Gods from outer space: science fiction as theology

[lpetrich]

Transcendent Outsiders, Alien Gods , and Aspiring Humans: Literary Fantasy and Science Fiction as Contemporary Theological Speculation Ryan Calvey concedes some incompleteness, but this is what he talks about.

In his introduction, he proposes liberal-religion and New-Age "sane spirituality" as an alternative to both religious conservatism and atheism. He continues onward to ET's as authoritarian gods, and then New-Age gods. He ends with "voices from below: aspiring humans", mentioning robots, supercomputers, magically-animated toys and statues, holograms and other AI simulations, projections of others' minds, assembled and cloned human beings, and also ET's.

Here is a more complete classification.

Angry -- authoritarian and judgmental and punitive. The Day The Earth Stood Still is a classic of that, with the ET's bringing a message of "behave yourself -- or else!!!"

Friendly -- like liberal and New-Age theology. Carl Sagan's Contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Starman, Cocoon. From Contact:

... the alien “Caretaker” she encounters provides her with a different, more sophisticated model for God. Contrary to her expectations of traditional religion/theology (judgment, intervention, commandments, etc), her encounter, while in surface ways similar to most human/transcendent outsider interactions, is far more in line with progressive and New Age spirituality than those we have discussed earlier.

...
‘It isn’t like that,’ he said. ‘It isn’t like the sixth grade.’ […] ‘Don’t think of us as some interstellar sheriff gunning down outlaw civilizations. Think of us more as the Office of the Galactic Census. We collect information. I know you think nobody has anything to learn from you because you’re technologically so backward. But there are other merits to a civilization’

...
The emphasis in Ellie’s interaction with the Caretaker is growth, expansion, and development—humans have reached a point where they are on their own.

CEIII is rather disjointed. The ET's are first very annoying, then very friendly. Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End fits, after a fashion, and also the Brobdingnagians and the Houyhnhnms of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Some additional theology is the sort-of virgin birth in Starman and the miraculous healings of Starman and Cocoon.

RC also mentions UFO contactee Orfeo Angelucci in this context, and George Adamski has some good examples. "Space Brother" Orthon from Flying Saucers Have Landed, about nuclear bombs and the devastation that they can produce:

To this, too, he nodded his head in the affirmative, but on his face there was no trace of resentment or judgment. His expression was one of understanding, and great compassion; as one would have toward a much loved child who had erred through ignorance and lack of understanding. This feeling appeared to remain with him during the rest of my questions on this subject.

"Space Sister" Kalna from Inside the Spaceships about war and things like that:

It is a great pity that we must talk of such sorrowful things—and still sadder that such woe exists anywhere in the Universe. In ourselves, we of other planets are not sad people. We are very gay. We laugh a great deal.

Aloof -- though such deities involve themselves with humanity, they don't communicate with us very much, if at all. The black slabs of 2001: A Space Odyssey are an obvious example, and H.P. Lovecraft's "Elder Gods" may also qualify.

In UFOlogy, UFO surveillance (the usual reason proposed for their presence) and UFO abductions (like what wildlife biologists do) clearly qualify.

Apotheosis -- humanity becoming gods. Isaac Asimov's The Last Question is an obvious one, and some of Arthur C. Clarke's works seem like that also.

Absent -- if not nonexistent. Humanity is at the top of the heap in sentience, with all entities more powerful than humanity behaving completely impersonally without regard for humanity. Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy is a good example of it, with its absence of sentient ET's.

So far, the real-life universe has been like this, Fermi Paradox and all.

 

[abaddon]

Inimical/Indifferent -- Vogons, Independence Day. Humans are just in the way.

 

[Hans]

I always liked the idea that we are a biology experiment for a very long lived race of 'gods'.

 

[Trebuchet]

All hail Davros!!

 

[Crossbow]

Scientology is essentially a religion that is written like a science-fiction story.

Which is not surprising considering that the founder of Scientology (L. Ron Hubbard) was a science-fiction writer himself who plagerized science-fiction stories from his good friend (A.E van Voght) who was also a writer of science fiction.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Indifferent Cthulhu Mythos.

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

I'd say created is a niche too.

The gods of the warhammer universe spring to mind. The AI in "I have no mouth and I must scream" and skynet would probably count in that range too.

 

[lpetrich]

Inimical/Indifferent -- Vogons, Independence Day. Humans are just in the way.

Not sure about Independence Day in this context. But Vogons fit. They are not actively opposed to us, but they don't care about what happens to us. It's like us stepping on ants.

I always liked the idea that we are a biology experiment for a very long lived race of 'gods'.

Cute thought. Presumably by genetically engineering us into existence.

Ancient astronauts in popular culture^WP has a *big* list of references to that notion, and Ancient Astronauts and Space Gods! is a nice discussion of it.

