by Terry McCombs
Terry McCombs maintained the "God/dess of the Month Club" on soc.religion.paganism for several years, producing monthly profiles of deities drawn from across the world's traditions. His approach was comparative and eclectic — and occasionally self-aware enough to apply the GoM format to non-traditional objects of devotion: Promethea from an Alan Moore comic, Yog-Sothoth from Lovecraft, and now, in this January 2006 entry, Science itself.
The result is a deadpan meditation on scientific culture — its priests and priestesses (known to others as nerds), its fundamentalists (debunkers), its heretics (Creationists who don't even know they're worshiping another god), and its vast treasury of sacred texts, which are technically called science fiction. Posted on New Year's Eve 2005.
Preserved here from the Usenet archive as a document of early internet-era comparative paganism.
Name: The Great God Science (G.G.S.).
Symbols: Light bulb, beaker filled with some mysterious liquid, microscope, meshing gears, test tubes, E = MC², the atom — shown as a larger circle with a smaller circle orbiting about it, a model completely out of date as a map of the atom, yet still popular. Showing that even those who follow the Lord of all that is Bright, New and Shiny cannot always let some things go.
Usual Image: If not ineffable, at least darn hard to pin down. Best guess: probably a lot like either Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, or Doc Savage.
Holy Books: Too many to name; two of the largest however are Newton's Principia Mathematica and Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Holy Days (a selection):
January 7 — Old Rocks Day
January 8 — Galileo Day and Stephen Hawking Day
February 12 — Charles Darwin Day
February 17 — Giordano Bruno Remembrance Day and National Public Science Day
February 19 — Nicolaus Copernicus Day
March 14 — Albert Einstein Day
March 31 — Bunsen Burner Day
April 3 — Scientifiction Day (the first magazine devoted exclusively to science fiction, Amazing Stories, premiers in 1926)
April 24 — Universe Day (Hubble Telescope comes on line, 1990)
April 26 — Richter Scale Day
May 18 — Bertrand Russell Day
May 27 — Rachel Carson Day (Silent Spring)
June 12 — Machine Day
June 30 — Meteor Day
July 16 — Atomic Day
July 20 — Moon Landing Day
August 28 — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Day
September 8 — Feast of the First Stardate
October 28 — Chemistry Day
November 9 — Carl Sagan Day
December 25 — Isaac Newton Day
Relatives: Necessity (mother, under his birth name Invention) and either Imagination, Desperation, or Wonder (father), though there are other contenders.
Synodeities: Hephaestus (Greek), Sarasvati (Hindu), Pranidhanavasita (Buddhist — Goddess of Control of Abstract Contemplation), Mahakala (Tibetan Buddhist — God of Tents and Science, not to be confused with the Hindu god of the same name, also known as the Great Death).
Claude Bernard (1813–1878), France's most famous physiologist, said that "Art is I, science is we." The Great God Science is the I of science.
There are religions whose gods are part of pantheisms, and gods that have monotheistic institutions. The Great God Science is rare in that he is the godhead not of a monotheism, but of a no-monotheism — declaring that there are no gods, and that he is the only one.
If not a jealous god, he is at least a stuck-up one. Cold-eyed and yet passionate and powerful, it was the Great God Science who laid the railroad tracks across the world — called by American Indians the Iron Snake — built for his perhaps-mother Manifest Destiny, but ending up serving his own needs of conquest, industry, and information.
It was as the 20th century was born that the G.G.S. truly came into his own and started to reformulate the world into his well-measured, calibrated, and cataloged image.
As he grew in the last century, so too did his avatars manifest, multiply, and spread. At first showing up as nameless or at least forgettable everymen in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, he later gained many names and images for himself — from the mythologized shadows of real people to avataric "fictional" manifestations such as Charles Darwin, Sherlock Holmes, Thomas Edison, Tom Swift, Tom Swift Jr., Craig Kennedy, Doctor Thorndike, Adam Link, Doc Savage, Albert Einstein, Captain Future, Steven Hawking, Dr. Who, Mr. Spock, Carl Sagan, Dexter, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Data, Jimmy Neutron, and many thousands of other heroes and advocates of the G.G.S. who appeared in his personal sacred texts — which, while called science fiction, were in fact one of the purest founts of his true worship.
The Great God Science transformed the 20th century with his webs of communication, from the telegraph to the radio to the Web, while at the same time his bolts of power changed war, art, medicine, and all aspects of life.
If of old such small things as warm west winds or bread ovens can be granted gods or goddesses, how then can the force that reshaped a world in less than 100 years be left out?
After all, he has his priests and priestesses known to most others as nerds, his fundamentalists known more widely as debunkers, and even heretics such as the Creationists — who do not even know they are worshiping another god altogether from the one they think they are.
Such is the power of the Great God Science.
— Terry McCombs
Colophon
Written and posted by Terry McCombs to soc.religion.paganism on December 31, 2005, as the January 2006 entry in his monthly "God/dess of the Month Club" series. This is one of his "unconventional deity" profiles — alongside Promethea (from Alan Moore's comic) and Yog-Sothoth (from Lovecraft) — in which he applies the comparative mythology format to a concept or fictional figure rather than a traditional deity. Original Message-ID: [email protected].
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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