SF Gospel

14 awesome things about 2008

Some genre-related, some religion-related, many both. This isn't a top 14, just the first 14 that came to mind, so, in no particular order:

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

It's a shame there haven't been more SF books about monks who live in a giant clock, because Stephenson's masterpiece has ended that particular subgenre. All else can't help but be an imitation. So if you've got a monks-in-a-giant-clock manuscript kicking around... well, I'm really sorry. My review is here.

Rapture Ready by Daniel Radosh

I'm always intrigued by the delightful weirdness of evangelical pop culture, and Radosh's book sums up why. Check out the online multimedia appendix for clips from Bibleman and Ultimate Christian Wrestling. (If I were smart I'd put together something like that for The Gospel According to Science Fiction.)

Doctor Who Season 4

"The Runaway Bride" was hardly my favorite episode, so I wasn't the only one who was... disappointed to hear that Catherine Tate would be returning to Doctor Who for a whole season.  Imagine my surprise, then, when Donna Noble ends up one of the most interesting companions in the 45-year history of the program. Billie Piper's Rose casts a long shadow, but Tate successfully made the show hers—in a very good way. And the finale is pretty much a blueprint for how to make geeks feel happy. 

Ex Machina by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris

I surprise myself saying this, since Brian K. Vaughan's other series have often left me cold, but this is one of the best comics coming out right now. My favorite moment of the year occurred in #33, in which Mayor Mitchell Hundred has a vision of the word made concrete: God as an embodiment of New York.

Cloverfield

I'm a big kaiju fan, so of course I was anticipating seeing this view-from-the-ground of a giant monster rampage. I thought it might lose some of its luster on second viewing, but I recently watched it again and I'm glad to say it didn't. Can there ever be a better fake-found-footage-documentary? I doubt it. My review appeared on Religion Dispatches.

Wall-E

I didn't make that big a deal of it or anything, but yeah, this was pretty great. And all about Plato's cave!

"The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" by James Alan Gardner (Asimov's, February 2008)

An amazing parable about love, fate, and alien artifacts. I reviewed it here. I'll be brief: this story deserves a Hugo. Come to think of it...

Asimov's in general

Sheila Williams has really, really good taste in stories, and the last year of Asimov's was nothing short of amazing. Check out my choices for the 2008 readers' poll to see some of the reasons why. Here's a tip: quit reading blog posts about the decline of the science fiction magazines and subscribe to this one. You'll be very, very glad you did. 

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Until Dollhouse—and possibly even after that—TTSCC is the closest network TV is going to get to Buffy at the moment. It's not perfect, sure, but it has moments of brilliance, chief among them the first season finale's robot-versus-SWAT-team battle set to Johnny Cash's "When the Man Comes Around." For a for-instance, here's my review of the season two premiere.

Alien Nation: The Ultimate Movie Collection

A couple years ago Fox put out a DVD set entitled Alien Nation: The Complete Series. The problem? It wasn't: it excluded the five TV movies Fox aired over the eight years after the hourly show was canceled. Alien Nation had the potential to be one of the best SF shows of all time before Fox killed it (sound familiar?), and the release of this DVD set (which originally came out last year, but only as a Best Buy exclusive) means that the whole thing is finally available for real. 

Iron Man

I was not that into The Dark Knight, which struck me as relentlessly cynical (and a bit nonsensical, too). After its ridiculously huge opening weekend I feared that we were destined for a few years of "grim n' gritty" antisuperhero movies wherein the good guys are really bad guys and everything is sad. And maybe we are. But Iron Man offers a glimmer of hope that there might still be some superhero movies coming up that are made for people who like fun. 

Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti is probably the best horror writer since Lovecraft, but he has a very hard time keeping his books in print. Many of his best stories were only available in expensive small-press hardcovers and even more expensive out-of-print omnibuses. Virgin Books has done us all a favor by releasing an affordable trade paperback of Teatro Grottesco, which includes many of his best stories (such as my favorite, "Gas Station Carnivals"). Anybody for some existential despair?

The Wrestler

I just reviewed this, so I needn't say much here. Just... wow. Good movie.  

