Scanning the X-files for God pt2.

[Part I of this article explored how some of the basic premises of popular science fiction betray a view of the universe grounded in atheism. The genre consistently inspires fear through its images of alien worlds and beings unmoved by Truth, and urges self-loathing through its abasement of the human person to the status of animal or machine. The opening quotation is from Fox Television's The X-Files.]

"The development of our cerebral cortex has been the greatest achievement of the evolutionary processes. Big deal...Maybe we have gone as far as we can go, and the next advance...will be made by beings we create ourselves...Or perhaps that step forward has already been achieved on another planet by organisms that have a billion years head start on us. If these beings ever visited us...would they react in anything but horror at seeing such mindless, primitive, hideous creatures?"

Back at his computer, FBI agent Mulder (the keeper of the X-Files, whose private ruminations on the cerebral cortex begin this article), holds the human being in pretty low esteem. At the time of this entry in his personal journal, he had just finished doing battle with an infestation of giant cockroaches which may or may not have been mechanical probes from an alien (read: superior) civilization. Whatever they were, everybody found them disgusting and wanted them dead.

As he reflects on this experience, Agent Mulder's thoughts could be paraphrased as follows:

"Humankind, having had the random good fortune to develop a brain, over time has also developed an arrogance which we mistakenly think permits us to squish first and ask questions later. Eventually we may discover that by squishing what we thought was a big ugly bug, we have actually destroyed some highly intelligent life form whose genius we were too stupid to recognize.

"Should we not therefore be afraid that an advanced alien species will at some point land on earth, take a good look around, and do the same thing to us-- having understandably mistaken `such mindless, primitive, hideous creatures' for their version of a big ugly bug?"

On television, this passes for "deep". However, it does not take much imagination to realize that any alien creature who could not immediately perceive the distinction between the human being and all other life forms wouldn't be intelligent enough to have gotten itself here in the first place.

Unfortunately, on The X-Files even the obvious isn't always obvious. A soft-spoken entomologist feeds both audience and FBI-man their proper understanding of the order of the universe: "Eat, sleep, defecate, procreate--that's all they [cockroaches] do. It's all we do, but at least insects don't kid themselves that it's anything more than that." This is not just vaguely agnostic, materialist, or secularist. It requires atheism--a firm conviction that the human is without soul, the world without spirit, and the cosmos without design. The scientist might see a kind of order in the "eat/sleep/..." continuum, but one cannot call it "design" without a Prime Mover, who has dignified His universe through intent.

Had this television entomologist been keeping up in her scientific journal reading, however, she might not have found terrestrial existence so meaningless. Plainly she missed out on a "quiet revolution in scientific understanding" known as the Anthropic Principle.

Anthropic Principle

According to American Enterprise Institute scholar Patrick Glynn, in his article "Beyond the Death of God" (1), by measuring such things as gravity, electromagnetism, subatomic particles, and the rate of expansion of the universe in the fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle convincingly demonstrates that

"Far from being an `accident', the existence of human life is something for which the entire universe seems to have been intricately fine-tuned from the start... [M]inuscule alterations...in these values and relationships would have caused catastrophic derailments in the series of events following the universe's beginning...[T]he slightest tinkering ...would have foreclosed the possibility of life."

This argument is not weakened by the recent discovery of possible organic life on Mars. The specimens found are primitive; but no matter how complex the Red Planet's fossils may prove, fossils they are-- victims of the "foreclosure" we were spared.

Naturally any attempt, no matter how scientific, to set Darwin's theory of the "random universe" on its head is not going to take hold easily. But it may at least rattle Bertrand Russell's view of the human being as a "curious accident in a backwater."

Not one for half measures, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, of the Pacific Jewish Center, is prepared to declare that "Darwin is Dead" (2), the title of an article in which he offers an explanation for the evolution of agnosticism by citing the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, whose 12th century insight could not be more pertinent to our own era:

"For centuries humans had known God. They saw the wonders of rocks, rivers and mountains as natural manifestations of His power. In stages, they forgot the source of these creations, and embraced nature as a replacement for God."

The Rabbi quotes two renowned university biologists who somehow find evidence in nature that free will is a mere myth and that man, "the titular spokesman for a few thousand mammalian species", is of considerably less moment in the grand scheme of life than those "insects who will surely outlive us all." Rabbi Lapin then sums up their Scientific Naturalist argument as if directly addressing our cynical FBI agent musing over his X-File:

"The message is loud and clear. Your actions have no more significance than those of a cockroach. Furthermore, like a cockroach, you are in no position to make moral choices of your own free will. When you commit some hideous brutality...external circumstances made you do it."

If such "Darwinian social implications" are fully absorbed by institutions such as schools and courtrooms, he continues, "civility and safety will be doomed." But the Rabbi is more optimistic than that. "God has often been abandoned through history," he writes, "but those cultures that survive, as have the Jews, always come home just in time."

