Spirits, ghosts, and that kind of stuff
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
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There are times I wonder:
6abc.com
I don’t know if skeptic Joe Nickell looked at that—-but as his writing proves, there really are times echos outlive the voice….
skepticalinquirer.org
Police who rescued miracle baby in river claim mystery voice called for help
Someone said 'help me,' say police officers who saved an 18-month-old from a submerged car hours after her mother died.
6abc.com
I don’t know if skeptic Joe Nickell looked at that—-but as his writing proves, there really are times echos outlive the voice….
Remembering Joe Nickell, Iconic Skeptic and Investigator | Skeptical Inquirer
Joe Nickell, the award-winning investigator and longtime Skeptical Inquirer columnist, died this week at the age of eighty. In addition to decades spent inv ...
skepticalinquirer.org
I guess I'm going to bump this topic up. Just saw it and I'd like to comment.
So the question was, why do so many sci-fi writers not include the supernatural/unexplained/etc. in their stories.
As several people have said, it's because science fiction is based on the extrapolation of scientific fact. This, of course, can range in degree. ST has played pretty fast and lose with its science, using hand-wavy technobabble, particularly from TNG on. Doctor Who is even less scientific than ST, but it's all fun to watch.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have really hard sf like the Martian, 2001 and 2010, Niven's Ringworld, anything by Alistair Reynolds or Vernor Vinge, Stephen Baxter, etc.
So, in general, you're not going to see the supernatural in science-fiction but, as several people noted, there are exceptions.
Ron Moore was mentioned early on. He referred to himself as a "recovering Catholic." So he's an atheist now, but he included the supernatural, God, angels, etc., in Battlestar Galactica. I recall reading an interview where he wanted to explore the effect of religion on people. The original BSG, of course, was inspired by the Book of Mormon since Glen Larson was a member of the church of LDS. So, I think Moore felt he could legitimately explore the supernatural and religious beliefs in BSG especially since the original show did that. What's even more fascinating to me is that he made the Cylons religious too, them being monotheistic while the humans were polytheistic. I personally didn't have any problem with the end of BSG except for them destroying the Galactica at the end. They should've landed it on the dark side of the moon or something and then jumped ahead thousands of years to see astronauts discovering it, kind of like the James Hogan Giants books.
Others brought up Babylon 5. JMS said he didn't believe religion would die out in a few hundred years as many atheists believe and, again, that was a topic he wanted to explore in B5 as well, e.g. humans and the Mimbari having the same souls.
Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy involves dead spirits from hell possessing the living in an interstellar culture. It's a great, massive space opera.
I read another book, Calculating God by Robert Sawyer. I won't spoil it, but in this hard sf story God does show up at the end and completes a plan. It was a good read but I didn't care for the end. It was cold, in the vein of Arthur C. Clarke's books.
Clarke is an interesting case in the sense that he said that advanced technology would always seem like magic to a primitive culture. He envisioned a collective, galactic mind in Childhood's end and the higher level energy beings in the 2001 books. Basically, imo, he was writing about gods, those these gods evolved naturally or, in the case of the 2001 books, eventually took their own evolution in hand. They eventually came to act as gods to more primitive life forms.
And religion and the nature of existence are tackled in Clarke and Dr. Gentry Lee's Rama series and Lee's Bright Messengers.
Carl Sagan's novel Contact is similar to Clarke's works (they were friends). Also, IIRC, Dan Simmons alluded to Jesus in his Hyperion books.
And everyone knows how religion was examined in Herbert's Dune and its sequels.
So that's stuff I can recall off the top of my head with regard to religion and the supernatural occurring in sci-fi.
Now, personally speaking as someone who is both a decently devout Catholic and has a PhD in AE with a dissertation that involved studying both classical physics and quantum mechanics, I think it is definitely a challenge to bridge the science-religion gap. One involves fact, the other, faith and that's a struggle for most people. More fundamentalist religious folks bag on atheists and agnostics and I think that is entirely wrong and definitely unchristian. Not believing in God and the supernatural is definitely a entirely legitimate viewpoint in this life. I don't blame them at all. It's hard to believe in God in light of how rotten we are as humans and how the world really is going to heck. It's hard to believe in miracles.
