sir_guinglain

So wrote one Rev John D Beckwith in a 1972 paperback called The Making of Doctor Who. We have talked about this momentous little publication before: it was the first Whovian reference book ever published; the only source of information on the early years most of us had before Jeremy Bentham started cranking out xeroxes. 

Why on earth was a C of E vicar asked to contribute an essay to a book which was mainly about special effects, Bill Hartnell’s CV and how they filmed the Sea Devils? I think that there is a pretty clear answer to that question. 

The Making of Doctor Who also contained an earnest little essay, presumably by Terrence Dicks, about the “science” in “science fiction”. It explains the TARDIS’s dimensions in terms of flat-landers, cubes and tesseracts; and points out that strange things happen to time when you approach the speed of light. It tells us, wrongly, that people in olden times believed that if you sailed far enough you would fall off the edge of the world: but it makes the much better point that although we know the world is round, we largely feel that it is flat. It blows our mind by telling us about non-Euclidian geometry: if you travel a hundred miles East, a hundred miles South, a hundred miles West and a hundred miles North, you don’t end up back where you started, because the surface of the earth is curved! And if you cut an orange into eight  segments, you end up with “a triangle with a square corner”. (Rather delightfully, my copy of the book has half-century old orange juice stains on the pages!)

I am afraid Dicks wanted us to draw rather anti-scientific conclusions from all this. We shouldn’t laugh at the sailors who thought the world was flat because some of our ideas might be wrong too. If we can be surprised by four-dimensional cubes and the geometry of curved surfaces, then might there not be all sorts of perspectives from which even more surprising things could be true? So, Daleks and sonic-screwdrivers — why not? It is a hand-wave which has turned up often enough in Doctor Who scripts. Bumblebees would be unable to fly if they were fixed winged aircraft, therefore aerodynamics is false, therefore you can believe anything you want to believe about anything.

The essay also introduces young readers to Femi’s paradox. Space is big, right? So “lets be gloomy” and assume that only one star in a hundred has a planet going round it and only one planet in a hundred as life on it and only one life-form in a hundred is intelligent and only one intelligent life form in a hundred has space ships….then (what with space being so big) that’s still a thousand space-going civilisations in Our-Galaxy-Alone.

So where the hell are they?

Dicks has two theories.

1: Those thousand space faring civilisations have got a hundred thousand million stars to check up on (in Our-Galaxy-Alone). And it takes an awfully long time to travel between them. (Did I mention that space was big?) So doubtless they’ll get around to visiting Earth in the next thousand years.

2: Maybe they have visited us in the past, but we didn’t spot them, because we weren’t “scientific enough”.

As evidence, Dicks points, not to the Pyramids or the Nascar lines, but to a book he calls The Holy Bible (in italics). He quotes the passage about the Four Living Creatures of Ezekiel. Aliens, obviously. He could also have pointed to the “wheel in the wheel” which “went up on their four sides and turned not when they went.” No less a person than Eugene H Peterson thinks that sounds a lot like a gyroscope.

And surely this is why they found a Vicar to say some nice things about Doctor Who on the final pages of the book? We have just, pretty blasphemously, claimed that one of the people who wrote the actual Bible — one of the people who, according to Christians, foretold the coming of Jesus — was an ignorant savage who couldn’t tell a four-headed ET from a Seraphim.

So here is the Reverend Beckwith to provide some balance.

Human beings have always looked up at the sky and made up stories, right? So Greek and Roman myths about the sun and the moon are in a very real sense a kind of olden days science fiction. And scientists and science fiction writers wonder what the universe is like, don’t they? Which is in a very real sense the same thing as the people of the Old Testament “looking for god in the heavens”. And get this — Christians think that Time and Space was made by God! So exploring Time and Space is in a very real sense the same as learning about God, isn’t it? And you know who else talked about Time and Space? Jesus! He told his followers that “God can be found and seen in everything around them” and also that “it is no good looking for God way out in space if we don’t recognise him in our familiar surroundings.” (Er…Citation needed.) Space exploration is a Good Thing, because it helps us understand that the Universe “can only have been planned by something greater than Man himself.” If we discover non-human sentient beings in Space, then God made them as well. The Bible totally says there are angels, who are certainly non-human and certainly sentient. So you could say that they are in a very real sense, “the first spacemen”. “Some people” even think the idea of angels came from alien visitations. And Doctor Who fights bad guys, which “proves that there is one basic Truth in God’s creations, and this is that the most valuable and worthwhile thing is goodness”. That is, in a very real sense, the point of Christianity, that good things are good and bad things are bad and good will win out in the end. We will now sing hymn number 425, All Things Bright and Beautiful…

Dicks’ essay was entitled “Could It All Be True?” But perhaps “It” doesn’t just refer to Zarbi and Silurians and boxes that are bigger on the inside than the outside, but the burning bush and the manna from heaven and the star of Bethlehem as well? The transition from Dicks talking about Ezekiel on page 108 and the Rev. saying that science fiction and Christianity were basically the same thing on page 109 doesn’t amount to a coherent argument: but it planted the idea in my head. The answer to both questions might very well be “Yes”. It evoked a mental mood in which watching Doctor Who on Saturday and going to Sunday School on Sunday were not incompatible and that reading Chris Godfrey stories and reading Every Boys Book of Bible Stories were not contradictory. I think that for the next decade (from the age of about nine to the age of about nineteen) I pretty much took it for granted that Kubrick’s "Dawn of Man" was more or less the literal truth; and that that literal truth was more or less what the book of Genesis “really meant”.

As has been said before: it was not a very healthy state of mind to be in. I was one of the Brainy People who the Man in the Street looked down on; but I was also one of the enlightened modern scientists, free from the arrogance of the pharisaical Victorians. I could listen to the preacher preaching and say “Aha; he doesn’t know he is really talking about aliens”, but I could read a science fiction writer talking about aliens and say “Aha, but the writer doesn’t know he is really talking about God.”

In 1963, the Rev JAT Robinson famously conceded that science had proven that God did not exist, but that it was okay to carry on worshipping a non-existent being because “God” really meant “whatever is most true and most important.” When you say that “God is love” you really mean that love is the most really, really, real thing that there is and you are definitely in favour of it" Robinson’s book was entitled Honest to God. Rev Beckwith’s essay was rather pointedly entitled “Honest to Doctor Who”.

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