If we’re going to talk about the connection between postsecularism and speculative fiction, there can perhaps be no better example than Arthur C. Clarke. According to his Wikipedia page, Clarke described himself throughout his life as an atheist or logical positivist. He demanded that no religious rites of any kind be associated with his funeral and famously said, “One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.” On the other hand, Clarke praised C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, which as a work of science fiction is just about as explicitly religious as possible. He was fascinated throughout his life by supernatural phenomenon, hosting several television series about unexplained events. He had “pantheist” printed on his WWII dog tags, and he sometimes claimed to be Buddhist (while insisting it wasn’t really a religion). Clear as mud, right?
This internal conflict is written all over Childhood’s End, Clarke’s third novel and the one that made him famous as a science fiction writer. The beginning of the book subscribes thoroughly to the secularism hypothesis, the idea that as science advances, religious belief will naturally decrease to the point of extinction. Childhood’s End begins with the invasion of Earth by a strange alien vessel that forces humanity and its governments to start acting in a logical, humane way. Working through the middle manager of the United Nations, the aliens stop all wars and conflicts, including the torture of animals. People’s standard of living increases dramatically overnight. Everything seems to be going for the best.
There are those who resist the alien takeover, and their resistance is portrayed as “a religious one, however much it may be disguised” (11). They claim some secular reasons, such as the right to self-determination and agency, but ultimately the narrative makes clear that these are all desperate excuses for their real concern. The UN Secretary General receives this perfect summary of the secular hypothesis from the Overlord when he explains the resistance to the imposition of a utopia:
“They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now” (19).
These religious resistors are portrayed negatively in the first half of the book. They kidnap the Secretary General in an attempt to get to the Overlord and are easily swatted away by his superior technology and benevolence. Their resistance is one of irrationality in the face of the obvious superiority of rationality and science-based progress.
At some point in the book, there is a turn in perspective. Mankind has everything it wants; people thrive in the post-scarcity culture brought on by the logical dictatorship of the Overlord. Yet something is dreadfully wrong. Humanity has lost almost all interest in the science of new discoveries, preferring simply cataloging of various species and other naturalistic pursuits. Additionally, the production of new art has almost completely stopped. The Overlord acknowledges this connection between the loss of humanities “superstitions” and the loss of human creativity near the end of the novel: “I am well aware of the fact that we have also inhibited, by the contrast between our civilizations, all other forms of creative achievement as well. But that was a secondary effect, and it is of no importance” (198). One scientist still seems to pursue the big questions in spite of the general malaise, and an artist colony nation forms in an attempt to reinvigorate the human spirit that has been somehow lost in the comfort of having all its needs provided for, but they are the exceptions fighting against the spirit of the secular age.
Why would someone who believed in the triumph of science write this? It becomes apparent that even though Clarke considered science edging out the old superstitions a good thing, he also believed something would be lost as it happened, and that this something was an essential part of humanity. The loss of religious belief seems, according to this book, to lead directly to the loss of everything that made humanity worthwhile.
Near the end of the story, humanity arises from this doldrum through what can only be called an ascension narrative. Children all over the world begin transforming from individual human beings into a metaphysical Overmind, eventually leaving their bodies behind to become part of the noncorporeal superbeing that sent the Overlords to Earth in the first place. There’s really nothing to distinguish this Overmind from a sort of supernatural God, other than the idea that it is the natural end-state of the evolution of most species. The Overlord describes it as something, while not identical, at least adjacent to the Latter-day Saint conception of God: “We believe—it is only a theory—that the Overmind is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of the universe. By now it must be the sum of many races, and long ago it left the tyranny of matter behind. It is conscious of intelligence, everywhere” (200). It is seemingly omniscient and omnipresent, and though it acts by commanding dead-end species like the Overlords, one could argue it is omnipotent as well.
This sense of the need for something beyond the rationality of science, the sense that in leaving behind religion we have lost something essential, is one of the major thrusts of postsecular literature. While science fiction might be the genre where we’d expect rationality to be celebrated, in fact I think we can find many authors, even in the golden age of sci-fi, who show this conclusion to be naive, including Arthur C. Clarke.