Is Knowing Sacred?
James A. Herrick
2009
In a clearing in a dark New England woods a father prepares to offer his only son
to deities who have descended from heaven in what can only be described as wheels
within wheels. This is a living sacrifice, but a deep loss nonetheless, particularly for a
man whose wife has recently perished in a disastrous hotel fire. As they separate, tearful
father and stoic son exchange a meaningful hand gesture: You and me, together, forever.
Everything will be all right, for all, including deceased mother and wife, are under the
care of wise and loving extraterrestrials.
Knowing (2009), starring Nicholas Cage, directed by Alex Proyas (Dark City, I
Robot) and based on a story by Ryne Douglas Pearson, was a modest financial success.
The movie opened with moderate strength, declined rapidly at the box office, and appears
to be doing well in DVD and international release. Critics were less kind than audiences.
RottenTomatoes.com records a mere 33% critical approval rating. Why the luke-warm
reception? Cage appeared disengaged, Knowing’s themes reminded audiences too
insistently of earlier science fiction, and the story is so close to Scott Derrickson’s
remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) as to cause confusion. Having said all
this, Knowing is not such a bad film. But, to assess it as sci-fi thriller is to miss its
significance, for Proyas’ film is a twenty-first century Nicene Creed, a work of religious
fusion worthy of Baha’u’llah himself.
Proyas, largely responsible for the film’s explicitly religious themes and images,
achieves the most complete synthesis to date of a system of rising and converging myths
that now constitutes a full-blown religion complete with deities, prophecies, redemptive
sacrifice, intervening providence, sacred landscapes and the hope of eternal life. Indeed,
the film mimics traditional religious tenets so cleverly that interpreting its central
message caused palpable confusion among religious and not-so-religious reviewers alike.
Was Knowing faith-friendly popular art, or shallow spiritual counterfeiting?
Widower MIT physics professor John Koestler (Cage) stumbles onto an alien
effort to alert humanity to its impending doom in a catastrophic solar flare event. The
prophetic warning is delivered by means of special children who receive numerically
coded messages from mysterious extraterrestrials known as the Whisper People.
Koestler‘s own son, it turns out, is one of these chosen children. The benevolent,
omniscient, and apparently omnipotent Whisperers are staging a Noah’s Ark operation
designed to relocate progenitors of a new humanity to an unidentified second Garden of
Eden in space. The whole cycle of human experience is about to “start over.” Perhaps
this time humanity’s ancestors will ignore the snake.
As the closing credits roll a benediction would be appropriate. During their two
hours in the theater audiences witnessed radiant alien angels ascending, colossal wheels
within wheels descending, a pristine garden in space complete with a rather conspicuous
tree, a pre-pubescent Adam and Eve, fiery mystical visions, crystalline spaceship arks,
and an apocalypse in which this tired world burns but a new world begins. Proyas pulls
out all the stops in Knowing, leading us on a pilgrimage from Genesis to Revelation or,
rather, the other way around. While Cage is no Charlton Heston—though he drives his
Ford pickup like he was in a chariot race—Proyas may one day be recognized as the
Founding Prophet of the Orthodox Church of Science Fiction. Like so many other
prophets, he stands on the shoulders of giants. Changing the metaphor, Proyas’ Knowing
weaves a rich mythic tapestry from threads supplied by the long history of science fiction
and scientific writing of the more speculative variety.
New myths featuring distant worlds as regenerative oases and intervening aliens
aplenty visiting our tiny blue world have captured the imagination of the public and
academy alike. Several of the top grossing films of all time belong to the science fiction
genre, and sci-fi television programs, books, video games, and graphic novels enjoy
unrivaled popular appeal. But sci-fi mythology’s extensive reach is perhaps even more
striking when we hear Stephen Hawking remark that creating colonies in space is crucial
to human survival, or Richard Dawkins suggest in Ben Stein’s Expelled that
extraterrestrials may have had a hand in life’s origins on earth.
My book Scientific Mythologies (2008) traced the centuries-long development of
several such myths emerging at the vast frontier between science and science fiction.
