SF and Religion

SF Signal has another one of their "Mind Meld" features today, in which they ask a number of SFnal folks the same question and amalgamate the answers into one gigantic post.

This time, the question is "Is Science Fiction Antithetical to Religion?" The distinguished panel includes Mike Resnick, Lou Anders (who suggested the question), Ben Bova, Adam Roberts, Larry Niven, Michael A. Burstein, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., John C. Wright, James Morrow, and Yr. Humble Correspondent.

My contribution was as follows:

That's cherry-picking names, though, isn't it? Plenty of the classic SF writers weren't atheists, and even the ones with sanguine views towards organized religion (such as Arthur C. Clarke) believed, or wanted to believe, in some kind of transcendence, even if it wasn't direct experience of some Godhead.

Science Fiction often does think religion will mostly go away, or will settle down quietly - let me mention Clarke again, who in several books has the whole world think better of religion after some major event - but that's just part of the general classic SF tendency to put the world into a neat, easily-defined box. (Psychohistory also comes to mind in this context; classic SF often thought all of human knowledge would eventually be as rigorous and predictive as classical physics - though they were clearly wrong about that.)

The only real, died-in-the-wool atheist of classic SF that I can think of is Asimov, who utterly epitomizes the idea that pure thinking can reduce the world to a set of axioms. Science has since proven - actually, science was already proving, back then, but classic SF didn't pay as much attention to real cutting-edge science as some people like to pretend these days - that the world is much stranger and more complex than the layman thought.

Smart SF writers, the ones who understand how real human beings think and feel, don't discount the effects of religion (and other forms of irrationalism and wishful thinking) on humanity. Clarke may have hoped that we'd outgrow it, and newer writers like Egan (in "Oceanic") may argue that we can and should engineer religiosity out of humanity, but they still take its role in human culture seriously, and know they have to account for it.

SF does have a tendency to explain things away, and religion is one of the biggest targets there - and "those closed-minded religious fanatics" are a common villain type for all kinds of SF - but there are plenty of SF writers who actually believe, to one degree or another. SF isn't necessarily anti-religion...it's just anti-irrationalism. The more rational a religion is, the more likely it is to be treated positively in SF.