"Contact" and the God-Concept

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the context in which the film "Contact's" religious theme surfaces, the pattern of ideas and events that point to the centrality of that theme and the means by which the theme is elaborated over the course of the story. The author believes, even though the film is a science-fiction adventure story, "Contact" can be interpreted as an examination of a human encounter with God as shown in both the resolution of the story line and the attributes of character informing the narrative. This paper explains that the relevance of Paul Tillich's God-concept to "Contact" is the film's use of extraterrestrial life in a modern experience as a proxy for examining the unavoidability of cosmic uncertainty and of the unsettling brush between ordinary experience and the infinite.

From the Paper:

"It would be a mistake to consider "Contact" merely a movie "about" religion-science conflict, though Ellie's attempts to articulate the meaning that her space-wormhole experience (and the space program's millisecond of lost radio contact) had for her put her on the verge of saying that the experience was spiritual. For her near-suggestion that the cosmos may include the hand of God, she is essentially shushed in favor of more focus on facts on one hand and accountability for the apparent failure of a very costly science project on the other. That episode is consistent with Carter's view that contemporary culture does not honor but rather trivializes religion: "one should not try to oversimplify the human mind by making religious conviction a ground for invalidating law". In "Contact", what turns out to be Ellie's discovery of a spiritual (not solely spiritual, but not merely scientific, either) connection to the cosmos is what invalidates, and her testimony before a scientific community that does not admit religion into its discourse, even though an explanation without a spiritual dimension does not cover its meaning for her."

More papers on "Contact" and the God-Concept:

• Essay # 15643 : "Contact"
• Persuasive Essay # 106355 : "Religion in the Western Civilization"
• Analytical Essay # 60420 : "Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things"

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