Spying Out the Amber Spyglass
Let me first note that I am a fan of science fiction and fantasy. I highly recommend Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles for children and his space trilogy for adults. Certainly I am no curmudgeon on the science fiction and fantasy genres. I think Christians can read and write them with profit, and they need to be more perceptive of the means and messages in good fantasy.
However, The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman is not good fantasy; it is literary, moral, and philosophical trash. Pullman does have some writing ability, but even that is often lost to his desire to rail against Christianity. His assaults are not even artistic; they tumble out in plain, blunt language. His fiction world is an unclear blend of the real and imagined, allowing him absolute power to reconstruct reality as the exact opposite of that which the Bible portrays. He systematically redefines good as evil and evil as good.
Consider two quotations:
"The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty—those were all names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves—the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are. . . . He told those who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie. One of those who came later was wiser than he was, and she found out the truth, so he banished her. We serve her still" (31-32).
[The speaker is a Christian martyr in the abode of the dead.]
"When we were alive, they told us that when we died we’d go to Heaven. And they said that Heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That’s what they said. And that’s what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew. Because the land of the dead isn’t a place of reward or a place of punishment. It’s a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace. But now this child has come offering us a way out and I’m going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was" (320).
Other ideas in Pullman’s work are equally dangerous and often more subtle. The physical is in all ways superior to the spiritual. Humans are stronger than angels. Technology is the way to gain power and insight into the universe as well as the means to master it—spirit world included. Will (a human boy) has a knife that can carve doors into other universes. It is a technological innovation, but it is the most powerful weapon in the universe. It can cut spirit beings into shreds. This triumph of the physical world is backward from the Bible’s portrayal of spirit reality.
Furthermore, everyone has a daemon, a being that is you but not identical to you. These daemons appear in animal form. In Lyra’s world (a universe Will has entered by cutting a door with his all-powerful knife), they are visible and tangible (hers is named Pantalaimon), but Will discovers that he has one too. The danger of this is that it invites the inner search for a companion being other than the Holy Spirit of God. The parallel concepts of spirit guides and familiar spirits are charlatanry at best, demonism at worst.
Third, everything hinges on a combination of theoretical physics and Hinduism. Evolution is a given. But matter is not inert; it feels, evolves, and becomes living beings. There is no creator. What’s more, there is the Dust, a substance that is presented as both the explanation for the mystic Oneness of all things and the missing "dark matter" of modern cosmology. It is not one or many living beings, but it has consciousness and purpose, guiding characters like Lyra to accomplish its ends. In short, it is the Hindu equivalent of God, whether Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, or whatever name he goes by, explained in terms of modern science. The Dust is the real motivator of all action and the true "good guy" of the series. Thus, a reader is led as far from Christianity as it is possible to go. In the clothing of both respectable science and traditional religion, Pullman presents the ultimate anti-God religion: he who claims to be God is evil, but you and I can be our own God if only we choose to be.
Pullman’s knowledge of Christianity is primarily Roman Catholicism, but his target is the Bible itself, and his goal is to turn young people’s minds permanently against the one true God. In His place, Pullman offers a weak humanistic religion where there is no explanation for sin, no ultimate good, and no hope for eternal life. It doesn’t take a spyglass to see this enemy of Truth for what he is.
Coart Ramey is a former author of Bible textbooks for BJU Press. He currently teaches Bible and History in Anderson, South Carolina.