Science Fiction and Religion

The origins of science fiction are most often thought to trace to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, a story born from a night of spooky tale-telling by the fireside that explores scientific, moral, and ethical questions that were of great concern in the 19th century—and that continue to resonate today. And, although novels and short stories built the foundations of science fiction, film and television have emerged as equally powerful, experimental, and enjoyable ways to experience the genre. Even as far back as the silent era, films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis have used science fiction to tell stories that explore many facets of human experience.

In Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy, Professor of Philosophy David Kyle Johnson of King’s College takes you on a 24-lecture exploration of the final frontiers of philosophy across several decades of science fiction in film and television. From big-budget blockbusters to television series featuring aliens in rubber masks, Professor Johnson finds food for philosophical thought in a wide range of stories. By looking at serious questions through astonishing tales and astounding technologies, you will see how science fiction allows us to consider immense, vital—and sometimes controversial—ideas with a rare combination of engagement and critical distance.

The Future Is Now

Science fiction is often concerned with the future, being used not only as a tool of prediction—humans are notoriously bad at accurately predicting the future—but also as one of extrapolation and interrogation. Rather than simply asking what the future will look like, the futuristic visions of sci-fi TV, like Star Trek, Firefly, and even the animated comedy Futurama, offer compelling statements about humanity’s hopes, dreams, and fears. We can, therefore, use fictionalized futures to better understand today’s world.

Setting a story in the future—or in an alternate reality, or on a faraway planet—also allows sci-fi creators to open up the realm of possibility beyond what our current world offers, while also looking at very real scientific possibilities. As you look at sci-fi films like Arrival and Interstellar, Professor Johnson highlights the kinds of issues worth considering if contact with extraterrestrial life or time travel became part of our real-life experience. And even if these experiences remain in the realm of fiction, considering them still provides insight into important philosophical questions. Indeed, throughout the lectures of Sci-Phi, you will ponder many questions that have concerned philosophers for centuries, including:

Do humans truly have free will?
Could machines one day be conscious? Or be sentient?
Could we actually be living in a simulated world?
How will humanity confront a future of diminished resources and advancing technology?
Are science and religion compatible?
When, if ever, is war justified?
How do we know what information to trust and what to dismiss?
Exploring Reality through Fiction

Staples of science fiction like time travel, alternate universes, and extraterrestrial life are endlessly fascinating ideas to explore. Yet, despite the insights they can give us, they may not seem very relevant to everyday life. Even our conception of reality—what is real and what isn’t—can have little bearing on the more mundane aspects of living from day to day. But science fiction, for all its futurism and outlandish flourishes, is not limited to these theoretical concepts; it is also a window into crucial discussions about the here and now, questions concerning ethics, power, religion, tolerance, social justice, politics, and the many practical dimensions of living in a world that is constantly changing and forever presenting humans with fresh new dilemmas to solve. And by removing us from reality, sci-fi can also remove our biases and make us see such issues anew.

Indeed, as Professor Johnson makes clear, stories of simulated worlds and artificial intelligence can seem far-fetched, but they actually offer valuable insights into social and ethical issues that may be more immediate and relevant than they first appear. By looking at them through fiction, we can take a step back and get a clearer picture of the larger implications. For instance, by looking at characters like Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation or the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, we are forced to wonder: If we create artificial intelligence that achieves true sentience, how will we treat these man-made beings? Will we repeat the sins of the past by enslaving them or will we embrace them as our equals? If we are ever able to re-create a convincing version of the world via computers, as films like The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor suggest, do the lives lived in those simulations mean less than those in the “real” world? The answers to these questions—and many others—speak volumes about human values and, given our ever-evolving technology, may require answers sooner rather than later.

