In the nineteen-sixties, the music media encouraged the notion that a young rock-and-roll fan had to side with either the Beatles or their rivals, the Rolling Stones. On some level, it must have made sense, given the growing aesthetic divide between the music the two world-famous groups were putting out. But, at bottom, not only was there no rivalry between the bands (it was an invention of the music papers), there was no real need, of course, to choose one or the other. In the fifties, something of the same dynamic must have obtained between Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, two popular genre writers, each with his own worldview.
Bradbury and Asimov had much in common: both were (probably) born in 1920, both attended the very first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939, both began publishing in pulp magazines in the forties, and both had an aversion to airplanes. That Bradbury spent most of his life in California and Asimov in New York made for a potentially interesting cultural contrast, though it never seems to have been played up. Still, it may explain something of the basic difference between the two writers as it comes through in the video above, a compilation of talk-show clips in which Bradbury and Asimov respond to questions about their religious beliefs, or lack thereof.
Asimov may have written a guide to the Bible, but he was hardly a literalist, calling the first chapters of Genesis “the sixth-century BC version of how the world might have started. We’ve improved on that since. I don’t believe that those are God’s words. Those are the words of men, trying to make the most sense that they could out of the information they had at the time.” In a later clip, Bradbury, for his part, confesses to a belief in not just Genesis, but also Darwin and even Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who theorized that characteristics acquired in an organism’s lifetime could be passed down to the next generation. “Nothing is proven,” he declares, “so there’s room for a religious delicatessen.”
One senses that Asimov wouldn’t have agreed, and indeed, would have been perfectly satisfied with a regular delicatessen. Though both he and Bradbury became famous as science-fiction writers around the same time — to say nothing of their copious writing in other genres — they possessed highly distinct imaginations. That works like Fahrenheit 451 and the Foundation trilogy attracted such different readerships is explicable in part through Bradbury’s insistence that “there’s room to believe it all” and Asimov’s dismissal of what he saw as every “get-rich quick scheme of the mind” peddled by “con men of the spirit”: each point of view as thoroughly American, in its way, as the Beatles and the Stones were thoroughly English.
Related content:
Isaac Asimov Explains His Three Laws of Robots
Carl Sagan Answers the Ultimate Question: Is There a God? (1994)
50 Famous Academics & Scientists Talk About God
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
So, whats your point?
The point is religion is just like choosing to watch a television show. You can sample different types and no harm will come from it.It is just entertainment not reality.
Religion had several major purposes:
1) It solidified the tribe against the “other.”
2) The concept of the afterlife, even if in Hell, made killing others so much easier.
3) It obviated the need to do the hard work of thinking.
4) If the tribe committed atrocities, they were excused by the sanction of the God.
5) If the tribe failed, that was explained by the tribemembers not being pious enough.
6) The effects of (5) and (6) meant that the priests and rabbis would always win.
who cares what untrained Biblical scholars who were nonbelievers think? they dead and know God and Christianity is real now anyways. Forever and ever without end.
Religion was — and is — a means of controlling the population, surely? The priest/vicar/rabbi was seen as your god’s mouth-piece on earth, and if he said that there was an afterlife, beneficent or otherwise, the populace was usually so ill-educated that they dare not contradict him.
Thus, the threat of an afterlife spent in torment was rather a good incentive to toe the line and not rock the Establishment boat, as it were. Witness our own lawless times and the concomitant decline of religious belief.
How can two dead guys weigh in on anything???
Wow…Dingo is right…won’t you guys be surprised in the afterlife…Say hi to Carl Sagan while your down there..
Brian…it’s “you’re.” The religious are typically illiterate.
These guys are speculative fiction writers, not scientists, so do let’s make allowances. I’m a writer myself, sometimes speculative, but mostly striving to entertain. Care for some entertainment? Go to Amazon, books, search term Garman Lord. What entertains me is the thought that there are three kinds of deep thinkers in the world, scientists, theologians and philosophers, all writing, supposedly, about the same thing, ultimate reality, so why are all their descriptions of ultimate reality all so ultimately different? I like to bear that conundrum in mind as I write and speculate; it keeps me from getting cocky.
The real fantasy is believing that evolution is responsible for the world around us.
Everyone agrees that it is utterly ridiculous to believe that the keyboard that I am currently typing on evolved from billions of years… yet people believe that the hand and fingers that I use to type this message, which is infinitely more advanced than this keyboard… was evolved over billions of years.
Evolution is super attractive simply because there is no “higher authority” to account to.
What real evidence do we have to show Evolution is true? There are no transition fossils across species. What scientific method can we validate our theories are true from something that happened billions of years ago? How does evolution explain where intelligence came from? It is all technobabble that you really have to take by faith… actually more like blind faith.
No think you… frankly I do not have enough faith to believe in evolution.
Anyone with a modicum of training in philosophy and logic understands the concept of magical thinking.
A reasonably comprehensive introduction to the study of philosophy includes Descartes, and the origin of skeptical philosophy.
It also includes a study of why proofs of the existence of a Deity inevitably fail.
What’s left is the scientific method.
