The Force be ...

I wanted to flag up this article on Star Wars with a focus on what it might suggest about the relationship between science and religion. Amongst all the other things is a bit of reference to overarching theological implications or dimensions. One of them is this: "According to Yoda, the force is a universal product of life that binds the universe together and can somehow be felt and manipulated by the sensitive mind. However, because the Force ontologically depends upon life and not vice versa, it differs from similar concepts in the major religions." Which a good remnder that the Force is to be understood as an emergent property of life rather than an originating force or agent. The author doesn't really describe it in those terms and the discussion of reductionism would have been an obvious place to make that kind of a link. In Christian terms, then, I think that we should think of the Star Wars Force as a kind of Principality or Power, noat as some kind of cipher for God or Tao or originating prime Mover. Lucas's own words quoted in the article seem to support the idea that there's more to be explored.

The exploration of good and evil is pretty important too. "when the man we knew as the endearing and precocious Anakin in The Phantom Menace finally rises in his sinister outfit as Darth Vader, it is difficult to shake the feeling that we have just witnessed the birth of a myth. The chilling “Yes, master,” followed immediately by his inquiry about the well-being of Padme, captures in a microcosm the twisted nature of the Dark Side"

For me the disappointment is that the implications for conceiving of good and evil and right and wrong are not more deeply opened up in the films and to a leser extent the article [though it isn't a core aim of the article so it would be unfair to criticise it on those grounds]. For many people, the Force represents a 'neutral' soemthing that is both good and evil and 'salvation' in the Star Wars universe lies in balancing them. This is quite a popularly appealing take on good and evil but it is profoundly disturbing too as well as conflicitng with how we normally live.

An ideology based on the idea that Good an evil need balancing is actually an ideology legitimising oppression, torture, injustice, slavery and so on. Blanace means that evil must continue to exist. It's the old Persian dualism again, as criticised memorably, soundly and ably by CS Lewis in Mere Christianity. Basically the perspective is that while we can conceive of good without evil, we cannot really conceive of evil without good. This means that to propose a moral balance is already to have succumbed to the dark side by atrributing to evil a substantiality it does not have: it is parasitic on good; pure evil does not exist in the way that pure good can and does. Evil is always the distortion or misappropriation of some good.

The best case for a moral balance idea of things rests on seeing good and evil as merely human constructs, something we map onto a neutral or indeferent universe. In which case 'good' and 'evil' are merely our labels for things that we find useful or not, helpful for survival or not, likeable or not and so on. However such an approach actually collapses under the eight of the terms good and evil which cannot be sustained except as ciphers for the much weaker concepts and relativised so much that they simply become statemnts of preference or interest. To sustain a vision of good and evil which can motivate human effort, we have to conceive of existence as fundamentally good and evil as the perversion and distortion of goodness.

If evil is an equal and opposite force to good, then ultimately there is nothing to choose between them: no reason whay we should prefer one over the other. The Star Wars universe, in the end, witnesses to the concept of a univers that is 'created' [?] fundamentally good: because it is recognised that love is better than selfishness, that justice is better than oppression and so forth. Totla relativism or thorough dualism are unsustainable against human experience and 'instincts'.

Even if good an evil were simply human mappings onto an indeifferent universe, we find that we cannot live as if that is the case without undermining the basis for moral action and striving. Back to the same fundamental ethical problem that it always comes back to philosophically.

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