I recently finished Yann Martel’s Life of Pi with mixed feelings.  Though the story made for a delighful, easy read about a kid trapped on a lifeboat with a Tiger for 227 days, it was also a very frustrating argument for faith in God.  I have deduced the argument from these few passages:

“I have a story that will make you believe in God” (Author’s Note).

“[Mr. Kumar] became my favorite teacher at Petit Seminaire 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” (Chapter 7).

Towards the end of the book, when Pi is telling his incredible story to two Japanese men who came to gather information on behalf of the sunken boat, they don’t believe Pi’s story; it’s too “unlikely”.  So, he tells them a different story, one without animals, but people instead.  It mirrors the themes, characters, and events of his initial story so well, that the reader is not sure which one is correct (as the reader too is hearing the story after the fact).  However, it is agreed that the first story is much better.  This brings Pi to asking the two men,

“‘So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer?  Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?’

Mr. Okamoto: ‘That’s an interesting question . . .’

Mr. Chiba: ‘The story with animals.’

Mr. Okamoto: ‘Yes.  The story with animals in the better story.’

Pi Patel: ‘Thank you.  And so it goes with God.’”

And in the last sentence of the book, the two men write in their report: “Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.”  They went with the more fantastical story.

In summary, the author’s argument is that since you can’t prove it either way and doubt is unproductive, theism makes a better story, so you should go with that.

I’ve mentioned the failures of such types of arguments before, so all I’ll say on this matter is I am far more amazed by the idea that the iron in my blood was formed in the core of a giant star somewhere than being specially created in a garden.

The second point I am more eager to talk about comes from the first chapter of the book.  The author makes a point, and a very thorough one, of describing the sloth (and trust me, I’m going somewhere with this):

“It’s only real habit is indolence.  It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day.  [. . .]  The sloth is at its busiest at sunset, using the word busy here in the most relaxed sense.  It moves along the bough of a tree in its characteristic upside -down position at the speed of roughly 400 meters an hour.  On the ground, it crawls to its next tree at the rate of 250 meters an hour, when motivated, which is 440 times slower than a motivated cheetah.  Unmotivated, it covers four to five meters in an hour.”

He goes on, but I’ll spare you the read.  You get the point.  However, then he asks the important question, “How does it survive, you might ask?”  The answer:

“Precisely by being so slow.  Sleepiness and slothfulness keep it out of harm’s way, away from the notice of jaguars, ocelots, harpy eagles and anacondas.  A sloth’s hairs shelter an algae that is brown during the dry season and green during the wet season, so the animal blends in with the surrounding moss and foliage and looks like a nest of white ants or of squirrels, or like nothing at all but part of a tree [. . .]“

This reminded me of another thing I’ve been pondering for quite some time: women.  We’ve all heard that in most species, ours included, the females are the choosers whether it be for mating or relationships.  In respect to humans, one wonders how they’re able to pull that off when social connections are equally important between the sexes.  I think a sloth analogy works to a large degree, though I stress that it only implies with establishing social connections with men.  The idea that men do and are supposed to make the first move rings true.  Women are able to wait even if they’re destroyed emotionally for it (I don’t count signals, and neither should you), and even in extreme cases in which a man is driven to  insanity by loneliness as in Lars and the Real Girl when the woman with a crush on him knows it.  Women can keep their place at the top simply by holding out longer; it’s mindbloggling inaction that promotes dominance.

-Dylan