The One, True, Loving, Islamic, Green Bug-Eyed, Pantheistic, Pagan God of the Cylons

Well the new Battlestar Galactica TV show has drawn to a close, and the mysterious identity of the One True God of the Cylons has been revealed, at least as much as it ever will be. So it's time for some final thoughts on a show on which religion played a rather unique role. On Galactica the Cylons, who are a race of intelligent machines waging a war of extermination against humanity, are monotheists who worship the One True Loving God, while humanity is literally pagan, worshiping the same same gods that ancient Greeks did.


The Islamic God of the Cylons

Who was the One True Loving God? According to the show's producers, the show's religious landscape was originally inspired by the Western-Islamic conflict, with the Cylons cast in the role of religious jihadists bent on destruction of the pagan infidels. It was a great idea, and could have led to all kinds of delicious storylines. Our modern society's descent into the neo-paganism of consumerism and scientific materialism could have provided the basis of many episodes. Cylons could have made converts among the humans and imposed Sharia law, etc. But the producers quickly lost interest in this storyline. They were content to exploit the creep-out factor of having machines serenely say to the nuked-over remains of the human race, "God loves you and has a plan for you, and if He wants you to survive He will protect you from me now."


The Green Bug-Eyed God of the Cylons

But religious rhetoric was a constant feature of the series, and the mystery of the identity of the One True Loving God was one of the shows main "teaser" elements. His or her identity would only be revealed in the final episode. So who was this God? Throughout the show my money was on this:

Which is to say, some green bug-eyed (OK red-eyed in this case) monster giving orders from a hidden base ship orbiting the Cylon home-world. A real, flesh and green-blooded creature would have satisfied what I like to call the Midi-Chlorian Principle, which is this:

In any work of science fiction, every mysterious physical, mental or (seemingly) spiritual phenomenon can and must be given a materialistic, pseudo-scientific explanation, no matter how ridiculous or how destructive it is to the story.

The Midi-Chlorian Principle

Science fiction authors are relentless scientific materialists. Any time they incorporate any element in their stories that doesn't have a clear, scientific explanation, I imagine a little voice in the back of their heads torments them until they find something, anything, to explain it away. Perhaps the best, and worst, example of this came from the Star Wars series. The original series introduced the feel-good, gauzy religion of the Jedi, which grants the Jedi a mysterious power over the physical world, and which Yoda describes thus:

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmph. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.

I feel sorry for George Lucas. The little voice in the back of his head must have tormented him for decades, because by the time he got around to completing the second half of the series he somehow convinced himself that it was a good idea to offer this explanation for the source of the Jedi's power: it comes from the midi-chlorians, which are germs that infect the cells of all living beings, the Jedi more than others. They even have a blood test to detect your midi-chlorian count and determine whether you'll make a good Jedi.

There's a kind of storytelling perfection here: the midi-chlorians completely dissipate all trace of mystery from the Force without actually explaining anything, and they do it in a way that is laughably ridiculous. A worse storytelling element is hard to imagine. But at least the voices in Lucas' head are quiet.


The Pantheistic God of the Cylons

But alas, there was no green bug-eyed monster forthcoming in the final episodes of Galactica. Either the producers are immune to the Midi-Chlorian Principle, or they've doomed themselves to decades of torment from the voices in their heads. So I ask again, who is the One True Loving God of the Cylons? One opinion comes from Dr. Gaius Baltar, a character in the series, in the second-to-last episode:

Baltar: I see angels. Angels in this very room. Now I may be mad, but that doesn't mean I'm not right. Because there's another force at work here. There always has been. It's undeniable, we've all experienced it. Everyone in this room has witnessed events that we can't fathom let alone explain away by rational means. Puzzles deciphered in prophesy. Dreams given to a chosen few. Our loved ones dead, risen. Whether we want to call that God or gods or some sublime inspiration or a divine force that we can't know or understand doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's here. It exists. And our two destinies are intertwined in its force.

(Agnostic) Cylon: If that were true, and that's a big 'if', how do I know this force has our best interests in mind? How do you know that God is on your side doctor?

Baltar: I don't. God's not on any one's side. God's a force of nature, beyond good and evil. Good and evil, we created those.

The good doctor is clearly a pantheist. Pan-theism is the idea that all things are a part of God, and that what God is, is simply all things. Pantheists tend to reject the notions of good and evil, since both are part of the world and form a part of God, and instead frame conflict as two sides of the same coin: positive and negative, hot and cold, male and female:

Yin and yang, classical Chinese symbol of conflict as parts of the whole

If only we could see the big picture, the really big picture, we'd see that evil isn't really evil and good isn't really good, that they're both necessary parts of the whole that is God.

It is said that there are two types of pantheism: naturalistic pantheism, which doesn't conceive of God as a sentient, conscious Person, and classical pantheism, of which Hinduism is the prime example, which may conceive of God as a conscious Person. But in any case, I don't know how pantheism could fail to be reductionist, because a creator (or Creator) must always be more than his or her creation. Ghandi's movement from "God is Truth" in his earlier years to "Truth is God" in his later years is a movement from recognition of an attribute of God toward a belief that God is "nothing more than" one of his attributes.