TV on the Internet

Hulu's only 9 months old, but dang, it's hard to remember the Internet without it. It's got a slew of good genre shows both new and old (Firefly, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the not-as-bad-as-you'd-expect Total Recall 2070) and some not-entirely-great-but-hey-it's-free ones, too (Swamp Thing, Lost In Space, and even the freakin' Time Tunnel). Netflix's Watch Instantly stepped up this year as well, lifting time restrictions for most users and allowing them to watch as much as they want—which allowed me to watch Quantum Leap in its entirety this summer. Who needs DVR? 

***UPDATE***

Wow, I totally forgot to put Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on here. Oops. So let's call it 15 awesome things. Well, you probably already know why it's great—and if you don't, why not just watch it? 

For our sins he was pinned: Salvation in The Wrestler

In Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, modern pop culture forms the stage of a very unusual Passion play. The film places Golgotha within the squared circle: it presents a wrestling match as a drama of violence that brings salvation. But who is the redeemer and who is the redeemed?

Mickey Rourke plays—though "embodies" might be a better word—Randy "the Ram" Robinson (born Robin Ramzinsky), a fifty-something professional wrestler quietly fading into oblivion in south Jersey. He still wrestles on weekends, but superstardom has long-since passed him by, and he struggles to make rent on his dreary mobile home. He is, like Travis Bickle, God's lonely man. His estranged daughter refuses to speak to him, and the closest he has to a friend is Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), a stripper who thinks of him as a customer rather than a companion. After a particularly brutal match, the Ram's years of physical and chemical abuse overtake him: he suffers a heart attack, and he is told he'll likely die if he continues wrestling. Thus robbed of his identity, Randy struggles to find his way in the world. Ultimately, he realizes that he needs wrestling, and, throwing caution to the wind, he goes ahead with a 20th-anniversary rematch against his old rival, a faux-Libyan heel named the Ayatollah.* 

The Wrestler is a movie all about redemptive suffering, as we see the central role that dramatized violence plays in the Ram's life. At a couple points this is made perhaps too clear, as in an early scene where Randy shows Cassidy the scars his career has left him with. She responds by quoting Isaiah 53:5 by way of The Passion of the Christ's opening epigraph: "He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; by His wounds we are healed." She makes the connection even more clear moments later, dubbing Randy "the sacrificial Ram," and later in the film we see a tattoo in the center of his back of Jesus crowned with thorns. Clearly, the film wants us to view wrestling as a spectacle of redemptive suffering.

And at times that suffering is extreme. In perhaps the most powerful sequence in the film, we see an ultraviolent match between the Ram and real-life hardcore wrestler Necro Butcher**. The two mangle one another with a variety of sharp implements scattered around the ring, and the action is intercut with scenes of backstage doctors patching the two up immediately after the match. The violence is intense: Necro takes a staplegun first to his own body, then to the Ram's; he stabs the Ram in the forehead with a fork; both crash through sheets of glass and tangles of barbed wire. (And, lest we forget what it all means, the Ram ends up with a sizable gash on the side of his torso.) It's a messy, bloody affair, and the audience loves it—but it's interesting to note that they express their enjoyment of the match by hurling abuse at the masochistic Necro (chanting, for instance, "You sick fuck" while he staples himself). Despite the extreme violence of the spectacle, the match still establishes a normative morality.

But what comes across most clearly is that this is a very, very different kind of wrestling than the Ram enacted twenty years ago. Wrestling in the '80s was simple, straightforward theater. In the final act of the film, the Ram tries to plan out his match with the Ayatollah, who responds: "You're the face, I'm the heel. Done." Compare this to a conversation Randy and Necro have before their match, in which Necro carefully explains what weapons he's going to use. In the Ram's day, wrestling was all good guys and bad guys, simplified stories of right and wrong. Necro Butcher's style of wrestling is still theater, but it's theater of a very different kind; it's something more akin to performance art. The stage is no longer the canvas, but the actual flesh of the wrestlers—flesh that is, by the end of the match, visibly torn and battered. Things have changed, and the Ram has a hard time staying current. In his day, wrestling was a drama of violence, but with a sturdy layer of make-believe on top. There's no faking being stabbed in the forehead with a fork. It's little surprise that, after a cursory patching-up in the aftermath of the match with Necro, the Ram ends up in the hospital anyway. 