You may be surprised to see how often a science fiction story can “trick” you into thinking about questions and concepts you may have never considered. Shows like The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror overtly present questions and issues for audiences to ponder. However, while other films and television shows may seem to focus more on the adventure and entertainment value of science fiction, they still often have deep philosophical dimensions. Consider the long-running British TV series Doctor Who. A beloved icon of science fiction, the show has always been framed as simply the exciting weekly adventures of a time-traveling alien; yet, throughout its decades on television, it has explored issues of autonomy, sentience, pacifism, colonialism, racism, grief, morality, and much more.

A Unique View of Philosophy

While each lecture of Sci-Phi focuses on a few key films or television episodes, you will also explore dozens of other movies and TV episodes along the way. Likewise, each philosophical concept you explore opens the door to further discovery. Throughout the lectures, you will be introduced to the ideas of great thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Turing, Baudrillard, and many others; and through these ideas, you will better understand the different ways philosophy examines the big questions, from metaphysics and epistemology to existentialism and ethics.

Fans of the genre will find their experience of sci-fi stories enriched by layers of philosophical inquiry that reveal each story to be much more than just entertainment. Similarly, those who are looking for a thrilling and accessible introduction to philosophy will be equally rewarded by Professor Johnson’s breadth of knowledge, as well as his deep and abiding love for both science fiction storytelling and philosophical exploration. As you engage with philosophy by way of sci-fi stories for screens both large and small, it is important to keep in mind that Professor Johnson will not shy away from revealing key plot points in many of the stories he explores throughout the lectures; so, although it is not required, watching the films and TV episodes at the heart of each lecture is recommended. Presented as a one-on-one conversation and enlivened by fun visual references to many of the stories you will encounter, Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy is a philosophy course unlike any other.

Whether telling stories of far-flung futures or investigating the here and now, science fiction is an invaluable source of intellectual and imaginative exploration. From the genre-defining classics like Star Wars, Doctor Who, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Twilight Zone to a new wave of speculative tales like Transcendence, Snowpiercer, Westworld, and The Hunger Games, sci-fi stories offer a uniquely engaging and incisive way to ask serious questions about the world we live in, even when those stories are set in a galaxy far, far away. Philosophy is the search for truth. Sometimes that truth is best revealed through fiction.

Lecture 1 : Inception and The Interpreation of Art
Lecture 2 : The Matrix and the Value of Knowledge
Lecture 3 : The Matrix Sequels and Human Freewill
Lecture 4 : The Adjustment Bureau, the Force, and Fate
Lecture 5 : Contact: Science vs. Religion
Lecture 6 : Arrival: Aliens and Radical Translation
Lecture 7 : Interstellar: Is Time Travel Possible?
Lecture 8 : Futurama, Doctor Who and Temporal Paradoxes
Lecture 9 : Star Trek TNG and Alternate Worlds
Lecture 10 : Dark City, Dollhouse, and Personal Identity
Lecture 11 : Westworld and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
Lecture 12 : Transcendence and the Dangers of AI
Lecture 13 : The Thirteenth Floor: Are We Simulated?
Lecture 14 : The Orville, Orwell, and the "Black Mirror"
Lecture 15 : Star Wars: Good vs. Evil
Lecture 16 : Firefly, Blake's 7 and Political Rebellion
Lecture 17 : Starship Troopers, The Doctor, and Just War
Lecture 18 : The Prime Directive and Postcolonialism
Lecture 19 : Capitalism in Metropolis, Elysium, and Panem
Lecture 20 : Snowpiercer and Climate Change
Lecture 21 : Soylent Green: Overpopulation and Euthanasia
Lecture 22 : Gattaca and the Ethics of Reproduction
Lecture 23 : The Handmaid’s Tale: Feminism and Religion
Lecture 24 : Kubrick's 2001 and Nietzsche’s Übermensch

The 2003 remake of the 1978 cult classic exchanged the Mormon allegory of the original for a wider religious message - asking us to confront the possibilities of a religious posthuman, the fear of religious violence, and concerns regarding the ethics of neoliberal pluralism. Punctuated with the typical space opera joys, Battlestar wonders if its future may actually be the shape of things to come.

