alt Hacker News> And I don't know many people into hard scifi who really care for the religious imagery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(Simmons_novel) is a massive classic and is full of that stuff. The Matrix has The One die and be resurrected as a godlike glowing being.
Most atheists/Christians aren't as rigid as you imagine.
> a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god
The vast majority of scifi (and other genres) doesn't care or take a position either way. Nothing in Blindsight says "there can't be a God"; it has nothing to do with that.
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>Most atheists/Christians aren't as rigid as you imagine
True in a lot of cases but Simmons might not be the best example because he took such a bona fide ideological dive off a cliff later in life it even re-contextualizes the Hyperion books
> Nothing in Blindsight says "there can't be a God"
I feel this is missing the point that OP is trying to get at. I wish I could cite Blindsight more accurately, but it's been a long time since I read it.
I don't think OP is suggesting the characters in the book sit down and reminisce about the time scientists proved there's no god after all, ha ha weren't all those believers silly all those years.
But Blindsight I found to be deeply nihilistic about the place of "humans as we know them". Whereas religions affirm that humans as we know them are somehow cosmically special due to their relationship with God, Blindsight posits they're just a weird blip of biology destined to be outcompeted.
I wouldn't necessarily call it atheistic so much as ahumanistic. It seems to focus on survival, power and force, and feels like it denies, rather than affirms, any sense of our own worth.
I may be overstating the case; again it's been a long time since I read it. I remember having, as some other posters have a said, quite a depressed feeling after having finished it. I didn't hate the book, but I didn't feel like I'd learned anything that would improve my life. Other than having had the chance to grapple with challenging ideas- which is better than having read something with no intellectual stimulus!