It's not stated explicitly in the film, but the match against Necro Butcher is a "Bring Your Own Weapons" match, a staple of CZW (Combat Zone Wrestling) events in which fans provide the tools with which the wrestlers mangle one another. The barbed wire, forks, and thumbtacks that nearly kill the Ram are provided by the audience; this is participatory violence. In this context, the audience's chanting takes on the audience's role in a Passion play. "Crucify him!" is replaced by "Fuck you Necro," but the end result is the same: the audience makes the violence possible (and necessary).

So perhaps it is the audience that is redeemed: through participating in the violent spectacle, aspects of their worldview (America is better than not-America; reluctant masochism is better than enthusiastic masochism) are reinforced. But the real salvation here is for the Ram himself. The movie makes it clear that he finds a clarity inside the ring that he can't find in the ambiguities of his real life. (It's little surprise that a wrestler of the '80s who dramatizes suffering falls for a stripper who offers fake pleasure.) His attempts to find a new normalcy (a new job, a better relationship with his daughter) end in frustrated disaster. Ultimately, the Ram can't simply be a character that Randy plays. He is the Ram; his true identity can only become manifest in the simple drama of an old-school wrestling match. Without wrestling, he has no identity, so he sacrifices his reality for fiction, and finds redemption in the bargain. When he emerges from behind the curtain to fight his final match, he truly becomes the character he's been playing in Passion plays for his entire life. The Ram is the salvator salvandus, the redeemed redeemer. His final entry into the ring is a resurrection: Robin Ramzinski has died, but Randy the Ram, the legend, the "spiritual body" that transcends ordinary existence, will live forever. 

Many thanks to wrestling fans extraordinare Mark Hugo and Michael Benni Pierce for their assistance with this essay.

*The reference is to the mid-'80s rivalry between Sgt. Slaughter and the Iron Sheik.

**Who I suspect may have gotten his name from the bass player for Norwegian black metal band Mayhem. 

Merry Christmas from SF Gospel!

Merry Christmas, folks. Presented for your listening pleasure (if that word is appropriate here), the 1964 novelty single "I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek" by the Go Go's. (Not those Go Go's. The other ones.) We've got Doctor Who Christmas episodes; why not more Doctor Who-themed Christmas songs? 

Doubt vs. Predator: A Vatican II Parable

My latest piece for Religion Dispatches is an essay on John Patrick Shanley's film Doubt, a parable about Vatican II, gendered power, and sex abuse scandals.

On the surface Doubt is a torn-from-the-headlines story about the abuse scandals that have rocked the Church over the last decade. At its heart, however, Shanley’s story is a parable of Vatican II. It's critical here to point out that Doubt is set in 1964, in the midst of the Second Vatican Council; in that context the story reflects the Church’s growing pains. Sister Aloysius is the old church, authoritarian and inflexible. Father Flynn is the new order, the jocular, friendly face of a Church whose pastors no longer turn their backs to the congregation. 

I saw the play on which the film was based during its Broadway run, and it was, simply put, one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. The movie is very good, but not quite that good. It turns the volume up a little, which does away with some of the subtlety and points things a little more toward melodrama. Nevertheless, the story is still powerful; the tug-of-war between the two principal characters is an incredibly compelling conflict. I'm pretty sure Meryl Streep saw the play too; she definitely borrowed a couple of mannerisms from Cherry Jones, who originated the role. 

Read the full review here.

Total moral depravity: The Day the Earth Stood Still

If the original The Day the Earth Stood Still is known for one thing, it's Christ imagery. In Robert Wise's 1951 film, alien emissary Klaatu announces his arrival with a paraphrase of Luke 2:14, preaches peace, love, and understanding before the U.N., is murdered by the forces of empire, rises from the dead, and delivers an apocalyptic warning before ascending to heaven. "If you threaten to extend your violence," he warns, "this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration." Though Klaatu's message is more political ultimatum than extension of grace, his story is a transparent attempt to transfer the Jesus story into an SF setting (Robert Wise's claims of scriptural ignorance notwithstanding). The salvation Klaatu extends is admittedly limited; he offers freedom not from sin or death but from nuclear war. Nevertheless, Klaatu was a Cold War messiah.

