Kubrick's Monolith: A Plausible Genesis Account?

Does 2001: A Space Odyssey offer a theologically sound explanation for humanity's origin?

I used to like watching movies. I used to look forward to new, exciting cinematic tales coming to a theater near me. I used to book tickets in advance to make sure I didn’t miss out on the next cultural touchstone that we’d all be talking about for months, if not years. I remember lining up outside the cinema doors, the buzz of excitement from people as they anticipated plunging into whatever narrative thrill-ride was about to unfold before their very eyes. In my case, it was The Dark Knight Rises, having been thoroughly converted into a lifelong Batman fan by Nolan’s matchless The Dark Knight. But previous generations had their blockbuster moments as well. My dad has told me many times about going to see the original Star Wars in theaters over and over again. There just wasn’t anything like it (and there was no way of watching it in one’s own home). On some level, it felt like it mattered—not just the movie itself, but being there to witness its greatness. To be a testament to magnificence. Where were you when you heard Neil Armstrong walked the Moon? My dad saw it seven times before it left theaters. And many years later, he’d watch it many times again with his son, ensuring that the story would live on to be told to the next generation.

But somewhere along the way, the silver screen lost its luster. The draw of the cinematic viewing experience waned. I grew tired, paralyzed even. I’ve hardly any interest in watching movies anymore, let alone going to the theater. When I contemplate what killed my desire, my suspicions inevitably turn towards Netflix. It was the first streaming service I adopted, and I think it changed me without my noticing. I stopped watching movies, and I started streaming series. Eventually, I stopped streaming series too (bar a few notable exceptions, like Severance). My enthusiasm for consuming new stories became blunted, deadened.

It was the abundance that did it. ‘Too much of a good thing’, to be sure. I was overwhelmed, inundated, smothered by the glut of ‘content’ that has become the predominant cultural production of the Information Era. A film wasn’t merely a film anymore. A series wasn’t a series. A video wasn’t a video, a game wasn’t a game; all of it gelled together to become a colossal, amorphous blob called ‘content’.

Now the prospect of scrolling through options on a streaming service causes me to convulse. I can see the gridwork of titles and thumbnails cascading before my eyes like the sickly green digits of The Matrix. I know that I can keep toggling forever, in any direction, but I will never reach the terminus. Is this progress? To have every possible human taste or whim catered for, to the point of exhaustion? Only a beast of truly limitless appetite could consume it all—a ravenous, world-eating wyrm. Is that what humanity has collectively become? Some might say that’s all we’ve ever been.

I find it paralyzing because, while the options might be limitless, my time is not. It matters what I choose to watch, because the moments I spend watching it I will never get back. Sitting down to consume some media either for entertainment or elucidation—well, all I can say is it had better be worth my while. And when I have access to so much, at the push of a button, how can I be certain that the choice I’ve made is indeed the best use of my precious time? How can I narrow the field and naturally select for the strongest, fittest specimens to stimulate my imagination and, perhaps, help me develop into a better, stronger specimen myself?

We produce an astounding amount of cultural artifacts. We’re practically drowning in the things. Almost all of them will fade from the public consciousness forever, sometimes almost immediately upon their release. They will be consumed and, I suppose, psychosocially excreted (pardon that unpleasant image). So when we sift through the morass and try to hold up the pieces of art that actually matter—that might stand a chance at outlasting not only us, but the voracious blob of Content itself; works that might one day have burrowed so deeply into the public consciousness that they will become myth and legend; stories by which we orient ourselves in the universe, as the ancients did with their tales of gods, heroes and demons—what stories will these be? Have we created any in the last generation? The last two generations? The last century?

I can think of at least one contender: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The choice of word ‘odyssey’ is fitting here, as it reminds us of Homer’s Odyssey—one of the greatest tales ever told. It is a grand narrative that buttresses our civilization and speaks to our deepest, most sacred idealizations of ourselves as human beings. I believe that 2001 is suitably epic in scale, scope, and ambition to be worthy of the name. It is, without a doubt, my favorite movie of all time. And yes, I include the twenty-minute long psychedelic fever dream at the end. And no, I don’t think it’s pretentious of me to say that. It is a movie that aspires to be more than just a movie; it is a story that has grander ambitions than merely to entertain or enthrall. It is the story of who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. The journey of humanity through the cosmos, from our earliest moment to our last, is in the telling.

And to top it off, it just might be the most theologically compelling depiction of the Genesis account as it actually happened—in real time, in real space, with real people.

Or apes, I should say.

