These Are My True Doctrines - If You Don't Like Them, I Have Others

People love coincidences. I love coincidences.  But I get jumpy when people try to find meaning in them.

Take the story in the video I embedded above.  It's charming, it's moving: A woman and the son she gave up for adoption find each other in the bakery she runs, where it turns out he has been a regular for years.  When she falls ill, he takes over running the bakery.  It's like the string of coincidences in Oedipus Rex, only with a happy ending.  "You can't tell this story without talking God, because I was led the entire way," the son tells the TV reporter, as the camera pans over inspirational mottoes and a battered Bible.   You could say the same about Oedipus.

Here's another story, also from Chicago.

     

The owner of a construction company is remodeling the bathroom of his parents' house, and finds a Christmas present behind the drywall; it fell there in 1978.  Hashtag Christmas miracle! -- I take it that's the TV station's label, since the man himself is pleasantly wry about it all.  "It's worth tens of tens of dollars," he says of the mint, unopened package of Thunder Jets.

Do I need to say that I'm happy for these people?  Of course I am, just as I was happy for the friend who lost her car keys.  Her friends on Facebook had prayed up a storm for her, but I didn't, so maybe it was my fault that she only found them only after paying a couple of hundred dollars to replace them.  I was also happy that a seven-year-old boy who was hit by a van and spent some time in an induced coma recovered and became a chef; I was not so happy that his mother said on NPR that the accident was God's way of nudging her to become a nurse, a career path she had resisted until then.  I'm more neutral when believers kvell that the Lord preserved a Bible, or a stack of Bibles, or some holy icons (via), when a church or residence burned down; I think they're flaunting a lack of moral sense, but as moral failures go this one is relatively mild.

When something terrible happens to someone by coincidence, nice people are apt to chalk it up to karma, not-so-nice people will call it a judgment.  But believers disagree on specific cases, and I've never been able to get them to explain the criteria they rely on.  Some believe that the COVID pandemic was God's judgment on America (the rest of the world doesn't exist for them); but the same people are apt to believe that the pandemic was a liberal germ-warfare plot.

I love to remember something the philosopher David Hume wrote centuries ago, that your ordinary person will justify belief in the Christian god by telling "you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it." This is still true, though belief in a capricious deity easily coexists with belief in a trustworthy deity whose eye is on the sparrow and will never let his chosen stumble, let alone fall.  

That Janus-faced god is not the god of the philosophers but the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the god of the simple common-sense believer who has no time for the double-talk of the pointy-headed intellectuals.  Not only of the superstitious doofus, though: in 1983 the late skeptic and (I presume) round-headed intellectual Martin Gardner published a book, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, in which he declared (Kindle edition, loc 2882):

In line with the practice I have tried to follow throughout this book, I take the word God to mean what I believe it means and has always meant to most philosophers and theologians in the history of Western thought, as well as to almost all ordinary people. As I use the term, God is a God who is in some way outside our universe, who in some manner created the universe, who has some kind of plan for humanity and for every person, a God to whom we can pray, above all a God who sustains our hope for immortality. A personal God. Yes, the God of Christianity, but not only of Christianity. The God of Judaism, of Islam, and hundreds of smaller faiths. The God of Plato (yes, Plato!) and Kant and Charles Peirce and Miguel de Unamuno and a thousand other eminent philosophers and writers who were theists unshackled by the doctrines of any organized religious institution.

There are many problems here, and I'm wondering whether I should bother to reread the entire book; but as another famous scrivener reportedly said, I would prefer not to.  His argument boils down to the claim that everybody else does it, which isn't even an argument.  Gardner would never have let an opponent get away with a similar assertion about belief in healing crystals, or ESP, or a "literal" seven-day creation.  Notice too how he goes along with the crowd while invoking bold free-thinkers "unshackled by the doctrines of any religious institution", giving his readers the worst of both worlds.

A few pages later Gardner wrote: "Plato, remember, wanted to keep Homer out of the hands of school children because he regarded the Homeric mythology as blasphemy against the gods."  

