Product Description

James A. Herrick looks at the surprisingly frequent collusion of science and science fiction for promoting and justifying alternative religions or spiritualities. In these new mythologies, spiritual beings with creation powers or at least highly advanced and friendly aliens are imagined and given plausibility by association in various ways with science. Through film and fiction, these ideas have a far greater social impact than might be expected. Herrick helps us identify these movements and the curious and questionable alliances made so that people of faith can respond to these growing cultural developments that already are having some influence on political, scientific and religious discussions and decisions.

• General readers
• Those interested in apologetics
• Culture-watchers
• Science readers
• Students and professors in the humanities

• A unique look at the development of alternative spiritualities in Western culture
• Probes the pervasive but questionable alliance of science and scientists with religion through science fiction film and literature
• Undergraduate text for apologetics, evangelism, literature and film, and sociology of religion courses
• Of general interest to those interested in new religions, science fiction, popular science and popular culture/film

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #735193 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Brilliant
I expect this will be the most important book on the Christian worldview published in 2008. The breathtaking thesis of the book is, in retrospect, so obvious that one could kick oneself for not seeing it before: science fiction and futurist speculation (dressed up as science) are in fact a new myth created to undermine the narrative of the Christian worldview. Here myth is the key idea: a narrative a culture tells itself in answering the great questions: who are we? where do we come from? what is the problem and the solution? SF culture, and the speculative science of leading lights such as Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, exists to answer all of these questions, but in a way radically at odds with the West of Augustine and Aquinas. Despite some flaws (James Cameron directed the first Terminator movie, not just the second; yes, Star Trek's John de Lancie may be a white male, but the Guinan character, equally old and powerful, is played by a black woman, Whoopi Goldberg; only an American insouciance about European history would describe Irishman Liam Neeson as "British"), the brilliance of the thesis and the detailed exposition wins out.

A Reasonable Guide to Scientific Mythologies
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1AI2NHW9EA31D This is my video review of James A. Herrick, Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious Beliefs (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008). If you'd like to dialogue about this book, please feel free to email me.

Wrong on religion, wrong on science fiction
"...when the question of his own religion's historicity comes up he hurries the matter along, betraying his (willful?) ignorance of Biblical scholarship and criticism."
"...his lack of knowledge about [science fiction] and existing critical work about it casts the entire book in doubt."
"...the entire book is basically an extended straw man argument."

My full review was published by the Internet Review of Science Fiction, and is available here:
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