Artwork by Paul Lehr, for the cover of Isaac Asimov’s The Stars, Like Dust

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Humanity’s family tree

The opening segment to 2001: A Space Odyssey is not what you’d expect. If you haven’t watched it before, here’s a link. It’s about ten minutes long and there is no dialogue save for the cacophonic chattering of apes (insofar as you can consider that dialogue—and you might, but more on that later). You’d expect space stations and rocket ships and distant planets with a title like that, right? What’s with all the monkeys? Well, to know where we’re going, you first have to know where we’ve been.

This segment bears the subtitle ‘The Dawn of Man’. Kubrick begins our story right at the truest point any story can feasibly begin—the beginning of humanity itself. See, the apes we watch in these first few minutes scampering about, fending off leopard attacks and rival apes edging in on their territory, are not humans. But they are hominins.

Hang on: what’s the difference?

Great question. It’s something I’ve been aiming to educate myself more about in recent years. A fantastic book I’d recommend is Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Noah Harari. In it, Harari lays out the key findings of decades of anthropological research aiming at answering the question: who were our earliest ancestors and what were they like?

I should probably pause here to mention that, though I am a person of faith, I believe in evolution. Heck, using the word ‘belief’ seems rather inappropriate if we are to have any serious appreciation for science and its ability to inform us about the true workings of the natural world—a world which, being warm-blooded mammals of flesh and bone, includes us. I recognize that this can be a contentious issue, especially among Christian circles. That’s fine; I have no desire to make converts of anybody. If you’re unsure of my intentions, I’d direct you to my introductory piece, Welcome to the Pneumanaut, which I hope will assuage your fears that I am some sort of social media proselytizer spreading misinformation and heresy among the weak-minded masses. In truth, I’m just a person who really likes sci-fi and thinks it might have a thing or two to say to organized religion, particularly Christianity. I am, in essence, attempting to synthesize seemingly disparate systems of thought in what I hope might be new and exciting ways; ways which may or may not lead to deeper understandings of the nature of the world, of God, or of ourselves. But I make no claims to know the ‘truth’ any more than you do, dear reader. I’m looking under rocks and stones hoping to find the Meaning Of It All, just like you.

But I digress. Where was I…? Hominins! Yes. Hominids are members of the family Hominidae, which encompasses all ancient and modern-day great apes. Within that group you can find humans, chimps, gorillas, orangutans. Hominins, then, are the subgroup within that group which includes only the various species of humans which have existed upon the Earth at one point or other.

Nowadays, it’s only us. There’s still much scientific confusion as to why we emerged as the lone survivors of the collective human race but it’s likely to do with brain size, superior adaptation techniques and likely, a certain penchant for bloodthirstiness. We Homo sapiens, however, are not the only humans to have ever existed. There are our close cousins the Neanderthals, the original inhabitants of what is now Europe and Asia, who lived somewhere between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago. There’s Homo erectus, a grandparent of sorts, who lived 1.8 million years ago to as recently as 110,000 years ago. Quite recently there was the discovery of the Denisovans in Russia, known to have interbred with both the Neanderthals and ourselves. To date, there is a certain percentage of Homo sapiens DNA which can be traced back to these other human species as a result of our promiscuity.

These alone only scratch the surface of our long and storied history as an ever-evolving species. There would have been even more ancient species from which we and our human brethren descended, but we’ve not yet unlocked the secrets of our DNA, nor found substantial archaeological evidence by which to identify them. But they surely exist as ghosts, their influence echoing across the eons to influence and shape us in the here and now. Our human bodies are the products of millennia upon millennia of painstaking evolution and adaptation to the harshest of environs. We became bipedal, we lost our tails, we grew opposable thumbs. This is to say nothing of our brains, which developed at such astonishing rates that we have become, it would seem, the most intelligent species ever to have existed, at least as far as this planet is concerned—even more so than our Neanderthal cousins who, despite having larger brains in terms of sheer mass, failed to branch out and explore beyond their frosty northern Eurasian climes.

Our brains are truly miraculous. Famed physicist Michio Kaku tells us this about our precious little slab of grey matter:

The brain is a world unto itself, populated by a trillion neurons, each connected to ten thousand others. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated thing in the known universe.