Gardner was being disingenuous here. First, Plato wanted to ban Homer and other canonical Greek poets from his ideal republic, not only to protect school children but all its subjects except for the small minority of philosopher-kings who ruled it. He suggested instead a "noble lie" of humanity composed of different metals according to the roles they played in the republic, which the ignorant Many would believe and their rulers would not.  Second, the god of Plato (yes, Plato!) was not a creator but a craftsman, not an interventionist personal god but a philosophical principle, and certainly not the god of Christianity.  Gardner tried to explain away the difficulties of his position by pointing out that "educated" Christians don't take Christian mythology literally. Nor, I would add, do uneducated Christians: both groups interpret their mythology opportunistically and incoherently.

Gardner thought he was staking out a middle position between atheism and fundamentalism, but his position was the false one that all religions basically believe in the same god.  In one sense he was correct, in that the god of Hume's "vulgar" believers probably is like the gods of most lay believers in all religions.  But in another he was completely wrong: the god of the philosophers, including Gardner himself, is an explicit rejection of the gods of popular piety.  Like another famous preacher, Gardner was trying to be all things to all men; but what was he offering except yellow stripes and dead armadillos?

If someone wants to believe that a god led them to the bakery owned by the mother who gave them up for adoption, no one is harmed by that. It's not even harmful if someone believes that a god nudged her to become a nurse by nearly killing her young son, since she didn't cause the accident herself. But what if someone believes that a god saved Donald Trump from the assassin's bullet?  From which it would follow that a god didn't save John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. from the assassin's bullet.  Or as I've asked in a non-Christian context, do earthquakes happen because the spirits are understaffed, or inattentive, or hungover?  In my experience, most believers try to avoid following their logic to its conclusion in matters like these; I don't think they should be allowed to get away with it.

Lately I've been thinking more about useful atheist responses to missionary activity.  The standard attacks on belief in gods, or on established religion, are generally valid but tend to miss the point, as Hume indicated.  Like Christian apologists, we sometimes move the discussion to topics we are prepared to address, instead of meeting our opponents head on.  I've been noticing a lot of books on Amazon or in the library which claim to help apologists and missionaries deal with the "new" secularism, and to avoid alienating potential targets.  It doesn't appear that they offer anything new, which may be a mercy.  But I find I have other questions, other objections, which go deeper and I think will be useful to explore. I want mainly to ask: what are they selling, and how are they selling it?

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*Gardner wrote a critical review of his own book for the New York Review of Books - under the pseudonym George Groth, as he apparently acknowledged at the end of the piece.  It's paywalled, so I can't read it. 

An Inordinate Fondness for Flesh-Eating Bacteria

A friend of mine posted these remarks --

Several people I know have had to say goodbye to their pets recently or having to face the prospect of doing so. I'm not a believer, but it seems to me that if God does exist, S/He wouldn't be so petty as to deny happiness to all of creation. So good on Pope Francis.

-- with a link to this article about everybody's favorite Bishop of Rome.  Since President Obama has proven to be a disappointment, many liberals and progressives are evidently looking for a New Hope, and they've found one in Jorge Mario Bergoglio.  They never seem to see the irony in this.  They're quite ready to dismiss with scorn those Christians and Christian leaders who appeal to imaginary beings to say things they dislike, but they seem sure that Pope Francis is a true Christian who's getting the Church back to the real, original teachings of Christ, risking his life to speak truth to power and preach the real will of God.  This is true even for some who present themselves as atheists; I must say I doubt that someone who appeals to the real will of God is really an atheist.  But leaving that aside, how do they know what God really wants?  How does Francis know what God really wants, or will do?

My friend's comment on the meme is a case in point.  Why does he take for granted that the creator of supernovae, mass extinctions, plagues, cancer, flesh-eating bacteria, birth defects lethal and merely disabling, predators, and human beings -- with all our unlovely traits and practices -- gives a rat's ass about "the happiness of all creation"?  Why would he suppose that such a being cares whether human beings see their pets in the afterlife?  (Except for cats, of course. That's why I'm a cat person, so I'll have a companion animal in Hell.)  The prevalence of suffering in the world is, at the very least, evidence against any claim that its creator is concerned with "the happiness of all creation."

