"Collision Course”
“How could anyone possibly know that a planet on a collision course would not collide... but simply touch?”
~Koenig, to Helena Russell
The moon is going to collide with the much-larger planet Atheria, annihilating Alpha and everyone on it. Desperate measures are mounted to divert the moon from this collision course – a chain of nuclear devices between the planet and the moon, set off in a coordinated explosion to nudge them out of the planet’s path.
With Carter out of commission, Koenig himself flies a reconnaissance mission and is intercepted by a large spaceship from the planet, which proceeds to swallow his Eagle. Exiting the Eagle in the belly of the huge ship, he comes face to face with an older woman dressed in black. She introduces herself as Arra, Queen of Atheria – the planet below. She implores him to stop the Alphan effort to divert the moon, insisting that the meeting of the moon and her planet has been predestined for millions of years. Her planet and all the life on it will be propelled to another plane of existence by the encounter.
Koenig is convinced she is telling the truth, and that he should trust her instruction to take no action. Returning to Alpha, he tells his story – and isn’t believed by anyone, though they give the appearance of accepting what he’s saying. The rest of the command staff thinks he’s gone nuts, but pretends to go along with him. When he realizes they are moving forward without him, he takes action, seizing Main Mission and holding everyone at bay with a stun gun. He won’t let anyone near the switch that will detonate the nuclear charges. This only reinforces everyone’s view that he is delusional.
A brawl breaks out, and the clock runs out: the moon has passed the point of no return, and it’s too late. It drifts into Atheria – which vanishes completely as the moon passes, unharmed.
Helena later apologizes, but he dismisses any need for it: his story was crazy, who could possibly have believed it?
Of all the 1999 we’ve surveyed so far, none presents a philosophical question as openly and clearly as this one.
Our heroes actually state it outright, in several scenes, as in an early exchange between Victor Bergman and David Kano, when Alan Carter’s Eagle is hopelessly lost in a radiation cloud. Koenig has gone out in another Eagle to try to find him, though there is little hope that he will:
“No instruments, visibility nil, and he has no idea where Alan is,” Sandra reports.
“It defies logic,” Kano says to Bergman.
“Yes,” Bergman replies, “it’s a thing called ‘faith’.”
And later, faith vs. reason is openly stated again, as Koenig receives from Arra her plea that he do nothing about their impending collision:
“Are you asking me to tell them to do nothing?” he replies. “How can I do that? They’ll need facts, logical explanations. They’re all, all of them, logical men and women! There is a way; if you come with me, Arra. You could help me to persuade them just by your presence!”
“I cannot come with you,” she tells him. “We both have our parts to play. Yours is to do nothing. I... I have much to do.”
“What you’ve told me sounds magnificent here, in this chamber, and from your lips. But how will it sound in the cold light of Moonbase Alpha? They’ll never believe me. They already think I’m suffering from radiation sickness. They simply will not believe me.”
“That is the test of your command. Are you unfit to play the part for which you have been destined since the beginning of time? I have faith in you, John Koenig.”
“And I have faith in you. But what is faith against the fact of imminent collision? I’ll need to know more. I'll need to know what you are going to do.”
“I go to shape the future of eternity. And I need your help.”
Finally, faith vs. reason pops up again with the command staff confronts Koenig over his insistence that they all follow Arra’s directive, and do nothing about the impending collision:
“It’s absurd!” Paul Morrow declares.
"Is it? You didn't see Arra,” Russell replies. “She has convinced John Koenig and as far as I'm concerned I see no reason to doubt his command now."
"It's against every fact and calculation,” Kano objects.
"Facts, calculations - you're beginning to talk like a computer."
“Hmm. Of course, reason and fact are against Arra,” Bergman agrees. “But then the commander's case is not based on reason or fact, but on faith. And I think we should have faith in him."
Koenig is right there listening, and the reality is that Russell and Bergman are just humoring him – they don’t really believe him. Even so, this scene is enough to move our discussion forward.
When we talk about “faith”, sometimes we’re talking about believing something without evidence, and sometimes we’re talking about belief in a person – standing by someone we know in some difficult situation. And in the “Collision Course” problem, we see elements of both, making it a bit hard to untangle.
Philosophy has much to say about the first, and nothing at all to say about the latter, so let’s begin there.
The substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen
It was during the great era of ancient Greece and Rome that the New Testament writer of the letter to the Hebrews (thought by most to be the Apostle Paul) declared, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
This could not be a more perfect definition. Prudent or not, we are obliged to acknowledge that the New Testament is proclaiming that the functions of faith are wish fulfillment and the validation of the imaginary. Faith, per the New Testament, is the Hebrew bridge over the Greek-Roman valley of thought and skepticism. It is a permission slip to continue wandering the halls of mythology.