Speaking for myself though, I choose to believe. I've been scorned for that online as I'm sure other here have been as well and, really, like I said, some fake Christians have scorned the folks who are good who just don't believe in God. I just look at it that we're all on our journey in life and we should treat each other with kindness and respect. Everyone should be free to choose what they believe in without scorn, hatred, etc. As a Christian, I believe we're all children of God and that all can be saved if their hearts and acts are in the right place. I don't think God plays favorites at all. He's too big for that.
So the question was, why do so many sci-fi writers not include the supernatural/unexplained/etc. in their stories.
As several people have said, it's because science fiction is based on the extrapolation of scientific fact. This, of course, can range in degree. ST has played pretty fast and lose with its science, using hand-wavy technobabble, particularly from TNG on. Doctor Who is even less scientific than ST, but it's all fun to watch.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have really hard sf like the Martian, 2001 and 2010, Niven's Ringworld, anything by Alistair Reynolds or Vernor Vinge, Stephen Baxter, etc.
So, in general, you're not going to see the supernatural in science-fiction but, as several people noted, there are exceptions.
Ron Moore was mentioned early on. He referred to himself as a "recovering Catholic." So he's an atheist now, but he included the supernatural, God, angels, etc., in Battlestar Galactica. I recall reading an interview where he wanted to explore the effect of religion on people. The original BSG, of course, was inspired by the Book of Mormon since Glen Larson was a member of the church of LDS. So, I think Moore felt he could legitimately explore the supernatural and religious beliefs in BSG especially since the original show did that. What's even more fascinating to me is that he made the Cylons religious too, them being monotheistic while the humans were polytheistic. I personally didn't have any problem with the end of BSG except for them destroying the Galactica at the end. They should've landed it on the dark side of the moon or something and then jumped ahead thousands of years to see astronauts discovering it, kind of like the James Hogan Giants books.
Others brought up Babylon 5. JMS said he didn't believe religion would die out in a few hundred years as many atheists believe and, again, that was a topic he wanted to explore in B5 as well, e.g. humans and the Mimbari having the same souls.
Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy involves dead spirits from hell possessing the living in an interstellar culture. It's a great, massive space opera.
I read another book, Calculating God by Robert Sawyer. I won't spoil it, but in this hard sf story God does show up at the end and completes a plan. It was a good read but I didn't care for the end. It was cold, in the vein of Arthur C. Clarke's books.
Clarke is an interesting case in the sense that he said that advanced technology would always seem like magic to a primitive culture. He envisioned a collective, galactic mind in Childhood's end and the higher level energy beings in the 2001 books. Basically, imo, he was writing about gods, those these gods evolved naturally or, in the case of the 2001 books, eventually took their own evolution in hand. They eventually came to act as gods to more primitive life forms.
And religion and the nature of existence are tackled in Clarke and Dr. Gentry Lee's Rama series and Lee's Bright Messengers.
Carl Sagan's novel Contact is similar to Clarke's works (they were friends). Also, IIRC, Dan Simmons alluded to Jesus in his Hyperion books.
And everyone knows how religion was examined in Herbert's Dune and its sequels.
So that's stuff I can recall off the top of my head with regard to religion and the supernatural occurring in sci-fi.
Now, personally speaking as someone who is both a decently devout Catholic and has a PhD in AE with a dissertation that involved studying both classical physics and quantum mechanics, I think it is definitely a challenge to bridge the science-religion gap. One involves fact, the other, faith and that's a struggle for most people. More fundamentalist religious folks bag on atheists and agnostics and I think that is entirely wrong and definitely unchristian. Not believing in God and the supernatural is definitely a entirely legitimate viewpoint in this life. I don't blame them at all. It's hard to believe in God in light of how rotten we are as humans and how the world really is going to heck. It's hard to believe in miracles.
