Interstellar Providence and Love
Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a former pilot for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), who lives out his retirement as a farmer growing corn. He struggles to make it as Earth undergoes an ecological meltdown, the land is unable to produce, and certain crops go extinct. Murphy (Mackenzie Foy/Jessica Chastain/Ellen Burstyn) is Cooper’s 10 year-old daughter. She is named after Murphy ’s Law, but not in the sense that “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” but in a positive sense that “whatever can happen, will happen.” She experiences a “ghost,” which manifest in fallen books, and strange patters in dust that has settled on the floor. She is curious yet perplexed as to what the ghost are attempting to communicate, until her father tells her the strange phenomena observed is Morse code. This opens the door for Murphy to decipher the ghost’s message. Her first decoded message is coordinates to a nearby location. She and her father follow the coordinates and wind up at a secret NASA base.
It is at the NASA base that Murphy is called out of retirement to pilot spacecraft on an expedition through a wormhole which emerged near Saturn. Previous expeditions through the wormhole have found three earth-like planets suitable for human habitation. Cooper is to confirm the habitability of at least one of the planets, which will then give hope for human survival as Earth grows increasingly uninhabitable.
Problems occur with the stark reality that Cooper will be estranged from his family for years on account of the expedition. Murphy is heartbroken as she does not want to see her father leave. Cooper is heartbroken but he sees the expedition is necessary for the survival of humanity. Cooper’s travels take him to far away planets, both of which are uninhabitable. Another downside to the expedition is the nearness the planet’s to a black hole with gravitational forces that warp time-space. Cooper spends a few hours on one planet, but the time dilation is such that several decades have passed on earth. The astronaut returns to a space station and reviews hours of video messages sent from loved ones on earth. He learns his son has married, and Murphy has had a very difficult life learning to live without her own father. Murphy grows up fatherless but strangely she becomes an astrophysicist and works on solving a mathematical equation, which would allow colonists from earth to traverse the wormhole and settle on a new planet.
Troubles on the expedition occur, and Cooper must jettison himself and the robot TARS, and they are sucked into a black hole, but their sacrifice allows another scientist on the expedition, Amelia (Ann Hathaway), to explore the third planet, which is found to be habitable. She is then set to enact a “plan B,” which would be the population of the new planet with frozen embryos raised to maturity. Cooper and TARS emerge in another dimension, and Cooper is able to peer into this universe’s dimension, seeing the grand stream of events in Murphy’s life. He finds that he can use portals to different events his daughters life to communicate with her from this other dimension. He then realizes that he is the “ghost” on the other side that gave the messages in Morse code to his daughter. He also reasons that humans from a distant future created the wormhole as a way of saving humans of the past.
Cooper then finds another portal to another time in Murphy’s life, and then manipulates a watch to communicate in Morse code the information his daughter would need to solve the equation which would allow colonization to other planets possible. Murphy receives the messages and realizes that the “ghost” was her father all along. Cooper and TARS subsequently find themselves on the Saturn side of the wormhole. They are rescued, and placed on board a large space craft carrying earth’s colonist across the black hole. Cooper is eventually reunited with Murphy, but on account of the time dilation, he is a middle-aged man yet she is a very elderly woman on her deathbed.
What struck me about Interstellar is that the storytellers wrestled well with the issue of the way prerequisite knowledge can influence decision making and the strains that can have upon relationships when the component of love is introduced. Cooper understands the necessity for him to be part of the expedition—it is for the life of his family and millions of other families. But, 10-year old Murphy is far too young to see what’s at stake and she only wants a life with her father in the picture. It takes her a life time to realize the importance of her father’s sacrifice and as an adult she too uses her own skill in astrophysics to find a way to allow people to pioneer to another planet.
Cooper's experience in the other dimension gives him the opportunity to see life in a way humanely impossible—he has semi-perfect observational knowledge of all events in his daughter's life through the stream of history in this universe. Analogous to Interstellar is the theological concept of divine providence. It is God’s general foresight, love, and care for people, which involves the way God ordains all events and holds control over every situation so that the ultimate good will be produced. “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28, NASB).
The pains of life are legion, but God can never be counted as capricious on the basis of their occurrence alone. The fact that God demonstrates His love in sending Christ to die to save sinners (Rom. 5:8) can serve as good reason to know there is more to the picture than meets the eye. The goal of love is never to keep the object of one’s affections from experiencing any pain; instead, love would seek to do what is necessary to improve the circumstances of the beloved. We may fail to understand the why question, yet we can still trust that God is knows all things, He is in control of all things, and that He is working to bring about the greatest good.
~ WGN
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