Reading Log, no. 6-2

He became my favourite teacher at Petit Séminaire and the reason I studied zoology at the University of Toronto. I felt a kinship with him. It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them--and then they leap.

I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Yann Matel
Life of Pi

This story will make you believe in God, or so it claims. I realize that this sort of thing is a marketing ploy to increase book sales, and yet still I take the comment seriously enough to challenge.

But first, the short version:

Boy name Pi tells story of being stranded in lifeboat in the Pacific for 227 days. Also in the lifeboat are a tiger named Richard Parker and, initially, a few other animals. Through boy's resourcefulness, boy and tiger survive. (Tiger eats other animals.)

But wait! There's a surprise twist! Boy then tells a parallel story of being stranded in a lifeboat, but instead of being in it with a tiger and, initially, a few other animals, he's instead in it with a few other humans. Boy admits to partaking in the savage act of cannibalism.

Boy then poses question: if you can't prove either story then should you not believe in the better one, the more comforting one? (That's the first one, in case you're wondering.) As a bonus, the tiger story has one chapter devoted to a carnivorous island, which is way cool!

And so that's how it's suppose to go with all of us. Given that we can't prove God's existence one way or the other, should we not choose to believe in God? -- the more comforting option compared to the one that involves difficult questions and few answers?

Yann Martel has proposed a modern equivalent to Pascal's wager: you can't know for sure, so you may as well make yourself comfortable. It precludes the possibility that there exists an ethical consequence for belief, and I find it irresponsible.

The twin fears of death and of lack of external purpose drive a lot of people to do and believe tremendously irrational things. Answers, not questions, assuage those fears. But answers, not questions, stymie progress. Clearly there's a balance to be struck between pain and comfort, and so it seems reasonable that the best of theological positions would strike some similar sort of balance.

Richard Parker was not in that lifeboat. Perhaps Pi should have better followed his father's advise?

But I learned at my expense that Father believed there was another animal even more dangerous than us, and one that was extremely common, too, found on every continent, in every habitat: the redoubtable species Animalus anthropomorphicus, the animal that is "cute", "friendly", "loving", "devoted", "merry", "understanding". These animals lie in ambush in every toy store and children's zoo. Countless stories are told of them. They are the pendants of those "vicious", "bloodthirsty", "depraved" animals that inflame the ire of the maniacs I have just mentioned, who vent their spite on them with walking sticks and umbrellas. In both cases we look at an animals and see a mirror. The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.