I'd also say it's going too far to take for granted that these humans will go to Heaven.  Will Fido look down on his Mommy's torment in Hell, as Lazarus did on Dives from the bosom of Abraham?  And that's assuming that there is an afterlife, which is a big assumption.

The linked article, from the New York Times, is thoroughly fatuous and sloppy.  As so often has happened, it involves a wild explication of a stray remark by the Pontiff.  The writer begins by declaring that Francis "has given hope to gays, unmarried couples and advocates of the Big Bang Theory."  I'm certainly gratified to know that I can hope to be reunited with the Big Bang Theory in Heaven; surely the creator of the universe wouldn't be so petty as to deny me that.

Anyway, here's what happened:

During a weekly general audience at the Vatican last month, the pope, speaking of the afterlife, appeared to suggest that animals could go to heaven, asserting, “Holy Scripture teaches us that the fulfillment of this wonderful design also affects everything around us.”

Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, analyzing the pope’s remarks, concluded he believed animals have a place in the afterlife. It drew an analogy to comforting words that Pope Paul VI was said to have once told a distraught boy whose dog had died: “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”

The news accounts of Francis’ remarks were welcomed by groups like the Humane Society of the United States and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who saw them as a repudiation of conservative Roman Catholic theology that says animals cannot go to heaven because they have no souls.

"Appeared to suggest"!  "Was said to have once told"!  With support like that, who needs an actual declaration from the papal throne?  You can hope for anything you like, regardless of what the Vatican says, and you can make up whatever fanciful tales you like about what the pope says or believes, but that doesn't guarantee you'll get what you want.

For what little it's worth, the Christian Bible doesn't have any clear account of the afterlife or of the "soul."  (I'm frequently surprised by people who talk confidently about souls, though they have no idea what a soul is, even if it exists; no one does.  I don't see how you can have a "new debate" on whether animals have souls when you don't know whether human beings have them.)  It doesn't, as far as I know, say anything about the status of non-human animals in the heavens or after death.  The "conservative Roman Catholic theology" is constructed of later extrapolations from the Bible, Aristotelian and Platonist philosophy, and theologians' prejudices and fantasies.  I don't see why the Humane Society or PETA, unless they are affiliated with and subordinate to the Roman Catholic Church, should care much what the pope has to say on this or any subject.  From the Times article I conclude that their spokespeople simply took the opportunity to expound their favorite talking points.

Maybe Francis does believe that animals will go to heaven; that's more than can be said for most human beings, since Jesus said explicitly that only a few would find eternal life salvation compared to the many would be lost.  But unless you're a conservative Catholic who believes that the pope has the keys to the gates of heaven, transmitted by apostolic succession from Simon Peter -- unless, that is, you accept Catholic mythology -- I see no reason to believe that Francis knows any more about this than anyone else does.

I've Got a Little List

Another of my right-wing acquaintances, this one a guy I went to high school with, posted a link to the above meme last night.  It's worth noticing, I think, because the claim that Bibles and prayer aren't allowed in school is so popular in certain circles, and because it's a flat lie.  I commented:

It's false that Bibles are not permitted in schools. I realize that the truth doesn't matter to Christians; I'm just pointing it out for the record.

I didn't really expect to get a response, but this morning I found that another person from my high school had asked:

To what Christian types does the truth not matter?

I replied:

Just for a start: those who post stuff like this.

I think I've said before that there seem to be some public-school teachers and others who may genuinely believe that they mustn't allow their students to pray on their own initiative during the school day, or read the Bible, or use Biblical material in class discussion or for writing assignments and the like.  But that would certainly be because they've believed the false claims of religious reactionaries who misrepresent Supreme Court decisions which forbid public schools to impose religious observances (like prayer or devotional Bible-reading) on their students.  (A misrepresentation which surely casts doubt on the implication of the meme that people who read the Bible are more honest or conscientious than those who don't.)

