Have you seenThe Life of Pi? The movie came out more than 10 years ago, and it’s one of those stories that leaves its interpretation open to you.
It tells the story of Pi Patel, who encounters a storm while sailing on a Japanese freighter ship with several zoo animals onboard. The ship sinks, and Pi spends most of the movie struggling for survival on a lifeboat for 227 days. When Pi is rescued by villagers and ends up in hospital, he’s visited by two insurance agents for the Japanese freighter, who question him about his ordeal. Pi first tells the story involving the animals on the lifeboat:
Narrative 1: Pi escapes the storm on a lifeboat with an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a tiger. The hyena kills the zebra and orangutan, but is subsequently killed by the tiger. Pi spends the next several months developing a complex relationship with the tiger (whom he names Richard Parker), trying to avoid being attacked by it while navigating storms, hunger, and a man-eating island.
Subtraction Stories
The Japanese insurance agents don’t believe Pi’s story. They push him to tell “the truth” about his story:
Young Pi: What else do you want from me?
Chiba (insurance agent): A story that won’t make us look like fools.
Okamoto (insurance agent): We need a simpler story for our report. One our company can understand. A story we can all believe.
Young Pi: So… a story without things you’ve never seen before.
Okamoto: That’s right.
Young Pi: Without surprises. Without animals or islands.
Okamoto: Yes. The truth.
So Pi tells them a second, different version of the story:
Narrative 2: Pi escapes the storm on a lifeboat with an injured sailor, his mother, and the ship’s cook. The cook kills the sailor to use him as bait and food. The cook then stabs Pi’s mother as she falls overboard to the sharks. Later, Pi returns to grab the knife and kills the cook, before surviving for the rest of his time until he’s rescued.
The Life of Pi is a commentary about faith. Like the Japanese agents, many people don’t believe in the fantastical stories that faith and religion tell us about reality. They’ll say that humans invented religion to tell ourselves stories which give meaning to our existence in the world.
This is known as a “subtraction story”, a term coined by the philosopher Charles Taylor. I first heard about it on the Questioning Christianity podcast by the late theologian Tim Keller.
A subtraction story goes something like this: In the past, humans didn’t know about science, so we invented gods to explain the world. As we grew in knowledge and expertise, we were able to explain more about the world with our knowledge. Rain isn’t caused by a rain god, it’s caused by the precipitation of water vapour. Love doesn’t have a transcendent purpose; its nothing more than chemical reactions happening in our brains which helped our ancestors survive better in tribes.
Like Pi who removed the surprises, animals and islands from his story, a secularist might say that we simply need to subtract the false beliefs, superstitions and miracles from reality. Then, we would finally be left with the pure, scientific “truth” of reality.
But is that really true?
Secularism is a Religion Too
Tim Keller posits in the same podcast that:
“Secularism is not the absence of belief; it’s a whole new set of beliefs that are just as unprovable as other religions” (emphasis mine).
In other words, Keller posits that while you can’t conclusively prove that there’s a God, you also cannot conclusively prove that there’s no God.
For example, here are some examples of assumptions which underpin a secularist’s worldview:
- Naturalism: The universe operates according to natural laws only; there are no supernatural explanations
- Materialism: The universe can be fully explained by the interaction of matter and energy
- Causality: The events in the universe occur through cause-and-effect relationships
Notice that there’s no 100% foolproof way to “prove” any of these assumptions through scientific means. Is there a scientific experiment that can conclusively disprove the existence of supernatural phenomena? Is there a way to conclusively demonstrate that the Big Bang happened on its own, in the absence of matter, without any outside influence? No, in both of these examples, you’d first need to believe in something first, before you subscribe to a secularist worldview.
A faith worldview isn’t better than a secularist worldview, or vice versa. What Keller is saying is that in order to subscribe to any worldview, you’d first need to believe in a set of unprovable assumptions. Ironically, secularism is as much of a “religion” as any other faith.
Comparing Beliefs
Now, isn’t super helpful, since it doesn’t tell us whether we should choose faith or secularism.
But Keller concludes that while you can’t prove either worldview, you can quite rationally compare both systems of belief. So we could compare a faith worldview and a secular worldview and ask ourselves questions like:
- Are the underlying beliefs of your worldview consistent with one another?
- Does your human experience match your underlying beliefs?
- Are you willing to accept the logical conclusions of your beliefs?
Most people never sit down to think about these things deeply, because it could obviously rock your life to its very core.
In the end, though, we all need to make a choice. Unfortunately, there’s no sitting on the fence: Either there’s a God or there isn’t. Either that love is transcendent, or simply chemical reactions happening in our brain. Either that there’s a meaning to the twists and turns of our lives, or that everything is simply dictated by nature and chance.
The Life of Pi ends with an adult Pi talking to a journalist who’s interviewing him several years after his ordeal:
Adult Pi: I’ve told you two stories about what happened out on the ocean. Neither explains what caused the sinking of the ship, and no one can prove which story is true and which is not. In both stories, the ship sinks, my family dies, and I suffer.
Writer: True.
Adult Pi: So which story do you prefer?
Writer: The story with the tiger. That’s the better story.
Adult Pi: Thank you. And so it goes with God.
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