In many respects, the showโs finale confirmed some things I suspected quite some time ago โ for instance, that the events of the show would be in our past, and that the inhabitants of our planet would turn out to be the offspring of humans and cylons. This nicely illustrates why intelligent design doesnโt get us out of the problem of regression and answer the question of origins. Even if it turned out that we inherited characteristics from beings that had been designed rather than merely having evolved, we would only succeed in pushing the problem back one step, onto another world, where we would then confront the same question: where did the original designer come from?
I was happier than some about the religious element of the finale. It didnโt try to wrap up the question of God, but left a fair bit of mystery. For fundamentalists, religion is about answering lifeโs questions. For other religious believers, religion is about hints of a mystery, pointers to transcendence, and a whole lot of symbolism. And the finale did some provocative things in this vein, like emphasizing that God is not on anyoneโs side, calling God a โforce of natureโ (as opposed to a person in some anthropomorphic or cylonomorphic sense), and saying at the very end about God that โIt hates to be called thatโ.
Anyway, goodbye Battlestar Galactica โ for now. Thank you for tackling serious issues and making us think. And thank you for ending before you ran out of good ideas. The worst thing one can hear from viewers of a TV series, after all, is โAll this has happened before, and all this will happen againโ.