The movies make people doubt god
I can hear the Dobsons, Robertsons and Falwells screaming that headline at their audiences now. Bill O’Reilly will develop an elaborate conspiracy theory on how Hollywood is subverting moral values by making people question their belief in god. Actually, working on one movie caused one actor to become an atheist. Except, he kinda was already.
Actor Cillian Murphy says that after working on the yet to be released scifi film Sunshine caused his view on the existence of god to change from agnosticism to atheism:
He says, “I was agnostic before this film. Now I’m very much an atheist.
“Not just because I spent time with these guys–they just confirmed what I’d always suspected.
“For me, the film ultimately is a battle between science and religion, or science instead of fundamentalism.”
Sunshine is set 50 years into a future where our sun is dying. A spaceship is launched with a device that is hoped will reignite the sun’s nuclear furnace but out of radio contact with Earth the mission starts to come apart. Aside from the obvious question of why humans needed to be sent on a mission that could probably have been handled much better by a robotic spacecraft, Murphy seems to not realize that he was already an atheist to begin with before starting work on the film.
Agnosticism is of course one form of atheism, and is in fact what most atheists mean when they say they don’t believe in a god. Atheism literally means without god and deals with one’s belief while agnosticism means without knowledge (gnosis is derived from the Greek word for knowledge and refers to spiritual knowledge). Thus one can be either an agnostic or a gnostic atheist depending on whether you believe it is possible to know if a god exists (or not). Most honest atheists will tell you that they are agnostic atheists because true knowledge of the existence of a god is impossible. On the other hand, a gnostic theist would be someone who knows that there is a god (or at least thinks they do) and likely many believers would find such a person as insufferable as a gnostic atheist.
While I have a feeling that this film won’t be hard science fiction, it’s an interesting premise and the movie is directed by Danny Boyle who directed Trainspotting so it just might not suck. You can catch the trailer here.
This was posted on the original Neural Gourmet site on March 28, 2007. I still haven’t seen Sunshine but after rereading this post I’m wondering if I should. Did anyone else see this film? How was it?
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Yes, learning is bad because it increases the risks of atheism. Ergo people should be forbidden from reading anything but their Bibles and all will be well. They’ll be bigoted morons who won’t be able to do anything productive, but at least they’ll still have faith.