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Independence From God... |
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Is It Possible? |
| by Craige McMillan |
| Perhaps it was all those old television episodes of Star Trek and the subsequent movies that implanted within our minds the idea that technology can explain—and in the end accomplish—anything.
I know I enjoyed them. And I suspect they had a subtle but profound effect on my thoughts as well. So it is likely that they had a similar effect on the imaginations and thought process of an entire generation, or two. Most people today would say that technology will eventually be able to do anything. But is that really true? Or does technology, like every other human endeavor, have its limits? That is one of the questions I chose to explore in the Armageddon Story series, with Reconnaissance the opening salvo. Are there really two separate worlds—existences, really—or is the future simply a straight line of progression from the present? You may not believe that novelists explore such ideas, but we do. We just do it with a collection of human beings (you call them characters, but we know they live outside of us), instead of formulas sprawled across chalk boards, or rats and mice being shocked in their cages. Given the number of eyewitness accounts of an afterlife that are circulating among readers at the moment, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discard the notion of an an existence after clinical death in this life. Perhaps the most profound account is Eben Alexander's experience. He is the neurosurgeon whose cerebral cortex was watched on hospital instruments by his colleagues as it shut down. But he didn't die as they expected. He came back days later with a story that makes them very uncomfortable. Why is that? Whether you accept his account or someone else's, it seems that God is difficult to escape—especially in death. Perhaps that is where we ourselves enter the supernatural—and are freed from the natural world? Near-death experiences were one of the reasons I finally wrote Reconnaissance, and am working on the next volume now (Behind Enemy Lines). That, and the characters insisted. Photo: Antennae Galaxy Hubble |
