Losing Faith in Earth

This week's premiere of Battlestar Galactica picks up where the last season left off: with the Galactica crew looking out at the devastated landscape of Earth. Over the course of the series, the crew has been following the prophecies of Pythia in the hope of finding the mythical planet of Earth and its thirteenth tribe. In the face of the total annihilation of the twelve colonies and the massacre of billions, this hope is all that has kept the Galactica crew going-- all that has kept them alive. With the discovery that Earth, too, has been devastated by a nuclear war-- and that it was a cylon rather than a human planet, anyway-- that hope is gone. With it goes faith, and in some cases even the will to live. Lieutenant Dualla commits suicide. Admiral Adama tries to do the same. Laura Roslin stops taking her cancer treatments, and burns her copy of the scrolls of Pythia. The crew is despondent; fights break out in the halls, and no one quite seems to know what to do.


Arguably, the Galactica crew would have been better off had it never found earth at all. At least then there would be something to look forward to. A while ago I paid tribute to the delay of the parousia. When Jesus didn't return when he said he would, the early Christians deferred his coming into the indefinite future. I used the term "tribute" in a tongue-in-cheek way at the time, but the truth is that there is something to be said for this sort of delay. Jacques Derrida saw in the Messiah's "always coming, never arriving" a useful metaphor for the structure of human experience. If the "goal" of history were ever to definitively arrive, Derrida argued, we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves. We derive the meaning of our existence from our hopes and expectations for the future. When those are lost, something essential of ourselves is lost with them. The Galactica crew has suffered, then, a double blow: not only has the "goal" arrived, but it also wasn't what they were expecting. The messianic structure of their reality has been shattered.


At the end of the episode, a few members of the crew begin to try to grapple with this loss of hope and faith, looking for a way forward. Their efforts will be familiar to anyone who has ever undergone a similar failure of religious belief. Lee Adama tells the Quorum of the Twelve that they are "no longer enslaved by the ramblings of Pythia": they are now free to go where they want to go and be who they want to be. For Lee, however, these words are motivated by necessity rather than conviction. Like many atheists, he is turning lemons into lemonade: the crushing loss of religious faith is interpreted, in retrospect, as liberation. There may be real truth to this interpretation, but it supplants the sense of pain and loss only with time and repetition. Admiral Adama, meanwhile, charts a course for the nearest inhabitable planet. The loss of messianic hope means that a new hope must be constructed, if nothing else than through sheer force of human will. This, too, finds echoes in atheism.

One thing that no one tries to do in the episode is to re-interpret the prophecies or to argue that Earth is still out there. I suspect that we will see this approach in future episodes. This is the way of 2 Peter: the messianic event is deferred into the indefinite future, because the loss of hope is too much to bear. Maybe the crew will even construct new myths to replace the old ones-- turn to new messiahs and new gods.

It should be interesting to see which way-- if any-- wins out in the end.