You might think a “philosophical zombie” is your friend that got caught up in the intellectual black hole of a certain type of philosopher (say, Immanuel Kant), never to emerge again as a normal person 😉 . But actually it’s a thought exercise philosophers use to talk about consciousness. “What if we could make a body that appears to be human and does all the things a human does, but does so because it is programmed to do so–and is not actually aware of what it’s doing?” Doesn’t that show that something is truly special about human consciousness?

I actually prefer another kind of thought exercise that I think makes the situation clearer. Let’s say that you locked somebody in a box who only reads English and fed that person questions in Chinese. A computer would be with the person that provides certain mathematical formulas based on Chinese character shapes that allows him or her to print out answers to the questions in Chinese, answers that seem correct to someone who can read Chinese outside the box. Is there a difference between getting the answers right based on the formula (without knowing what either the questions or answers mean) and understanding the questions and answering them based on understanding? If there’s a difference, and it seems obvious to me that there is, then it’s possible for a machine to produce right answers without consciousness–which means being conscious is a special state that is more than just our brains firing neurons in structured ways. It means actual understanding and actual perception of events, not just processing answers.

Note that many neuroscientists hold to the concept of “physicalism” which means that everything about consciousness (and everything else) is explicable by the laws of physics operating in brain function. This is related to the idea of “reductionism,” that everything about our consciousness “reduces down” to brain function that will eventually be understood by science. Which would mean that being conscious being special would amount to an illusion, nothing more than neurons firing on a large scale–whether that makes sense or not. Perhaps you would not be surprised to hear that scientists who think this way are often atheists.

But not all scientists take this approach, not even all atheists. And while philosophers tend to oppose scientists in supporting the idea that something is special about consciousness, not all do. And how consciousness is special has many different versions. Some philosophers and scientists (including Thomas Nagel) have even in essence supported Eastern religious notions in maintaining that every bit of matter in the universe “must” have consciousness to explain where consciousness came from.

This debate over consciousness is a real one between and among neuroscientists and philosophers. This is true even though debating the existence of God is not at the center of mainstream academic discourse anymore. It’s true even though the common scientific assumption is now that the universe generated itself out of nothing somehow (perhaps by trying over and over and over in a multiverse until one came out right)–and even though the origin of life from non-life is commonly accepted as explained (though it isn’t). In academia, the reality of being aware of the world is a different category. Even many scientists who are otherwise wholly dedicated to a material universe weigh in differently on what is called “the hard problem of consciousness.” The hard question being, why does consciousness exist in the first place?

Star Trek, one of my favorite science fiction fandoms, makes contradictory approaches as to what consciousness is. When discussing Data or the holographic doctor on Voyager, Star Trek tends to assume that consciousness is an emergent property, that a sufficiently complex system will simply generate self-awareness, just because it is complex enough. Which some philosophers and scientists agree is possible, but a great many think is nonsense.

Spock transfers his katra to Dr. McCoy. (Source: Memory Alpha)

Yet in the Star Trek movies Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock, Spock transfers his consciousness or katra/soul to Dr. McCoy before he dies, or at least makes a copy of his inner self and transfers it (which would perhaps make him a philosophical zombie when he was saying goodbye to Captain Kirk, though nobody I know ever talks about that 🙂 ), only to have it later united to a new body generated for him. This entire idea requires consciousness to be separate from the complex physical structure from which it is thought to have emerged, or else it would not be transferable. And if a consciousness is separate from physical structure, then consciousness would not exclusively be an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system.

Star Trek has even had characters wonder if the soul comes with a body taken apart and reassembled in a transporter beam. Usually this concern is played down, as if “of course” all there is to a human, including consciousness, is automatically in the body and so thus is automatically sent by the transporter. But what if, as happened several times in Star Trek, a transporter accident made two copies of you?

The two versions of Riker, William and Thomas. (Source: Memory Alpha).

Which of these copies would “you” be in terms of your point of view? Not really talking a soul here–if the two versions of you stood on the right and the left of each other, which direction would your experience of looking come from? If you suggest you’d see from both sides at once because the bodies are the same, that isn’t the experience of identical twins, is it?

Or let’s say you had a machine like a transporter, but it could copy human beings or other intelligent life. You step on the pad for it to scan you (which it does without dissembling you), then step down again. The machine cranks out a copy on the pad where you just were and you watch it exit the room. Doesn’t it seem intuitively obvious that your consciousness would stay with you and would not go out of the room with the copy that just left?

Transporting in a new copy. (Source: Forbes)

But what if the copy-machine-transporter actually had to kill you to in order to make copies? Then what would step off the pad, even if exactly like you in every way, in a brain with all the same complex structures as your own, would be something you are not aware of, right? Your conscious awareness in the place where you were would cease to exist. Even if your body (and other consciousnesses) were reproduced in ten new copies right after you were gone.

That means if a transporter takes you apart before assembling you again in another place, your consciousness would presumably end and would not go to the other location. Unless you really do have a soul/spirit that’s linked to your consciousness, which the transporter beam would somehow be able to send along with the body.

So even just talking about a human being’s self-aware point of view, without specifically talking about a soul or spirit, human consciousness has a strange property of providing a conscious point of view that does not transfer just because you can reproduce its structure. Which suggests consciousness is unique, that it’s more than just a product of brain function.

