The recent blockbuster "Knowing" rang a distant bell in my memory. In an early scene the Nicholas Cage character's astronomical colleague is stunned. How can Nicholas believe the theory that a pageful of apparently random numbers, written in 1959, contains prophecies of a string of disasters from 1959 to 2009? The incredulous colleague correctly points out that such pattern-seeking theories are a dime a dozen.
The only occasion I met such a theorist in person was in 1978. I was working for the Department of Social Security in Reading and visited a guy who had paid no National Insurance (Social Security tax) for a few years. He lived in a little cottage in an idyllic corner of South Oxfordshire about ten miles north of Reading. He had given up his regular job and was devoting his whole life to deciphering a pattern of words in the Bible. I wish that I had kept detailed notes of his explanation, because I can't remember any significant points of his hypothesis or what great secret he was hoping to unveil to mankind. As I have heard nothing of him since, I assume that his labours were futile.
He was living off his savings - very frugally, as he had a wife and two children, who allegedly fully supported him. I wrote my report and the case was filed away as he was doing nothing illegal; if you do no paid work, you pay no National Insurance.
Plainly the Cage character has an equally sympathetic employer, as he seems to be able to absent himself from his official duties at M.I.T. whenever the spirit moves him. But maybe M.I.T is more spiritual than you might suspect from its sternly rationalist title. In this movie, the first view you enjoy of its campus is centred on a most imposing domed building that could well be a temple or basilica.
Admittedly the spiritual themes in "Knowing" are pursued with as much subtlety as an air raid. The dazzling ascension into the spaceship accompanied by angelic figures and a torrent of light, the apocalyptic destruction of mankind (in effect by fire from Heaven), the final images of two innocent humans in a glorious landscape dominated by a magnificent tree......haven't we been here before? In the End is the Beginning, to be sure. But the fact that the scriptwriters pressed the traditional spiritual buttons shows some marginal lip service to the core beliefs of most Americans. Of course they also pushed the filmmaker's favourite emotional button (Children in Peril) with the zeal of a lab rat hitting the Food switch.
All the above special effects were exceedingly bloody impressive on a $50 million budget, a pittance by Hollywood blockbuster standards. It also paid for a spectacular air disaster, a forest fire and the most insanely over-the-top train wreck I have seen since "Speed". (Gentlemen, subway trains, in New York, or anywhere else, just don't go fast enough to create such mayhem.) I couldn't complain about the bang for my bucks, even in a typically over-priced British multiplex. It certainly pays to shoot movies in Australia rather than in a Los Angeles studio. But were there any wider lessons we might draw?
One obvious lesson is that all the dollars on the planet can't guarantee a half-decent screenplay. You might object that asking for any internal coherence or intelligent story development in a major movie is an inherently silly request. You would have a better chance of finding the truth in a British tabloid. But the very title "Knowing" and the early part of the film, where logical thought is needed to decipher the code, might raise some hope of a moderately thought provoking fable.
Sadly, "Knowing" is so appallingly written and realised that the numerous logical contradictions in the screenplay are simply evaded in a parade of stunning special effects, and any intelligent story development is crushed by a series of creepy or baffling incidents. Why the presumably super-intelligent extraterrestrials spent their time hanging around the hero's home like a bunch of dim witted kiddy fiddlers instead of evacuating more of the human race or working out a way to deflect the Sun's wrath and save us all......well, that's a mystery known only to God and (maybe) the scriptwriters. If you believe the prophecy written down by the little girl in 1959, these aliens had at least 50 years to evacuate or save us and they did precisely nothing. Or they might have made the message less cryptic in the first place and allowed us a chance to save ourselves.
Of course prophecy is an inherently contradictory business. If you accurately predict the future and someone believes you and tries to change it, the prophecy is falsified. The only satisfactory story of prophecy that I am aware of is, of course, Macbeth. The witches' prophecies are entirely "true"; they are sufficiently accurate to lure Macbeth into mortal sin. Yet they are also sufficiently misleading to deny him a moment's genuine benefit or peace of soul and eventually lead him to utter spiritual and physical destruction. And the story is structured so that the anti-hero progresses through his prophesied future with a predestined inevitability.
