Get Lost
I think I need a flux capacitor.
The fifth season of the popular television show Lost began this past week. I have already blogged about Lost and my love/hate relationship with the show’s creator, J.J. Abrams. It would appear that many of the theories I had about the show back at the end of Season 2 are now being proved correct. I guessed it would have something to do with time travel. Based on the season premiere, I was on to something.
I heard a brief comment about the show on the radio the other night. The commentator did not like the episode, and feels the show has gone overboard. In truth, I believe that as the show has begun to provide answers to its many mysteries, it has gone deeper into scientific, philosophical, and theological ideas. A show can lose viewers whose primary interest was a mid-week escape from thought when it starts to ask big questions.
I was the type of kid who used to think about time travel. I used to think about how it would work, and how the way it was presented on television was often contrary to how I thought it would work. As I read the work of C.S. Lewis, and the way he liked to think about time and God’s ability to be simultaneously in and out of time, it occurred to me that maybe the scientific questions I loved to ask were not far off from the theological questions I loved to ask.
I am just about done with Madeleine L’Engle’s book Walking on Water, a book I have brought up in some of my more recent blog entries. Like Lost, her book A Wrinkle in Time was also not afraid to blend philosophy, science and religion. Last night I read this:
“All that the new discoveries of science can do is enlarge our knowledge of the magnitude and glory of God’s creation … When they upset the religious establishment it is not because they have done anything to diminish God; they only diminish — even more frightening — change the current establishment’s definition of God.”
America in the age of Red State/Blue State, Conservative/Liberal, Republican/Democrat, Capitalism/Socialism, etc. etc. etc. likes to divide things along a very definite, two-sided line. Religion vs. Science is one of the more common divisions that finds it way into the conversation. Institutions of Religion and Science are often very content with this division, using it to increase their media exposure. Let’s face it, if there is anything the socio-political climate of the last decade has shown us is that controversy sells. So you have to choose: are you a man of science or a man of faith?
In Lost, two of the main characters are forced to face this question directly. And they move back and forth between the two sides as they struggle with the conflicts presented by the island.
What’s great about the show is that the show makes no assumptions about either side of the issue, and by allowing their main characters to struggle with these issues, moving back and forth, they seem to be making an argument that any division is really only in our minds. On Lost, people of science become people of faith, as each new discovery seems to make the improbable probable. When anything is possible, leaps of faith are not that difficult to take.
There is a great scene in the film Donnie Darko where the main character, Donnie Darko (coincidence?), asks his science teacher about the mechanics of time travel. The discussion logically moves from physics to questions of free will and predestination. The teacher is forced to remove himself from the conversation, not because he doesn’t want to answer Donnie’s questions, but because if he did, he could lose his job. How quickly a discussion of science can become a discussion of theology.
How great would it be to have a conversation about both of these topics without it being a controversy used to make headlines?
