Why Isn’t Science a God?

Published July 15, 2017 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey, guys!

I’m a long time listener, but shamefully I’d never written any email thus far. But, specially upon listening to the recap podcast, I decided to write about two things.

Why isn’t Science a god?

First: why isn’t Science a new god? It’d make perfect sense. It can be viewed as a belief system like others that are depicted in the show (even in the first episode, Mr Wednesday asks Shadow if the plane flies because people believe it can fly, so it’s a belief in science). Even if one claims that science is driven by empiricism, it’s not everyone who can reproduce the experiments that prove theories etc, so in the end, one is believing in the word of another being. This would sort of make scientist prophets, which is a funny thought. I’m not a book reader, and I don’t know if Science is a character in the books. I waited until te end of the season to see if it would appear, but alas. So, is Science a character in the books? If not, why do you guys think Neil Gaiman chose not to depict is a new god?

Regarding the acting

The other thought regards the acting.
There’s a musician called Arjen Lucassen, who has a project called Ayreon, in which he invites many different singers to sing in the albuns, since they’re all concept albuns with different characters. In one of these albuns, there is an alien god-like race, and humans; all of the aliens are voiced by amazing top talent singers, and the humans are played by good singers, obviously not on hte same level. There’s not way this wasn’t on purpose, just like, as one of you said, the gods all have these great actors and actresses playing them, and the mortals are played by “weaker” actors/actresses (Betty Gilpin was painful to watch). I’m totally fine with this, I just wonder if Emily Browning and Ricky Whittle are too.

Thanks for being such amazing hosts, and for the good work with Westworld as well (I haven’t watched Taboo). I had some friends telling me I would like to watch American Gods, but what made me actually watch it was that I wanted to listen to your podcast, so thanks!

Cheers from Brazil,

Thiago W.

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