Bladerunner

In 1982, when Bladerunner was released, 2019 could only have been a blink of an eye in people’s thoughts. Even the year 2001, the year in which the movie 2001: A Space Odessey (1968) takes place, must have seemed far off. Of course, the actual year was not so futuristic as to have a computer take over a space station; controversy over AI eclipsing the grasp of human control would not hit the societal mainstream for twenty years.  So, Ridley Scott can hardly be blamed for positing flying cars, and, even more astonishing, imposing the notion of a replicant, a being of genetic biomechanics that fuses computer and human characteristics, on 2019. Even acknowledging the tremendous impacts on society of inventions since the dawn of the twentieth century, the pace of technological change is slower than we imagine. In 2019, on the cusp of a global pandemic, flying (and self-driving) cars were just in the prototype/testing phase, and AI existed rudimentarily, and certainly not corporeally in human form. Scott missed the mark, probably by decades, though he got the trajectory right. Indeed, the film’s central issue—that of the threat of run-away, or “rebellious,” AI to humans—was reflected in the press especially during the first half of 2023. I contend, however, that the philosophical merit of the film lies not in political theory, but, rather, in what it means to be human. The nature of human understanding, self-awareness, an ethical sense, and matters of theological reflection are all brought to the forefront in the question of whether the replicants can and should be taken as human beings. In other words, it is the fusion of AI, or computers more generally, and biology that lies at the core of the film.

In the film, Deckard is hired to kill replicants who have rebelled by traveling to Earth. His character arc can be grasped in terms of a gradual recognition that they essentially human, or at least enough like us that they can and should be regarded as subjects rather than objects. The film furnishes us with several criteria in which the replicants can be counted as human.

Self-awareness is the foremost criterion: taking oneself to be an entity that has subjectivity. At one point in the film, Pris, a female replicant, says, “I think, therefore I am.” Cogito ergo sum. The screenwriter doubtlessly had Descartes in mind. I am aware that I am thinking, therefore I exist. Even if an evil deceiver has us believing incorrectly that the world of appearances exists, we know that our thinking does not depend on any external world. In the film, the replicants can indeed think; they have been programmed to do so by Tyrell, who is a genius. In fact, the leader of the rebel replicants on Earth, Batty, refers to Tyrell as the replicant’s creator (god) even though it could be argued that the genetic bioengineers who grow the biological organs of the replicants also warrant such divine status. In actuality, there is nothing divine about programming AI or growing biological organs presumably out of stem-cells. It is not as if Tyrell and his engineers create everything, whether ex nihilo or not (one of the Creation accounts in Genesis is not ex nihilo). In other words, the give rise to existence itself is qualitatively different than creating something in particular in the realm of already-existence.

So the replicants have the human attribute of being self-conscious of themselves as entities that can think. This is not to say that they are minds in vats filled with chemicals. Pris insists that she is also physical, by which she means biological or corporeal in nature. She has a body; a replicant has biomass and even human genes. One of the biometric engineers tells a replicant, “You have my genes in you.” Can we say then that Descartes’ mind/body duality pertains to replicants? The replicant’s mind is programmed whereas the bodies are grown organically. The film does not provide us with a definite account of how the replicant brain is “hard-wired”—whether it is a computer physically emmeshed in a biological body or that computer code has somehow been written into the organic neuro-networks. The latter alternative lies beyond our comprehension, at least as of 2023. Indeed, it may even seem paradoxical. In a Gospel narrative, the risen Jesus walks through a door yet he is hungry and eats a fish. It is clear that his corporeal body has been transformed yet is still corporeal. In Pris insisting to the bioengineer who grows eyes using his own genes for replicants that she is physical rather than merely a thinking thing, the implication is that the replicants are entirely biological (i.e., every organ is organic rather than machine). Yet in her death throws after being shot (not tased!), Pris’s body shakes violently as if it were being electrocuted. The implication here is that her brain was hit and is electronic circuits rather than made of flesh. If so, it is remarkable, again from the standpoint of the actual world in 2023, that a hard-wire computer can have self-awareness, and thus be taken as a subject (i.e., having subjectivity).