Star Trek functions as a religion though the universe itself is explicitly humanistic and secular. Star Trek Into Darkness offers an interpretation of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the creators may not have intended the film as a religious text, it offers an analysis of what happened, a set of responses, pointing to a path forward, incorporating those events into the Star Trek (and ultimately our own) universe. I will offer a close reading of Star Trek Into Darkness that explores the negotiation of what it means to be human and our place in the post-9/11 world. My thesis is that the film can be read as implicitly religious in two senses. First, it offers a vision of what is human in the face of questions of terrorism and pre-emptive strikes, duty and honor, life and death. Second, it offers viewers a reflection on possible responses to 9/11 and the aftermath, pointing forward. It is a secular homily on being human in the past, present, and future.

Abstract: Modern science fiction and fantasy fiction movies can be considered new forms of mythology because they play the same role in modern culture that older forms of mythology played in earlier cultures. In this respect, these new mythologies offer us a way to look deeper into our own personalities and consciousness as well as physical reality itself than we could normally explore by purely scientific and logical means. When we look more deeply into the mythical scenarios presented by science and fantasy fictions, we can find that they offer a way of exploring how we believe that our own human consciousness is evolving.

The relevance of fiction has become a hot topic in the study of religion. A special place in these debates belongs to the investigation of how fiction transforms into religion, or in other words, how and why a text of fiction affords to be read as a religious text. In order to scrutinize the methodology for analysing these “fiction-based,” “invented,” or “hyper-real” religions, Markus Davidsen invited scholars in his field to a symposium at the University of Leiden in 2014. Two questions guided their research: “1) Can a distinction be drawn at all be- tween religious narratives and supernatural fiction? 2) Can we determine which textual features it takes for a fictional narrative to afford religious use?” (2f).

This course will look at a sampling of fictional works from the past twenty years that significantly engage in a discussion of the role(s) that religion plays in various aspects of contemporary life. Some of them are set in the distant historical past and some are set in the present, but all of them explore the relationship between (post-)modern worldviews and culture-defining beliefs structures that are centuries, if not millennia old. We are neither seeking to validate or to invalidate these beliefs in our discussions of these texts – this will be a literature course, not a theology course – but rather we will look at how contemporary authors from around the world are using religion as a part of aesthetic, philosophical, and political expressions in fictionalized form.

In this paper, I address the question of whether metaphysics and theology are or can become science. After examining the qualities of contemporary science, which evolved from an earlier historic concept of any body of literature into a formal method for obtaining empirical knowledge, I apply that standard to metaphysics and theology. I argue that neither metaphysics nor theology practices a scientific method or generates scientific knowledge. Worse, I conclude that both metaphysics and theology are at best purely cultural projects—exercises in exegesis of local cultural and religious ideas and language—and, therefore, that other cultures have produced or would produce radically different schemes of metaphysics or theology. At its worst, metaphysics is speculation about the unknowable, while theology is rumination about the imaginary.

Starting with Erlich's experience teaching A. C. Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END and SPACE ODYSSEY — and a discussion on the Science Fiction Research Association ListServ — briefly discusses the mystic leaps at the end of the two novels, with a reference to Kubrick's film, and uses this discussion for (gentle and indirect) commentary on some continuing "Culture Wars" skirmishes in the US.

There is a wealth of well-argued literature discussing the character of The Doctor as a Messiah or God figure, and with good reason. The sound of the approaching TARDIS is often described as one of hope for the helpless and terror for the oppressors. But that does seem a bit too easy. I will argue that, instead of being even an inverted messianic figure, The Doctor is a failed god. Using a selection of Tenth doctor episodes as a case study I will show that, in the face of a cosmic challenge, The Doctor is impotent and must be rescued by another party - namely, the companion serving as the audience surrogate. What does the ultimate failure of our Cosmic Good, our savior, say about us and our society - if anything?