Eye in the Sky
Yesterday I started listening to the audiobook of Philip K. Dick's 1957 novel "Eye in the Sky." It starts with a sci-fi cliche of a particle accelerator malfunction which sends a group of people into another dimension. But instead of meeting aliens or going back in time, they land in a world where religion is true. Prayer actually works, miracles actually happen, and sins have immediate and sometimes deadly consequences.
The implications of this are fascinating and incredibly amusing. Because these phenomena happen with regularity, the protagonists from our godless world begin to exploit this using scientific principles that were never developed in this alternate dimension. For example, they begin to create mechanisms of mass production using miracles to create matter out of thin air, such that an endless stream of water could be generated simply by pouring a glass into the miraculous replicator. Because science operates on regularities in events, and these religious phenomena are easily replicable, they end up reducing religion to science.
That's not the whole of it, as they continue into further dimensions that are different caricatures of our society, but I found this one part to be an incredibly amusing story. It illustrates exactly why religious, spiritual, and mystical claims are bullshit by definition. The story shows that if religious claims were actually true, then they would cease to be religious and simply become another aspect of the natural universe. This is like other fictional praying machines like the Electric Monk from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, or the computer from the short story by Isaac Asimov, "The Nine Billion Names of God," where a Tibetan monastery buys a computer to enumerate all nine billion names of God in order to bring about the end of creation.
For 1957, this is a particularly irreverent and clever piece of fiction and I'm enjoying it immensely.
The implications of this are fascinating and incredibly amusing. Because these phenomena happen with regularity, the protagonists from our godless world begin to exploit this using scientific principles that were never developed in this alternate dimension. For example, they begin to create mechanisms of mass production using miracles to create matter out of thin air, such that an endless stream of water could be generated simply by pouring a glass into the miraculous replicator. Because science operates on regularities in events, and these religious phenomena are easily replicable, they end up reducing religion to science.
That's not the whole of it, as they continue into further dimensions that are different caricatures of our society, but I found this one part to be an incredibly amusing story. It illustrates exactly why religious, spiritual, and mystical claims are bullshit by definition. The story shows that if religious claims were actually true, then they would cease to be religious and simply become another aspect of the natural universe. This is like other fictional praying machines like the Electric Monk from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, or the computer from the short story by Isaac Asimov, "The Nine Billion Names of God," where a Tibetan monastery buys a computer to enumerate all nine billion names of God in order to bring about the end of creation.
For 1957, this is a particularly irreverent and clever piece of fiction and I'm enjoying it immensely.