I don't pretend to understand the pantheist point of view; my thinking on this is the same as C. S. Lewis'. After logic led him inexorably and unwillingly to the conclusion that God exists, the atheist-turned-Christian Lewis says he briefly hoped to find that God was "more of a place than a Person." But he quickly rejected this idea. For a God to be the creator of personhood, he must be more than a person, not less. Any "force of nature" god is clearly sub-human, less than a person. In the Trinity Lewis found the more-than-a-person concept he was looking for.


The Pagan God of the Cylons

But the producers of Galactica don't appear to agree with Baltar's pantheistic notion of the Cylon God, because they depict God as much more than a force of nature. He's conscious, he sends his emissaries out into the world (Baltar's "angels," which are people that only Baltar can see), and he manipulates the course of history. The producers laid down their final card with the very last lines of the final episode, when the two "angels" are talking to one another, 150,000 years later (in modern-day Tokyo) about whether the human race is about to repeat the cycle of robot-against-human violence:

Angel that looks like a Cylon: "Let a complex system repeat itself long enough, and eventually something surprising might occur. That too is in God's plan."

Angel that looks like Baltar, leaning forward warningly: "You know he doesn't like that name."

So there you have it, the Cylon God himself rejects the title of "God." He is, therefore, a pagan god, and the whole series turned out to be a conflict between a pagan god that exists v. pagan gods that may or may not exist. Thankfully, this wasn't part of any grand religious scheme on the part of the producers. They themselves admitted that they didn't plan the series out from beginning to end, and it's almost certain that the "angels" in the series were first conceived as Cylon agents appearing to and tormenting Baltar using some unknown alien technology. The producers were therefore saddled with "angels" who initially acted more like demons, and settled in the end to define them as mischievous pixies, who toy with humanity in pursuit of their own hidden agenda.

Actually, this isn't so different than the green bug-eyed monster explanation. A pagan god is just a bug-eyed monster that never dies. Perhaps the producers will silence the voices in their heads by explaining to them that the Cylon god is actually orbiting his home world on a base ship somewhere. It's a far cry from the seamless blending of Catholic theology with the pre-Christian nature worship that you get in Tolkien, but I'll certainly take this whimsical ending to the series over the sincere, neo-pagan humanism of Star Trek.


The Score

Which leads me to the ranking of Galactica in the world of spiritual science fiction and fantasy:

Show/Story	Grade	Comments
The Lord of the Rings	A+	Tolkien's blending of Catholic cosmology with pre-Christian fairy tale elements is so seamless and unassuming that I read the whole trilogy without realizing it had a Christian underpinning. Only when you read The Silmarillion do you see how carefully Tolkien wove his fairy stories into a Christian universe.
Chronicles of Narnia	A-	C. S. Lewis says he wrote his fairy tales to be an antidote to the pagan worldview that he saw present in most fairy tales, most of which literally originated in pre-Christian Europe. The world of these fairy tales is dualistic, meaning that good and evil are depicted as being equally powerful, equally likely to win in their struggle with one another. In the Christian worldview evil is a mere corruption of good, and is infinitely weaker than good. Hence the White Witch retreats in fear before the all-powerful Aslan. C. S. Lewis' stories are refreshing in that they provide almost the only unique depiction of good and evil that you can find in all sci fi/fantasy literature, but his Christian allegories are so heavy-handed that the message often distracts from the story.
Battlestar Galactica	C+	It turned out to be much ado about little, a pagan god fighting pagan gods, but at least they kept us guessing until the end.
Star Wars	D+	The awfulness of the midi-chlorian storyline almost makes you forget that the Force of the original series was already pretty bad, pure saccharine-soaked Kool Aid calculated to offend the fewest possible audience members. But I feel we need to cut Star Wars a break, because it's aim was low to begin with. Star Wars is really a fairy story set in a futuristic world, and the Force was just an excuse to populate the story with wizards and sorcerers.
Star Trek (1990s version)	D-	The later editions of Star Trek lost some of the earlier shows' passion for humanism, and settled into a bland, comfortable scientific materialism, with just enough socialism thrown in to make you glad they never tried to explain their philosophy in any depth. They were never completely cured of the disease of humanism however, as in the movie where the Borg queen decides that humanity is just too darned special to destroy, and instead wants the mighty human race to become equal partners with the Borg. Pity the billions of other, poor races of beings that populate the Star Trek universe! All they can do is look upon us with envy, and like Spock, hope and pray (well hope anyway) that they might one day be as wonderful as us. Strange that in some 40 years of storytelling they've never managed to explain exactly why the human race is so darned wonderful.
Star Trek (1960s version)	F-	A reminder of the famous warning that when people lose their religion, the danger is not that they'll believe nothing, but that they'll believe anything. The original show put the human race on a pedestal with such fervor that it can only be described as true paganism, a true attempt to make gods of men. In some shows they intimated that the destiny of the human race was exactly that, to "evolve" into almighty, omniscient and virtually immortal gods.