I wanted to continue thinking about big ideas regarding humanity’s place in the universe. I decided to focus on religious and spiritual ideas because the intersection of science-fiction and religion is fascinating to me. I read that despite his atheism late in life, Arthur C. Clarke was fascinated with the idea of God, saying that “Any path to knowledge is a path to God—or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use.” I read two stories by Clarke which grapple with spiritual ideas. The first, which shares its title with H.G. Wells’ 1897 story, is called “The Star.” It details the journey home of a space exploration crew from a dead star system. On the visit, the crew found that one of the planets destroyed by the exploded star previously housed life, and they discover a vault with records of a civilization that was peaceful and very similar to humanity. The story ends with the lead member of the crew, a priest, reckoning with a crisis of faith after he calculated that the star was the Star of Bethlehem. He asks, “Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?”

The other story I read was “Nine Billion Names of God” which focuses not on Catholic faith, but on Buddhism. The story is about two Western computer operators who help Tibetan monks who have the belief that once all nine billion names of God are listed, the function of the universe will have been completed. The Westerners treat the task as a joke and do their job quietly, finally leaving once the computer program is almost done listing all nine billion names. However, as they ride out of the monastery, one of them realizes that “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

Both stories deal with questions of how faith intersects with our growing scientific achievements as a species. In “The Star,” humanity’s ability to travel to distant planets is a double-edged sword, allowing us to see the beauty of distant civilizations while forcing us to see the reality of God’s love for us. An entire civilization had to die so Jesus could be found, leading the priest to ask: “was it worth it?” In “Nine Billion Names of God,” Clarke explores the idea of computer technology being used to fast track the “natural” processes of faith – what would’ve taken thousands more years to complete is able to be completed within months, ending the universe prematurely. The ideas in these two stories contradict themselves – in the former, God seems to be conceived of as independent from the greater universe, serving only Earth and humankind, while the latter imagines him as being dominant over every star and every world.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=0c82c204a87d1a075cb2c5aa65214898&view=Cirrus