Furthermore, the replicants have emotions, which are in the subjectivity; that is, the replicants know that they themselves feel. The replicants, especially Batty being of the sixth generation, are intelligent. So too is Tyrell, who had programmed Batty; both are superb at the game of chess. The replicants know that they (i.e., their respective subjectivities) will one day come to an end. In being mortal, they are like us. Similarly, they fear death. Two replicants, one of whom is Batty, make it clear that they fear dying. Batty even tells Deckard, the bladerunner, that it is precisely that fear that makes someone a slave—a slave to one’s fear. So it is clear that AI extends in the story-world of the film beyond intelligence to include emotions. Additionally, Batty clearly mourns Pris, and even exacts vengeance on Deckard for having killed Pris and another replicant in Batty’s rebel group.

Even more astonishingly, the AI manifesting in Batty includes a moral sense. When Tyrell tells Batty, “You’re the prodigal son,” Batty retorts, “I’ve done questionable things.” Ironically, it is the human Tyrell who seems to be missing the moral sense, for he replies, “Also extraordinary things!” It is indeed extraordinary that a replicant would then bring in theology in saying quite sadly, “Nothing that the god of biomechanics would let you into heaven for.” Batty even conceptualizes heaven. At one point while fighting Deckard, Batty says, “Go to hell; go to heaven.” Batty’s sarcastic quip, “Aren’t you the good man” to Deckard for not fighting fair, can be assumed to have theological and not merely moral overtones. Batty even calls him a bastard spirit. Finally, clearly aware that he is soon going to die, Batty saves Deckard rather than kills him. Kindness to one’s enemy has explicit religious overtones in Christianity even if most Christians prefer to focus instead on a metaphysical belief-claim that is only indirectly linked to helping one’s enemies. Indeed, the history of Christianity presents examples of Christians having “true belief” yet belying the claim by persecuting rather than helping people they didn’t like. Here in Bladerunner, it is a replicant that ironically provides us with an illustrative example of Christian charity. Deckard can only look up perplexed at Batty’s change of heart. When Batty dies, he releases a white dove, which flies away, evocative perhaps of Batty’s soul leaving his body. At the very least, Batty has in his mind the idea of God. In his proof that God exists, Descartes posits that existence because the idea, itself having full perfection, could not come from a being of less perfection. So God must exist for there to be the idea of God in a human mind. Yet a finite mind can also have the idea of infinity without there even needing to be infinity.

At the very least, it is clear that Batty thinks a lot about morality and even religion. In contrast, Deckard does not. Even though Batty has done “questionable things,” it is telling that he is quite aware of this. Historically, Shaftsbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith all posited a moral sentiment in human nature; we are fundamentally sociable creatures who gain pleasure from shared experience that “fellow feeling,” or sympathy, and imagination can provide. When Batty saves Deckard from falling, the two share an intimate moment emotionally as Batty shares the marvels of what he has seen.  He is saying, in effect, that he had not been merely an instrument, or object, that humans sent out to protect the colonies in space; rather, his existence has chiefly been that of a subjectivity, and is thus worthy of being taken as an end in itself, rather than merely as a means to a human’s plans. Kant’s ethical claim that beings partaking in rational nature—being able to use reasoning—should be valued in themselves is taken up and embraced implicitly by the most advanced replicant. As he was being used as an instrument—an object—to protect the intergalactic colonies, Batty was marveling at the sights. He was not merely a machine. Perhaps by observing the humanity of the dying replicant, Deckard then comes to the realization that he loves Rachael, one of the female replicants, and that she can love and trust him. The two recognize each other as subjects—each as having a subjectivity rather than being taken as an object.

