Aslan or Qslan? Insights into Latter-day Saint Cosmology from the Sci-fi/Fantasy Divide

Is advanced science indistinguishable from theology?

Imagine, if you will, that you are watching an episode of a mythical ninth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The starship Enterprise orbits an unusual planet that is populated by some scattered humanoid civilizations at a medieval stage of technological development and a thriving community of talking animals, centaurs, and dwarfs. These animals and mythological creatures worship a benevolent talking lion they call Aslan, who—in the climatic scene of the episode—appears to the crew of the Enterprise. He commends Captain Jean-Luc Picard for his ethical leadership, gently scolds Commander Riker (for something or other), and has a reassuring conversation with Data.

Of course, Picard and his crew discover that this quasi-divine figure is a member of the Q—which, in Star Trek canon, are a near omnipotent race of beings that, with a snap of their fingers, can reconfigure reality to their whims. This particular Q has taken the form of a lion, populated the planet with talking animals, and behaves indistinguishably from the character in CS Lewis’s story. To differentiate him from Aslan, let’s call him Qslan.

The question this hypothetical episode raises for its viewers is this: Is Qslan the same thing as Aslan? He has the form of (and behaves indistinguishably from) Aslan. Is that enough?

Our answer is no (and we suspect yours is too). The universe in which Aslan is the moral sovereign of Narnia is simply not the same universe in which Jean-Luc Picard commands the Enterprise. Any encounter with a Q pretending to be Aslan is and will always be just that: a mimicry. Further, any encounter between Captain Picard and the real and actual Aslan would fundamentally change the Star Trek universe: it would no longer be Star Trek, but only an alt-universe mimicry of it.

We think this situation is a good proxy for why some people reject Latter-day Saints’ claims to be Christian. In their minds, our Jesus talks like their Jesus, acts like their Jesus, but is, like Qslan, a mimicry. To understand why (and why Qslan isn’t Aslan), it is useful to understand what makes the Star Trek universe fundamentally different from the Narnia universe—and what makes science fiction different from fantasy, on a fundamental level.

Most will agree that the differences between science fiction and fantasy extend far deeper than aesthetics (dragons and castles vs. aliens and spaceships). Some might argue that science fiction involves plausible extrapolations of known science (the possible), while fantasy deals with the impossible. But this explanation fails because science fiction often deals with the impossible too (perhaps faster-than-light travel). All speculative fiction is counterfactual fiction—fiction that assumes the world is different than what it currently is. For example, speculative fiction may assume that the earth is flat, or that the year is 2120, or that the Nazis won World War II. However, science fiction assumes a particular kind of universe, while fantasy assumes another. Science fiction consists of the subset of speculative fiction set in a naturalistic universe, whereas fantasy is a subset of speculative fiction set in a non-naturalistic universe.