Space Travel=Blasphemy?
This trailer for the 1955 George Pal special-effects extravaganza, Conquest of Space, with it's Chesley Bonestell-designed rocketships, and a storyline inspired by Werner Von Braun's Mars Project, epitomizes retro-futurist design.
I loved this film as a kid, but never realized until today that its plot, in which a general attempts to sabotage a mission to Mars because of his religious beliefs, was based on a 1940s controversy over whether or not the Bible forbade humanity to leave the Earth. Noted Christian theologians like C.S. Lewis insisted that the vast distance between the planets was God's way of quarantining us from His other creations. Lewis even went so far as to write the Perelandra Trilogy to drive home his belief that space travel was nothing short of blasphemous, which is odd, because I've read the trilogy a couple of times and never got that message out of it.
Up until now, I've always had a lot of respect for C.S. Lewis, but I may have to re-evaluate that in light of this information.
Update: The original link to YouTube is dead, but you can still view the trailer at the Internet Archive. I've updated the link accordingly.
[Link: Conquest of Space]
[Link: Wikipedia entry]
Comments
I can't have any respect for an atheist that turned back to religion and then became a religious scholar.
Posted by: rone | July 3, 2006 9:32 PM
I don't know enough about the circumstances surrounding Lewis' conversion to really form an opinion one way or the other, although I don't see it as some sort of betrayal. But since I'm not an atheist, I don't have a problem with people changing their minds when it comes to religion.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | July 3, 2006 10:47 PM
I don't see it as a sort of betrayal, either, but more of a modern replay of the Saul->Paul story. "I've changed! I've seen the light!" "Whatever, you're still a big jerk."
Posted by: rone | July 3, 2006 11:21 PM
Well, that analogy doesn't really work for me because there was a huge difference between the characters of Saul and Paul: Saul was running around brutally murdering and torturing Christians before he converted, and afterwards, his views on the role of Gentiles in the early church were far more liberal than those of his contemporaries.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | July 4, 2006 7:33 AM
Yeah, maybe i'm just bitter. I think he was just sneaky. But it's hard to argue with the results.
Posted by: rone | July 4, 2006 9:19 PM
Other than this colossal theological brain fart, the rest of his output was relatively impressive, particularly his apologetics, so finding out about this has made me feel a bit letdown and betrayed.
But when you get right down to it, I've always felt that his fiction was subpar and/or aimed at a juvenile market. Perelandra disappoints on a number of levels, bad theological underpinnings being only one of them.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | July 5, 2006 6:30 AM
Ahh! You namechecked Chesley Bonestell. My heart thumps with joy.
Posted by: Bella Rossa | July 5, 2006 11:35 AM
Chesley was the bee's knees! After growing up on his cool illustrations, I'm still trying to get over my disappointment at the way our space program turned out design-wise.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | July 5, 2006 11:43 AM