It may seem surprising, then, that Scott Derrickson's remake excises the messianism from the story. Klaatu is still shot by the military, but it happens well before he's had a chance to do any preaching. on top of that, at no point do we believe he's dead, so he can't really be said to have a resurrection. That fact alone separates this story from the messianic original by a few parsecs. But the differences don't end there: few people even know of Klaatu's existence, since he's denied an audience before the U.N. The public knows aliens have landed, but they don't know why. Klaatu's mission on Earth is therefore a secret one. And it's a bleaker one, too: in this film, the aliens have already decided we're beyond saving, and they're here to exterminate the human race. Klaatu isn't here to deliver a final warning; there is no last chance. Klaatu isn't an advocate; he's just here to read the sentence of the condemned.*

The new Day the Earth Stood Still is fixated on moral depravity. The aliens have "waited long enough," we learn, and humankind has shown no sign of changing. The aliens are Calvinists, believing in the total depravity of humankind, our complete inability to improve ourselves. By the film's end Klaatu has begun to doubt this view, but by that point it's too late for him to extend a warning; the destruction of humankind has already begun. His role then becomes that of Abraham at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah: arguing for the deliverance of the condemned despite our sins. 

And it's here that the remake drops the ball. It doesn't really give the audience any reason for expecting that humankind will change. I suppose the filmmakers expect that our worthiness is just supposed to go without saying, but the fact is that, in dramatic terms at least, the aliens make a far better case for our destruction than the humans do for our salvation. This is the role that John Cleese, playing a scientist who received a Nobel Prize for his research in "biological altruism," is supposed to fill, but apparently his argument got left on the cutting room floor. (Despite his relatively high billing, he only speaks a handful of lines.) The film feels generally lackluster, and it's here, what should be the real message of the story, where that shows most clearly. Despite a half-hearted spoken claim that we can become better, the question hanging over the movie's abrupt ending is: what if we can't? 

I'm generally critical of the concept of total depravity, which has some ardent descendants in conservative Christianity today. It's a topic on which I'll say more in a few weeks (when I review James A. Herrick's Scientific Mythologies**). The original The Day the Earth Stood Still had a slightly pessimistic edge. Klaatu was an irascible messiah; he seemed irritated that we needed to be told not to kill each other. But in the end it affirmed a belief in moral progress, and in messiahs, be they divine or alien, as agents and advocates for that progress. The remake offers scant hints at that kind of progress, and it leaves the audience with a profound sense that, though humanity's sentence has been suspended, its case has not been dismissed.

For more on the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, see chapter 6 of The Gospel According to Science Fiction.

*I think aliens should come to Earth and threaten to reduce our world to a burned-out cinder if we don't stop giving Keanu Reeves lead roles in science fiction movies.

**Special sneak-preview capsule review: I don't like it!

"In ancient legends..."

"In the ancient legends, the god Darwin prophesied in a world in which tradesmen struggled in competition. The god Newton appeared in a world that had discovered machinery; the god Einstein in an age when. . ."

"Awa' wi' ye and yer gods. I don't think they were gods at all, but only Terrans that the One God gifted with wisdom."

"The One God?" The Fudir had always imagined the gods as beings much like men, but with powers beyond those even of the Hounds, and with an ability to act unseen greater than that of Greystroke. As Newton controlled the motion of stars and planets, Maxwell and his demons shaped and moved whole galaxies and the electric roads that entwined them. And the quarrel between them could not be resolved even by the god Einstein, who sought a rune that would join them. The idea that there might be only one god astonished him.

"Och, list' tae me loshing. I said there'd be nae religious arguments, and here I am starting one myself."

"I never argue about the gods," the Fudir said. "It leads nowhere, and can only irritate them."

                                                             --The January Dancer by Michael Flynn

The January Dancer is a very, very different book from Flynn's excellent Eifelheim (which I reviewed here). The gulf between them shows the breadth of SF as a genre: Eifelheim is a sort of alternate history tale about aliens in the Middle Ages (and 21st-century researchers' discovery thereof); The January Dancer is straight-up space opera, complete with space battles, ancient relics, and a star patrol. It's not my favorite kind of SF, but I did appreciate Flynn's playfulness with language, particularly in the early chapters, and the exchange above on the religion of the far future.