The more familiar of these feature space as sacred place, ET’s as highly evolved
demigods and enhanced humans as our hopeful future. In sacred tales told by major
prophets such as Spielberg and minor ones such as Roddenberry aliens and ancient races
guide humanity through a vast cosmic maze that leads to material and spiritual liberation.
Despite post-modernist protestations to the contrary, these new myths have inexorably
formed themselves into a meta-narrative that now enjoys the status of a worldwide
religion. Knowing was actually more profitable abroad than at home.
To be sure, there have been skeptics and dissenting voices in science fiction’s vast
and ancient community of faith, malcontents and heretics who questioned alien
intentions, sent humans into space only to have them eaten alive or driven mad, or
meditated darkly on the future’s bleaker possibilities. To correct this unfortunate
divisiveness science fiction religion required a clearly articulated and authoritative
synthesis of all of its major doctrines, a summary exposition of a unifying vision, an
Epistle to the Romans, or Romulans.
Now, in the Latter Days of sci-fi religion, Prophet Proyas arrives as the Great
Synthesizer of the Faith, resolving conflicts in the ancient texts and settling disputes
among the various schisms that have arisen since the fateful Day the Earth Stood Still for
the first time in 1951. Arthur Seer Clarke, having received the mantel from Meister Olaf
Stapledon, taught us in Childhood’s End (1953) that alien intelligences, not the old
uncreated God, have been in control of human destiny from the beginning. Let us take
comfort—they will continue in this role forever and ever. Von Daniken the Baptist, a
madman preparing a way in the wilderness, needed add no humble question mark to his
visionary Chariots of the Gods? (1968). This raving fundamentalist was, after all,
essentially correct—often visited, our ancestors mistook sky-travelers for deities or
angels. Now we understand the clear reference in Ezekiel to a space ship, not to mention
the origin of Easter Island’s strange heads.
Who else may be counted among the orthodox? Prophet Spielberg’s Close
Encounters (1977) taught with clarity that certain favored ones among us possess a strong
sense of the aliens’ benevolent presence, and that these visitors desire only to protect and
guide us. But, the Gospel according to St. Lucas also has something of great value to
teach us. Mysterious ancient races—call them Jedi, Nephilim or simply the Old Ones—
carry within them deep spiritual understanding, expansive powers, and a connection to
the numinous itself. Often these Ancient Masters identify remarkable children to receive
and convey their special messages, the older ones among us ordinaries being a bit too
hidebound to grasp what a child with a high mediclorine count or a gift with numbers
comprehends instantly.
What should we make of the sci-fi religion Knowing offers up, whose nascent
doctrines are present in fiction and non-fiction alike well before Wells? Our exodus from
scandal-plagued, paternalistic organized religion sent us in search of new sources of
mystery and transcendence. Science fiction provided both in abundance, as well as a
penchant for metaphysics that appeared to address the same issues as religion. Space
spirituality was also a response to the growing cultural hegemony of science, an
authoritative source of knowledge that, alas, lacked a holy of holies, an entrance into the
numinous. Masters of epic space narratives such as Stapledon (Starmaker (1937), Last
and First Men (1930)) crafted a soul for dead naturalism by imagining mystical science
as a vehicle for spiritual exploration. Science fiction faith thus offered audiences the best
of two worlds—the intellectual confidence of science and the ethereal comforts of
spirituality, Charles Darwin and Deepak Chopra.
“Your mom is safe,” Cage incongruously assures a young girl whose mother has
just been killed in a terrifying car accident. He knows this because the aliens, like the
Bible in the old Sunday school refrain, told him so. Sci-fi faith, like all faith, remains
defiantly confident of its object without requiring objective evidence; faith is simply
knowing. But, Knowing‘s religion, unlike that old time version, poses us no fussy
questions about how we have lived or what we have believed. It nevertheless requires
abandonment to something higher—the ineffable purposes of extraterrestrials and the
evolving cosmos. What good, after all, is transcendence that does not transport? And,
what is spiritual transport if it leaves us unwilling to sacrifice everything?
Knowing reimagines the hope and power we once found in traditional religion but
without the moral responsibility and the intrusive God, a focus-group faith for a new age.