The human brain is so complicated, even, that Evolutionary Theory cannot adequately explain just how it came to be. (I say theory because, yes, evolution is still a scientific theory rather than a fact. It’s hard to scientifically prove something which takes millions upon millions of years to occur. That does not, however, mean it ought to be discounted or not taken seriously, including by people of faith.) Now, I don’t mean that evolution is so utterly flabbergasted by the existence of the brain that the entire theory collapses in a heap of rubble like a post-Enlightenment Tower of Babel; rather, I mean that the sheer complexity of this squishy thing between our ears eludes a straightforward scientific explanation. The neural connections in the human brain are on the scale of trillions. For comparison (though it’s crude to compare brain complexity in such simplistic terms), the next most complicated brains would be those of either elephants or dolphins. These brains are in the billions in terms of neural connections. Certainly impressive, but several orders of magnitude below that of human beings. Why this disparity, then? Evolutionary Theory should be applied to the development of our brains just the same as these intelligent creatures. How can we explain the dearth of neurological sophistication in other animals as compared to the mind-boggling computational power of the human brain? It’s like everybody else is bringing abacuses to the evolutionary Mathletics competition, while we’re rolling up—two hours late—with a gosh-darned CPU strapped to our heads. These critters aren’t even in the same encephalic galaxy as us.

Simply put, we can’t quite explain it. The standard scientific response would be to maintain that the core principles of evolution are true, and so must still hold even if we haven’t ironed out all the kinks yet. And that’s fair enough. It’s quite possible that as our scientific understanding advances, the mystery might begin to unravel. But a human story that is told purely in terms of evolution, tracing a line backwards through time from ourselves, to our hominin ancestors, to actual non-human apes doesn’t feel very satisfactory from a spiritual standpoint, and certainly not a religious one. Where does God fit in to this? Don’t have have something called a ‘soul’ which elevates us? Isn’t there more to this story than just random mutations of DNA across untold successions of generations?

Of course there is, would say most religious or spiritually-inclined people. It can’t just be particles and physics and biology at the end of the day! There has to be some magic in it, somewhere, to explain just how all this can be what it is. Isn’t it just too wonderful, too beautiful, too fantastic to be nothing more than cold machinery? Us, too—aren’t we just a little more than stardust?

I think Stanley Kubrick might have suspected the same things—or at least, so he seems to suggest in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Because the hominins at the Dawn of Man, you see, are not alone.

King Louie gets his wish

It was just another day on the savannah when the Monolith appeared. The hominin who would go on to become known as Moon-Watcher was licking his wounds after duking it out for control of the local watering hole against a rival tribe—a fight which he’d lost. He and the gang were hanging out, planning their next move—hopefully, to a place where their competitors wouldn’t be quite so burly—when a strange object suddenly revealed itself in their midst. The hominins were, understandably, quite spooked. They gnashed their teeth and chittered vehemently at this intruder to ward it off. It did not respond. Indeed, the Monolith did nothing but wait. As it stood in silence, its smooth obsidian surface invited these primitive creatures into a dark, yawning realm of infinite depth and dimension, entirely beyond their understanding. What lay within? They couldn’t know, and it terrified them.

But Moon-Watcher, as he would soon be known, was braver than the others. He approached this stranger. He reached a hand to the void. He reached for the forbidden knowledge hidden within its depths. And there he grasped something. He did not know what it was—he did not know the nature of this Monolith that had granted him passage—but he took hold of it, withdrew his hand, and looked upon the world anew.

It is curious that Kubrick and Clarke gave him this name, ‘Moon-Watcher’, since he never actually looks up at the Moon during the movie. But the name is clearly symbolic, capturing the essence of the transformation that has taken place. We can easily imagine this creature looking up and seeing the Moon above his head with new eyes. He recognizes, for the first time, that it is there and he is here, down below, gazing up at it. It exists. He exists. He has awakened to himself and the world beyond.

He has become human.

And the first thing he does with his newfound humanity is grab hold of a bone and use it as a weapon of vengeance against the apes who’d spurned him.

This is how Kubrick imagines our human origin story: a transcendence of raw animal instinct brought about by portentous encounter with an alien intelligence. Evolution had already done a lot of the work to get us to where he needed to be—arms, legs, digestive systems and all that—but our minds needed to be ignited by a holy fire. In the Arthur C. Clarke stories which act as companion pieces to the movie—most notably The Sentinel, in which human researchers discover another Monolith on the surface of the Moon—it’s clear that these oblong anomalies are the creations of some ancient alien civilization, early explorers of the stars who visited the young Earth and saw its potential to host intelligent life of its own. They left these Monoliths as totems, augurs, waypoints in the journey toward ascension. Humans, they must think, have the potential to be more than what we are.

