Science And Religion In Fiction II

Most fiction still recounts human interactions on Earth where the Sun and stars are immemorial lights in the sky whereas science fiction recognizes that the Sun is a star and that Earth is a planet. "Hard," unlike "soft," sf assumes considerably more scientific knowledge than just that. In Poul Anderson's works, we are expected to understand or at least accept:

time dilation on an interstellar round trip in Starfarers and on a one-way intergalactic journey in Tau Zero;

quantum mechanics as the basis of hyperspace in the Technic History and of alternative histories in the Time Patrol series;

scientific rationales for alternative means of faster than light (FTL) space travel, based on the author's knowledge of physics, in other works;

evolution by natural selection of intelligent species on several extra-solar planets in the Technic History;

conditions on solar planets consistent with the latest scientific information at the time of writing;

interplanetary orbits consistent with Newtonian mechanics.

Soft sf writers accept that we are surrounded by interplanetary and interstellar space but otherwise disregard scientific knowledge. Ray Bradbury's and CS Lewis's versions of Mars are humanly habitable. FTL, even if mentioned, is never rationalized. A Bradbury story said, of interstellar explorers, that their speed was that "...of a god." Lewis's Venus bears a divinely created first man and woman and the planets are steered through Heaven not by gravity but by presiding angels.

However, Lewis in particular did not merely disregard science for fictional purposes. His opposition to materialist philosophy was based at least in part on a failure to understand scientific method. Lewis thought that a scientific world view entailed an unacceptable behaviourism and that the only philosophical alternative to that was idealism or, since an impersonal absolute mind made no sense, theism. Of course, many of us question whether an absolute person makes sense either. The absolute is the opposite of the relative whereas persons exist in self-other relationships. But the more basic point is about scientific method and this puts Lewis into a fundamental philosophical disagreement with the entire ethos of hard sf as represented by Poul Anderson.

To be continued.