5

In We Trust: Science,

Religion, and Authority

James D. Proctor

Background

When I first delivered the lecture^1 that led to this essay, I was up
against some pretty stiff competition: the opening night ofThe Ma-
trix: Reloaded, which not only had a slightly bigger special effects
budget than I had, but was all about science and religion. Science,
as both diabolical and redemptive technology, science as a seemingly
real yet utterly virtual world of computer code in which people are
unwittingly trapped like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, science as the
empowering tool of Morpheus and his band of high-tech freedom
fighters.
Yet religion, too. Listen to the strong parallels one scholar draws
between the originalMatrixand the central story of Christianity:

Neo, like Jesus, is the long-expected Messiah who is ultimately

killed only to resurrect as a fully “divine” creature. The final

scene even evokes the bodily ascent of Jesus to heaven. Also,

Morpheus seems every bit the equivalent of John the Baptist,

even to the point of baptizing Neo in a graphic scene in the liq-

uid bowels of the human battery chambers. Trinity might be

compared to Mary Magdalene and Cypher clearly parallels Ju-

das.^2

He also notes the very important Buddhist theme inThe Ma-
trix,stressing “our ignorance of existential reality” as the fundamen-
tal problem both in Buddhism and in the world depicted in the
movie.