Indeed, Ron Moore, who is himself an atheist actually got frustrated with the fact that Star Trek always requires a rational explanation for everything which is why he included God and Angels as part of BSG, even up to the criticized ending of "God did it" which truth be told, is evident throughout the whole series and isn't as left field as many claim it is in the finale.
Indeed. I was one of the people who saw all the explicit mentions of God and angels and prophecy and miracles throughout Moore-BSG and convinced myself "These are false claims, there must be a rational explanation that will eventually come out." But when the finale made it explicit that it was all real, that it had been divine intervention all along, I realized I'd been fooling myself the whole time, that we'd been explicitly told what was going on all along and had just refused to believe it. We're not used to seeing magic realism combined with space opera, so we didn't recognize it for what it was.
Which is particularly ironic in the case of BSG, given that the original series was created as a sci-fi riff on the Book of Mormon and was steeped in religious themes, right up to an episode where Patrick Macnee played the literal Devil. To skirt network censorship, they had to dress up their angels and demons as highly evolved aliens, but it was still clear what the intent was. So why should we have been surprised that the remake was more explicitly grounded in the divine?
There was also SeaQuest, which even in the primarily realistic first season did an episode about a haunted shipwreck where the ghosts were in fact actual ghosts and the episode ends with them moving onto Heaven. Granted, that was due to the network requesting a Halloween themed episode.
Oh, that drove me crazy. The first season generally had such good science, but then at the end they threw it out in favor of a ghost story and an alien episode. And then in season 2, it became so dumb that it made
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea look plausible.
Although what really frustrated me was what the producers said in the press. In season 1, they said "
SeaQuest isn't science fiction, it's a plausible extrapolation of the future from real present-day science" -- which is a good basic definition of what science fiction
is. Then in season 2, the new producers said, "Okay, we're going to start doing science fiction now," and it became mindless fantasy nonsense. It just underlined the ignorant, derogatory assumptions the general public made at the time about what science fiction was, as if they didn't recognize that the word "science" is 50 percent of it.
I think it comes down to one's personal belief system. If you are open to the possibility of the religious or unexplainable, then science fiction and ghosts are not irreconcilable. If you are not then you tend to be more critical. It also depends on the set up and structure of the story being told.
But science, by its very nature, is not about belief. It's about what can be objectively observed and verified, removing personal bias and subjectivity as completely as possible. It's not just about whether something exists, but about the process of verifying its existence and studying how it works.
What I hate is fiction that depicts supernatural phenomena as existing but being intrinsically "beyond science," as if science were a fixed, unchanging body of knowledge. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. The whole purpose of science is to expand, to discover new things. A century and a half ago, quantum physics would've been seen as a fantasy beyond what was known to science. But now, it's the foundation of all modern physics and of everyday technology like diodes and transistors. Since it was real, science was able to observe, confirm, and use it, to expand itself to encompass that reality. That is literally what science is
for.
By the same token, in a universe where magic or ghosts or whatever existed, they would be part of the workings of the universe, so the science of that universe should be able to observe them, confirm their reality, learn the rules by which they operate, and incorporate them into the ever-expanding body of scientific knowledge. If existing scientific tools (technological, conceptual, or mathematical) don't account for them, it's the job of scientists to devise new models and principles that can encompass them.
This is what I love about the premise of
Ghostbusters. Ghosts exist in that universe, but the protagonists are scientists who study them and develop technology to detect and contain them. There's no claim of an intrinsic separation between the natural and supernatural; it's all one reality that science can learn to understand and address. (I guess you could say the same about
Danny Phantom, while we're at it.)
Also, of course, what you believe about reality should have nothing to do with what you consider acceptable in a work of fiction. I don't believe the paranormal exists in reality, but it exists in the
Ghostbusters universe, and that franchise gets it right that science is a process that can expand to encompass its existence, rather than a rigid dogma that can't learn new things.
For all its flaws, Event Horizon does a great job of bridging the two worlds and leaves it up to the interpretation of the viewer whether the final explanation is scientific or spiritual.
I liked the idea that the "supernatural" phenomena were the result of the different physical laws of the other universe. I saw a similar idea in prose story once, Greg Bear's novella "The Way of All Ghosts," in which interaction with another universe with a higher (?) "dimension of order" had effects on matter, mind, and reality that were hellish and unbearable to people from our universe.
Event Horizon also offered a relatively plausible depiction of the effects of exposing a person to vacuum -- at least, more plausible than the idiotic "explosive decompression" of
Outland or the usual instant-freeze nonsense (which is the opposite of what would happen, since vacuum is an insulator, and any moisture on the skin would sublimate to vapor from the lack of pressure rather than solidifying).