Asimov's and Analog, January 2009

As usual, there are some great stories in Asimov's this month. Most interesting for our purposes here is Robert R. Chase's "Five Thousand Light Years From Birdland," which explores some of the difficulties of interspecies communication.The narrator is on his way to the alien planet of the title to serve as an ambassador to its avian inhabitants, the Rahnee'ah. But first he needs to figure out how to communicate with Screet, his Rahnee'ah shipmate, who may determine that humankind isn't worth communicating with and eat him. There's a translator that can figure out the vocabulary, but rarely conveys a statement's real meaning. His best tool for learning the meaning beneath the language is Eutik Si Euban, an enormous history book that is the Rahnee'ah's equivalent of the Bible. It's the source of all of Screet's mysterious allusions, so figuring it out the alien's religion is essential to learning how to communicate with them without being eaten. The other standout story this month is Will McIntosh's "Bridesicle," which packs an emotional punch—it describes a future in which standard insurance covers your cryogenic freezing but not necessarily your revival.

Analog's January/February double issue is pretty strong, too, and there's little question that the best story this month is Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "The Recovery Man's Bargain." The title refers to Hadad Yu, a shady businessman who specializes in "recovering" lost merchandise, which puts him somewhere between a private eye and a thief. When a group of aliens hires him to recover a human being, he pushes his sense of ethics to the limit and beyond. Rusch's story is a powerful and engaging exploration of the pitfalls of moral compromise. By the story's end, Yu has undergone an ethical transformation:

For the first time in years, the universe was open to him. But he was no longer thinking of it as a place full of things. It was a place full of creatures—sentient beings with lives of their own, problems of their own, loves of their own. Creatures he had never gotten to know. 

Yu has taken an unpleasant path from Martin Buber's "Ich-Es" (I-It) to "Ich-Du" (I-You). He no longer views people as things. Buber's idea has seen expression elsewhere in SF: in particular, it's reflected in Philip K. Dick's discussion of the android mind and schizophrenia, which influenced his career-long exploration of the question, "What is human?" In Dick's terms, Rusch's antihero becomes truly human over the course of the story—but that progression requires doing some pretty inhumane things. 

Why John Scalzi is wrong about SF and religion

Well, that title oughta get me some hits. But it's not really what I'm going to say. Keep reading and you'll understand... 

In a recent post on AMC's SciFi Scanner blog, John Scalzi discusses religion in science fiction film.

...in our common culture, science and religion often take antagonistic roles towards each other -- just pair off a creationist and someone versed in evolutionary biology, let them go five rounds, and you'll get the typical view. But as with everything, the reality is not so clean cut. Polls regularly show that the majority of scientists practice a religion of some sort, while no less than the Roman Catholic Church accepts the idea of biological evolution. Since science and religion co-exist in the real world, how do they exist in the worlds of science fiction movies? The answer (or my answer, anyway) is that it's a mixed bag. Though benevolent spirituality occurs fairly frequently in the future, organized religions are oftentimes used as stock antagonists.

He goes on to list some examples of fluffy spirituality (Star Wars, The Day the Earth Stood Still) and (supposedly*) anti-religious screeds (The Handmaid's Tale, The Chronicles of Riddick) before concluding with some thoughts on the synthesis presented by Contact, which he describes as one of his favorite SF films:

In the movie, Jodie Foster's atheist astronomer and Matthew McConaghey's God-centered maverick preacher trade deep thoughts about the nature of the universe (as well as deep, moony gazes into each others' eyes). Neither converts the other -- I hope that's not a spoiler for you -- but what they do find is that while their views of the universe and God's place in it are not the same, they can still respect each other as seekers of truth.

