Religion and the new Dr. Who

In the book 'The Making of Doctor Who,' there is a short essay by a clergyman. This indicates the approach of the classic series to religious issues. The essay assumes that there are two kinds of people: 'religious' and 'non-religious.' It reassures us that Doctor Who is compatible with a religious outlook. It was as if the writers felt the need to bring a tame clergyman on board to avoid offending the status quo or the comfortable majority. For this reason the series rarely touched on explicitly religious issues (though it did occasionally flirt with Buddhism in the sixties and seventies).

Banned

Russell T. Davies makes no secret of the fact that he is an atheist, and sees himself as being opposed to religion. In his first trip with Rose the Doctor travels to a space station in the far future. Here it is mentioned in passing that religion is banned. The implication is that religion is a primitive stage in human development that will die out.

The Daleks were thought to have been destroyed. However, in Christopher Eccleston's final episode we learn that their emperor preserved them. He processed the genetic material from the dregs of humanity to create a new race of Daleks. However, these new Daleks have been driven into a kind of religious mania, and worship their emperor who calls himself 'the god of all Daleks.' This can be seen as neat twist on the Daleks' symbolic origins. Terry Nation conceived them as a kind of cosmic Nazi. It is fitting in the age of Islamo-fascist terrorism that the totalitarians should see their warring in religious terms. On another level there is a suggestion that any religious outlook is a sign of mental instability, and can lead to a hatred of those who are different.

The world view implicit in the new series does hint at a religious outlook of a specific kind. In the episode, 'The Doctor Dances' Rose is surprised to learn that alien technology has been able to restore life to a dead child. The Doctor responds:

'What's life? Life's easy; a quirk of matter; nature's way of keeping meat fresh.'

There is a suggestion here that life is nothing more than an emergent property of the organization of matter. If so, then matter is the basis of all existence; in other words matter is here being given implicit divine status. It is taking a role which Christianity  reserves for God. The tendency to seek a 'scientific' explanation for everything has here pushed over into seeking a materialistic explanation for everything. But to see life  as nothing more than an organization of matter is to go well beyond anything that has ever been scientifically verified. The 'scientific' explanation turns out to be a philosophical interpretation.

In the same episode we have the use of psychic paper to read minds. But if life (and therefore mind) is only an organization of matter, it is difficult to see how there could ever be direct contact between minds without the mediation of matter in some form.

Psychic powers such as telepathy occur in the series because they are part of the literary construct of science fiction, but in fact they are in conflict with a purely materialistic worldview.

In saying that life emerges from and therefore can be reduced to matter the writers are not devaluing life; life in all its diversity and complexity is the product of the wonderful process of evolution, and as such both species and individuals are to be treasured.

So 'good' in the new series is identified with the diversification produced by evolution. In the episode 'New Earth,' Cassandra believes herself to be the last 'pure' human. She describes other humans as 'mutant stock.' Rose replies,

'They evolved like they're supposed to; you stood still.'

Later in the same episode, after the Doctor has helped create a new human subspecies, he says excitedly,

'The human race just keeps on going, keeps on changing; life will out! HA!'

If life is something that has emerged as a quirk of matter it is difficult to see how it was 'supposed' to have happened. How has this cosmic purpose been introduced into the Universe?

If life is valued because it has emerged through evolution, and death and disease are part of this process, it is not surprising that death and disease are also valued. At the end of the episode 'The End of the World,' Cassandra is dying. 'Help her,' says Rose but the Doctor stands by and allows her to die saying,

'everything dies; everything has its time'.

This attitude is unlike that of the Doctor in the classic series, who frequently risked his life to help vulnerable enemies. It is best explained as a reflection of the belief that death has to be accepted and even welcomed as part of the process that makes life possible and desirable. In 'New Earth' Cassandra comes to accept her own inevitable death.

At the opening of 'New Earth,' Rose is surprised that all disease has not been wiped out by the year five billion. The Doctor explains that

'the human race moves on but so do the viruses; it's an ongoing war.'

This theme is developed in the episode, 'The Rise of Steel' when the Doctor lectures the creator of the Cybermen:

'Everything you invented, you did to fight your sickness… and that's brilliant… but once you get rid of sickness and mortality what's there to strive for? The Cybermen won't advance.'

Here sickness and mortality are seen as necessary to make human progress possible. Progress arises from this ongoing war. Human advancement and evolutionary progress are seen as part of the same process. In some ways this develops the ambivalent attitude towards progress found in the original series. Certainly there was a belief in progress. However, this was coupled with a wariness of the potential dehumanising effects of technology. The earlier Doctors had a dislike of computers. This character trait has vanished, probably because we, the viewers are now so used to computers we would find it rather quaint.

Much of the new sexual attitude of the series can also be seen as rising out of this evolutionary world view. Sexual diversity like other kinds of diversity is to be celebrated and therefore the conventional family becomes only one of many possible sexual lifestyles.

Dave Ferguson, July 2006