Sci-fi religion engages the yearning human spirit without asking it to leave the mystic
Sagan’s divine Cosmos, All that there Is, Was, or Ever Will Be, Amen. Benevolent
aliens, Edenic planets and transforming technologies all arise from within the system of
nature. Thus, miraculously, we experience transcendence without need of the
supernatural, otherworldliness without having to accept another world, and protective
deities without a Divine Judge. For postmodern Westerners this is religious change we
can believe in.
The clash of science and religion has been one of the least productive contests of
our time. Yet, as Professor John Koestler discovers and as Arthur of Sri Lanka tried to
tell us, space faith relieves the nasty tension between these two potent forces. When
Koestler desires deeper understanding of what the mysterious Whisper People are trying
to tell him through his son, he simply hotfoots it over to MIT to check the latest computer
generated data on solar flares. The world will end by fire, not ice. But, a spiritually
sensitive child has already revealed this truth to him. Holding up an antique illustration
of Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels she remarks, “It’s the sun.” Koestler, a new convert to
alien religion, accepts his fate and that of the rest of humanity.
Having seen the same light as the prophets of old, the physicist finally acquiesces
in the alien-constructed eternal order of things. Science is religion’s partner, and it’s a
marriage made in space. In the face of the new numinous who can but yield? Abrahamlike, Koestler yields up his only son to the insistent deities from the stars whose plans are
beyond his poor powers to comprehend. That, after all, is the nature of religious
conviction. The space-gods, who appear to be Scandinavian, are about to do a new thing,
and this redemptive activity requires a sacrifice. However, we are assured that the
selected children are going to a better place: a new planet with its own Tree of Life.
According to the theology of Knowing and similar narratives, religion of the alien
variety is in fact advanced science. The faith of our fathers, ever a juvenile misconstrual
of alien paleo-contact, failed to grasp the fundamental fact that technology—not a Great
Spirit—brought the sky travelers to earth in the first place. Earthly religion was a
primitive guess, a glimpse in a glass darkly of a higher truth we now fully know even as
we are fully known. The scientist Koestler tells his earthly father, a Christian pastor from
whom he is estranged, that he has received a “prophecy” that must be taken seriously.
Pastor Koestler, with surprisingly little resistance, comforts himself in the truth of the
Whisper People’s message of harmony that reunites his fragmented family at the very
moment they and the earth are destroyed. But, as the Reverend Koestler whispers with
peaceful resignation as solar flames consume the family home, “This is not the end.”
The earth burns, along with John Koestler and, presumably, MIT. But, we are
reassured that, indeed, this is not the end as we watch children and rabbits run through
fields of grain on a fresh new world. The alien deities have, for unspoken reasons known
only to them, deigned that earthly life will start over again. In Knowing the endless cycle
of life in an infinite universe, under the careful scrutiny of trustworthy alien stewards,
trumps traditional faith’s linear cosmology with its apocalypse and final judgment by a
wrathful though just God. Proyas’ vision is as unambiguous as it is traditional in its own
way, for sci-fi religion’s orthodoxies, through many twists and turns, have been
developing for a very long time indeed. Today space faith’s doctrines and sacred icons
are readily recognized even by infidels, which is why a movie like Knowing is
comprehensible at all. And, though its religious comforts may not persist much beyond
the dark confines of the multiplex, dissolving in the bright light of a parking lot, even this
vaporous quality befits a faith designed for consumers rather than believers.
Knowing’s odd title promises intellectual and spiritual confidence in the face of
life’s persistent mysteries—injustice, loss, suffering, and finally death. But, it is just such
a profound and sustaining spiritual confidence that Knowing, despite its careful rehearsal
of science fiction religion’s emerging orthodoxies, is in the end incapable of providing.
Knowing (2009)
This time around the world ends in a solar flare. John Koestler finds out about this through his own
son’s remarkable connection to several alien entities called The Whisper People.
See p. 141 on Generic description. This process involves describing the qualities that characterize
similar artifacts to see if a genre exists. What does Knowing add to our description of the First
Encounter with Aliens genre?
Note any similarities and differences between Knowing and our other three artifacts. Under the
heading Generic Participation, can we determine whether Knowing belongs in our genre.