It's not the deepest discussion, but I think he's more or less on-target: SF has a pretty broad range of attitudes toward religion. He opens with a caricature of conflict, but immediately debunks it. So what's my problem, then? The whole thing appears under a title that's all about conflict: "The Battle Between Science and Religion - And SciFi Is the Battleground." The title takes the idea of a creationist-biologist boxing match literally, and applies it to the genre as a whole—which isn't what Scalzi is saying at all. It's the same problem that the Atlantic Monthly had a few months ago: they ran a few articles that collectively argued that interfaith conflict can't sustain itself under the header "WHICH RELIGION WILL WIN?" (I wrote about it here.) The media, from the Atlantic to AMC, seems to really, really want conflict, so there's a tendency to apply distorting titles that support a narrative of conflict. This means reducing multifaceted situations—like the interaction of science and religion, for instance—into "debates" between the furthest extremes (like the caricature in Scalzi's opening). Here's a tip: if you want to hear something interesting about religion and science, the last thing you should do is book Richard Dawkins and Ray Comfort. The extremes get goofy real fast—and they get boring even faster. The middle ground is where the good stuff is. As Scalzi says regarding his love of Contact, "I can live with being called a squishy centrist on this one."

So, no, I don't think John Scalzi is wrong about religion and SF. However, I do think that his view of what is and is not religious is a bit too narrow. As I've complained elsewhere, far too many SF-and-religion discussions just look at the surface—Star Trek episodes with Greek gods in them, evil churches, and that loudest of clichés, the preacher-villain. They ignore the deeper religious themes that run through so much SF: ideas of good and evil, the core messianism of the epic hero, the concept of creation (both cosmic and local), and above all the providential desire to guide the world toward a better future that I see as SF's ultimate (and ultimately spiritual) aim. Those things are all religious (and each gets a chapter in my book The Gospel According to Science Fiction.**) More importantly, those religious ideas shine through even when the surface message of a book is anti-religious, or the author is an atheist. (Ask me about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sometime.) SF doesn't need to have gods or churches in it to be about religion. I mean, dang, Scalzi, the name of your column is "Notes From the Monolith"—don't you know that 2001 is one of the most profoundly spiritual films ever made? Religion can't just coexist with science in SF—it can, and should, thrive there.

Check out John Scalzi's original post, and a lively discussion with many contributions by regular SF Gospel reader-and-commenter D. B. Ellis, here.

*But that's another post entirely.
**This fulfils my self-serving plug quota for this post.

What did Scientology do to this guy?

My latest poston Religion Dispatches discusses last week's news story about an ex-Scientologist who was shot dead at the Church's Celebrity Centre in Hollywood when he showed up there with two samurai swords and started threatening visitors. 

As one would expect, Anonymous's message boards are gathering lots of information on the story. As one would also expect, they've given him a meme-ish name: "Epic Sword Guy." 

Read my full post at Religion Dispatches.

The theological forest and the dogmatic trees: Frank J. Tipler's The Physics of Christianity

You'd think that Frank J. Tipler would have a reputation as a bit of a crackpot. His 1994 book The Physics of Immortality describes his theory—in the scientific sense, mind you—that at the end of the universe all matter will collapse into a singularity wherein every being that ever lived will be raised from the dead to eternal life. The "Omega Point" theory, backed up with extensive calculations and formulae, inspired multiple works of SF, most notably Frederik Pohl's Eschaton Sequence and Robert J. Sawyer's Hybrids. Tipler also helped popularize the concept of the anthropic principle, the idea that our universe's physical laws are suspiciously well-suited to the development of carbon-based life—an idea that appears, among other places, in Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God and not one but two stories that appeared this year in Analog—Carl Frederick's "The Exoanthropic Principle" and Jerry Oltion's "The Anthropic Precipice." 

Borderline-wacky scientific ideas are among the best inspirations for SF, and Tipler's blend of religious concepts and scientific proofs certainly seems pretty close to wacky. There are plenty of non- and pseudo-scientists applying theoretical axes to theological grindstones, but Tipler is fairly unique in that he's legit. A professor of mathematics and physics at Tulane University, he has a solid background in quantum physics and general relativity. And though his opponents might consider his ideas non-scientific, he backs them up with calculations complex enough that few non-professionals are qualified to debunk the meat of his arguments. In the scientific community, Tipler's ideas have been occasionally lambasted (a review in Nature called The Physics of Immortality "a masterpiece of pseudoscience"), but he certainly hasn't been written off as a crackpot. In fact, Tipler's 2005 article on quantum gravity was selected as one of the "Highlights of 2005" by the journal Reports on Progress in Physics. Notably, Tipler cites this essay as the foundation of his most recent book, last year's The Physics of Christianity.

