Prometheus Poses Eternal Questions About Science, Creationism
By Angela WatercutterEmail Author June 8, 2012 | 2:50 pm | Categories: movies, sci-fi
In Prometheus, David (Michael Fassbender) is an android who lives amongst his makers and is unimpressed.
Photo courtesy 20th Century Fox
It’s understood that Prometheus is a prequel of sorts to Alien, but it’s also an origin story of another kind, a thought-provoking tale about the quest for truth — both scientific and spiritual — about where humans come from.
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It’s an eternal question, and Ridley Scott’s sweeping new sci-fi movie about a ship full of seekers in search of the origins of life on Earth fully embraces the tension between science and religion, the clash of ideas among adherents to Darwinism, creationism, and intelligent design.
If there is a quest for scientific facts about the origin of life, then can’t that also be considered a search for god, if “god” is understood to be “creator”? If the quest of science is to find out what we came from, or “how we got here,” then finding the answer isn’t that much different than finding religion. All theories — scientific as well as religious — involve at least some faith in their until they’re proven — it’s just that some people believe in the lab and use it to test their hypotheses, while others believe in the Word.
The twist Prometheus puts on the question is, “What if the answer is in the heavens, but instead of a bearded deity, what if our creators were extraterrestrials? And, if so, who or what created them?”
That bit of storytelling gymnastics — playing up the fiction as much as the science — was intentional. In a recent interview with a group of reporters, Damon Lindelof, the Lost co-creator who worked on the Prometheus script with director Scott and writer Jon Spaihts, said the concept for the movie was to move away from Alien’s chestbursters and xenomorphs and focus on the origin of the human species and whether we have makers who share our DNA.
“This idea of creating one in one’s own image becomes a sci-fi construct as opposed to a supernatural construct or a religious construct,” Lindelof told the reporters. “I think the movie sort of dabbled in marrying those two ideas.”
That’s not to say that the R-rated Prometheus, out Friday, is some kind of a pro-creationism, anti-science allegory. It’s not. (Scott himself has professed more belief in the possibilities of aliens than god, telling Esquire “the biggest source of evil is of course religion.”) The film simply plants seeds of thought — sort of like cinematic panspermia — that will naturally lead audience members to question the origin of man, whether they’re Darwinists, creationists or something else entirely.
The movie’s incessant sly references to faith shed light on the fact that, when it comes to how we answer life’s big questions, some use the scientific method, some use catechism, others use both, and everyone believes something. Scientific theories can be proven more readily than the existence of deities, but the path of the righteous in both cases starts with a leap of faith. And like with The Hunger Games — which is either an Occupy-channeling feminist passion play or an allegory about the dangers of Big Government, depending on who you ask — what audiences take away from Prometheus and its characters will likely be informed largely by the mental baggage they bring to the theater.
It wouldn’t be a Ridley Scott sci-fi film if there wasn’t a clash between artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence.
In the film, archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (played by Noomi Rapace) plays the tough embodiment of this internal conflict between faith and science. An educated woman who still wears her father’s cross around her neck, she is what her Weyland Industries boss calls “a true believer.” Her scientific study has led her to believe that there are makers somewhere in the stars — she and her partner Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) call them “the Engineers” — who put life on Earth and want us to come find them.
Does that mean there’s a god? Um, dunno. But she’d like to ask.
(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)
