Abstract
I am not a religious person, in the sense of believing in a supreme being who is the ultimate cause of the world we immediately live in, or of the universe at large in which our world is but an extremely tiny part. I am not even a deist. In other words, I am not someone who at least believes in a Creator, while not going so far as to further believe that He/She/It cares about human affairs. In fact, to be up-front about it, I confess to being an agnostic (a polite atheist). For all my readers who are true believers, however, please understand that I am not aggressively hostile about this issue. I don’t think it silly to believe, and I am even willing to admit I could be wrong. I simply haven’t been convinced that I am in error. I almost certainly don’t have to discuss here the difference between being an agnostic and an atheist, but I do like the following illustration of an agnostic, an atheist, and a true believer:
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Notes
- 1.
For more on the mathematical physics of the rainbow, see my book When Least Is Best, Princeton 2004 (corrected paperback 2007), pp. 179–198.
- 2.
See Budrys’ essay in the “Books” column of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1979, pp. 19–28. As the Polish science fiction writer, critic, and analyst Stanislaw Lem (1921–2006) wrote 2 years earlier in the same spirit as did Budrys, “it makes no sense at all to look at the universe from the standpoint of ethics.” See his “Cosmology and Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies, July 1977, pp. 107–110.
- 3.
Steven J. Brams, Superior Beings: if they exist, how would we know?, Springer-Verlag 1983. This book is the sequel to Brams’ first application of game theory to theology: Biblical Games: a strategic analysis of stories in the Old Testament, MIT Press 1980. Brams is professor of politics at New York University. See also Appendix 1.
- 4.
See 1 Corinthians 15, in which Paul the Apostle declares the resurrection of Jesus to be the basis for the truth of Christianity.
- 5.
Peter Heath, “The Incredulous Hume,” American Philosophical Quarterly, April 1976, pp. 159–163. Heath was a professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia.
- 6.
“The Science Fiction Hall of Fame,” reprinted in Silverberg’s Beyond the Safe Zone, Donald I Fine, Inc. 1986.
- 7.
See “Does Science Fiction—Yes, Science Fiction—Suggest Futures for News?” Daedalus Spring 2010, pp. 138–150, for why Professor Ghiglione came to change his mind.
- 8.
Martha C. Sammons, ‘A Better Country’: the worlds of religious fantasy and science fiction, Greenwood Press 1988, p. 127. Sammons was a professor of English at Wright State University.
- 9.
See Lewis’ essay “On Science Fiction” in his Of Other Worlds, Harcourt 1975, and Blish’s essay “Cathedrals in Space,” reprinted in Turning Points (Damon Knight, editor), Harper and Row 1977.
- 10.
Beverly Friend, “Virgin Territory: the bonds and boundaries of women in science fiction” in Many Futures, Many Worlds: theme and form in science fiction (Thomas D. Clareson, editor), The Kent State University Press 1977, pp. 140–163.
- 11.
But not always. For example, H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, first published in 1895 in serial form, is deservedly recognized as a literary classic and it has never been out-of-print.
- 12.
A penname for a writer better known under his real name, Poul Anderson.
- 13.
From the Introduction to the anthology Strange Gods (Roger Elwood, editor), Pocket Books 1974.
- 14.
Lem’s “On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction,” Science-Fiction Studies, Spring 1973, pp. 26–33.
- 15.
“God and Einstein,” in Clarke’s Report On Planet Three and Other Speculations, Harper & Row 1972, pp. 115–116.
- 16.
Rem B. Edwards, Reason and Religion, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1972, p. 175. Edwards was a professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee.
- 17.
The lectures can be found in Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience: a personal view of the search for God, The Penguin Press 2006.
- 18.
See, for example, Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?, Harper & Row 1987. Freidman is a distinguished Bible scholar, now on the faculty of the University of Georgia. More provocative reading can be found in Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version: truth and fiction in the Bible, Viking Penguin 1991, and Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: the story behind who changed the Bible and why, HarperCollins 2005. Ehrman is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Fox is a historian at Oxford. Most recent is the quite scholarly (that means it’s pretty dense reading!) by Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years, HarperCollins 2010. The title says it all. Jenkins is a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University, and a senior fellow in religious studies at Baylor University.
- 19.
In Joy Still Felt, Doubleday 1980, p. 461.
- 20.
The verse Asimov is discussing is Isaiah 7:14, and you can find additional discussion of it in his Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: the Old and the New Testaments, Avenel 1981, p. 532.
- 21.
In Creations: the quest for origins in story and science (Issac Asimov, et al., editors), Crown 1983, p. 101.
- 22.
Martin is best-known today, to viewers of television’s HBO, as the creator of that channel’s extraordinarily popular fantasy series The Game of Thrones.
- 23.
This idea, of aliens not only being proselytized by human missionaries but actually becoming members of the missionary faith, was presented in an hilarious 1974 story by William Tenn (the pen-name of Philip Klass (1920–2010)), “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi.” There we learn of the very non-human Bulbas, from the fourth planet of the star Rigel, who with the help of a human rabbi win the legal right to be recognized as Jews.
- 24.
In a case of ‘fact following fiction,’ in September 2012 Karen King, an historian of early Christianity at the Harvard Divinity School, announced the discovery of a fourth-century Egyptian papyrus that refers to Jesus as being married. That announcement caused, as you’d imagine, not just a little turmoil at the Vatican.
- 25.
See the Introductory essay by Alan Ryan in Perpetual Light, Warner 1982.
- 26.
The movie’s depiction of Nazi obsession with the supernatural was not just made-up Hollywood make-believe nonsense. See, for example, Bill Yenne’s Hitler’s Master of the Dark Arts: Himmler’s Black Knights and the Occult Origins of the SS, Zenith Press 2010.
- 27.
The problems of communication between humans and SF aliens have received a scholarly (and highly entertaining, too) treatment by Walter E. Meyers, a professor of English (now emeritus) at North Carolina State University in his book Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction, The University of Georgia Press 1980.
- 28.
Time Machines: time travel in physics, metaphysics, and science fiction (2nd edition), Springer-AIP 1999, and Time Travel: a writer’s guide to the real science of plausible time travel, Writer’s Digest Books 1997 (reprinted, with a new Preface, in 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press).
- 29.
As I finish the writing of this first chapter, I think that my take on the matter of God has, in fact, evolved towards the one adopted by the SF writer James Blish: “I believe there might have been a Creator but He never intervenes, does not desire worship and may not even be around any more.” Quoted from the brilliant, book-length treatment of Blish by David Ketterer, Imprisoned in a Tesseract: the life and work of James Blish, The Kent State University Press 1987, p. 321.
- 30.
A Cross of Centuries: twenty-five imaginative tales about the Christ (Michael Bishop, editor), Thunder’s Mouth Press 2007, pp. 45–46.
- 31.
The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave (Robert M. Price and Jeffery Jay Lowder, editors), Prometheus Books 2005. See also note 4.
- 32.
Gabriel McKee, The Gospel According to Science Fiction, Westminster John Knox Press 2007. The author has a Master of Theological Studies from the Harvard Divinity School, which probably explains the second goal.
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Nahin, P.J. (2014). Introduction. In: Holy Sci-Fi!. Science and Fiction. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0618-5_1
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