In short, the film essentially asks what it means to be human. Self-awareness, reasoning, emotions, a moral sense, and even contemplation of ideas transcending the limits of human conception and perception are qualities that pertain to at least the most advanced generation of replicants. It is ironic that it is a replicant, Batty, who brings up and critiques Deckard from moral and religious standpoints. Clearly, a replicant’s understanding goes beyond the machine-type of “manipulation of symbols according to rules.” Moreover, the cognition and understanding mesh with emotions and self-awareness, as well as the awareness of other subjects. Indeed, the aforementioned qualities of the replicants are sufficient to support the claim that they can love and be loved in return—the Bohemian ideal expressed in Moulin Rouge. 

In Bladerunner, both Deckard and Batty come around to being more human, and thus more humane. Both can be taken as subjects rather than objects; both have subjectivities. Perhaps it can even be said that Deckard’s humanity depends on that of the replicants, or at least to the recognition that they are sufficiently human to be taken as such rather than as walking computers. Certainly, it is the humaneness of Batty that Deckard literally comes to depend on to live another day. It certainly would not make sense to say that Deckard owes anything to the replicant were it merely a machine that manipulates symbols according to rules even assuming the existence of machine learning. Yet that Batty has a subjectivity and thus experience that goes beyond his essence—an existentialist assumption—means that Deckard can feel that he owes Batty a debt of gratitude. Certainly Deckard feels an ethical obligation toward Rachael because she not only loves him, but trusts him as well. She is thus capable of being hurt emotionally, should he betray her by reverting back to viewing the replicants as objects. Finally we have in Bladerunner what it means to be human, ironically in its fullest sense.  

L'Argent

The film L’Argent (1983) is about how far people will go to get money (l’argent en francais). One major problem with greed is that people who are enthralled by it will go to virtually any length to get money. Even a religion can unconsciously warped to separate greed from earning and having wealth. Historically, Christian thought on greed and wealth has shifted from anti- to pro-wealth. Whether enabled by their religion or not, greedy people will think nothing of other people being hurt in the process. Hence, greed can be reckoned as selfishness incarnate. To claim that money is God not only puts a lower good above a higher one, but also manifests self-idolatry.

“Well, I’m not waiting around for universal happiness which, believe me, will be boring as hell. I want to be happy now, in my own way. O money, God incarnate, what wouldn’t we do for you?” says Yvon’s prison-roommate. “Given how corrupt the world is,” he continues, “and the impossibility of it changing, they who tell us to obey promise a future happiness.” Is money truly God incarnate? Does it even make sense that that which transcends the limits of human cognition, sensibility, and perception, as St. Denis maintained back in the sixth century, can be incarnate as material things? Is this not an oxymoron? “What wouldn’t we do for you?” follows from money being God incarnate, for no limits exist consistent with following that which is God; everything else is of a lesser priority as only God is sacred. Lastly, would universal happiness really be boring? Compared to a world in which people are rude and aggressive, I would take the inherently satisfying luster of happiness. Perhaps the prisoner likes a world of disagreements and even fighting. In other words, we must consider the source—a prisoner.

How does Yvon come to find himself in prison? He has violently killed a family in order to rob them. A perfect example of the wanton disregard for other people’s welfare in following money as God incarnate.  To the family’s hard-working woman, who is willing to be task-oriented but not inordinate in the pursue of money as criminals are wont to be, Yvon asks, “Why not just throw yourself in the river? Do you expect a miracle?” She replies flatly, “I expect nothing.” Money is not her God incarnate.

The filmmaking reflects the woman’s task-orientation. Conversations are monotone, direct, and purpose-economized without any small talk.  Hence, a lot of silence exists, which gives that film-world a harsh quality. When people interact, they do so like robots. Movements are precise, limited to purposes. The sound also is precise in emphasizing tasks, such as that of closing a door fully. Human beings are purpose-driven, intentional, beings.