So if we imagine the universe to have generated itself as atheists do, where did consciousness come from? To say that it’s a property emergent from a physical structure that’s complex enough seems insufficient, because it fails to explain the results of a few simple thought experiments. To maintain that it “reduces down” to nothing but brain structure and therefore is not really special denies the actual reality of being self-aware. To on the other hand claim that all matter is already conscious is not only counter-intuitive concerning how inanimate objects act, it’s quasi-religious in a way I imagine most atheists would immediately reject.

Atheists are either left with adopting “mysterianism” which means believing the hard problem of consciousness is too hard for us human beings to solve, so we should stop worrying about it (which seems unscientific to me), or in effect arguing against consciousness being a special state. Which amounts to being in denial of human daily experience and a whole set of rational thinking.

If I propose a different kind of mysterianism, that there’s a mystery in the nature of God that’s too complex for us to solve, I do introduce an extra element into the discussion of origins, but that extra element reduces the amount of mysterious and inexplicable ideas to one. Instead of separate mysteries of the origin of physical matter and the laws of physics, the mystery of the highly improbable low-entropy state of the early universe, the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, the mystery of the origin of life, and the mystery of consciousness, monotheism proposes just one mystery–God.

Or in the analogy used throughout this series, is it really simpler to imagine a car without a motor climbing hill after hill on its own just because that kind of car has fewer parts? Or is it simpler to imagine an extra part, a motor, that provides a single explanation of how each hill was climbed?

The Creator is that single thing, like a motor in the analogy, that makes the universe make more sense with God than it would without God.

God is specifically shown to be the origin of consciousness in the Bible. Adam’s body was first formed out of the dust of the earth (i.e. physical elements) but then made animate with consciousness–or as the Bible relates, God breathed into Adam the “breath of life” and he became a living being (or in some translations, “living soul”). Genesis 2:7.

Or in Star Trek terms, God put a katra into Adam, who then became more than just a body. He became self-aware. Conscious.

This series of posts is winding to a close, with just one more planned part left. Please share your thoughts on the the topic of consciousness–or on Star Trek‘s use of katras or other similar notions in science fiction or on the use of transporters or anything else that comes to mind–in the comments below.

Sometimes evangelicals—like the culture around us—struggle to view women as fully human.

We see this in church cover-ups that protect powerful men and institutions at the expense of vulnerable women.¹

We see it in the discrimination and dismissal faced by women living out their callings.²

And we see it in the stories we celebrate, from our beloved classics that feature jaw-dropping sexism to contemporary novels and films that use women as window dressings: nice in appearance, but without much personality.

This week we feature Catherine Jones Payne and her novel Breakwater in Lorehaven Book Clubs. Stop by the flagship book club on Facebook to learn more about this story.

If we look at the early church, we’ll find that our stories weren’t always this way. Many early church sources tell us of the martyrs, both men and women, who sang the praises of God as they faced down death and declared Christ’s victory over the grave.

Take The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church, a volume compiled in medieval Ethiopia that reflected much-older oral histories. In its pages, we find hagiographies (or “holy stories”) of both men and women. Consider the account of Sara, a Christian woman whose husband denied the faith under fear of death and torture. But Sara would not bend the knee to anyone but God.

Determined that she would not lose her sons to a faithless father, she fled with them by ship to have them baptized by the Apostle Peter. On the way, the ship was overtaken by a storm so violent that she thought they would all drown. So she dug a knife into her skin deeply enough to draw blood and used her blood to anoint her sons with the sign of the cross. Then she picked each of them up and dipped them into the water over the side of the ship, baptizing them. At once, the sea calmed.³

In stories like this one told by the early and medieval Church, women were not portrayed as secondary figures propping up the men around them. Instead, they were shown as fully human in their own right, reflecting that the curse of Eden is being undone and our earthly divisions fading away, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.

This would have been news to John Milton. There are a lot of writers I could pick on, but Milton is notorious.

For those who haven’t read Paradise Lost, it’s a seventeenth-century epic poem that tells the story of the Fall—first of Satan and then of humanity. It’s beautifully written, but it takes a deeply misogynistic turn when it narrates the moment of the Fall. In Paradise Lost, Eve alone—Adam is off making a flower crown (I wish I was joking)—is tempted and eats the fruit. When Adam finds her later, he’s devastated and only makes the decision to eat the fruit out of some twisted sense of nobility—so she won’t fall alone.

Are you for real, Milton? All this is contrary to the biblical account! Let me draw your attention to Genesis 3: “She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it” (NIV, emphasis added). Enough said.

Milton’s legacy of sexism has carried down through the centuries.

Can we talk about C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra? Lewis imagines the possibility of a new creation of a human-like race on another planet in truly Miltonian fashion. The conflict of the book centers on the interactions of Lady Tinidril (the Eve figure), her tempter, and her protector. Here, like in Paradise Lost, the Adam and Eve are separated as the woman, Tinidril, is tempted. When faced with temptation, Tinidril cannot possibly think for herself but instead declares that she will rely on her husband to teach and advise her concerning the tempter’s claims.⁴

The tempter then suggests to Tinidril that her husband may not know more than she does. This statement, however, is clearly a mistake: it absolutely baffles Tinidril, who insists:

“That saying of yours is like a tree with no fruit. The King [her husband] is always older than I, and about all things.”⁵

Eventually, Tinidril overcomes temptation, not by analyzing the tempter’s words and finding them wanting, but because a man intervenes to protect her. She is passive, never active.

Fast-forward to today. Walk through the fiction section of any Christian bookstore, and you’ll see that most of the female protagonists live and move and have their being between the covers of romance novels.

