The Jesus/Darwin fish wars perpetuate the image of a war between science and religion. Nonetheless, the Jesus fish did play a key role in the evolution of modern science fiction--and with it, aided in popularizing its underlying science of complex adaptive systems.*
To the left are panels from Robert Crumb's adaptation of "the religious experience of Philip K. Dick." (Hat tip: Boingboing.net) As you can see, the object that set it all off was a Jesus fish necklace, worn by a girl bringing him some pain medication. A beam shot off of it into his eyes, unveiling a hidden truth: that we are actually living in New Testament times.
When PKD had his vision in March 1974, he already had written a sizable body of work dealing with alternate realities. The experience that you see described here, however, led PKD to see the modern world itself as a fictional skein obscuring the reality beneath. For PKD, the reality hidden by dark forces was the real world of around 50 AD, plunged into a mythic struggle between Christian enlightenment and satanic deception.
For the remainder of his life PKD wrote fiction and gave talks spreading his gospel of a real world hidden by fictional forms. As he himself observed, it was a theory that would have made Plato proud. His writings also helped popularize a neo-gnostic vision of hidden reality behind the deceptions of so-called modern day existence.
Sound familiar?
PKD's vision of a deeper reality behind our current fiction helped spawn a new generation of speculative fiction, Philip Dick's own Valis to William Gibson's landmark concept of cyberspace to Baudrillard's Simulacra to Grant Morrison's influential graphic fiction series, The Invisibles.
The first Matrix film arguably represents the high watermark of this movement, not only for its special effects but its imaginative integration of the science of complex adaptive systems with a host of memorable metaphors from philosophy and religion.
And it all goes back at least in part to a delivery girl's Christian fish sign pendant.
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