Religion and Science Fiction
A couple of really amazing short stories by Arthur C. Clarke.
The first is titled The Nine Billion Names of God. I read this one a long time back, but immediately remembered it when I recently read another similar story by the same author.
Which brings us to the second short story. This is titled The Star (Thanks to arnab for the link).
Clark brings religion and science together beautifully. Both are extremely well written, and have surprise ending. There isnt much I can say about either that you wont get from simply reading them, so do that!
Another example of this religion-science-fiction literature is Contact by Carl Sagan. Though the movie was great, the book goes much deeper into the philosophy of everything. There is this scene in the book where a believer is proving his faith by standing in front of a giant pendulum. Science says that the pendulum should obey conservation of energy, and attain a certain height before it swings back. The argument here is that if this person stands closer than this distance to the pendulum, would God make it stop before it hits his face? And it so happens that just before the pendulum is about to be swung, the curator comes in and stops the “nonsense”. Thus something intervenes!
There are sure to be other such interesting books/stories. I havent really read many others (I can think of another couple, but am too tired to look for references atm - maybe later).
December 23rd, 2003 at 7:54 am
I haven’t read all that many sci-fi books that deal with religion, but Asimov’s robots deal a lot with human and robot psychology. The movie “The Millenium Man” covers that is brief.
October 7th, 2004 at 5:19 am
Yeah, Clarke is amazing at what we love him for. I dont know if you guys have read the Rama series by the same author, it simply kicks ass (well at the first two books do …) I have read another couple of essays/storys by Clarke. There’s is this really clever one in which God, Clarke says, has to obey the speed of light. So in a Universe (which is admittedly BIG ) God hears you and all your million requests , but its anybody’s guess whether he’ll be there in time.
August 9th, 2006 at 5:47 pm
i just completed an astronomy course, in which we read some of Clarke’s short stories.
One imperticular jumped out at me, it was about a man who was in his space pod,
and crashed very near to the sun. do you happen to know which short storie that was?
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