After killing all of the family except the woman, Yvon asks her for money. There is none, so he kills her. What wouldn’t he do for money? In a twisted sense, he turns himself in as if redemption were in the confessing. In that story-world, the good lies in confessing rather than not viewing money as God incarnate in the first place. In spite of his confession, he is still legally, moral, and religiously on the hook for having gone too far in killing for money. Confessing is the least that he could do, once having committed such a violent crime. The latent self-idolatry in the selfishness that lies at the root of greed is protected by denial concerning the self-as-god assumption. Similarly, the God-incarnate status of money—that is, God as sourced in our human realm rather than transcendent—blinds Yvon from the fact that he goes too far in the pursuit of money, for it is merely a measure of economic value in our realm.

See God's Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of  Christian Thought on Profit-seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon. 

The Seminarian

A closeted gay student at an evangelical seminary is a contrast with a rather obvious clashing point, with the predicted ending being that the student is kicked out and must find or come into his own identity free of exterior constraints. Yet The Seminarian (2010) smartly avoids that road well-traveled. Instead, the screenwriter risks giving theology a prominent, and perhaps even central place in the film. The venture is at odds with the bottom-feeder mentality of Hollywood represented in the film, De-Lovely (2004), in which Cole Porter’s bisexuality occupies center-stage. Comparing these two films, irony drips off the screen as De-Lovely, which is patterned after a theatrical musical, looks down on Hollywood and yet has a common theme, while The Seminarian is a film through and through and yet takes the high road by supposing that the viewers can and will stay through some substantive theology, which transcends social issues and even the dramatic.

Theologically, The Seminarian, through its protagonist Ryan, wrestles with the relation of God as love and the love that is in human relationships. Specifically, if God made us capable of feeling love for another person so to demonstrate that God is love, then why do we suffer in relationships in which there is love? Ryan, who is suffering because he is falling for a guy he met online but keeps postponing a second date, runs the risk of using theological analysis to work out a personal problem. He supposes that we suffer in matters of love here below because God suffers for want of love from us. The unmentioned implication is that Jesus suffers on the Cross because we have fallen short from loving God. We have hurt God and so stand in need of being redeemed in order to be able to love God such that it will not suffer from want of our love. The suffering servant on the Cross is not just a human suffering, but also the divine suffering. Yet doesn’t this imply that God is incomplete in some way? God may have created humans so to be loved by us—hence the hurt from having love denied—but God itself is the fullness of love. As Augustine and Calvin emphasize in their respective writings, God is love. This is the subtitle of the film!

So, as in most theological problems worth their salt, an internal problem can be found and begs to be solved. Although Ryan attempts a solution in his thesis, the problem of God being complete unto itself is not addressed in the film. Perhaps God voluntarily created a vulnerability within the divine when he created humans to love, and thus glorify, it. The second person of the trinity, the Logos, is a part or manifestation of God since before the beginning, and we can perhaps find the vulnerability—even if still when the suffering of God is potential—meaning before the Incarnation of Jesus as a god-man, fully human and fully divine, and even so fully able to suffer. In other words, the divine in Jesus suffers too; it is not just his human nature that suffers. Interestingly, the Gnostic text, The Gospel of Philip, has the divine leave, or abandon, Jesus on the cross just before he dies, and thus after he suffers. The question is perhaps whether love that is by its very divine-nature complete or whole yet suffer. If so, the pain would be from humans not loving God as we were meant (by God) to; the pain suffered by God would not be from a want of divine love.

It is significant, I submit, that a Hollywood film would give viewers such ideas to ponder rather than focus on the gay-guy-meets-conservative-religionists element of the narrative—a theme which had already enjoyed pride of place in many films that tease the tension that is in a society in motion. To be sure, Hollywood is indeed still capable of dishing out banal sugar to a superficial public, but this makes the choice made in the screenwriting of The Seminarian all the more noteworthy and deserving of emulation.