Now, I’m not knocking romance. It’s a perfectly good genre that knows its audience, but it focuses exclusively on women’s relationships with men. That’s well and good, but it ought not be our only story—when women’s only stories are romances, we begin to think that having a husband and family is the only thing God made women for.

There are other stories about women, however. Despite its setting in Greek mythology, Wonder Woman is one of the most deeply Christian films I’ve seen in years. It’s a major-studio movie, and I don’t know if the director claims any sort of faith. But its themes of duty, strength, and love drove me to aspire to a more life-changing Christianity. Furthermore, it portrays femininity as complex: a fierce, protective compassion willing to fight to make the world better. We’re not used to seeing such deep, profound truths about who women can be, and it left me openly weeping in the theater.

I rejoice when I see that sort of womanhood in books written by Christian authors and especially coming out of Christian publishing houses. Because there really are wonderful books out there that center on women as active, engaged, fully human characters:

• The Story Peddler by Lindsay Franklin,
• Scarlet Moon by S. D. Grimm,
• A Time to Die by Nadine Brandes, and
• The Progeny by Tosca Lee.

All these spring readily to mind.

Another of Tosca’s books—Havah: The Story of Eve—is a flowing, refreshing, beautiful corrective to Milton and Lewis’s fractured tales of Adam and Eve.

When I was writing Breakwater, I made the conscious decision to center the book around a handful of strong women—Jade, the protagonist; Cleo, Jade’s mother; Pippa, their friend; Junia, Cleo’s sister; Yvonna, an antagonist—but I didn’t want to reduce feminine strength to hand-to-hand fighting, a la Marvel’s Black Widow. I love Natasha Romanoff, but I wanted to write women that I could recognize myself in: women whose conflicts are complicated; who engage moral tensions with their intellect, not just with weapons; who come to differing conclusions because of competing ethical frameworks.

Sometimes the women of Breakwater make bad decisions because of inexperience, or pragmatism, or a hero complex. But at the end of the day, they are navigating their waters as best as they can. They can be wrong without being wicked, or right without being perfect. They can be fierce but feminine; steely but nurturing; determined but still sometimes confused. In short, they’re allowed to embody all the contradictions that make up the human experience, just as male characters regularly do.

In the words of Wonder Woman, only love can change the world. But stories matter. Our stories matter. As people of faith write, read, and wrestle with fiction in which women are as fully human as men, I believe we can begin to see each other that way, as people made in the image of God. And to the degree that Christian men and women view each other as co-heirs of the kingdom of God, as one in Christ, can we more fully reflect and enact God’s agape love in the Church and to the world.

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The “wrong” I’m referring to in the title is related to the poll I posted a week ago as part of my post “Where Do You Find Your Speculative Fiction?”

While the poll is still live, the results after one week are . . . not what I would hope. First, the number of visitors who participated in the poll is a fraction of those who come to the site. So why didn’t all visitors take part? I can only suppose that they are not particularly interested in the topic.

But this site came into being as a means for readers to discover Christian fiction. Are we failing to connect readers in a meaningful way to the very genre we most want to promote?

Secondly, I was surprised that not more people identified movies and TV as their source of speculative fiction, although many of the “other” comments opted for an “all of these” kind of statement. Still, the results would say that most of those who took part in the poll are reading! I find that encouraging.

Nevertheless, the largest share of the reading pie is going to general market books rather than to Christian speculative fiction.

We did have some good discussion in the comments—special thanks to those who gave more insight through that avenue. Here are a couple things that came up:

1) By “speculative fiction” I’m referring to the umbrella name that’s given to the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. There are many permutations of each of those, too many to list. So the term “speculative fiction” is a type of catch-all that refers to any and all stories that include something of the imaginary based on the unseen world rather than only the imaginary dealing with the seen world.

2) Another comment addressed the quality of Christian speculative fiction. Since I wrote a recent post dealing with that subject, I won’t elaborate here, other than to say, bad fiction outnumbers good fiction, even on the general market side of publishing. Therefore, reading a few titles or authors is not the best way to make an evaluation of an entire genre. I suggest reading the books and titles that are getting wide acclaim. Those aren’t necessarily the books that are most popular!

3) This part of one of the comments piggy-backs on that point: “Unfortunately, as I have discovered, even if people do love the speculative Christian fiction genres, they hardly care to take the time to investigate and discover the authors that aren’t on the top of popularity. Because of this, several Indie and small traditionally published authors go unheard-of.”

People may not be aware of the changes in the publishing industry. Once Christian fiction was not well written, and even when the plots and characters improved, the story still came across as preachy. That’s changed to a large extent. In the same way, once self-publishing was called vanity publishing and authors were paying to get their books in print, often without adequate editing or well-designed covers. But that’s gone the way of the dinosaur, and not the Jurassic World kind. Small publishing companies and self-published books have come about, in part, as a revolt against those who say there is no market for Christian speculative fiction.

But the problem remains: how do those books find their readership?

That’s where reviews come in. And social media. And word of mouth. Those who read books they love need to take the few minutes it takes to write a brief review which they can post on Facebook or Twitter or Amazon (especially Amazon and/or B&N) or Instagram or Goodreads. There are also places where speculative readers hang out—like Spec Faith. Include your reviews here or at our sister site, Lorehaven, which happens to be dedicated to reviews of the best speculative titles written by Christians.

4) One last observation: many of the authors and titles that came up in the comments are . . . old. Or older. I think it’s fine to read Chesterton or MacDonald or O’Connor, but if Christian speculative fiction can have the impact on culture that I think it can, we need to be reading what’s coming out today. Who’s read Paul Regnier (science fiction) or Emily Golus (young adult fantasy) or Nadine Brandes (dystopian)? More importantly, who’s writing reviews and letting people know on social media sites what books they ought to be reading?