This permission was increasingly necessary in the ancient world. Already, the Greeks and Romans were looking beyond the Earth into the cosmos, beginning to wonder about what might be out there, and how humanity might fit into it. Put another way, they set the world on the path to knowledge by way of inquiry, and inquiry demands explanation.
With the great minds of Greece and Roman busily beginning to explain things – big things, like the nature of human beings and the universe – there followed a trend in religious rhetoric to step back from explanation. Plato and Aristotle made it their business, then, to push back, to introduce intellectual organization into that rhetoric in an effort to keep explanation important.
This effort, realized in the Forms, centered on demonstrating how religious belief in good and evil could emerge from intellectual reflection. The idea was to soften the perceived dangers of using one’s brain in the indulgence of religious belief, to the end that Reason could be accepted as a precursor to Faith – that thinking rationally might lead one into the light.
This worked reasonably well. The early Christians accepted the compatibility of Reason and Faith, and we can even pick out reasoned arguments in the writings of Paul.
The Stoics, on the other hand, were somewhat accommodating, as well. They embraced the harmony between Reason and Faith, leaning into cosmology and resolved that there was an explicit order to the universe, and it was fine by them if God imposed it. The Epicureans weren’t so accommodating; more skeptical and less dogmatic, they argued for a materialistic worldview, eschewing the ethereal and focusing more on non-divine origins in the roots of human evil.
Much later, St. Augustine was dismissive of any need for reason in coming to faith; that reason was not a path to knowledge of God. Only love of God could impart knowledge of him. This wholesale dismantling of Plato and Aristotle’s Reason->Faith impetus led to the work of Thomas Aquinas, who took the extra step of suggesting that reason alone could bring knowledge of God, and that reason then becomes dependent upon faith. In effect, he boxed reason up so that it wouldn’t run amuck.
God is dead (Nietzsche said)
With the advent of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the role of religious faith in explaining either the nuts and bolts of the universe or the behavior of human beings was over and done. “God is dead,” Nietzsche declared – well in advance of the New York Times – and by “dead” he meant “irrelevant”.
The philosophical contribution here is that with the retirement of supernatural explanations for human nature and mythological explications of human behavior, a new responsibility now looms over humanity – a requirement that we cease being passive in moral judgment, that we have a duty to self and others to self-improve and to push back against that which harms others. Nietzsche went so far as to accuse Christianity of working against this responsibility.
Fides et Ratio
Neither Nietzsche’s say-so nor the unceasing march of science and enlightenment have managed to banish faith altogether, of course, though (as noted above) the deep need to draw upon faith to explain humans and the universe persists, as the religious are still trying to plug God into science’s gaps.
And there is still some philosophical energy in the efforts of faith’s remaining proponents. Fides et Ratio – Rational fideism – holds that faith is necessarily a precursor to knowledge, that reason itself tells us faith is essential to reason. The argument goes like this: in every form of systematic thought, there must be foundational axioms that must initially be accepted as non-self-evident beliefs. This being the case, faith is an essential component of any thought that leads to knowledge. This seems like a me-too argument to stay in the conversation, as faith of this sort doesn’t open any door the faithful are concerned with opening, but okay.
"I think we should have faith in him.”
Reason has been winning for centuries, and reason will win in the end. But it is arguable that this is what 1999 was saying all along in this episode.
On the other hand, the faith being asked of the Alpha command staff is, indeed, “the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.” They hope for survival as they barrel towards doom; they did not see Arra.
Even so, the kind of faith we’re talking about here isn’t the kind that philosophy has been mulling over all these centuries; it’s that other kind we mentioned – belief, not in a set of unproven propositions, but in a person.
Koenig himself wasn’t “acting on faith”; he knew, based on evidence, that he wasn’t hallucinating and that Arra was both immeasurably powerful, as well as trustworthy. She offered up the coordinates to locate Alan under impossible circumstances. Moreover, he was inside the Atherian ship, and had some sense of their cosmological perspective.
He was acting from reason – but his colleagues didn’t have the benefit of the evidence that drove his reasoning.
Their faith, then, was ultimately about him – belief, not in this explanation or that, this unevidenced proposition or that, but in the man. A faith that failed them.
And this is where the episode leaves us, requiring that we examine, in the true fashion of Plato’s Forms, the implied conclusion of the episode: that Faith and Reason went nose-to-nose, and Faith won.
Per Plato, it was just the opposite.
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