Realive

In 2016, Robert McIntyre, a graduate of MIT, became the first person to freeze and then revive a mammalian brain—that of a white rabbit. “When thawed, the rabbit’s brain was found to have all of its synapse, cell membranes, and intracellular structures intact.”[1] The film, Realive, made that same year, is a fictional story about a man with terminal cancer who commits suicide to be frozen and revived when his illness could be cured. In the context of McIntyre’s scientific work, the film’s sci-fi demeanor belies the very real possibility that cryogenics could realistically alter fundamental assumptions about life and death even just later in the same century. What the film says about the life and death is timeless, however, in terms of philosophical value.

Diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer, Marc Jarvis opts for cryogenics. His body is to be frozen and revived when technology has advanced to the point of being able to reanimate him and cure the cancer. “I’d be able to live longer,” he blandly tells his friends, who are skeptical. For this to happen, he responds, “I guess I’d have to trust humanity.” He is referring to the advent of the necessary medical technology, rather than to the question of whether global climate change might extinguish the species in the meantime. This “sin of omission” by the screenwriter is particularly strange, given physicist Steven Hawkins’ prediction at the time that the species would have at most a century left on a habitable Earth.

In the story, living longer isn’t Marc’s actual goal, so he may well be indifferent to the plight of the species as he informs his friends of his decision to go with cryogenics. He does not commit suicide with the hope of being revived when he could be cured so he could live out the rest of his life.  As he tells Elizabeth, his nurse after he is revived 60 years later, in 2084, “Suicide was my way of fighting the arbitrariness of cancer.” Suicide, he tells her, was “the only way of avoiding the agony and the uncertainty of when death would finally arrive.” In retrospect, he says that being able to end his life at his choosing gave him the power to die peacefully. He had not really thought he could be reanimated; suicide, he tells Elizabeth, “gave me back control over my life.” He had accepted death; things were fine as they were. He accepted his experience of life as that which it had been, even though he was still young (roughly 30). The fear was gone, he tells Elizabeth more than 100 arduous days after having being revived. His fear of death is still gone, he informs her as he then asks her to help him commit suicide again. He has already died once. He is once again prepared to end his life. His final wish: “To be nothing again, to disappear, to finally rest in peace.” Why? To return to an after-life existence in heaven? Or out of a preference for not existing over the pain of living?

Just after being revived, he is enthusiastic. “I was going to die,” he tells the medical team in front of his bed. “I was going to disappear, forever, and I’m alive again. I’m alive!” But he quickly realizes that his “new life” comes with some rather serious drawbacks, medically speaking. At least for some weeks, his body seems permanently “on the verge of collapse.” He records the following for future posterity: “Life, what do we expect from it? Certainly not this fragility, this half-speed existence. We definitely don’t expect a medical history full of afflictions and minor defects, a propensity for phlegmbosis, numbness in the extremities, involuntary movements, loss of equilibrium, scaling of the skin, irritation of connective tissue, respiratory insufficiency, cardiac insufficiency, incontinence, impotence. You don’t expect so many limitations so soon.” His physician tells him that he could expect a life like people with chronic diseases or the elderly, and he would have to maintain at least periodic connection to a machine that keeps him alive. In erroneously assuming that these conditions would be permanent, both Marc and his physician dismiss the likelihood that medical science would continue to advance. 

To be sure, Marc’s medical team knew Marc would lose all of his memories, after which no medical science could bring them back. You expect at least to keep your memories, Marc narrates for posterity. “What if your memories were erased as well? What will become of me once my memories have faded?” Fortunately, a device exists in 2084 that can allow people to recover memories without actually remembering anything, but he dismisses it outright too. He could still draw on those stored memories mentally—hence indistinguishable from him really having the memories—and perhaps advancements in medical science could literally grow more “gray matter” such that Marc would someday begin to accumulate new memories. In short, the static nature in the assumptions made not only by Marc, but, more astonishingly, by his medical term in 2084 is astonishing, given their experiences with medical advancements.

