty of religion in SF. Frankly, I think we are along way from getting rid of religious thought, if anything there appears to be a hardening of the extreme positions.

Puck

I agree that we are along way from getting rid of religious thought, Zeda.

Where we differ, is that I think the hardening we are seeing, is the result of extremism coming to an end. I think the current volume we are hearing from the radical religious is the scream of the dying.

I don't see general religious belief going away any time soon. I see religion softening more and more over time, once the fanatics have worn themsleves out, and worn out their welcome. I see the current climate of fanaticsim as a passing fad of the general masses. It's only a lifelong thing for the deeply disturbed, who need it to make themselves feel important and special.

But I'm a hopeful Puck, and think that religion will continue to change, and change into something more universal and acceptable over time. If we don't blow ourselves to 'kingdom come', then in time, religion as we know it will become unrecognizable from what it is today.

I won't live to see it, however.