{"id":21,"date":"2014-11-14T13:02:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T13:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/?p=21"},"modified":"2014-11-14T13:02:00","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T13:02:00","slug":"scientific-romanticism-in-interstellar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/?p=21","title":{"rendered":"Scientific Romanticism in Interstellar"},"content":{"rendered":"<div dir=\"ltr\">I have a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thegospelcoalition.org\/article\/the-scientific-romanticism-of-interstellar\">piece<\/a> at the Gospel Coalition this morning that is part review and part analysis of the film<i> Interstellar.\u00a0<\/i>In short the movie asks great questions but provides thin answers.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"ltr\"><i>\u00a0<\/i><\/div>\n<div dir=\"ltr\">An excerpt:<\/div>\n<div dir=\"ltr\"><\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div dir=\"ltr\">If Interstellar were a religious text, the dogma it encodes could be called something like \u201cscientific romanticism.\u201d This belief system would hold that science will solve all of our problems one day, even the ones that by definition resist empirical observation and thus exist outside the purview of science (see Sagan\u2019s Contact for another dogmatic specimen). Scientific romanticism works well as a narratival contrivance, but when employed to spice up the lives atheists who otherwise think that they have a clearer-headed view of the universe than those troglodytic believers, it can expose the scarcity of meaning available to those who eschew belief in God.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div dir=\"ltr\">When it speaks of love, the movie is notably utilitarian.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"ltr\">\n<blockquote><p>Love\u2019s value is apparently utilitarian, not ontological. It serves a purpose, but it has no value by itself. In these terms, the self-love of Dr. Mann and the survival instinct that animates his betrayal of our main characters is perfectly legitimate. Cooper calls him a coward because he seeks to preserve himself at the cost of the mission, but we might be reminded that, at this point in the film, Cooper is guilty of the same thing. The elder Dr. Brand\u2019s plan A is a hoax, earth is doomed, so why not return to your loved ones? Dr. Mann is completely justified in his actions, so why all the sinister music while he is doing his thing?<\/p>\n<p>Love is transcendent, the younger Dr. Brand says, but what that means differs from what it means in a world created and sustained by a personal God.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<div dir=\"ltr\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"ltr\">Read the rest <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thegospelcoalition.org\/article\/the-scientific-romanticism-of-interstellar\">here.<\/a><\/div>\n<div style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"><\/div>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have a piece at the Gospel Coalition this morning that is part review and part analysis of the film Interstellar.\u00a0In short the \n<a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/?p=21\"> [...]<\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_excerpt -->","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":393,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,20,27,29,37,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atheism","category-cultural-hermeneutics","category-faith","category-film","category-interstellar","category-science"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sunergoi.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Interstellar-astronauts-e-014.jpg?fit=2560%2C1536&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5ESBE-l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}