At any rate, Naomi, Marc’s girlfriend before he died, had herself frozen in hopes of being together with her true love again someday. Elizabeth wants to assure Marc, “Someday you two will be able to be together again like you were before; it’s only a matter of time.” Here in Elizabeth we find the openness of a dynamic assumption; medical science should be regarded as a moving target!  Yet he isn’t buying it. He knows Naomi’s bodily condition is not good; the process of freezing had not gone well. “I don’t even want to imagine Naomi if she’s trapped in someone else’s body, someone else’s life,” he tells Elizabeth. “That’s your fear talking,” Elizabeth correctly tells him. In short, Marc has lost hope—faith in medical science and even in life itself. Accordingly, he wants to commit suicide again, and he wants Elizabeth to bracket her own hope and assist him.

The nineteenth-century European philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, aptly describes Marc’s rationale for killing himself “for good” (i.e., without any hope of being reanimated again). “A man who kills himself does not take his life, it has already been taken from him. That is why he kills himself; he destroys only a semblance of himself; what he casts away is a mere shell whose kernel, whether by his fault or not, has long since been eaten away. But a healthy, normal life . . . is and should be man’s highest good, his supreme being.”[2] Marc expects a healthy, normal life; it is his god. Yet paradoxically death is not his enemy, for suicide is to him simply a preference for not existing over life without his god.

Life and death are of course the true characters in the fictional drama. Expectedly, religion is in the mix, though surprisingly only explicitly in a few instances in the film. The position taken in the film, through Marc as a witness—albeit fictional—is that life “is nothing more than a state of matter . . . there’s nothing transcendent or divine about it.” As such, life is merely biological. In fact, Marc opines that it is life that’s “scary, not death.” Life is “always on the verge of extinction.” A human life can quickly, and unexpectedly end without the person having any control over it. As for the soul, Marc figures it is maybe “the part that is lost when you freeze the meat and thaw it out again.” In short, the film adopts a materialist perspective. There is no after-life, other than revitalized, or unfrozen, life itself. In other words, being reanimated—not resurrected!—is the only after-life, or, more accurately, life after life. In between them: nothing. Not existing. How hard this is to apply to ourselves!

“Welcome back to life, Marc,” the physician says as Marc regains consciousness upon being revived. “Do you remember anything about the other side?” Is there an afterlife?, the physician wants to know. The first report of a possible “eye-witness” of heaven in human history is underwhelming: “Fear, dying, waking up,” Marc answers without a hint of excitement. Later, he makes it explicit: “Before I died, I thought there was nothing after death. Now I’m sure.” He is the only person alive immune from what Feuerbach describes as the fantasies of profligate human imagination. Marc records his (or the screenwriter’s) own thoughts as follows: “Why do we yearn so desperately for life after death? What is it that we want? Perhaps reward for our grief, or punishment for our sins. No, what we really expect to find is what we already know; what we once had and lost. If there was something, we would turn it into more of the same—the same chaos and the same beauty, the same reward for the same effort, the same tale by the same idiot. If there was something, it would probably be purgatory.” In other words, we construct, or hope for, an after-life looking all too familiar—human, all too human. The “most sensitive, most painful of man’s feelings of finiteness is the feeling or awareness that he will one day end, that he will die,” Feuerbach suggests.[3] All a person knows and experiences is premised on the ongoing—perceptually-seeming “ever” present—basis of existing, the end of which must surely be felt to be torrentially horrendous. A human’s “defense against death is the belief in immortality.”[4] People who think they know for a fact there is an afterlife might want to pause at word in italics. None of us know, which is why the screenwriter of the film has Marc’s physician ask.

The physician—a man of science!—is disappointed in Marc’s answer as it is well within the realm of biology. He wants for there to be a religious dimension so much that he over-reaches cognitively. In presenting Marc to the public (i.e., investors), for example, he refers to Marc as “the first person resurrected.” However, resurrection is a distinctively religious term that refers to a spiritual-physical body; Jesus’ resurrected body, for instance, goes through the door of the Upper Room and yet he is hungry so he asks for a fish! Clearly, more is going on here than reanimation or revitalization. Cryogenics does not even constitute the sort of miracle as Jesus performed in bringing Lazarus back to life, and yet Marc's physician refers to his successive cryogenic attempts, including Marc, as Lazarus!

