Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – christians afraid of science fiction

Now, one of our favorite thoughtless conservative Christians, Winter Knight, is now very afraid of us nerds.    Why?  Because science fiction makes atheists!  <cue scream>.  He found a nice little article from a conservative Christian/desperate Catholic/white nationalist rag called The American Spectator from 11 years ago to support his “research”.     

That original article is quite whitewash job, claiming how important the Catholic Church was to astronomy.  It entirely ignores how the RCC was material in holding astronomy back, and its murder of those who dared to disagree with it.  The author, one Hal Colebatch, is “shocked” that it was noted that many science fiction writers are noted to be atheists.  I *think* this is the compilation of essays he is talking about.  It does look good.  Alas, it’s kinda expensive. 

The article makes little sense in that Hal isn’t sure why writing science fiction makes one able to consider the question if there is a god or not.  Unsurprisingly, Hal thinks that only theologians are qualified to talk about this, the old “sophisticated theology” argument.  The mere fact of being an atheist doesn’t necessarily make one a good anti-apologist, nor does being a science fiction writer.  However, many science fiction writers are polymaths and they have indeed spent time in thinking about such things as all of the possibilities of a universe, including whether or not there is a god involved. The article wraps up with a Christian so upset that people don’t mention them in every breath.  

Poor WK he is upset that reading science fiction shows that religion is anti-science.  Now, what science fiction he is reading is beyond me since I do not recall a single instance of this and I’ve read a LOT of science fiction.  Religion is rarely if ever mentioned, so where WK is seeing this persecution of poor WK is a mystery.  As noted above, it’s just the need for attention.

What WK seems to be most bothered about is that a fair amount of science fiction shows that humans and aliens aren’t that different and humans aren’t as special as a conservative Christian must believe he is.  WK and his god aren’t needed. 

WK is upset that his god might not be the creator.  For all of his lies about intelligent design, he just can’t stand it if his god isn’t considered the designer.  He also again lies about the multiverse hypothesis (not theory) and the false claims about fine-tuning and of course hasn’t a clue about the Big Bang Theory, still insisting that it’s evidence for his rather silly god.  The BBT does show a beginning; it doesn’t say it was the only one.   

Here’s his whine “. And that’s why when we produce evidence for them in debates, they will believe in speculations rather than go where the evidence leads.”  Nope, we consider the speculations of WK and find them to be unsupported since our creationist has no evidence for his claims.  His religion is revealed as nothing more than speculation and fiction. 

Here’s another gem from WK “They seem to think that untestable speculations are “good enough” to refute observational evidence –“   Hmmm, WKs god?  The ultimate untestable speculation.   No evidence at all for it.  We can see that WK has never read science fiction or watched it.   Alas, nope, it doesn’t make the mysterious of the universe seem easy to understand to the atheist.  WK whines that SF invents imaginary answers to the questions of the universe.  It can, and surprise, that’s what the bible does, showing it to be the fiction it is.  As WK himself says, this fiction is accepted becausethere is a  “want and need to believe in those speculations”.

Alas for WK, fictional characters and real humans can be moral and intelligent without WK and his god.  The bible are myths that the Christian wants to believe. 

Us SF fans want both the evidence for the BBT and the imagination for warp drives. As we know from many interviews with scientists, it was science fiction that caused them to question and move forward, not listening to religion which says “we already know the truth”.  Poor WK, the cosmic background radiation and nucleosynthesis shows his primitive myth about gods and creation to be wrong. 

Then ol’ WK entirely goes off the rails, and rants about how atheists are only atheist because we want to enjoy sex.  Poor dear, he is always about the sex.   I guess the poor fellow is jealous of so many things.   Alas, our worldview is not discredited at all.  Poor WK, he can’t even get other Christians to agree with him.

If WK really wants to see religion in science fiction, he should watch Babylon 5.  There is a whole episode about religion, The Parliament of Dreams, but alas he’ll be upset with it since it dares to show *all* of earth’s religions, as well as those of aliens.  There’s also a great episode about Christianity and monks:  Passing Through Gethsemane.    And then we have G’Kar, an alien who shows the best of what a spiritual sentient being can be (after being a general pain in the ass through out much of the series).