The Physics of Christianity is a more straightforward book than The Physics of Immortality; indeed, it devotes the first few chapters to a (still rather dense) crash course in basic theoretical physics for laypeople. It gets off to a promising start in the introduction, where Tipler lays out a theological hypothesis reminiscent of Olaf Stapledon's Star-Maker:

The latest observations of the cosmic background radiation show that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago at the Singularity. Stephen Hawking proved mathematically that the Singularity is not in time or in space, but outside both. In other words, the Singularity is transcendent to space and time. According to theologian Thomas Aquinas, "God created the Universe" means simply that all causal chains begin in God. God is the Uncaused Cause. In physics, all causal chains begin at the Singularity. The Singularity itself has no cause. For a thousand years and more, Christian theologians have asserted that there is one and only one "achieved" (actually existing) infinity, and that infinity is God. The Cosmological Singularity is an achieved infinity. 

The Cosmological Singularity is God.

There's an excitement running through the beginning of the introduction. It could have been the beginning of a scientifically-supported theological treatise, but that's sadly not the case. Instead of explaining philosophical theology, Tipler bogs himself down in discussions of individual miracles, several of which are of little theological importance. Discussing the Incarnation and Resurrection make sense, but why devote so many pages to the Star of Bethlehem? Tipler behaves as if there is an absolute consensus that the star a) was an undisputed historical fact, and b) must have been a supernova, rather than a comet—or a metaphor. If that weren't bad enough, the discussion of the Resurrection—the sine qua non miracle, the thing that Paul declares (1 Cor 15:14) essential to his (and all Christian) faith, the source of Hume's critique of Christianity on which so much of modern skepticism and atheism depend, the most important thing a book like this could discuss—gets warped into a bargain-basement defense of the Shroud of Turin. A discussion that should be broadly relevant turns into a defense of a very particular kind of Catholicism (or something), and one begins to wonder what Tipler means by "Christianity." If there's a single word to describe the book as a whole, it's sidetracked.

There are also some unexplained discrepancies between The Physics of Immortality and this book. For instance, the earlier book devotes several pages to explaining why Tipler disbelieves in the Resurrection and the Trinity. The Physics of Christianity offers theoretical explanations of both, but no explanation for what has led the author to change his mind. The differences can be frustrating to those familiar with Tipler's earlier work, and that frustration is exacerbated by the fact that he refers to The Physics of Immortalityfrequently. An appendix of things Tipler no longer agrees with—something akin to Augustine's Retractions—would be a big help.

Nevertheless, there are some intellectual gems scattered throughout The Physics of Christianity. Take chapter 5's rightful insistence that "Miracles do not violate physical law":

Indeed, why should God violate His own laws? He knows what He wants to accomplish in universal history and has therefore set the laws of physics accordingly. Thus, to claim... that a miracle violates physical law is in effect to deny either God's omniscience or His omnipotence... If we cannot trust God to keep inviolate His physical laws, then we cannot trust Him to keep His word that we will one day be resurrected to live with Him forever.

The writing of most prominent atheists, including Richard Dawkins, is really a critique of supernaturalism, and the fact that there are plenty of people who believe in a God that is not supernatural but fundamentally natural often gets forgotten. Since I'm one of those non-supernaturalists, it's great to see in Tipler's book some validation for my own ideas.

But that's really why I found the book so frustrating. Because I agree so much with Tipler's theology, his cosmological definition of God, the place of the Many Worlds interpretation in his model of the universe and of divinity, I wanted him to devote the whole book to matters theological. Discussing individual miracles seems like splitting hairs, and ultimately marginalizes the whole book. When Tipler talks about the Star of Bethlehem—the first miracle he discusses—he marginalizes the whole book. There's no religious consensus on its historicity, and whether or not it actually happened is of absolutely no theological import. By discussing it first and in such depth, Tipler gives his opponents ample evidence to dismiss the whole book as a hodgepodge of rationalizations for things that probably never happened. It's a shame, because the theology (and the scientific explanations thereof) that underlies the discussion is truly compelling. Most of those foundational ideas are more thoroughly explored in The Physics of Immortality, which is a far superior work. If The Physics of Christianity devoted its energies to meatier topics, it would be a far more worthy successor.

Read the first chapter of The Physics of Christianity here.