The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey only shows one of those black slabs giving ideas to some of our ancestors, but Prometheus goes full-on about how some ET's genetically engineered humanity into existence. As to TV shows, Stargate features ancient-astronaut-gods rather prominently.

The idea goes back to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, inventor of Theosophy, with her Venusian "Lords of the Flame". Later Theosophists, like Annie Besant, expanded on them, and Desmond Leslie in Flying Saucers Have Landed tells us that

About eighteen million years ago, say the strange and ancient legends of our little planet, at a time when Mars, Venus and Earth were in close conjunction, along a magnetic path so formed came a huge, shining, radiant vessel of dazzling power and beauty, bringing to earth ‘thrice thirty-five’ human beings, of perfection beyond our highest ideals; gods rather than men; divine kings of archaic memory, under whose benign world-government a shambling, hermaphrodite monster was evolved into thinking, sexual man.

referencing various Theosophists' works. DL also tells us that this event happened in 18,617,841 BCE.

All hail Davros!!

The leader of the Daleks in Dr. Who.

Scientology is essentially a religion that is written like a science-fiction story.

Yes, a reinvention of Gnosticism, an early-Xian sect that ended up suppressed as heretical.

Which is not surprising considering that the founder of Scientology (L. Ron Hubbard) was a science-fiction writer himself who plagerized science-fiction stories from his good friend (A.E van Voght) who was also a writer of science fiction.

Yes, I remember learning of a Scientologist who believed that movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are literal history that had happened to those movies' creators in previous reincarnations.

 

[Rincewind]

/trimmed/

Yes, I remember learning of a Scientologist who believed that movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are literal history that had happened to those movies' creators in previous reincarnations.

So we should have seen them suing George Lucas by now?

 

[HansMustermann]

Methinks the OP moves the goalposts a little between ET being GODS (in "a sufficiently advanced technology" way) and not existing at all. That's a bit like saying that lizards are either gold dragons, green dragons, black dragons, or not existing at all

The more Occam-conform solution to Fermi is that, basically, ET is subject to the same physics we are, and, quoth Douglas Adams, "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." And probably for them the economics just aren't there for them to come over here to play god.

Plus, I'm a bit weary of any kind of "planet of hats" typology of aliens taken seriously. Any intelligent life will have a variety of needs and brain pathways, regardless of how those are actually implemented. And unless they're all digital and preloaded with the same presets at the factory, they'll have a wide spectrum of baselines for all those pathways. Even within the same species, some will be more optimistic, some more pessimistic. Some will be more social, some more distant. Etc.

Plus, if we're talking INTELLIGENT life, a characteristic of any intelligence is the ability to learn and extrapolate from what they've learned. But even if you feel like nitpicking that, if they can't learn, they never get to build rockets.

So individuals with wildly different backgrounds and experiences will have learned wildly different things from them. A gang member from Nar Shaddaa will have different experiences from a moisture farmer from Tattooine, which in turn will have wildly different experiences from a life-long career army officer from Dromund Kaas.

Expecting a whole ET species to fall neatly into such a category, as in, every single one is benevolent, or every single one is evil, or every single one is aloof, is just nonsense.

 

[catsmate]

The leader of the Daleks in Dr. Who.

Creator. Mostly the Daleks were led by the Emperor.

 

[Bikewer]

Indifferent Cthulhu Mythos.

The Great Old Ones are hardly indifferent.... They are decidedly inimical. Thier desire is to "clear the Earth off" of nasty humanity and re-claim it for themselves.
But they are constrained by being banished (or in Cthulu's case, confined to "dreaming" in his sunken city of R'Leyh.)
Have no doubt... When the stars are right, they'll be back.

 

[HansMustermann]

Creator. Mostly the Daleks were led by the Emperor.

The Daleks however make my point. To get a whole alien population to be hell-bent on exterminating everyone, they had to be genetically engineered AND sealed in a machine that sealed off any positive memories in separate memory banks. (According to the newer series.) AND we're shown that the machine mis-translates everything into "exterminate" even if the poor barstard sealed in the tank is trying to say something nice. (See the episode where Missy seals Clara inside a Dalek tank.) It is only due to the Doctor's altering the past that "mercy" gets included in the machine's translation software as the only positive word, so to speak.

Let that roll around in your head. Even with a genetically engineered race, you need such an engineered communication barrier to ensure that conflict always ensues.

And pretty much what I'm saying is that it's the only realistic way that any species would be squeezed into a single role.

 

[dudalb]

Scientology is essentially a religion that is written like a science-fiction story.

Which is not surprising considering that the founder of Scientology (L. Ron Hubbard) was a science-fiction writer himself who plagerized science-fiction stories from his good friend (A.E van Voght) who was also a writer of science fiction.

