'It does so more in the manner of an Old Testament prophet than a futurologist.'

Science fiction author Philip Purser-Hallard looks at faith in an increasingly futuristic world

I often tell people that science fiction doesn’t set out to predict the future.

The fact that, in this unthinkably futuristic year of 2007, humanity has yet to set foot on Mars, build intelligent robots or wipe itself out in a cataclysmic nuclear holocaust, shouldn’t reflect badly on the many stories of the future in which these are supposed to have happened years ago.

As far as science fiction (SF) deals with the actual future, it does so more in the manner of an Old Testament prophet than a futurologist. Rather than telling us, ‘This is what will happen,’ it warns us, ‘This is what might happen if we’re not careful.’

Bleep Impact

The difficulty with such admonitions, however, is that the excesses of popular SF tend to discredit them in the eyes of many.

How can we seriously the suggestion that, for instance, an asteroid might collide with the Earth, destroying so much of the biosphere as to make human survival highly problematic?

It’s ‘pure sci-fi’. And ‘sci-fi’, as we all know, is nonsense about flying saucers, men with pointy ears and cute robots going bleep.

This failure to suspend disbelief could literally be disastrous.

Defending the planet from stray space debris is a vital business, to which national governments and academic departments are devoting serious attention – yet the politicians (and ultimately the publicly-funded academics) answer to an electorate who may find the idea silly because they saw it at the cinema once with Bruce Willis.

As so often with SF’s doomsday scenarios, the remoteness of the event’s probability must be considered in conjunction with the scale of its potential consequences.

The frequency of major asteroid collisions is counted in tens of millions of years, but if one occurred tomorrow, our civilisation would collapse like a house of cards in a hurricane.

It may, in fact, be very unlikely indeed… but it only needs to happen once.

Blank Stares

Scientists who espouse unorthodox theories such as the ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics often encounter this same ‘Argument from Incredulity’, more picturesquely called the ‘Blank Stare Argument’.

Quite rational people may reject a hypothesis on the basis, not of careful consideration of the evidence, but of their own lack of imagination. If a concept won’t fit with what’s already in our heads, we assume it can’t be true.

Christians who are required to defend our beliefs to others (which these days means most of us, and quite right too) will be familiar with the Blank Stare Argument.

Somebody may tell us that the idea of God is intrinsically silly, only to reveal later that what they’re actually rejecting is the pop-culture image of a bearded old man and his backing harpists boogieing amid the cumulonimbi.

As with SF, a purely cosmetic accident of perception has contaminated the substance of the argument.

While fun, escapist ‘sci-fi’ has its place, SF also has a vital social responsibility.

When warning of extreme scenarios – asteroid impact, plagues of self-replicating nanotechnology, artificial rogue black holes – its duty should be to present them such that they might fit inside a reasonably open mind, rather than making them absurd by association.

And who knows – maybe a mind which has already stretched to accommodate such unlikely apocalypses, might also find room for the idea of a saving God.

• Read Philip Purser-Hallard's blog