That, I think, is the only way Christian speculative fiction will be discovered.

In the last few weeks, a story has emerged about the toxic behavior of certain segments of the Star Wars fandom.

It was revealed that Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico in The Last Jedi, had removed herself from Instagram. According to reports circulating on the web, she left due to a flood of sexist and racist bullying from a small but vocal segment of Star Wars fans.

Other people pointed out that Daisy Ridley, who portrays Rey in the latest Star Wars movies, has removed herself from social media for similar reasons.

The backlash was almost immediate. Legions of fans who recognized the toxicity of this minority’s behavior denounced them and their attitudes. Folks rallied to hashtags and memes trumpeting their support for the beleaguered creators who had to endure the online bullying and abusive language.

Now I think this probably needs to be said upfront: I’ve been a Star Wars fan since I was a kid. An obsessive one, even. I consumed almost all of the novelizations up through The New Jedi Order series. I played numerous video games. I thrilled at the interconnectedness of the old EU. I dreamed of being able to write a novel set a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

And at the same time, I personally have enjoyed all of the new Star Wars movies since Disney purchased Lucasfilm. I loved the fan service in both Rogue One and especially in Solo. I think that The Last Jedi is a brilliant meditation on the concept of failure that subverted many of the tropes that had been established by the previous films of the franchise. And The Force Awakens is all right too.

That said, I understand that not everyone shares my opinion. I can see why folks who were invested in their theories about Rey’s parentage didn’t appreciate Kylo Ren’s revelation. After watching The Last Jedi the first time, I too was upset that we never learned Snoke’s backstory (although I’ve come to realize that was never all that important to the overall story to begin with). And the Canto Bight sequence didn’t totally fit for me either.

While I understand why people don’t like those movies, I’m not about to lecture them about why I think they’re wrong. I’ll explain my reasoning if people ask, but I won’t argue with them. If they don’t like it, that’s fine.

So there’s no way that I would ever condone the frankly toxic and sinful behavior of the minority of fanboys with over-inflated beliefs about how important they are to protecting the honor of a fictional world filled with space wizards. But at the same time, as I read the stories and saw the behavior unfold on-line, I realized that I recognized it. I’d seen it before. There’s a Biblical parallel that I think explains why people are behaving the way they are.

To do so, we need to dive into the days of the early church and a sticky question that plagued the leaders of the Way: what do we do with all these Gentiles?

The road to the council of Jerusalem

Nowadays, it’s easy to overlook the fact that in the earliest days of the Church, Christianity was essentially a Jewish thing. After all, Jesus was Jewish. So were all of His apostles. The earliest converts to the faith were all Jewish. The crowds at Pentecost were there for a Jewish holy festival. With very few exceptions, the overwhelming majority of the earliest Christians were Jews first and, as such, they viewed their relationship with God through the lens of their Jewish identity.

And that was fine! It was good and right for them to do so. The Christian faith was an outgrowth, continuation, and fulfillment of Judaism.

Theirs is the adoption to sonship; there is the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.

Romans 9:4-5

Amen indeed! But then, several years after the birth of the Church, things started to change. Non-Jews started to trickle into the Church. The first “official” non-Jewish convert was the Roman centurion Cornelius (whose conversion is so important that Luke essentially tells the story in Acts 10 and then again in Acts 11). But then, with the sending of Barnabas and Saul on a missionary journey through parts of Asia Minor, that trickle turned into a flood. Suddenly folks who weren’t Jewish, who didn’t have the common Jewish heritage of the original Christians wanted to identify themselves as belonging to the Messiah.

And this tripped up many of the “veteran Christians.” How could someone who wasn’t Jewish become Christian? They didn’t keep kosher, they didn’t observe the Sabbath, they weren’t even circumcised, for crying out loud! How could they truly say that they understood and appreciated this whole Jesus business as much as a Jewish Christian did?

Well, some of the Jewish Christians thought they had it figured out: “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses” (Acts 15:5). You Gentiles can certainly become Christian. But before you can do that, you have to become a good Jew first. These folks, who have become known as the Judaizers, often would follow Paul and teach the people he brought to the faith that they weren’t really Christian unless they first became circumcised. They claimed that Paul wasn’t a real apostle, that he was an also-ran who didn’t have the proper authority to teach people what Christianity was all about.

For Paul, this was too much. In his mind, there was no reason for people to be forced to obey the Mosaic Law. After all, none of the Jewish believers could keep it perfectly either. Why would they force others to attempt what they couldn’t accomplish? Was it circumcision that saved or Jesus’ death and resurrection? And don’t even get him started on the whole “fake apostle” business! If you want to see Paul’s passion for this subject, just read the book of Galatians. He gets so worked up about it all that, at one point, he wishes that the Judaizers would just finish the job and castrate themselves (Galatians 5:12)!

Eventually, this debate would grow so contentious that the Church’s leadership would gather in Jerusalem to discuss the matter, which we can read about in Acts 15. The Judaizers were given their chance to explain their side. Peter reminded everyone of what happened with Cornelius. And Paul and Barnabas were able to talk about what they had seen among the Gentiles as well. Eventually, James, the brother of Jesus Himself, weighed in against the Judaizers. The council decided that Gentiles wouldn’t have to become Jewish before they came to faith in Christ.