There is evidence that the whole Xenu saga started as a Pulp Sci Fi story thzt L Ron wrote and could not sell after the Sci Fi pulps collapsed in the early 50's.

 

[lpetrich]

Indifferent Cthulhu Mythos.

As I posted: HP Lovecraft's Elder Gods.

Methinks the OP moves the goalposts a little between ET being GODS (in "a sufficiently advanced technology" way) and not existing at all. That's a bit like saying that lizards are either gold dragons, green dragons, black dragons, or not existing at all

The more Occam-conform solution to Fermi is that, basically, ET is subject to the same physics we are, and, quoth Douglas Adams, "Space is big. Really big. ...

That is correct for super-hard SF, trying to avoid far-out speculation as much as possible.

But if one allows the more far-out sorts of entities, then they can be more godlike, and the article I mentioned compared such entities to various sorts of deities.

Plus, I'm a bit weary of any kind of "planet of hats" typology of aliens taken seriously. ...

Expecting a whole ET species to fall neatly into such a category, as in, every single one is benevolent, or every single one is evil, or every single one is aloof, is just nonsense.

I agree. But we on Earth may only be seeing an expeditionary force, and its participants may be atypical of the general population of its home.

Creator. Mostly the Daleks were led by the Emperor.

My bad about Davros.

The Great Old Ones are hardly indifferent.... They are decidedly inimical. ...

Interesting.

So aloof (non-communicative) super ET's could be divided into two types:

• Friendly (2001: A Space Odyssey)
• Hostile (Independence Day)

There is evidence that the whole Xenu saga started as a Pulp Sci Fi story thzt L Ron wrote and could not sell after the Sci Fi pulps collapsed in the early 50's.

Any evidence of that? I wouldn't be surprised.

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, I was under the impression that you were talking about aliens, rather than the roles they have in fiction. In fiction the shorter version is that, when they do have any stereotyped role, they tend to be fit into one or more of the dramatic archetypes like antagonist (e.g., the Borg), contagonist (e.g., the Vulcans in Enterprise), mentor, etc. And be given the attitude that fits that role.

I say when they do have any stereotyped role, because there are plenty of aliens in SF that are just another society that has its own diverse individuals and its own problems, and often has no particular interest in humans. Star Trek or Dr Who for example have plenty of aliens that really aren't interested in playing gods, and often aren't in a position to play gods or even to come here anyway. Hell, there are plenty of aliens in SF that get the crap end of the stick from humans (Avatar, the wossname squid faced guys in Dr Who) or from other aliens (e.g., the Remans in Star Trek.)

So even in SF, there are plenty of aliens that aren't really anywhere near gods.

 

[catsmate]

So aloof (non-communicative) super ET's could be divided into two types:

• Friendly (2001: A Space Odyssey)
• Hostile (Independence Day)

There's also the indifferent and, well, *alien*. Who do things that pitiful human intellects don't comprehend for motives that are impossible for us to understand.
Of course that's difficult to describe in fiction.

 

[lpetrich]

Well, I was under the impression that you were talking about aliens, rather than the roles they have in fiction. In fiction the shorter version is that, when they do have any stereotyped role, they tend to be fit into one or more of the dramatic archetypes ...

So even in SF, there are plenty of aliens that aren't really anywhere near gods.

That's certainly true. I was more concerned with the superpowerful ones.

There's another type that I've thought of: the trickster or mischief maker, someone who makes life miserable for others for their own enjoyment. On Star Trek, Trelane and Q.

There's also the indifferent and, well, *alien*. Who do things that pitiful human intellects don't comprehend for motives that are impossible for us to understand.
Of course that's difficult to describe in fiction.

Presumably something like editor John W. Campbell's famous challenge, which I've bolded below.
Fantastic Reviews - Larry Niven Interview - Larry Niven Wiki - Wikia

FR: The Ringworld series and your other Known Space books include some of the most well-known and adored alien species in science fiction, including the aggressive, catlike Kzinti and the cowardly puppeteers. In the words of John W. Campbell, these aliens think as well as a man, but not like a man. How do you go about creating your alien races? Do you have a personal favorite from among your own aliens?

LN: I liked John Campbell's challenge and have done my best to meet it. Among my aliens I have many favorites, mostly the ones who keep reappearing. Kzinti, puppeteers, Moties, Chirpsithra...and the fithp, who only appeared once, and are too complex for short stories.

 

[jimbob]

There's also the indifferent and, well, *alien*. Who do things that pitiful human intellects don't comprehend for motives that are impossible for us to understand.
Of course that's difficult to describe in fiction.

Rendezvous with Rama?

 

[Peter May]

Rendezvous with Rama?

Alien visitation is as entertaining as a dose of the clap.