Can a story make you believe you in "God"? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The argument that this story will make you "believe in a God" is very subjective, and therefore based on one's own belief and interpertation of the story and what a "God is". Such interpertations all dependng on your own personal background, experiences, beiefs, and potentially the generation you grew up in. However, I fully believe if you take a moment to peel back all of fictional and religious elements of the story, and set aside your own personal aspects, the true underlining message of this story is to make readers/viewers want to believe in a "God" without preaching as to what that "God" is, or how everything came into existance. Such a concept can be heavily debated, but many research papers and articles online. 

 

The following is a Q&A passage taken from " The Empathetic Imagination"- an Interview with Yann Martelan. Yann is asked if the the boundaries of religion and fiction play a significant part in his dramatization and story Life of Pi play, and hints towards asking if it was intended to "make people believe in God?

 

Yann's response is the following:

"Yes [they do], but then the question is: What do you mean by fiction? I discovered in writing Life of Pi that in a sense religion operates like fiction. A good novel works by making you suspend your disbelief. When you read a novel that doesn't work, you sense that, "Oh, this happened and it was so improbable. That's not how they do it." Novels that don't work are emotionally dead, their mistakes in idioms or in cultural habits are annoying. A good novel-even though there are robots and flying dinosaurs-just takes us in. Religion works the same way-it makes you suspend your disbelief so that factual truth becomes irrelevant. It's not because the facts are ignored. It's more how you interpret the facts and how much you value facts that affect the totality of your sense experience. So to say that the book will make you believe in fiction, to me, isn't very far from saying it'll make you believe in God. I think it's acceptable to say that God is a fiction, if you understand that this doesn't necessarily mean that this fiction doesn't exist. It just exists in a way that is only accessed through the imagination." (28)

 

Similary, in the article Feeding Tiger, Finding God: Science, Religion, and "the Better Story" in Life of Pi, by Gregory Stephens, it argues this point directly. It states how Life of Pi is describes is in fact a religious book, however it is designed to make sense to a nonreligious person. In a similar fashion the book "achieves something more quietly spectacular than a literal conversion, or a restoring of one's faith in God: it makes the reader want to believe in God". Thus, the article relates to how Yann Martel is ultimatly giving the reader or viewer a democratic choice to believe or not, but attaching a desire to believe rather than the belief itself " (Ishmael) (29)

 

Another example of this debate is raised and addressed in a Huffington post article right around the time the movie was released. The artile, 'Life of Pi': Can a Movie Make You Believe in God?, was published in the Religion section and written by Nancy Fuchs Kreimer ( a Director of the Department of Multifaith Studies and Initiatives at  Reconstructionist Rabbinical College). Nancy makes a strong point againsted many of the agrument at the Life of Pi is not about finding a "God", as she shows how "the ability of stories to create [a] transcendent meaning is just the start. I do think the movie is about God, but not the kind of God one chooses to "believe in" or not, who is featured in lush stories with animals rather than in dryer, flatter, more prosaic accounts. It is certainly not about a God who explains why people suffer and redeems all evil. This is not a God whose story one necessarily would 'prefer' ". (30)

 

Finally, many of the directors and screen writers have been quoted as saying “We don’t want to say that you should believe in all things and nothing all at once. All of these narratives, all of these stories that we rely on are grasping toward the same thing. [...] They’re all trying to put some sort of order on the chaos and the despair that we confront in our lives, and if you listen to those stories, you can hear the common theme along the journey.” Thus, David is addressing the notion that belief is the key theme, and albiet he never outright says it was. (30) 
 

This blog article focus on the aspect of storytelling as a main theme in this movie, and I may decide to use it for the website as mentions the parallel between Life of Pi and the Biblical story of Noah — “as he attempts to bring along some of the zoo animals on his lifeboat”. (31)

 

There is a lot of merit to the idea that this book will make the reader believe in God, many critics and reviews have come to this conclusion. Once the reader takes a moment and understands fully, the impact of the story it is not hard to conclude that God does exist, and that this fictional story is a vessel for the readers/viewers, and pushing for them to want to believe in a God.