Exactly!

Well, my new SF book is starting off promising:

Read this in the first couple of pages of James Blish’s A Case of Conscience. The setting: a two-man station on the jungle planet of Lithia. Here’s part of a discussion between the biologist, who happens to be a Jesuit, and the physicist, working to decide whether the planet would be a suitable port of call for Earth, without damaging either world.


“Well, don’t forget that Lithia is my first extra-solar planet,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “I think I’d find any new habitable world fascinating. The infinite mutability of life forms, and the cunning inherent in each of them … It’s all amazing, and quite delightful.”

“Why shouldn’t that be sufficient?” Cleaver said. “Why do you have to have the God bit, too? It doesn’t make sense.”

“On the contrary. It’s what gives everything else meaning,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “Belief and science aren’t mutually exclusive – quite the contrary. But if you place scientific standards first, and exclude belief, admit nothing that’s not proven, then what you have is a series of empty gestures. For me, biology is an act of religion, because I know that all creatures are God’s – each new planet, with all its manifestations, is an affirmation of God’s power.”


Now all that remains to be seen, er, actually, read, is whether the book stays true to this premise or works to undermine it …