In short, Marc’s (albeit fictional) body is not supernatural, and yet the physician uses terms suggestive of a religious miracle. In fact, he refers to Marc as the first resurrected man more than once in the film. It is as if man of science were driven instinctually to make what is human, divine. According to Feuerbach, “Man makes a god or divine being of what his life depends on only because to him his life is a divine being, a divine possession or thing.”[5] God is beneficent (because good), and thus of use to humans—hence petitions are made as a matter of course in many liturgies, but the underlying presupposition or basis of this belief in the divine attribute is that human life is itself of great worth (i.e., divine).

Therefore, Marc while still young and yet seemingly deprived of God’s beneficence has a knee-jerk reaction for his life to go on, albeit after some time of not existing. Alternatively, he could pin his hopes on heaven, yet he dismisses it even before he knows it to be a fantasy of the human imagination tinged with fear. Yet even in ostensibly wanting to live more, or again, it is to be on his terms.

According to Feuerbach, we are the gods—or, more accurately—our human ideals are our true gods—the potential of the species, which Feuerbach erroneously claimed is infinite. The danger in idolizing our ideals lies in settling for nothing less. Hence Marc acts rashly, I submit, in committing suicide again. His god is human, all too human. If Feuerbach was right, even the ostensibly religious deity is really just human life in its infinite potential. Yet the terrain of our experience is finite—our perception, feeling, and cognition only go so far. Even cryogenics in itself could merely extend a human life, rather than making human beings immortal.

 

---

[1] Candace Sutton, “Human Bodies Frozen in Desert Facility Waiting for Science to Wake them Up,” News.com.au.

[2] Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 52.

[3] Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 33.

[4] Ibid., 34, italics added.

[5] Ibid., 52.

A Theory of Everything

In his doctoral dissertation, Steven Hawkins demonstrates that the universe could have begun spontaneously. That is to say, the big bang could have gone off without being triggered by a divine intelligent being, or God in the sense of the word as used in the Abrahamic religions. To say that the universe could have begun in a moment of singularity is not necessarily to vitiate the deity-concept of all content. In fact, Hawkins’ work may one day trigger a movement to hem in the concept to the terrain that is distinctly religious.

Throughout A Theory of Everything (2014), God as the Creator is depicted in a strict dichotomy with physics as only one of the two can survive intact. I submit that the “either/or” choice is unnecessary because it arises from a category mistake involving religion. In positing God as the first cause or prime mover of a physical process, we distend the religious domain onto that of the natural sciences. Characterizing God as the condition of existence, on the other hand, backs the concept of the deity away from physics, chemistry, and astronomy and thus avoids the unnecessary dichotomy.

We can go even further still, putting some daylight between the two domains. Plotinus, a second century Platonist, characterized God as extending beyond the limits of human cognition and perception. Infinite space and never-ending time, on the other hand, are within our realm and thus not particularly divine. Indeed, what we experience as existence is within our realm rather than transcendent. To claim that God as Creator is the condition of existence can be interpreted as an attempt to source God beyond the limits of human cognition and perception unless that condition is taken as the cause of a sequence of events understandable through any of the natural sciences.My point is simply that theology is not one of the natural sciences, so the choice between them is unnecessary as it stems from a category mistake wherein the religious terrain oversteps or encroaches onto that of physics and chemistry. Pruning back the ancient conception of the Abrahamic deity to the distinctly religious can save the concept from entanglements that pit it against scientific investigation. Put another way, to apply such investigation to God represents a category mistake wherein science oversteps its innate boundaries. Rather than debate if God is behind the chemical reactions known as the big bang as is done throughout the film, we might try to figure out what is distinctly religious or theological in nature.