I’ve heard a lot of comparisons between The Martian and Robinson Crusoe. I understand the juxtaposition between someone shipwrecked and someone stranded on a foreign planet. But the comparisons are very thin and exemplify the fact that no one knows what Robinson Crusoe is really about.
His helmet is cracked just like his theology.
A deserted Mars is a lot like a desert island. But the Mars of the movie is more sterile and desolate, not because it’s so far away from earth, but because it’s so far away from reality, because there is no faith there. Oh sure they throw a crucifix and an almost prayer to whatever gods, but the only god Daemon worships is Science. He prays to Science, does the sacraments of Science (math), and Science saves him, so. . . so he can teach a class on how great man is, I guess. Go Science! Who needs God?
This story is the modern story, the atheist story, it bears more similarities to Verne’s The Mysterious Island than to Daniel Defoe’s work. An Island where the mysteries can all be explained by science. Crusoe’s story is exactly the opposite. The stories of 13th to 19th century seafaring exploration, are Christian stories. Oh sure the Vikings may have discovered North America hundreds of years before Columbus, but who cares? He changed the world. He changed the world for His God. The evidence from his diary is quite clear; he believed he was on a mission from God. It was the great commission that spurred him to take such a risk and sail beyond the map.
The first great task given to Man on this earth was to rule and subdue it and fill it with people. To turn the garden into a city. But rather than filling the earth and building a heavenly Jerusalem they holed up and build Babel. So God intervened and sent them again to their task. He appointed a special people, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They were to be a priestly people spreading God’s blessing to all the earth. Instead they holed up in another city Jerusalem, on the Temple Mount, their robbers den. They thought it was the Heavenly Jerusalem, but again they only created another Babel.
Then Jesus stepped on the scene. He condemned this city and again set his people, now the Church to their task, spreading the Gospel to all the world. It is no accident that he chose fishermen. The people of Israel saw themselves as people of the covenant, the deed to the Land. They were not a seafaring people, they were people of the Land. What’s out there? We are the chosen people, we don’t even need a rapture, we just sit back comfy and watch the world burn, comfy in the promises of God. But the new commission, demanded sea exploration. His disciples were fishers of men, on the sea, which was always associated with the Gentiles. And so that mission extended to the great explorers who carried the Gospel to the far reaches of this earth via the vast oceans.
This was the sea Robinson Crusoe sailed on. Of course the mission was not without it’s faults, as anything good. He found himself on a slave ship sailing to his plantation, when God reached down and crashed his ship on a desert island. Again the hand of God sets man on the correct path. Through this testing Crusoe, studies the Bible he finds amongst the wreckage and becomes a true Christian. He now has hope and a purpose. Not merely to survive and prove the veracity of the human will, nor to vindicate Science. He turns his wilderness his garden, into a city. Then he goes into the world and spreads the Gospel to the savage, whose new name is Friday. This is life on a desert Island, the life missing from Ridley Scott’s Martian soil.
Crusoe’s story is a microcosm of the great expansion of Western Civilization as it spread that civilization to the savages of the world. It wasn’t always pretty, many of them rebelled rejecting Jesus and his saving grace they chose to remain in darkness. Oh to our shame how we romanticize them today. And out of this fulfillment to fill, multiply, spread, rule, subdue, and preach came the very science which modern man now worships.
In the movie the whole world is united in rescuing this astronaut. The utopia portrayed is astoundingly naieve. Crowds gather in the streets to watch on giant screens as the astronaut is reconnected with his companions and brought back to earth. The reality is that the worship of Science separates people more than it ever brings them together. We each think we are the Daemon superman who can control every aspect of creation with our mastery of Science, we don’t need other people or God. Besides why gather in the streets to watch something that I can watch by myself on my iPhone? Large groups of godless people are more likely to burn and destroy than they are to cheer for a lost astronaut. Or perhaps they will be blown to bits by terrorists. Which brings us to the reality of paganism. Like the cannibals on Crusoe’s island, or the Muhammedan terrorists, life outside of Christianity is death. Kill or be killed, the rule by force. There is no democracy, or civilization and especially no science. There is tribal warfare and the worship of death.
The rule of the game, created by God, goes like this: you become like what you worship. A people with no god and no purpose don’t take risks, what’s the point? If you just worship man, then Darwin was correct, it’s about evolution and things happening by chance, just randomly getting better. We exist to exist. Then Hitler was right we should help evolution along by killing undesirables so that the more advanced man can continue to evolve. And then the point of space travel is simply to perpetuate ourselves for the sake of perpetuating ourselves. Oh and because we are destroying the planet with cars. Which is only bad because our priests, the scientists, and their computer models say it will stop things going on as they supposedly always have.
On the other hand the worship of the true God, led us to explore the seas. Jesus told us to go into all the world, so we did. The God of scripture is constant and faithful, he told us he speaks to us in nature, so we decided to study his faithfulness and we called it the scientific method. He taught us to live at peace with one another and so we had time for science and the arts and literature. Christians took the culture of paganism and baptized it and created the beautiful Medieval model of the cosmos. Rich themes of Mars and Venus and Apollo. Which we still use today though we have forgotten their meaning. Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to the moon. On Christmas Eve 1968 the astronauts aboard could not help but feel closer to God as they saw what no man had ever seen. Their earth from the moon. They read from Genesis “In the Beginning God created the heavens and the Earth. . .” They proclaimed the Word of God from the heavens. Later in Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin took communion on the surface of the moon. This is the reality of men when confronted with awe inspiring beauty of space travel. This is what men do when confronted with their own insignificance, and the possibility of imminent death. You don’t play around with the worship of man, and his abilities, you fall on your face as Crusoe did, you repent of what you have done and you give your life to the service of Jesus the Christ. You join his mission, and you rush out to tell others to proclaim the glory of his work from distant mountains or distant planets. Ridley Scotts Martian is simply a cold dead rock, he is nothing but a pirate pillaging Christianity to make his story watchable, while giving men another excuse to ignore Jesus the Christ, and focus on themselves.