Michael Crichton was a wildly successful novelist–The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, just to name two of his many books. But one of those books, Prey, suggests to me that he never came to terms with his own religious impulses.
Try as he might, Crichton could not let go of the notion that human beings are destined to control their environment (“Ye shall be as gods”). We have no need of God: we will eventually learn how to iron out the rough spots.
But it was those rough spots that Crichton wrote about; and he never shook off the observable truth that people–even scientists!–make very inadequate gods. The promised utopia never gets past the breaking-the-eggs stage.
Prey made me pity Crichton. The man had too much integrity to set up phony-baloney fictional utopias. Reality kept crashing in.
He had the courage to face it, but not the wit to answer it.
I suspect that a lot of people cannot admit, even to themselves, what they truly believe in their heart of hearts. I’ve met any number of people who are die-hard liberals by declaration, but practice relatively conservative values in their everyday lives. A former coworker, who advocated for electric cars, etc. recently bought a gas powered pickup truck for his daily transport, admitting that an electric vehicle just wouldn’t do what he required. But he still believes that it will all work out in some unspecified endpoint, just over the horizon, just out of sight, and electrics will rule the day. Not impossible, say I, but not anytime soon.
When it comes to belief in a Creator, I think it’s much the same. I’ve read many books written by various scientists for a more general readership. Invariably, these are apologetics for evolution as a source of life, and in a surprising number of these books, they come close to admitting that an Intelligent Designer must have been behind all we see, but they always come back to blind chance and innumerable happy little accidents to explain God out of the picture.
I’ve read and enjoyed Chrichton’s work. His book Airframe is the only aviation book written by an outsider, I’ve ever read that gets it right. Virtually all aviation fiction, and pretty much all aviation news reports, leave me sputtering invectives as they stumble over their own feet, trying to explain that which they don’t understand. Chrichton got it.
I have a theory on belief systems, based mostly on cults. It’s simple, when someone places all of their trust in a human leader, be it business, political, or religious, they are in fact making a wager. Suppose that someone follows an unconventional religious leader who advocates a minimalistic lifestyle and forestalling all achievements in anticipation of some nebulous future reward.
Once someone has made sacrifices in their life and perhaps burned their bridges, any thought that brings into question the validity of the belief system effectively challenges the wager that they have placed. Once a person has bet everything, the thought of that wager being in error cannot be tolerated. If you speak to a person in that mental state, they will revert to emotional arguments, almost immediately. Reasoning doesn’t help.
Some years ago, I found myself doing business with a group of people who belonged to a business cult. This company offered “training” and claimed to have the secret to harmonious workplaces with high productivity and all sorts of other good things. You just had to ltrust the program”. (When you hear that phrase, you are almost certainly dealing with coercive tactics, usually employed by cults or certain types of sales organizations.)
I had to do business with these people, and they tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit me. Then they had a recruiter from the cult call me directly. I shut down the recruiter in a matter of minutes, just by asking some questions, and they never called back. When the business in question quit shoveling money into this “training” program, all of the brotherhood, love bombing etc. stopped instantly and within a few months, almost everybody forgot all about it.
It’s the same with at least some dyed in the wool atheists. At the bottom of it all, they have wagered their professional reputations on the religion of atheism and can’t afford to back down. Even Richard Dawkins, as combative as he is towards belief in God, calls himself a “cultural Christian”, admitting at least a degree of appreciation for the values of the Judeo/Christian ethic, while insisting upon denying the Higher Power behind this ethic.
Chrichton made his money writing about runaway technology, and the dangers lurking behind this world’s nearly blind acceptance of new developments. Had he lived longer, what would he have to say about AI, self driving cars, lithium ion battery fires and the tech overload which seems to have crept into everyday life? I imagine that he would have seen the potential for hidden dangers. But the greatest danger is not runaway technology, but failure to acknowledge that we are not the ultimate authority over our lives. If every person on earth believed in, and subjected themselves to the will of one Creator, many of these problems would dissipate.
“Bet everything” is dubious ground on which to make a stand.
I’ve seen it play out in real life. What’s sad is when the person finally comes to the realization that things weren’t working out the way they expected. A lot of grasping at straws happens, and maybe some bargaining with reality. Reality usually doesn’t give an inch.