Acknowledging the courageous progress of new scientific enquiry (like that represented by the Anthropic Principle), Rabbi Lapin declares the degrading effect of Darwinistic thinking "a quaint academic relic." Put another way, he would probably agree that modern Darwinism is the real science fiction.

Science fiction

For the fertile imagination, science fiction can be an irresistible lure. It is the fairy tale material of our age, complete with its high-tech versions of magical powers and fire-breathing dragons. But where fairy tales almost always operate in a moral universe in which good is clearly defined (and usually triumphs), that of science fiction is often in flux, if not downright shattered. Chris Carter, for example, has stated his belief that, in this life, good wins out "a surprisingly paltry amount of the time."

Exceptions can be found, of course. The science fiction of C.S. Lewis is in a category of its own. P.D. James' The Children of Men is the rational antidote to Margaret Atwood's shrill tract The Handmaid's Tale. And even a stereotypical sci-fi context, such as the post-nuclear, culturally decimated world of Walter Miller's brilliant book, A Canticle for Leibowitz, can be used to illustrate the endurance and redemptive power of universal truth and, finally, of faith in God. Miller's 1959 novel is actually a prophetic look into the heart of the Culture of Death, which it rejects utterly--an exception indeed.

It would be easy to just enjoy popular science fiction entertainment and dismiss its vision of the universe as inconsequential. One could wish that the genre were actually more outlandish, and less reflective of a genuine modern malaise directly attributable to the decline of both faith and religion.

Ignorance of religion

The entertainment media go through spates of fixation about organized religion, the current one being almost entirely hostile. The X-Files may be exceptional in that its periodic interest in religions (including Catholicism) is only occasionally insulting or amusingly inaccurate; usually it is respectful, sometimes betraying the sort of wide-eyed curiosity one associates with the cultural orphan who is heard to inquire, upon first seeing a crucifix, "What did that poor guy do?" The X-Files at least treats religion seriously, but demonstrates, as the media do time and again, that to personnel on both sides of the camera there is no being more "alien" than the faithful religionist.

One of the two lead X-Files characters is Catholic--not surprisingly since the employee population of the FBI is "overwhelmingly Catholic." (3) (One wonders if the show's writers are aware of this fact, and have considered what, if anything, it might mean.) Agent Scully is "lapsed", of course--a devout character could be so boring. She repeatedly professes beliefs of some kind, but they appear to afford her little anchor in her turbulent existence.

The spongy metaphysics of The X-Files' "lower case religion" cannot begin to define the spiritual longings with which modern Western society now wrestles. The anxious pilgrims who populate "planet Sci-Fi" will continue to flail in place, like overturned cockroaches, until they recant the immature impulse to jettison traditional faith in favour of the loneliness of rudderless personal spirituality.

Worry. Be sad

At last summer's convention of "Readercon", a large organization of science fiction literature buffs, one black-leather-clad delegate sported a very disconcerting button. Admittedly, one button does not a culture make; but in this company it seemed oddly predictable. It read: "Worry. Be sad."

Last fall saw the debut of Chris Carter's next television project, a show called Millennium, conceived to exploit the climate of worry which has historically preceded the turn of centuries, and at least one millennium that we know of. Dotted among the sequence of images underlying the weekly opening credits of this thoroughly unpleasant program are the glib admonitions, "Wait...Worry...Who cares?" But if Mr. Carter had really done his homework on this millennial theme, he might have been surprised to discover that, notwithstanding the genuine climate of fear at the time, the last millennium passed with a monumental sense of relief when nothing terrible happened at all. Moreover, it was followed by one of the most explosively creative and joyous artistic and spiritual reawakenings in the history of the human race. As the French monk Raoul Glaber wrote in the year 1003, "It was as if the earth had shaken itself, and everywhere dressed itself in a white garment of churches." Christendom's gratitude was communal, traditional, and devotional.

The year 2000, lest we forget, is only a millennium for those who mark time by the coming of the Christ. It is thus a peculiar paradox that millennial anxiety is showing itself among people likely to regard our calendar as an artifical construct born of religiocultural imperialism. But from the Christian point of view, as University of Toronto Professor Janine Langan has insightfully observed, the fact that "A.D." has given way to "C.E." (the Common Era) only underscores the magnificent impact of that "one solitary life."

So despite the cynicism, pessimism, and atheism which lie at the heart of much of today's popular culture, "rumours of God's death have been greatly exaggerated." The cerebral cortex is not an achievement, it is a glorious gift. Yet by no means is it the determinant of the worth of a human being (as anyone with a Down's syndrome child will affirm). The soul is the gift which allows us to see the power of God in the rocks, rivers, and mountains. And one day--who knows?--maybe to see his handiwork in the wrinkled faces of little green men.

(1) . Glynn, Patrick. "Beyond the Death of God." National Review, 6 May 1996: 28-32.

(2) . Lapin, Rabbi Daniel. "Darwin is Dead." Crisis, November 1995: 58.

(3) . O'Beirne, Kate. "Courting Catholics."