s be present in the act of faith. Existential doubt and faith are poles of the same reality, the state of ultimate concern" (Tillich 22).
It would be a mistake to consider Contact merely a movie "about" religion-cience conflict, though Ellie's attempts to articulate the meaning that her space-wormhole experience (and the space program's millisecond of lost radio contact) had for her put her on the verge of saying that the experience was spiritual. For her near-suggestion that the cosmos may include the hand of God, she is essentially shushed in favor of more focus on facts on one hand and accountability for the apparent failure of a very costly science project on the other. That episode is consistent with CarterÆs view that contemporary culture does not honor but rather trivializes religion: "one should not try to oversimplify the human mind by making religious conviction a ground for invalidating law" (Carter 120). In Contact, what turns out to be Ellie's discovery of a spiritual (not solely spiritual, but not merely scientific, either) connection to the cosmos is what invalidates, and her testimony before a scientific community that does not admit religion into its discourse, even though an explanation without a spiritual dimension does not cover its meaning for her.
Everyone at NASA control takes the core of Ellie's experience to be the abortive mission and destruction of the fancy space tower, as well as the anomalous millisecond gap that Ellie experiences over a period of several hours of bent-Einsteinian time. But the importance of the disconnect between Ellie's experience and that of the technical people on the ground is the fact that she cannot convince others of the reality that unfolded from her when the weight of evidence is that her reality is physically impossible. It is the same category as mankind's concept of God because that reality, i.e., spiritual experience, when carefully thought out and systematically examin...