Speaking for myself though, I choose to believe. I've been scorned for that online as I'm sure other here have been as well and, really, like I said, some fake Christians have scorned the folks who are good who just don't believe in God. I just look at it that we're all on our journey in life and we should treat each other with kindness and respect. Everyone should be free to choose what they believe in without scorn, hatred, etc. As a Christian, I believe we're all children of God and that all can be saved if their hearts and acts are in the right place. I don't think God plays favorites at all. He's too big for that.
Well, "fact" isn't really a scientific term; there's data and there are theories based on the data, but there's always room for doubt since new data could change things. Rather, science fiction is based on concepts founded in scientific theory, even if it's an unverified theory or if it's applied loosely for the sake of the story. There is no theoretical basis for things like ghosts and spirits and magic. It used to be believed that there might be scientific merit in paranormal or psychic phenomena, but no one ever managed to confirm them with evidence or formulate theoretical models of what caused them and how they worked, and without those, they aren't science. Still, a lot of "soft" sci-fi still includes "psionics" because there's a lot of precedent in the genre, from the era where it was taken seriously.
Really, TNG was initially the best Trek show at offering ideas that weren't technobabble but had a real scientific basis behind them. A lot of the scientific and technical talk in early seasons is grounded in reality, like the periodic nova star in "Evolution," or the "Kerr loop of superstring material" that created the time warp in "Yesterday's Enterprise" -- which, aside from the error of using "superstring" to mean "cosmic string," is a much more plausible basis for a time warp than the gibberish chroniton whoozits of later shows, since a Kerr ring is a rotating black hole singularity that could theoretically function like a spacetime wormhole, and cosmic strings are as dense as singularities. It was Voyager where the technobabble really degenerated into nonsense and made-up words.
DW has only once made any attempt at scientific credibility, during the Second Doctor era when Cybermen co-creator Kit Pedler was the technical consultant. Otherwise it's been entirely fanciful. It's long struck me as incongruous that it started out trying to be an educational show, but based its history stories in reality while going for flights of fancy with their science fiction stories.
I wouldn't call Niven's stuff all that hard, considering it relies a lot on arbitrarily advanced alien technologies that do whatever the story requires, like hyperdrive, General Products hulls, scrith, stasis fields, and whatnot, in addition to things like telepathy and alien ancestors for humanity.
The original BSG had to disguise its religious themes and pass off its supernatural beings as Sufficiently Advanced aliens, to avoid upsetting network censors. As for the reboot, I think of it as magic-realist science fiction.
The soul thing was presented as a belief of the Minbari religious caste, not a definite fact. Arguably,
the reason their Triluminary read Sinclair as having a "Minbari soul" was that he was actually Valen and the device detected Valen's DNA in him. Since he'd introduced human genes into the Minbari gene pool a millennium earlier, the Minbari detected familiar elements in the humans they scanned and interpreted that as Minbari souls being reborn as human.
Granted, there were the Soul Hunters, but it was left ambiguous whether what they were doing was actually capturing people's souls or just recording their consciousness somehow. Many B5 characters were motivated by religious or supernatural belief, but the show only portrayed it as a personal motivation, not an objective fact.
The thing about B5, though, is that JMS touted it as a much more scientifically plausible show than Star Trek or anything else on TV, but apparently he didn't actually know anything about science or medicine and didn't bother to consult anyone who did, so his idea of what was scientifically plausible was usually utter nonsense, like characters' health and life expectancy being determined by their reserviors of "life energy" like video game character health bars. The only science the show got right, basically, was centrifugal gravity and the way space fighters maneuvered.
Or to our culture if we encountered one so advanced we were primitive in comparison.
And even then it was like "Mmmm, smell those molten mercury fumes! This reminds me of when I lived next to a brewery."
Maybe, but I think we all knew who Iblis was supposed to be.
This is true. It indeed did start out as an educational show but then when they saw how the SF stuff became a massive hit and the audience numbers had skyrocketed they ditched that like a hot coal. It's mentioned in books a few times and in that anniversary movie they did about how the show came to be.
