Science and Religion

I just finished reading "The City and the Stars" by Arthur C. Clarke, the same man who brought us the literary incarnation of "2001: A Space Odyssey," which remains one of my favorite science fictions to date.

Here's the short synopsis (of "City" not "2001"): Humanity, several billion years in the future and after having taken part in a galactic empire, has ultimately confined itself to the only two remaining cities on Earth. Both of these cities are totally isolated from one another by the deserts that cover the rest of the world, and both of them have lasted, virtually unchanged, for a little over one billion years.

The story starts in the first city, Diaspar, where the inhabitants are essentially immortal. The protagonist is, more or less, the first person born in the city for millions of years, and the story follows his actions and how they affect the future fate of the human race.

Like all "hard" sci-fi epics, the less you know beforehand, the more entertaining the read, so I won't give anything else away. But Clarke is good. His worlds are vivid, believable, and endlessly fascinating. I would certainly recommend this novel to any hard sci-fi fan. Note, the distinction I'm making here is significant. "Hard" refers to fiction which is rooted in known reality and theoretical science. "Soft" science fiction, on the other hand, doesn't bother much at all with that sort of tedium and produces things like "Star Trek" and "Star Wars," both of which are more closely related to fantasy and westerns than they are to science fiction, but I digress.

As I've already made clear, I enjoyed the book. It didn't instill the same childlike awe in me that the more famous "2001" did, but it still fascinated and entertained me in ways only good sci-fi can. That said, it suffers from a lamentably typical anti-religious bias that plagues many of the smaller minds in science. I use the word suffer here to describe the very real way in which it diminishes the work. When an author treats science as the only rational faith to which human beings ought to ascribe, he needlessly alienates a significant percentage of his readership. His fiction is no longer honest at that point, it's preachy. No one likes getting preached at. I'm Mormon, and I typically never read Mormon fiction, because many Mormon authors have not learned how to tastefully incorporate their faith into good literature.

Science is not religion. When it is treated as such, both are cheapened and diminished. There's a great little commentary on this topic by Orson Scott Card in what is mostly a review on "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," so I won't go too far into it. What I will say is that believe what you will, it is wrong to openly attack others' systems of belief. Accepting that, one can understand the degree of thoughtlessness and arrogance Clarke displays when he uses, as a major theme and plot device in his story, the "inexplicable insanity" of humanity's obsession with religion. In his fascinating (but still, lest we or he forget, very fictional, and very logically flawed) billion-year distant civilization, mankind has evolved past the primitive compulsion toward religion, and instead has fully embraced the Truth that science so clearly and patiently offers.

This is all quite unfair of me, because Arthur C. Clarke passed away a matter of months ago. My grief over his loss is sincere. He was a great mind and a great author. Perhaps my time would be better spend in soliloquy, but my mind is more consumed with the tragedy of his scientific arrogance. This will ultimately prevent much of his work from reaching the enduring status of work by more sensitive, thoughtful authors. Thank goodness, I suppose, for "2001," and for Stanley Kubrick--without whom Clarke may very well have been forgotten entirely.