So why did my mind drift in this direction when it comes to the current crisis in Star Wars fandom? Well, because I’m a theology nerd, of course. But more than that! The story of the Judaizers is an example of what happens when folks appoint themselves gatekeepers for a community. It happened with some of the Jewish Christians in the earliest days of the Church. And it’s happening again with Star Wars.

Watchers at the gate

In some ways, it’s not surprising that we see such vehemence arise in Star Wars fandom. When George Lucas first crafted the stories set in that universe, he tapped into the power of the monomyth, relying on the work of Joseph Campbell. By doing so, he didn’t just create a story, he created a new mythology, something that could and has tapped into the part of the human psyche that responds to myths and legends. That’s a smart idea. It means that his stories, characters, and themes have resonated deeply with people for decades. That’s why the franchise has such strong staying power.

But there’s a flipside to that as well: that yearning for deeper meaning and mythology is right next door to the part of the human mind that responds to myth and religion with fanaticism. And oftentimes, that fanaticism expresses itself by turning people into gatekeepers. They believe that they have to protect their precious mythology and beliefs from those who don’t appreciate or understand it the way they do. These newcomers are so different from them and don’t fit their ideas of what a true believer looks like, sounds like, acts like, believes like. Threatened with outsiders and newcomers, the temptation is to circle the holy wagons and dictate who can and can’t come in.

I think this helps explain what we’re seeing in the Star Wars fandom. The precious orthodoxy of certain fanboys’ vision has been threatened by girls and minorities (never mind that there have been female and minority fans from the beginning), so they respond with gatekeeping behavior. The newbies don’t “do Star Wars” the right way? Then those heretics have to be stricken from the canon and treated as anathema.

Now all that said, I’m not saying that people have to be absolutely thrilled all the time with the new movies. If you don’t like the movies, that’s fine. If you didn’t like Rose Tico or you think Rey is an overpowered Mary Sue, that’s okay. It’s even fine if you’re still in mourning for the passing of certain stories, characters, and concepts into Legends status. I didn’t like that either. (Although let’s remember, Disney de-canonizing the old EU is not the same thing as Thanos snapping his fingers. I still have those Legends books on my shelf and can read them anytime.)

But if you’re tempted to resort to toxic behavior, then you’ve gone too far. There’s a huge gap between criticism and abuse. It’s one thing to say you didn’t like a fictional story. It’s quite another to decide that gives you license to spew so much hate and bile at another person that they have to retreat from any interaction with fans. And that’s especially true if you claim to be a Christ-follower. That kind of hatred and vitriol over a fictional story is just childish and antithetical to the faith.

So what’s the solution here? I honestly don’t know. More civility in our discussions and interactions, definitely. Calling out toxic behavior when we witness it, certainly. But beyond that? Who can say?

All I know for certain is I can’t wait to see what’s coming up in Star Wars. In many ways, I’m still a kid at heart when it comes to lightsabers, TIE Fighters, and all the rest. I’d just hope that my fanaticism will be tempered with respect and civility.

After all, that’s what the Jedi would want. And so would Jesus.

In the imagination of many, Darwin’s Origin of the Species points to lifeforms coming into existence without any need for a designer or planner. Yet Darwin’s ideas actually addressed the capacity of life to change and develop after it’s already in existence. Darwin’s concept of evolution in fact does not in any way address life coming from non-life. That’s a separate issue, one usually called abiogenesis. And abiogenesis research shows there’s a massive hill related to the idea that life came from non-life. Or in the way “natural” has been defined by this series, the origin of life is extraordinarily unnatural.

Though perhaps you wouldn’t think so if you read science news headlines. The title of an article from November 6, 2017 exclaims, “Scientists find potential ‘missing link’ in chemistry that led to life on Earth.” A read through the article reveals that prior to this moment, absolutely no progress had been made in explaining how the basic elements of a cell could interact together at the same time and same place: lipids, proteins, and nucleotides (RNA/DNA). Finally, it may be possible, though it requires verification, that a common chemical could allow an important chemical reaction in these three essential building blocks of any type of cell.

An even more breathless title from 2015 proclaims “Chemists claim to have solved riddle of how life began on Earth,” but if you read the article, what you find is that chemists have found some natural processes that given appropriate precursor chemicals and copious ultraviolet light, can assemble the basic building blocks of a cell: lipids, proteins, and nucleotides.

“Wait a minute,” someone might say. “Didn’t science already establish that life can arise from chemicals back in the 1950s?” No, actually, though the experiments of  Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did show that amino acids, a building block of the proteins required for life, can be assembled from a randomized process of running current and ultraviolet light through the right set of precursor chemicals. It wasn’t until 2015 that an experiment showed that precursor chemicals for all elements of life can be generated randomly.

“But that’s progress, right?” someone might say. “Science is closing in on the answers, making progress.”

I don’t want to begrudge the chemists their interesting results, but there’s a number of things about these headlines that displease me. First, why was abiogenesis already so commonly accepted as true when there wasn’t even any kind of known mechanism for the assembly of amino acids and lipids and nucleotides? When only building blocks for proteins had been produced by the experiment conducted in 1952?

By the way, this idea that life can emerge from non-life and really should do so has been tremendously influential not just in the search for extraterrestrials (SETI) and other sciences but also in science fiction. Science fiction stories teem with aliens thought to have emerged via abiogenesis and evolved on their own just as life on Earth is thought to have evolved, including the monster creature from the 2017 move, Life (a movie I reviewed on my personal blog). Of course even if abiogenesis isn’t valid, that doesn’t mean alien life can’t exist, because if God created life here, it’s possible to think he created life elsewhere. So we can imagine aliens exist without thinking of abiogenesis and evolution–but the main reason aliens are part of modern thinking about the cosmos is because abiogenesis is commonly assumed to be true in out culture. Even if that doesn’t make sense when you think about how living cells really work.