But hang on a second. A super-intelligent, non-human entity with the power to imbue consciousness upon those it deems worthy; an entity whose own origin stretches into the unknowable past, whose acts of will resonate across eons as if unbound by the constraints of time and space? Doesn’t that sound a lot like…God?

Yeah, it does. It’s my suspicion that Kubrick’s depiction of the Dawn of Man in 2001 and the account we read in the Book of Genesis are much more aligned than we may realize. Substitute the Monoliths for God, and we might have a theologically plausible scenario explaining just how we came to be here, intelligence and all.

There’s a period in prehistory that’s not all that well-understood by scientists called the ‘Upper Paleolithic Revolution’ which may serve as the key. Hariri describes it in his book, which is where I first learned about it. Essentially, somewhere around 50,000 to 40,000 years ago there was an explosion in ancient human activity and advancement. (The first human civilization—the Sumerian culture—was only around about roughly 8,000-5,000 years ago, for frame of reference.) There was something of a ‘cognitive leap’ which occurred, which no one has been able to explain and is hotly debated in scientific circles. Why so suddenly and in so many different places did humans begin to create art, bury their dead, trade materials, build complex tools? It all seems to have happened everywhere at once, and come from nowhere. The archaeological record is all we have to go on, since this was well before the time of written language. One would think the long, slow march of progress would be steady and predictable, unfolding across the eons—just like evolution. But the Revolution suggests that, for some reason, we rushed this process along, seemingly out of sheer will. Overnight, we became what we are: no longer intelligent apes, but human beings. We ascended, you might even say.

Is it just that our brains suddenly achieved some kind of evolutionary breakthrough? If so, how come? And even if we believe that, how are we supposed to make sense of what that might mean neurologically? The brain suddenly growing new lobes on the turn of a dime? Hard to picture that happening—it doesn’t seem all that scientific.

So what if science doesn’t have the answer? What if a Monolith did come down all those years ago, and humanity stepped across the threshold between base instinct and higher learning? What if that Monolith was God?

Reimagining Genesis

I’ve never been one to view science as fundamentally at odds with religion, and so it goes with science fiction. I don’t think that we owe our existence to ancient aliens, like how Ridley Scott’s Prometheus portrays it. Why draw the line here, you ask, and not with God? For one thing, both Prometheus and 2001 only kick the creationist can down the road, since—if we were in fact created by aliens visiting Earth—we must ask, who then created them? Abiogenesis is another as-yet unsolved scientific dilemma, just like our mysteriously complex brains. There isn’t much reason to think, based on the scant evidence we have of intelligent life existing on other worlds (read: nothing), that our origin begins with that of another, older extraterrestrial species.

But that’s a matter for another essay. To assume that God is the reason for humanity rocketing out of relative obscurity and taking center stage as planet Earth’s most dominant species is, perhaps, no less implausible. And if you’re not someone who’s prepared to make a leap of faith and believe that there are things beyond us which cannot ever truly know so long as we are corporeal beings relegated to a material existence, I doubt I’ll be able to convince you otherwise. All the same, the leap I’m about to make seems more like a bit of a hop to me, really. I’ll let you be the judge.

Here’s the hypothesis: what if we owe our own origin to God, as Christianity and the other great religions attest (and really, most all spiritual belief systems, if we broaden what we mean by ‘God’) but God worked within the confines of physical reality up until the very last moment? What if the miracle of human consciousness—the human soul—is that last gift that was imparted to us, after billions of years of evolving from single-celled organisms to the advanced life forms we are today. Doesn’t God still get the credit as the ultimate Author of Creation, even if a lot of what he created was a system of natural processes that were allowed to play themselves out? Sounds like Deism, I suppose, but there’s more to it. In this imagining, God’s not a watchmaker who winds up the machinery of the universe and then fobs off to take a lunch break or whatever—He’s invested in how it all unfolds, tinkering with it, reveling in it. And He’s always intended to bring about His grand design in the shape of His children, those creatures made in His own Image. Us. It makes no odds whether we arrived on the scene by means of divine miracle, such as the molding of the clay into a man, or the metaphorical ‘molding’ of the genetic code of early hominins into that of Homo sapiens. The spark that is us—the breath in our lungs—that’s from God. It’s a miracle either way, but only one of those stories strives to harmonize science and spirituality. There needn’t be a discordant note between them, if we take that science tells us facts about our physical world, while faith tells us a different sort of facts—facts about who we are, and who we’re meant to be.

