Tag: Storytelling

Life of Pi, God, and The Universe.

At the end of Yann Martel’s breathtaking novel and film, Life of Pi, two Japanese officials sit by the hospital bed of a young man who has survived 227 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean. They have come to understand how the Tsimtsum, their company’s cargo ship, sank. Pi tells them an incredible story: a tale of sharing a lifeboat with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a magnificent Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. He speaks of carnivorous islands, transcendent storms, and a relationship of terrifying co-dependency with the great beast.

The officials, unsurprisingly, do not believe him. Their faces are etched with polite disbelief. “We need a story that we can believe,” they say. So, Pi offers them another. A story without animals. In this version, the lifeboat carries Pi, his mother, the ship’s brutish cook, and an injured sailor. It is a grim, horrific account of human depravity—of murder, cannibalism, and desperation. It is a story of mere survival, stripped of all wonder.

After a long silence, he looks at the men and asks a simple, profound question. “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?” The lead official, after a moment, quietly answers, “The one with the tiger. That’s the better story.” Pi looks at him, a gentle understanding in his eyes, and replies, “And so it is with God.”

Story One: A Universe That Sings.

This choice, presented in a quiet hospital room, is the fundamental choice we all face when we look out at the cosmos. We are presented with two grand narratives about where everything came from. The first is a story of intimate intention, the one found in the opening pages of Genesis. It doesn’t begin with a chaotic explosion, but with a divine word. “Let there be light.”

In this account, the universe is not a cosmic accident; it is an intentional act of artistry. A Creator speaks reality into existence, separating darkness from light, waters from sky. The story builds with a poetic rhythm, and at the end of each creative day, a beautiful refrain echoes: “And God saw that it was good.” This is not the assessment of a detached engineer checking his work. It is the deep, resonant satisfaction of an artist beholding his masterpiece. Goodness and beauty are not happy by-products; they are woven into the very fabric of existence from the first moment.

The climax of this story is not the formation of distant galaxies or blazing suns, but the creation of humanity. We are told we are made in God’s own image—Imago Dei. In this narrative, our existence is the point of the story. Our lives have inherent meaning because we were conceived in the mind of a loving Creator before the foundations of the world were laid. It is a story that tells us we belong here. It is a story that sings with purpose.

Story Two: The Unceremonial Goodbye.

The second story is the one told by modern naturalism. It begins not with a word, but with a singularity—an infinitely dense point that explodes in a Big Bang. It’s a story of magnificent scale, of forces and particles, of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. It is, in its own way, a stunning account. But philosophically, it is the story of the hyena and the cook. It is a story of survival of the fittest, of a “blind, pitiless indifference.” It is a worldview that Pi was taught as a boy in the most brutal way imaginable.

As the son of a zookeeper, the young, spiritually curious Pi saw a soul in the animals. He saw wonder. His rational father, Santosh, saw a dangerous naivety. To teach his son a lesson in cold, hard reality, he had a goat tied to the bars of the tiger’s cage and forced Pi to watch as Richard Parker tore it apart. As Pi reeled in horror, his father delivered the core tenet of this second story: “That tiger is not your friend! When you look into his eyes, you are seeing your own emotions reflected back at you. Nothing else.”

This is the universe of pure naturalism in a single, visceral lesson. A universe without a soul, where any meaning we perceive is merely our own reflection staring back at us from a cold, empty reality. And for Pi, this lesson was proven in the most heartbreaking way possible at the end of his journey. After 227 days of shared ordeal, after surviving the impossible together, he collapses on a Mexican shore. The tiger, his companion in suffering, walks to the edge of the jungle, pauses, but doesn’t look back. He simply vanishes. “What hurts the most,” the older Pi tells the writer, “is not taking a moment to say goodbye.” It was unceremonial. In the end, Richard Parker was exactly what his father said he was: an animal. An uncaring force of nature.

That is the universe of the Big Bang, beautifully and terribly illustrated. It may be awesome and powerful, but it feels nothing for you. It does not know you exist. The love you feel, the meaning you seek—these are, in this story, one-way projections. The universe travels with you for a time, but in the end, it walks into the jungle without a word.

The Story That Haunts Us.

So, we are left with a choice. One story gives us a universe that knows our name, crafted with love and infused with goodness. The other gives us a universe that came from nothing and cares for nothing. One story says beauty is a clue, a signpost pointing towards the divine Artist. The other says beauty is an evolutionary trick, a fleeting reflection of our own emotions. Pi’s story with the tiger is filled with unimaginable suffering, but it is never meaningless. God is always there, watching. Even when Pi feels abandoned, he later understands that God “gave me rest and gave me a sign to continue my journey.” The story of the cook is just suffering—brutal, pointless, and ugly.

The story with the tiger—the story with God—doesn’t promise an easy life. It promises that the journey, with all its terrors and wonders, has a purpose. It promises that you are not alone in the boat. The other story promises nothing. Both require faith. It takes faith to believe in a loving Creator you cannot see. It also takes faith to believe that the intricate order of the cosmos and the deep consciousness within your own mind are the result of a random, unguided accident.

So, which story do you prefer? The one taught by Santosh with a goat and a cage, confirmed by an unceremonial goodbye on a lonely beach? Or the one that whispers of a loving Creator, of a universe that sings, and of a beauty that is more than just a reflection of our own eyes?

And so it is with God.