Maybe I should stop for a second here and say that all life, all of it, has a lipid (or fatty) outer wall in each cell, proteins that provide structure inside the cell, and DNA to provide a memory of how to build the proteins (and RNA to provide the connection between DNA and protein assembly and some other cellular tasks). Viruses have less than that, but a virus hijacks a living cell and forces it to make more of the virus–by itself, without a cell to host it, a virus is not alive.

All three things, lipids, proteins, and nucleotides (DNA/RNA) are required for life, as is the ability to process chemicals for food, commonly carbohydrates. If you can’t bring all three structural things together in the same place at the same time, then a cell is impossible. Kudos to the 2017 discovery of a chemical that reacts in a helpful way with all three cell elements–instead of destroying some elements while working with others, as all previous experiments with these kinds of chemicals revealed.

If science is ever to establish that abiogensis is “natural,” that is, chemicals just doing what chemicals do, the 2015 and 2017 results are important first steps to even beginning to think life could spontaneously leap forth from non-life.

But there’s still some problems that show the spontaneous origin of life if far from likely. Not minor gaps that need to be worked out, but massive, cavernous holes.

One such issue is that amino acids come in two varieties when produced by natural chemical reactions, 50 percent with a version with a chemical group on the left and 50 percent another version with the group on the right. Left and right cannot be mixed in making a protein–all has to be right or all left. It turns out all life uses exclusively left-handed proteins.

Nucleotides also show handedness (a.k.a. chirality). Random processes of generating them produce equal amounts of left and right versions. Yet all life only uses one version, in this case, right-handed nucleotides. Simple probability shows that generating all twenty amino acids used in proteins and all the nucleotides required to code for proteins in the right sequence in the right place quickly becomes astronomically improbable.

For example, a bacterial cell averages around three hundred amino acids per protein. So even if we imagine a process that assembles proteins randomly (no known process for this exists–building blocks of proteins, amino acids, assemble randomly but don’t attach themselves to one another to build whole proteins randomly that I have ever read), if they are being assembled out of 50/50 left/right amino acids, the odds of getting a single protein to self-assemble with only left-handed amino acids are .5 multiplied by itself 300 times. Or  about 1 chance in 4909000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. (4.909 10^91). And how many individual proteins does a single simple cell have? About 2 million. Even if we imagine the first cell only had a tenth or a hundredth as many proteins, the complexity of single cell is astoundingly high. And extremely improbable (to put it mildly) as a random event.

RNA is commonly thought to have originated first and then doubled itself to make DNA over time. Yet RNA without the protection of a cell wall or protein is fragile and easy to destroy. So it’s not only true that the problem of assembling an RNA strand is hard because of handedness (like assembling proteins), it isn’t as if they could just keep trying and accumulating themselves until one gets lucky–since chemical processes would also destroy RNA strands as they are forming. The whole thing has to come together as a system at the same time in order to self-propagate.

Scientists in this field are of course looking for ways that chemistry could have come together and made the astronomically improbable more likely. There are numerous hopeful ideas that the first life could have started out a lot simpler than any known life and gradually have become more complex. These ideas don’t really work now, but perhaps they will someday (is the thought of researchers in this field)–and that’s what the 2015 and 2017 results represent, scientists trying to work out chemistry to show how such ideas could possibly function. And they are making a few small steps forward (not that they have already solved everything, as the headlines of science reporting implied). Which is exactly what scientists should be doing, looking for proof that the hypothesis of spontaneous abiogenesis actually was likely. Or if they fail to find such evidence, they ought to admit they are left with a highly, highly improbable chain of events.

So far, they are nowhere close to showing life coming from non-life is anything other than astronomically unlikely. Which the public should know, but somehow mostly does not.

When confronted with such massive improbabilities, one answer given is the same as the one evoked for cosmology. The multiverse + the anthropic principle (check out the third paragraph under “RNA world” in the linked article to see the multiverse used to explain abiogenesis). Given essentially infinite dice rolls, this all could have worked itself out–life could have come from non-life, given enough chances. That’s the thinking.

In the analogy of this series of blog posts, the origin of life from non-life, abiogenesis, represents a massive hill of improbability. We can imagine the “car” of the universe threw itself over the hill somehow without a motor to move it. But it’s much simpler to think of the universe having a designer (that the car has a motor pushing it) who planned the elements of life and put them together. Instead of imagining a universe that wins the cosmic lottery over and over and over and over, just to avoid talking about God.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Please share them below.

When I first heard of Triplanetary, recommended as one science fiction’s great space operas, I caught the copyright year 1997. When I actually got the book in my hands, I realized 1997 was the copyright renewal, 1948 was the original copyright, and much of the book had run as a serial in 1934. Triplanetary is, in a word, old. Old books are often the best to analyze; they come unhindered by current debates, unfiltered by current assumptions.

Triplanetary, an epic clash of four intelligent species framed as an even more epic struggle for galactic destiny, presents an excellent case-study of how a creator’s stories reveal his beliefs. In the first place, it has actual ideas; in the second, it is not a book with a message, so what comments it makes on philosophy or religion are subtle and, perhaps, unconscious. The novel opens with the chance meeting of two alien races hundreds of millions of years ago. The races, super-intelligent and practically immortal, are about equal in ability but polar opposites in nature. Multiple galaxies are not big enough for the both of them, and the benevolent aliens, thinking long-term, hatch a plan: They will find some promising planet and, over the course of thousands of generations, “develop” a new race to outstrip their rivals and finally take the place of Guardians of Civilization.