What about the Six Days of Creation? We’d have to take them as being symbolic, which many believers already do. It won’t cut much ice with the Young Earthers, I know, but we’re no less serious about respecting the Scriptures than they are. The difference is, we hold that the ancient stories like those we find in the Genesis account as being representative of truth, rather than the literal truth. And I’d even argue that oftentimes, stories are superior to revealing truth than reality is. But, again, that’s a different essay.

So, picture this: hominins wandering across the ancient continents millions of years ago, fighting and feeding and breeding as all animals do. They evolve and adapt, nature ‘selecting’ them all the while. The strongest survive and pass on their genes; the weak perish. It’s a crude world, but it is ‘good’. Better than the alternative, anyway. And it’s about to get even better.

At some point, somewhere around 300,000 years ago, these hominins have fully evolved into Homo sapiens. They are us, through and through. They are ‘anatomically modern’, meaning if you were to get in a time machine and travel back to meet them, they’d appear physically identical to you. Not monkeys anymore, but men. They’re finally ready for the journey to begin. They’re ready to meet their Monolith.

Only, instead of a big black rectangle descending from the sky, there is only a whisper. A voice on the wind, commanding the dust and the waves to rise up. The earliest hominins-just-turned-humans hear this voice, somehow. Miraculously. Divine inspiration, we can call it. And they are awakened to themselves. They become Moon-Watchers—all of them. A species like no other, who can ask questions like ‘Who am I?’, ‘Where did I come from?’ and ‘What is that big shiny thing floating above my head?’ In pursuing answers to these questions, they will begin to develop the first cultures. They will create rites and rituals for things which they do not have names, but profound and deep intuitions. Sorrow for the dead. Fear of the unknown. Jubilation for the birth of a child. Revelation of the hidden world. A clamor of activity will rise up across the savannah, the jungles the forests, the tundra—we are alive! We hunger and thirst and yearn and desire and seek and hope and mourn and die and kill and loathe and fear and so much more yet to be discovered. But discover it we will! And we’ve all the time in the world to do it.

I suppose, too, that this is where the Fall comes in. With this gift, this newly acquired Knowledge, there comes a price. The early humans have been elevated to a higher station than their beastly counterparts. They understand now what it is to kill and eat the flesh of another living thing. They understand pain, fear and torment and how it can be experienced by all creatures great and small. Because they understand this, they understand the consequences of their own actions. They realize that they can inflict these kinds of wounds upon one another. They can feel what another feels. And not only physical pain, but emotional, too. They can steal one another’s precious belongings, harm one another’s beloved ones. They understand all these things. And yet, one by one, they still reach for the bone club to strike one another down.

And so we see the Genesis story begin to unfold, only in real time, with real people who actually walked the Earth. These ancient humans were likely the first people to develop stories that explained who they were and what they’d experienced; stories that might have eventually been codified and mythologized in the story of Adam and Eve, or the Eridu Genesis (the Sumerian Creation Myth) which preceded it. There’s still divine mystery to it all, of course, but we begin to see how legend and science might overlap in synchronous ways.

I doubt this kind of parallel—the Christian narrative meeting the extraterrestrial Monoliths, crisscrossed with scientific theory—was exactly what Kubrick had in mind when he was filming 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was a self-professed atheist, after all; the monotheistic religions of the world held no sway over him. But the idea that there was more to life than just the facts of matter—the idea that somewhere out there was our destiny—seemed a powerful inspiration for him. He conveys this longing for the beyond so convincingly in the movie, perhaps better than any other movie I’ve ever watched. I’ve focused heavily on the hominins’ encounter with the Monolith millennia ago, but we shouldn’t forget how the movie ends: a modern-day human embarks upon a journey to understand the mysteries of the universe, wherein he encounters his own Monolith. Thus, the process of transcendence begins anew—and somehow I doubt this is the final stage.

We sense deep in our souls that there is more to life than what we can measure with our eyes or finely-tuned instruments. For people of faith, it’s God tugging at our heartstrings, pulling us closer to him. For others, it’s the Great Unknown. It’s the Monolith, beckoning us to a greater awareness and understanding of ourselves and our place in the cosmos.

Whichever it is, dare we answer the call?

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*Though none of the hominins in 2001: A Space Odyssey are explicitly named, the one hominin who interacts with the Monolith is named in both the film’s screenplay and the novelization by Arthur C. Clarke.

**For those who haven’t watched it, it’s not a spoiler; it happens in the first few minutes of the movie. It’s shown that humanity was created by super-intelligent alien race who introduced our genetic material to the Earth, anticipating that the planet was a suitable habitat for us to evolve naturally.

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