![]() I have no illusions about it, but it must be done. Any more than there is a place for you, Malcolm. Mal: So me and mine have to lay down and die so you can live in your better world? Operative: I believe in something greater than myself. As the doctor heading the experiments tells the Operative who comes to investigate River’s escape, “Given the right trigger, this girl is a living weapon.” Their justification for torture and human experimentation is, as the Operative later explains to Mal, River is a psychic, a reader, who “sees into the truth of things.” In their attempt to weed out and crush the Independents, the Alliance had kept River prisoner, experimenting on her to fracture her perception of reality and control her mind. Simon risked everything to break River out of a high-security facility operated by the Alliance and they have now taken refuge on the Serenity in an effort to stay out of the Alliance’s grasp. He and his crew of misfits smuggle items on the black market, but his most dangerous cargo is medical doctor Simon Tam and his sister River. One of these bands of renegades is led by Mal Reynolds, captain of the ship Serenity. In opposition to this authoritarian rule are pockets of renegades, remnants of the Independents who fought against the Alliance in the Unification War, skirting the edges of society. Nothing is allowed outside of the approved order. While ostensibly benevolent, Alliance rule brooks no dissent. In this space western, the known universe is now controlled by a corporate government, the Alliance, which attempts to keep all citizens under regulated order. The goal of making a new and better world precipitates the conflict of Serenity. Teacher: River, we’re not telling people what to think. We’re in their homes and their heads and we haven’t the right. River: People don’t like to be meddled with. It is Whedon, an atheist, who brings the idea to life in film. Plantinga and Lewis discuss this idea in theory. It is this freedom to choose right or wrong, love or hate, that brings about true virtue. free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.” To have a vibrant and vital world, individuals must be free. Lewis presents the same argument in Mere Christianity writing, “. But the universe with the free creatures it contains and the evil they commit is better than it would have been had it contained neither the free creatures nor this evil.” C.S. Plantinga suggests that “A really top-notch universe requires the existence of free, rational, and moral agents and some of the free creatures He created went wrong. ![]() We would not have an appreciation of goodness without an understanding of evil. Cruelty makes kindness sweet in contrast. There would be no bravery if cowardice was not an option. In the same way, there are certain qualities of creatures that require the existence of the opposite in order for a thing to have virtue. He cannot make married bachelors or square circles because those things are impossible by their very nature. In Plantinga’s Free Will Defense, he posits that an omnipotent God can do anything that is logically possible, but He cannot do that which is logically impossible. If Lennon could imagine a world of perfect peace, why could not a perfectly good and perfectly omnipotent God manage to bring that about? As David Hume challenges in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, “is he able and willing ? Whence then is evil?” Director Joss Whedon gives an answer to Hume in his movie Serenity (2005) with a visual depiction of the Free Will Defense by Alvin Plantinga. The pain and suffering in the world is the most oft-referenced argument against and criticism of God. Some might believe it is an end to be achieved at any cost. This vision, one of perfect peace, seems to be a desirable end. So beautiful, in fact, that it seems to echo the promise of the prophet Isaiah. John Lennon gave voice to the longing of a disenchanted generation in his song, “Imagine.” Speaking to and for a culture ripped apart by civil strife and racial tension, one in which the flower of its youth was sent halfway across the world to the humid jungles of Southeast Asia, the words of Lennon’s ballad encourage us to “imagine all people living in peace,” one where there is no need for the destruction of war because there is a “brotherhood of man.” No conflict.
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