Not that I imagine it’s a spoiler, but that race is us.

With this idea, the author tips his hand regarding his essential worldview. A Christian author could easily write a secular book, but even there – even in a sci-fi novel nobody believes anyway – he’s unlikely to portray humanity as the product of aliens monkeying with the evolutionary process. The aliens’ “program of genetics” – managing blood lines and human mating, through means that are never described – hints at eugenics; it’s ambiguous, however, whether the aliens’ genetic program advanced the evolution of humanity or created a master race within it.

The most important idea in the novel is Civilization (capitalization from the original). It’s curious that Civilization is never defined; perhaps the author assumed that people would know what he meant by it, and perhaps, back in 1948, he was right. Probably what he meant was Progress in every way the word can be understood. Triplanetary presents a long history of malignant aliens engineering the destruction of civilizations, from Atlantis to Rome to the United States, and an equally long history of benevolent aliens raising up newer, better civilizations in their place. One sees, in the long panorama, a climb out of chaos and violence, a march toward science and technology. You might even call it the long arc of history, bending toward justice. This unexamined optimism, with its touching idealism and materialistic faith, is old and widespread.

The ethic of Triplanetary is not our modern ethic. It’s too archaic in its reverence for womanhood, its definition of manhood by courage, resolve, and physical heroism; its casual assertion of moral principles above love is bracing. At the same time, it is not a Christian ethic. The sense, felt sometimes in the pages of the book, that Civilization matters more than the millions lost along the way is cold and foreign. The ethic of Triplanetary is, moreover, divorced from God – amicably divorced, to be sure, but divorced all the same.

Triplanetary is revealing of its time and its author. Beliefs about God, the universe, and right and wrong have a way of becoming apparent, even when left unspoken. We all show our hands in the end. It’s only a matter of how.

If you worship truth, you’re a heathen.

In the West, many times, self-proclaimed Christians unknowingly worship verifiable fact.

But reliance on verifiable fact is entirely opposed to faith in God, whose appearance as a human is a ludicrous impossibility but for the simple exercising of faith.

Hebrews 11:6 (ESV) says:

And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

What is faith? Faith is the exercising of the imagination on God’s promises. Without the human imagination, faith is impossible, worship is impossible, and pleasing God is impossible.

This week we feature Brennan S. McPherson and his novel Flood in Lorehaven Book Clubs. Stop by the flagship book club on Facebook to learn more about this story.

Jesus said that if we’re nice only to those who are nice to us, our niceness is meaningless (Luke 6:32-36). In the same way, when we believe only in what may be proven, our belief is nothing.

Children believe implicitly. They do not find faith a hard concept to grasp. Only after being indoctrinated with scientific thought does faith become difficult.

We take that to mean children are naïve and easily fooled. But here we must caution ourselves. Because across the board, four year old’s have an easier time following Christ than thirty-year-old science majors.

Can’t you see? Isn’t it obvious?

I’m not saying we need to reject truth or verifiable fact. Accepting those is necessary and easy.

The difficult part is moving past truth and verifiable fact to actual faith in an intangible, infinite God who knows things we can never wrap our minds around, and uses them to order a universe that mostly lies beyond the cold grip of science.

If you don’t prioritize faith over knowledge, the first calamity will pummel your faith.

When pressures rise, and pain increases, reliance on intellect will be the sand you built your house on.

This is why I write fantasy. To remind myself that the mysteries of God are greater than the little I actually understand of him, and that I must have faith in God to follow and honor him.

This is why my writing fantasy is an elaborate prayer and a form of worship. Because it is a tool I use to set my heart on the mysteries of Christ.

Western adults are so terrified that fantasy will confuse children. But anyone who’s ever played make-believe with a four year old child knows that this is a silly fear.

Children know that make-believe is not real, and that is precisely why they enjoy it. Like irony, to know that something is not true and yet to act as though it is provides the purest of joys.

Until we grow older, and everyone tells us that make-believe is unhelpful and dangerous. That the imaginary worlds we loved when we were children are not only distasteful, but a waste of time.

At first, we don’t listen. But demands pile on top of demands, and we trade a sense of wonder for practical engagement with everyday life.

It’s not all bad.

We need to be diligent and faithful in our daily duties. But sometimes the dust of this world weighs heavy, and we forget that through everything, God has strung his beauty like a master weaver at the loom.

This, I think, is the primary strength in Christian fantasy: that it can so powerfully re-awaken our love for, and fascination with, God’s beauty.

If you ever wonder why certain church groups seem stale, rude, or resentful, search for a fascination with the wonders and beauty of God’s person. You won’t find it. Search for a vibrant, daily personal practice of prayer and worship. You won’t find it.

You can find theologians among the spiritually dead.

It’s not about knowledge, it’s about faith.

Without the human imagination, heart-level worship doesn’t exist.

That’s also how Christian fantasy can broaden our capacity for worship, because it broadens our imaginations.

That’s why I read it. That’s why I write it. That’s why I love it.

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“Flood comes at you like a storm. There’s a simplicity to its tumult, a feral edge to its beauty.”
— Lorehaven Magazine

Explore Brennan S. McPherson’s novel Flood in the Lorehaven Library.