400 years after Shakespeare, it would be nice to think that highly paid filmmakers would be prepared to face the implicit contradictions of prophecy in an interesting way, but no such luck. Perhaps we should just be grateful for any sympathetic treatment of religious attitudes in a major movie. It was particular refreshing to see the hero's quietly decent pastor father portrayed in a positive light instead as a nutcase, bigot or charlatan.
I have speculated in the past that popular culture provides ways of preparing the public for radical changes in scientific perception. The most obvious recent example is "Sex and the City". The completely irresponsible behaviour of four promiscuous women in New York, the AIDS capital of the planet, was a pretty merciless mockery of the horseshit fed to the public for years by the AIDS industry. Similarly the role played by the Sun's fluctuations in the heating of the earth in "Knowing" looks like an equally savage mockery of the "CO2 = Global Warming" yarn we are still being sold in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.
Is "Knowing" another straw in the wind, signalling abandonment of crassly rational explanations and looking instead for salvation from the Heavens? There have been a few signs recently, in the most unexpected places. On 3rd April, I saw the word "GOD" in enormous letters on a magazine cover in W H Smiths newsagents, not normally a hotbed of piety. No, it was not on the cover of "The Tablet" or "The Church Times". The "New Statesman", normally a left wing political mag appealing to a small number of people who still take left wing thought seriously, was running a special issue on religion.
Given the contributers, I took it about as seriously as you could take "Knowing" on cosmology or prophecy. Here were all the Usual (gruesome) Suspects. Christopher Hitchens (but not his religious brother Peter), Richard Dawkins, Polly Toynbee..... A few of the more reliably on-message theists, such as A. N. Wilson, were wheeled on. Since writing "The Death of God" (around 1999), Wilson claims to have found God alive again.
The Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, was permitted a typically intelligent three column inches...about the same as our ever-asinine George Monbiot, the noisiest promoter of the religion of global warming. Good to see that Prophets of Doom are still given a hearing. But given the 3 pages devoted to Hitchens and Dawkins combined, you knew where the NS editor's sympathies lay. No danger of the good Rabbi or any competent Catholic theologian being given three pages. Yet the fact remains that religion is a prime factor in human affairs and cannot be ignored even by a handful of eminent atheists in major Western cities.
Religious problems just keep breaking out, like an itch the secularists cannot quite reach to scratch properly. The bruhaha over the recent idiotic Parliamentary Bill allowing the heir to the Throne to marry a Catholic is a prime example. I pointed out that such permission could mean that the Monarch after next might be a Catholic head of a Protestant Church of England. Not according to the fine print on the front of "The Daily Telegraph" (who usually get their religious facts straight). Any spouse of the heir would have to agree that their children be brought up as Protestants. So the heir could marry a Catholic as long as she was a bad Catholic. What if the spouse was a Jew (bearing in mind that Jewish identity is transmitted via the mother).....or a Muslim....or a devout Hindu?? Er, better to drop the whole dumb affair and keep on offending only Catholics.
The recent appointment of our new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, attracted plenty of space in the secular press. The discussion on his merits was conducted in grossly secular terms, but the fact that they thought this item deserved the column inches is another sign that the Death of God has been greatly exaggerated.
And as I write, BBC Radio 4 is transmitting a documentary discussing the politics and legal status of the Church of England. Should it continue to be the recognised State Church, with the hereditary monarch as its anointed head and seats reserved for Anglican bishops in the House of Lords? How can the Church in England be boxed in by foreign Anglican Churches (who comprise the majority of Anglicans and inconveniently keep insisting on traditional Christian teachings) AND adapt to the sexual practices of 21st century Britain (including the practices of its monarch)? One of the contributers blamed Richard Dawkins for stirring the pot and raising the anomalies of the C of E's position. Perhaps we should be grateful to the troublesome professor for raising the public profile of religion.
Another contributer on the program pointed out another aspect of the "Catholic Monarch" debate. If the Monarch became Catholic, he would be anointed at his Coronation by an "Archbishop" whose priestly consecration was "null and void" according to the Pope's encyclical "Apostolicae Curae" (On the Nullity of Anglican Orders) of 1896. Holy Cow, we are getting the Latin title of an encyclical issued 113 years ago quoted over the secular BBC radio waves.
The future remains unknown, but it seems that the prophets of the death of religion still have a very long and futile wait ahead of them.
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