“An sf reader will pause cautiously, then move closer.”
–Spyder Robinson

Moses read sf? I didn’t know that.

“A lot of the best science fiction is intensely ‘cosmic,’ conveying just how huge and unknowable the universe is, and how little we still understand it,”

Not understood is different from not understandable, though. From the science fiction novel “Time Pressure”, by Spider Robinson:

People who read a lot of sf are the least gullible, most skeptical people on earth. A longtime reader of sf will examine the flying saucer very carefully and knowledgeably for concealed wires, hidden seams, gimmicks with mirrors: he’s seen them all before. Spotting a fake is child’s play for him. (A tough house for a musician is a roomful of other musicians.) On the other hand, he’ll recognize a real flying saucer, and he’ll waste very little time on astonishment. Rearranging his entire personal universe in the light of startlingly new data is what he does for fun. One of sf’s basic axioms, first propounded by Arthur Clarke, is that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Confronted with a nominally supernatural occurrence, a normal person will first freeze in shock, then back away in fear. An sf reader will pause cautiously, then move closer. The normal person will hastily review a checklist of escape-hatches—”I am drunk”; “I am dreaming”; “I have been drugged”; and so forth—hoping to find one which applies. The sf reader will check the same list—hoping to come up empty. But meanwhile he’ll already have begun analyzing this new puzzle-piece which the game of life has offered him. What is it good for? What are its limitations? Where does it pinch? The thing he will be most afraid of is appearing stupid in retrospect.

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is ‘mere’…. It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964).

This is a fascinating topic with many surprises. Because Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were atheists, it’s easy to underestimate how much seriously weird metaphysical, mystical, magical and even outright demonic experimentation was stirred up by the Russian Revolution.