Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2011 07:34:58 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: "gt-pfrc at ml.gt.org" <gt-pfrc at ml.gt.org>,
 WSFA Official List <wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com>,
 WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Ken MacLeod: Science fiction opens up the universe
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Excerpt:
These debates make a poignant contrast with their like today. Theology's =

relationship to science has become damage limitation rather than
enthusiastic embrace. One factor in this change has been not geology or
Darwin =96 which the 19th century churches assimilated within months of
the Origin's publication =96 but the ever-widening influence of science
fiction.

This isn't because SF writers are atheist =96 most aren't =96 or because =
SF
is explicitly atheistic in its texts or subtexts. It's because SF
dramatises life in the universe that science has discovered: a universe
vast, ancient and indifferent. That discovered universe, and its
so-called laws of nature, precisely fit the slot in the human mind once
occupied by another infinite, omnipresent, and all-powerful reality:
God. And as Spinoza well understood, one infinite reality leaves no room =

for another.
--- end excerpt ---

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jul/14/science-ficti=
on-universe-god>

mark