Existential Threats - Lisa Vox

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diametrically opposed each other, a view that American scholars formally proclaimed in two histories: John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science in 1874 and Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1896.3 These two works promoted the idea that there was an unbridgeable rift between religion and science that dated back centuries.

      Modern scholars have largely rejected this thesis, sometimes called the “conflict thesis.” Ronald L. Numbers, a historian of science who has written on the American historiography of this idea, complains that the warfare metaphor has disguised the complexities of the relationship between religion and science while unfairly maligning the former. Historians have shown that the usage of the terms “science” and “religion” to indicate discrete categories of human activity disguises how Westerners historically conducted investigations into the natural world and God in concert.4 Over the course of the 1800s, a wide range of partisans debated the origins of life as well as the ages of the Earth and the universe. As participants in these debates staked out their positions, especially regarding the role of God in these matters, they sought to differentiate themselves. Our inheritance from those disputes includes a vocabulary with terms like objectivity, technology, and the scientific method in addition to a categorization of bodies of knowledge and associated activities as distinct from one another, such as science, religion, theology, and technology.

      Americans don’t live as if science and religion are separate, nonoverlapping spheres, as the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould characterized the science-and-religion relationship in 1999.5 Neither do most people stagger around awkwardly in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance because they hold beliefs, at times contradictory, drawn from a variety of religious, scientific, and cultural sources. Perhaps, then, we should show no astonishment that an American history of ideas about the destiny of humanity since the late nineteenth century reveals similarities between scientific and religious visions of the End. This holds true even for science devotees who increasingly believed conservative evangelicals were dangerously antiscience and for conservative evangelicals who, by the end of the twentieth century, promoted the charge that scientists and their sympathizers actively deceive the public about threats like climate change.

      That dispensational premillennialism in particular offers insight into understanding how scientists developed their own views about the future is a testament to what we can learn from subjecting both to the same historical analysis. For their part, far from challenging or failing to respect science, premillennialists have integrated scientific conclusions into biblical interpretations. Hewing to an older paradigm stressing that a lone scientist can conduct investigations into nature that prove Truth, dispensational premillennialists have continuously bolstered their biblical interpretations with reference to scientific figures, ideas, and works. Nor have scientific apocalypticists only engaged issues that fall strictly into the territory of what repeated experimentation and observation can determine. As they faced the threats they feared would cause the end of the world, scientific apocalypticists addressed matters such as the most ethical way to live and the purpose of human existence. When there appeared to be conflict between the two apocalyptics, scientific apocalypticists were the ones who initiated it by painting premillennialists in an unflattering light. In the 1990s, more premillennialists began to question the science behind environmentalism, but they did so in the context of both scientists and the wider public contesting the idea of infallible scientific authority.

      In an analysis of nonfiction, novels, short stories, and films produced between the nineteenth century and the present day, I uncover rhetorical and thematic similarities between dispensational premillennialism and scientific apocalyptic beliefs, showing they are concerned with the same fundamental questions about the meaning of life and the fate of humankind. Science did not necessarily produce different, more realistic, or more rational responses to global problems; rather, both fields offered similar scenarios and solutions to man-made, existential threats emanating from technological developments for much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The way Americans face existential threats today is indebted to the related histories and similarities between religion and science.

      In the nineteenth century, the scientific apocalyptic was new and less like a religious apocalyptic at that time than at any other period since. Initial scientific apocalyptic musings wondered how nature could effect the end of the world. Soon, however, scientific apocalypticists wondered how humans could cause the end of the world or of the species; as they speculated on a man-made apocalypse, they adopted premillennial language and scenarios. Each apocalyptic during this period described a perpetual sense of crisis because of an impending catastrophe caused by human action. That the rhetoric of both religious and scientific apocalyptics was analogous is not a coincidence. Conservative evangelicals purposely incorporated science into their visions of the End. While scientific apocalypticists did not always consciously duplicate the way premillennialists envisioned the End, they did not have a language of crisis of their own. As scientific apocalypticists tried to warn humans about the dangers facing them and push the solutions that they thought were necessary to lessen such hazards, they tended to imagine scenarios and use language similar to what dispensational premillennialists used.

      Science fiction has been key in the development of the scientific apocalyptic since the late 1800s. It fleshed out the apocalyptic by exposing what is only implicit in much popular science writing: that humanity is deserving of judgment, and only a worthy remnant emerging from a worldwide disaster will survive to build a better world—just as premillennialists believed would happen during the end-times. The historian James Gilbert has written about the relationship between science fiction and religion: “Frequently stories contained prophecy, revelation of things to come, secret knowledge, myths about origins and ends, the paranormal, and salvation imposed from beyond—all of which addressed the sorts of questions that religion traditionally answered.”6 Gilbert maintains that science fiction counted among its readers professional scientists who appreciated that science fiction could deal with the implications of their discoveries and theories from a partisan perspective.7 As we shall see, American science fiction writers after 1945 assumed the mantle of prophecy, while scientists themselves sometimes wrote fiction in an advocacy role.

      In addition to science fiction writers, the scientific apocalyptic included scientists who wrote books aimed at laypersons about the fate of humanity (and the world) and popular science journalists who wrote to warn Americans that they needed to change their way of life. All scientific apocalypticists, from scientists to science fiction authors, engaged the same basic questions about the purpose of life that premillennialists did. Michael Shermer, a science historian writing in 2006, argues, “Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.”8 In telling this epic saga, scientists and science fiction writers presented remarkably similar stories to the ones that conservative evangelicals told.

      The endpoints of the stories that each provided to make sense of the world and ease the fears of worried Americans differed from one another. Premillennialists’ answer to all problems facing humanity was Jesus Christ, whose return was the event all of human history led up to. Christ would stop humans from destroying each other in a nuclear war and would cleanse the Earth of pollution. Meanwhile, scientific apocalypticists, despite using the language and formulae of premillennialists, looked at the same problems facing the world and proposed political, technological, and, toward the end of the twentieth century, vaguely spiritual solutions. Both felt that humans were guilty of terrible acts (and feared that humanity would not restrain itself in the future from even worse acts involving nuclear war or damage to the environment). For premillennialists, Christ could change an individual’s heart to make him or her more mindful of the environment; accepting Christ was also the only way to live through any final nuclear or environmental crisis. Scientific apocalypticists envisioned a fundamental flaw within the human species itself, akin to original sin. Without a messiah to save individuals, science fiction writers came up with various salvation plans, including purging the species through nuclear war, but also imagined that humans might simply pollute their surroundings to the extent that all life would simply perish. Since 9/11, this fatalism has suffused the scientific apocalyptic, bringing it even closer to the perspective of premillennialists who have washed their hands of the world.

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