And even then it was like "Mmmm, smell those molten mercury fumes! This reminds me of when I lived next to a brewery."
Maybe, but I think we all knew who Iblis was supposed to be.
John Steed?
It's been some time since I saw some of the relevant episodes, like River of Souls, Day of the Dead, and Lost Tales, but I sometimes felt that JMS wasn't making an effort to keep up that degree of ambiguity.
Well, B5 took the existence of some kind of metaphysical "life energy" for granted, as well as telepathy and incorporeal beings, so it basically took the same tack as Star Trek and a lot of other sci-fi, the assumption that a consciousness can exist separately from its physical brain. It's basically the same approach as a lot of soft SF, taking things that are functionally equivalent to magic and the supernatural and sticking sciencey-sounding labels on them like "psionic" and "incorporeal" and such, in order to create the pretense that they have a non-spiritual explanation understandable by future science.
(Also, splitting hairs, but "Day of the Dead" was the one post-season 2 episode that wasn't by JMS, but by Neil Gaiman.)
Right, I intended to mention that. But someone as focused as controlling his show as JMS was seems unlikely to have let Gaiman do anything too incompatible with his show, even though Gaiman was already a big name at the time.
I was surprised when I read the scriptbook, though. There was some dialogue that was so painfully clunky in Day of the Dead I thought JMS must have rewritten it. But there it was in Gaiman's book.
I found "Day" really refreshing because it was the first time in a long time that the dialogue didn't sound like JMS talking to himself, but finally had someone else's voice and sensibilities.
I loved Neil’s concept of the Endless (the Greek Pantheon struck me as Big Brother meets the Boys).
What puzzles me is the Egyptian concepts of the afterlife.
The strict materialist viewpoint is that each of us is the mind running in our meatware—if soul was outside “our bodies, ourselves” then Phineas Gage’s injury should have slowed-not changed-his nature.
Sci-fi allows a lifeforce for Matilda May to drain—and Good Omens has the imp and angel thing down—but the ancient Egyptians had all that beat with each of us having eight aspects in about the most complicated cosmology my binary-addled brain ever experienced:
Khet (body)
Sah (spiritual body?)
Ren (name)
Ba (personality)
Ka (vital essence)
Ib (heart)
Shuyet (shadow)
Sekhem (power…or form)
Known together as the Akh in the afterlife.
The complicated things that are hallucinated…wow.
A very atypical book by Norman Mailer was ANCIENT EVENINGS (followed by the 2014 film “River of Fundament”)——a work perhaps inspired by the pulp “Tarbis of the Lake” that HPL may have had a hand in.
Speaking of which, Simon & Schuster are releasing “The H. P. Lovecraft Experience,” as described by S.T. Joshi on his August 11, 2025 blogpost—which also features part 2 of his history of atheism titled:
“The Downfall of God:”
stjoshi.org
What puzzles me is the Egyptian concepts of the afterlife.
The strict materialist viewpoint is that each of us is the mind running in our meatware—if soul was outside “our bodies, ourselves” then Phineas Gage’s injury should have slowed-not changed-his nature.
Sci-fi allows a lifeforce for Matilda May to drain—and Good Omens has the imp and angel thing down—but the ancient Egyptians had all that beat with each of us having eight aspects in about the most complicated cosmology my binary-addled brain ever experienced:
Khet (body)
Sah (spiritual body?)
Ren (name)
Ba (personality)
Ka (vital essence)
Ib (heart)
Shuyet (shadow)
Sekhem (power…or form)
Known together as the Akh in the afterlife.
The complicated things that are hallucinated…wow.
A very atypical book by Norman Mailer was ANCIENT EVENINGS (followed by the 2014 film “River of Fundament”)——a work perhaps inspired by the pulp “Tarbis of the Lake” that HPL may have had a hand in.
Speaking of which, Simon & Schuster are releasing “The H. P. Lovecraft Experience,” as described by S.T. Joshi on his August 11, 2025 blogpost—which also features part 2 of his history of atheism titled:
“The Downfall of God:”
S. T. Joshi - Blog for 2025
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