I wrote the following for The Dialogue, the newsletter of the church where I serve, First Christian Church, Disciples of Christ of St. Joseph, MO.
Over the weekend, I saw the new
movie Prometheus, which if you didn’t
know is a sort of prequel to the classic 1981 science fiction/horror movie Alien.
The director of the 1981 film, Ridley Scott, returns to direct this new one. Whereas the film 30 years ago was in many
ways an exercise in simplicity (future astronauts inadvertently bring aboard an
alien killing machine and then meet their demise in a claustrophobic space
ship), the new film moves to the other end of the complexity spectrum and dares
to ask all kinds of really big questions about life, existence, faith, the
creation of the universe, etc. In the
end, I guess I found the movie unsatisfying, but it did leave me thinking and
actually having interesting conversations about it, which is more than I can
say for most Hollywood fare.
Director Ridley Scott is no stranger
to using the genre of science fiction to ask questions about what it means to
be human. One of my favorite science
fiction films is Scott’s 1982 film BladeRunner, in which organic robots called “replicants,” who are
indistinguishable from human beings, try to find their creator. To their dismay, the replicants (who are used
for dangerous manual labor in space) discover they were made by a soulless
corporation, and the CEO of that corporation views them as products not
people. [SPOILER ALERT: I’m going to start giving out details of Prometheus, so stop reading here if you
don’t want to know those details.] Similarly,
in Prometheus another search is underway
for a creator, but this time the ones doing the searching are humans. Set in 2093, archaeologists have discovered
ancient pictures of aliens, who apparently initiated the process of biological
evolution on earth, and they set off across the stars to find the aliens who
made us.
The very first scene of the movie
shows the aliens creating human life, and thus my disappointment began
there. As many movie critics have pointed out, ever since the publication of the book Chariots of the Gods? in the Sixties and the resulting 1970 “documentary”
based on the book, it’s been a common sci-fi trope to talk about aliens
inspiring ancient human civilizations, if not creating human life itself. Chariots
of the Gods? was ridiculed as “pseudo-history” and “science fiction
pretending to be history,” but Hollywood saw an opportunity. Probably the best example of aliens creating
human civilization comes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey. Of
course, there was also the cheesy but oh-so-fun 1980’s TV show Battlestar Galactica which began with
the narration: “Some believe that life down here. . . began out there.” I seem to recall a bad sci-fi move Mission to Mars back in 2000 that had a
similar plot point. Who knows how many
other films used the same device? Prometheus is not exactly breaking new
ground here.
Trite science fiction plot points
aside, Ridley Scott has biblical thoughts on his mind. In a recent interview in Esquire, Scott remarks that his intentions were to address
questions of human origins, God and creation.
He says, “I'm
really intrigued by those eternal questions of creation and belief and faith. I
don't care who you are, it's what we all think about. It's in the back of all
our minds.” At least some of the film’s
characters share Scott’s questions (at least the ones not inserted just to be
gruesomely killed by aliens). In Prometheus, the heroine, Dr. Elizabeth
Shaw, wears a cross and we learn via flashback that her faith in God goes back
to her believing father. Shaw remains
faithful even when it is confirmed that human life came from aliens. When her boyfriend asks why she continues to
wear the cross after finding out that aliens rather than God made humans, she
replies by asking, “Yes, but who made them?”
Shaw is joined by a human-looking robot named David who seems keenly
aware of the human emotions and desires he does not possess. In one scene, David asks a scientist why he
was created; the response: “Because we could.”
David offers the jarring rejoinder that perhaps the aliens created
humans just “because they could.”
Prometheus may have been overdone, but
the questions it wrestles with are real, namely does scientific inquiry reveal
that we humans were made by an impersonal process rather than a personal
God? If so, what does that say about the
worth and purpose of humanity? What does
it say about me? The Christian response
is that however God created the universe and humanity in particular (divine
fiat, evolution, space aliens, etc.) such creation was done with love. God loves the universe so much so that God
came in Jesus Christ “to reconcile to himself all things” (Colossians 1:20). It is the fear that we are unloved and that
our lives have no inherent purpose which drives so much of the Christian
response to debates between science and religion. This is unfortunate, because all kinds of
awful things are done when people are afraid.
Besides, we are told in our scriptures that “perfect love casts out fear”
(1 John 4:18). From the Christian
perspective, this “perfect love” enables us not to fear what science discovers
or even what science fiction dreams up, because we can, along with the father
of Prometheus’ Elizabeth Shaw, “choose to believe” that we
are loved by our Creator no matter the method of our creation.
Okay,
I’ll confess that my experience of God’s “perfect love” may leave me unafraid
of Prometheus’ plot point that
humanity was created as a part of an alien race’s biology experiments, but it
does little to stop me from screaming my head off when later in the film an
alien bursts out of somebody’s stomach.
Some fears are unrelated to the meaning of existence, they’re just fun.
Grace
and Peace,
Chase
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