It has an advantage religion lacks: it works.
Where’s the evidence of God’s existence? Oh… that’s right, there’s faith. You don’t need proof when you have faith.
You have the gist of it but you have some errors that need to be addressed. It was the Code of Hammurabi that was the model for “law” and how crimes would be handled. It preceded the bible by about 300 years. But it was Christianity with similar Mosaic law that was more than likely responsible for proliferating the concept throughout the western world. It was elf-serving priests who are responsible for twisting religion so that they could favor their own pocket books and banks in their dogged determination for the bible to be taken as the literal word of God. Surely the word was given with some flexibility to allow it to remain relevant to the changing times. I mean, if something was meant to endure throughout eternity, there would absolutely have to be room for interpretation. I believe that’s what the article was inferring.
Why is there so much vitriol on both sides of this dialogue? “The religious are typically illiterate”. “The irreligious are typically mean and spiteful”. Neither comment does much to advance the conversation — it just demonstrates a fear of perspective of others so it is easier to shut them down with insults. Let’s have real, thoughtful, respectful conversations. Let’s stop bashing each other and picking out microscopic defects (that we all have) and start listening to each other.
Religion was the first science, science the first religion.
It all had to do with trying to explain:
snow
rain
death
life
the sun
the moon
etc.
All the other shit came later.
Ok. I read it. It’s a rambling article about 2 dead men who didn’t condone or practice “religion.” From a Christian perspective, that’s their choice since we are given free will. The problem with that lies within the fact that no one we know–outside Jesus Christ– has ever been documented as having “descended into hell” at death, only to rise again to ascend to heaven, again, with the watchful eyes of witnesses to that fact. While they’re both great writers, I don’t read them for their religious beliefs.
All agnostic and atheist always call it a religion. However, it is about you having a relationship with Christ Jesus. Whom by the way has full documentation of 500 witnesses of him being alive after death. It is your soul that we are talking about. Where do you want your soul to be? In Heaven, where you are loved, cared for, merciful, kind, compassionate, humble, forgiven, are all the qualities of. Or perhaps you want the opposite there of, hate, anger, envious, jealous, mocking, selfish, a place of no water to quench you thirst, the absence of God whom created you, constant bullying by the dark angles whom where thrown out of Heaven. Ultimately it is your choice, as is given to you from God. Just in case you choose Christ, repent your sins publicly with witnesses, be genuine and sincere for he will know. Ask for him to come into you, body, mind, soul and spirit in his name, Christ Jesus. Get connected to him, through the spirit (his helper) by reading the Bible and pray daily or as often you are compelled. Just for your info, my very 1st verse written upon my heart is from the Book of Mathew, Chapter 7, verse 14; “Small is that door, narrow is the path that leads to life and few will find it.” That door is opened by Christ, either he and you have a relationship or not, for he will know, whom opens or closes that door. Narrow is the path, that being the example Christ had used and demonstrated while here upon earth. Remember I will not judge you in your choice, for it is God’s and Christ’s alone. I am a fellow citizen in the Kingdom of Christ. Let me be the 1st to say welcome brother or sister. Have a Blessed day everyone.
True religion is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, body, and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself.” This is of course a seeming oversimplification…
Evolution and a higher authority aren’t mutually exclusive. Higher authority’s pulling the Evolution strings.
A fascinating book for enquiring minds is Dr. Armand M. Nicholi’s “The Question of God”, subtitled “C.S.Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex and the Meaning of Life”. If you saw the recent movie FREUD’S LAST SESSION (2023) with Anthony Hopkins, the book is a much more far-reaching and profound examination of the convictions of two of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers. Unfortunately, you can’t “get at” God from an anthropological or historical angle. It needs to be from a personal angle, which is what this book does.
So many people talking about the opinions of “two dead writers, who aren’t even scientists”, this in defense of ideas written down by people who are also dead and also not scientists.
Citation Needed!!
Religion is whatever anyone chooses to believe about anything and everything they don’t understand.
No one really knows and no one ever will know what the ultimate truths are.
The underlying problem with religion comes from those self-appointed individuals or groups of individuals who have concocted it into serving their own selfish interests for power, wealth, or any myriad of other anti-social reasons whether seemingly well intended or not.
The only avenue remotely capable of reaching the truth is science.
There is not a single religion, faith, belief, pronouncement or writing that has ever answered any question of who we are; where we came from; or why we are here.
Virtually every bit of our compendium of knowledge currently in existence has come from science.
So I’m going with that.
“Virtually every bit of our compendium of knowledge currently in existence has come from science.” Every bit? As a person trained in the physical sciences, I kind of doubt the sweeping generality of that statement. Science is very model-driven. Some would claim that science can explain everything. I have to counter that by saying that science doesn’t explain; it describes. Science (as you said) can answer the question “How?”, but it can’t answer the question “Why?”. And you should give a little credit to philosophy and mathematics. Two words: Gödel’s Theorem.
Ray Bradbury had a high school education. But an amazing imagination…
Issac Asimov however was a scientist, and also wrote Non Fiction. We was a Bio Chemistry Professor. No allowances needed.