"Did God become incarnate for the other Milieu races?
"'All of them except the Lylmik seem to think that he did. And Milieu anthropologists - or whatever they call themselves - tell us that many of the more primitive races in the Galaxy have Incarnation myths very like ours. Of course, none of this is proof of God's Incarnation. It can't be proved. But I believe it...That kind of belief is called faith.'"
-Julian May, Jack The Bodiless, 24, 297.
The speaker:
is enacting a nativity myth even as she speaks (conversing telepathically with her already powerful unborn son while hiding from hostile authorities);
rightly calls the Incarnation a "myth," i.e., a meaningful story, even though she believes that it is also a true story;
is wrong, in my opinion, to accept the story as true without proof.
Here again, Anderson and May address the same deep issues in different but parallel ways.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I agree with Teresa Kendall, I believe the Incarnation is both a MEANINGFUL story and literally true.
I wonder if you noticed, but Pere Teilhard de Chardin is favored by some of the characters in the INTERVENTION and MILIEU books. Long ago, I went thru a de Chardin phase and read various of his works, such as THE DIVINE MILIEU and THE PHENOMENON OF MAN. I was never a partisan of de Chardin, but I thought he was worth reading. One complaint some critics made of him was that he came dangerously close to advocating a kind of pantheism. Which of course is no idea an orthodox Catholic can believe.
Sean
Sean,
I have read de Chardin and noticed that he was mentioned. He thought that interstellar travel was unlikely. Like a lot of people, he thought that, since human beings are conscious, consciousness must be present in some minimal way in even the simplest organism. I think that everything is either conscious or not. Consciousness began when some organism became sufficiently sensitive to its environment.
I think that evolution is driven by natural selection. It is not directed towards greater consciousness.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And you've touched on some of Pere Teilhard's ideas which I simply can't accept. I don't believe the rock I stumbled over has an even minimal "consciousness."
And I also don't believe that evolution and blind chance is ALL that there is. Which is where I differ from you.
Sean
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