The purpose of this research is to examine the portrayal of religion in the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, popularly known as Blade Runner, by Philip K. Dick. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the novel's religious themes emerge and then to discuss the characteristics of religion described in the narrative that results in pattern of commentary on cultural attributes of religion and religious attributes of culture.
The relationship that the characters in BR have to religion cannot be understood without reference to the narrative strategy of withdrawing them from history and placing them in a mythical future. The story can be interpreted as a commentary on the place of humanity in the cosmos that entails its history and destiny. The characters' situation can be understood as a consequence of and response to the dimensions of reality that their past experience created. Dick accomplishes this by setting the story in a recognizable place (the Bay Area and peninsula of Northern California) that is nevertheless pushed outside conventional reality and inside a postapocalyptic future that has been arrived at because human behavior, specifically World War Terminus (Dick 12), has altered that reality permanently. This explains the offhand references to fallout, radiation, and other environmental contamination vis-a-vis an extraordinarily advanced technology-driven culture that appear throughout the book. But technology is all that the culture has since human and animal life forms have been radically depopulated. The environment of BR is an artificial construction that is the result of human ingenuity's response to a world that has been spoiled by human ingenuity.
The religious significance of the novel's setting arises if the physical milieu in general is interpreted as a paradise lost (Earth itself, by way of WW Terminus), or, alternatively, as the post-technological version of the plagues of Eg...