Read our full review exclusively from the spring 2018 issue of Lorehaven Magazine!

Last week when I invited commenters to list Christian books in the speculative genre that they would add to the number I had mentioned, we received a grand total of . . . one. One. So I started wondering, are we still reading? Are we reading Christian fiction? Are we reading general fiction? Are we reading independently published books or those published by small presses?

If the latter, all the more important that we tell each other about the good books we’ve found. Traditional publishing has a number of ways of getting the word out about the books they put out. Small presses and individual authors have less resources and fewer options.

And the truth is, with the number of books available now, there really is no way to read them all. I’m a member of a Facebook group for speculative authors (actually more than one, but in this case, I’m thinking of one in particular), and I’ll be frank: though I know many of those authors, there really is no way I can read all their books. I’ve bought some, but the number I can actually read is not large. Still, I would expect some of those names to appear on a list of good books you’d recommend to others.

That wasn’t the case.

I understand some people simply prefer books put out by the general market. I’ve bought some of those, too. I mean, I totally get why people love Brandon Sanderson. His writing is fresh, intriguing, innovative.

I also understand that there are a lot of speculative story options on TV or movies, including Netflix. From horror to fantasy to science fiction, and all of the permutations of those genres, it seems like some venue is showing the stories that land in the speculative fiction lover’s wheelhouse.

But I have to come back to the Christian part of the equation. Some 15 years ago, I insisted that there was a market for Christian speculative fiction, if we would only produce it. Now I’m starting to wonder. Was I wrong? Did we Christian speculative fiction writers miss the window of opportunity? Or are people actually reading but not writing reviews, not telling others about the best books? Or have our writing skills not caught up to our storytelling skills, so that “best books” are elusive?

I wish I had some definitive answers here. But I’m honestly at a loss to know why, when prompted to share with others the books we love, we don’t have Christian speculative fiction titles to pass along. So I guess, this post is really my effort to understand the state of speculative Christian fiction as it stands today. Any thoughts you care to share would be greatly appreciated.

Plus, if you could help me out by participating in this poll, I’d really appreciate it.

Let’s be honest about something: we all have questionable tastes. Whether it’s music, movies, food, or fashion, something that we enjoy would make most people turn up their noses. I’ll use myself as an example. I absolutely love Michael Bay movies. I also have a soft spot for rapcore and nu metal. My fashion sense, if it could be called that, is stuck squarely in the 1990s. And I’m old enough now that I don’t care at all.

Let me be honest about something else: as a creative person, I am connected with many other creative types on social media. Yet hardly a day goes by when I don’t come across something that makes me think, “Ugh! How can you like that?” This thought often enters my mind when I see something related to the extreme side of the horror genre, such as torture porn, splatterpunk, cannibal horror, etc.

I’m not dissing the horror genre as a whole. I’ve enjoyed plenty of creepy and ghoulish tales, and I know that everyone has different tolerances and sensitivities. But when I see some of the descriptions and covers of these insanely brutal stories and films, they can look positively nauseous. I haven’t read any books that would be considered “splatter” but I would say that American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis contains several passages that dive headlong into the gruesome pool (and make the movie look tame by comparison).

Now you might be saying, “Well Mark, look at the books you’ve written.” Yes, my books often contain quite a bit of graphic content. My first trilogy, set in a world where Satanism has replaced Christianity, contains numerous scenes of theatrical and eye-popping violence. I will contend that my medieval plague epic, Nikolai the Penitent, is one of the most graphic Christian fiction books in recent decades. My imagination has always been excited by fictionalized violence, which is also why I am drawn to action movies and heavy metal music. So even though I am shocked by how some people can be entertained by the horrors of torture porn and splatter stories, I can empathize at least on some level.

But something’s been changing within me recently. I’ve become more diligent in my walk with the Lord, spending more time in His word and prayer and trying to be more intentional about witnessing. And as I am trying to align my heart and my mind with God’s, I find myself less drawn to these forms of entertainment. I still enjoy a cheesy action movie and I still headbang to a solid metal riff, but I feel disturbed if the violence is sadistic or the lyrics are aggressive. I’ve never been an angry person so horror movies and metal music were never a means of escape or mental catharsis for me, but the power and aggression were captivating.

Not so much these days. This is also reflected in my own writing. Many of you know that I’m taking some time off from writing as “Mark Carver” in order to write contemporary Christian Western books under a pen name. It was only meant to be just a short break to let my imagination recharge, but when I look back at some of my old books, I don’t know if I can write like that again. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not ashamed of anything that I’ve written. Yes, I have some shocking material, but it is all firmly under the banner of Christian fiction, even if some people don’t see how that’s possible. However, I won’t deny that a part of me took perverse delight in writing those horrific scenes, just like many people get a kick out of a particularly “cool” kill in a movie, or how others enjoy watching helpless victims get fictitiously but realistically tortured on screen or in a book.

So does this mean I’m getting soft? Legalistic? Boring? No. As I said, I’m proud of my books, even if they are a little messed up. I’ve just noticed a direct correlation between my walk with God and my entertainment and creative inclinations, and this is why I can look at people who revel in stomach-churning horror and see that what they need is prayer. This is also why books that are both Christian and horrifying are still necessary because they can be a way to reach out to unbelievers who otherwise wouldn’t pick up a Christian book. But if you are a believer, I would encourage you to pray about what entertainment you enjoy. Listen to your conscience, because that is the voice of the Holy Spirit within you.

Personally, I’ve started enjoying bluegrass and Southern gospel along with my heavy metal. Want to fight about it?