David Baron comes on the show to talk about The Martians, the alien craze that captured turn-of-the-century America…
Show Notes
01. “David Baron”
02. “The Martians Craze”
There’s a man called Schiaparelli who thinks she revolves once on herself in the same time it takes her to go once round Arbol—I mean, the Sun.
– C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (Chapter 2)
03. “The Lewis Connection”
- Handramit in Out of the Silent Planet means “Valley” (literally “low earth”)
04. “Religion and Rocketry”
- Lewis’ related essays: The Seeing Eye and Religion & Rocketry
- Camille Flammarion
- Carl Sagan
- Alexander Graham Bell
05. “Fiction & Imagination”
- H. G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds, adapted by Orsen Wells
06. “Percival Lowell”
07. “Development and the Turn of the Tide”
- Nikola Tesla
- Matt Damon appeared in the movie The Martian
08. “Communications Embargo”
- Movies where there are alien communications: Contact and Independence Day
- David Todd and the “Big Listen”
09. “Personal Takeaway”
For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.
– C. S. Lewis, Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. But supposing a man’s reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz.
– C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 11)
He gazed about him, and the very intensity of his desire to take in the new world at a glance defeated itself. He saw nothing but colours—colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.
– C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 7)
10. “What’s next?”
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