Of course, I exaggerated slightly in implying that there are no Christians to whom the truth matters.  I can think of several; but I think of them as the exception that proves the rule, since they generally are the targets of attack from other Christians for what they say and write.  Ironically perhaps, they aren't particularly "radical" (whatever that means in a modern Christian context) or even dissident in their theology: I have in mind the scholars James Barr and Dennis Nineham, from whose work I've learned so much.  Both are ordained clergymen in mainline denominations as well as scholars, and they seem comfortable enough in their churches.

But here's another example of dishonesty about religion from a source I've noticed before:

This one was shared by some Facebook friends who are gay and not religiously orthodox but still seem to want to find shelter under His wings.  My objection is what it was before: I see no reason to believe that there's a supreme or superior being who's doing anything for starving babies or people with cancer.  This meme is like a kid saying, "Mom, I don't have time to take out the garbage, I'm doing my homework, I have a big test tomorrow I have to study for!" -- while really he's watching Internet porn.  And if there's anyone who can't use the excuse of not having time, it's God.

Ours Not to Reason Why

A couple of friends shared this meme on Facebook the other day, leaving me baffled.  "For no reason"?  The same people post memes like this at other times:

They're people who post stuff to the effect that God has us in his hands, that he'll never never ever abandon us, he has a plan for us and no one could possibly thwart it.  They also post stuff about how God took someone to be with him, because "He only takes the best."  (The Onion recently satirized this trope, very effectively.)  So how can they say that someone died for "without reason"?  (Which leaves aside the question why anyone who believes in immortality could possibly mourn the death of anyone.  C. S. Lewis said somewhere that there must be an afterlife, and everybody really believes in personal immortality deep down, because every culture has beliefs about it, so it must be true.  Even if that were true [and it's debatable], every culture also sees death as a bad thing, and mourns the loss of those who die, which on Lewis's logic would mean there must not be an afterlife.  If death means going to be with God and your loved ones in heaven (again, this assumes way too much), then why shed a single tear at the departure?  As Sappho wrote, if death were not an evil, the gods would die too.

It's not only Christians who believe in everything having a reason and post material pushing the notion: I have friends from non-Yahwist traditions who make the claim, and I believe some nominal non-theists and believers in science have done so.  In a tiny sense, they're right: except at the quantum level, every event comes from somewhere, so we can say that there's a reason why you were struck by lightning or won the lottery.  If your cat is killed by a drunken driver, there are reasons why: it happened because your cat stepped out into the road, and because someone was out driving under the influence on his or her way home from a basketball game.  Most people don't think in those terms, though: when someone says that everything happens for it reason, they usually seem to mean that some person-like entity intends each event for reasons of its own, usually for our instruction or to show its glory or to give another angel its wings.  They want to believe that there's intention guiding the universe, so that everything happens for a purpose.  And they may be right, who knows?  I don't think they are, but I'm more or less agnostic on the point.  I think, however, that the burden is on them to prove their belief, which they can't do.  And I find it revealing when such people flip-flop and declare that something they didn't like happened "without reason."

Alfie Kohn argued in The Myth of the Spoiled Child that many of the value-laden statements people make ("Children are spoiled nowadays" or "Children need a good ass-whooping now and then to teach them discipline" or "We simply have to trust His will) are not even meant to be statements about the way the world actually works; rather they're about how these people think the world ought to work.  I admit that my distaste for many of their values is connected to my values.  Like the character in a Peter DeVries novel, I don't find it at all comforting to believe in a Cosmic Someone who sees everything that happens but refuses to intervene (or worse, intervenes to make bad things happen).  I find the suffering in the world less upsetting if no one is behind it.  But clearly many (most?) people don't agree with me, which is their right, but it seems that their faith in their Cosmic Someone falters from time to time.

So It Goes ...

I've begun reading Thornton Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, another of those classics I've put off for decades.  I read a few of his later books during the 1970s, and liked them, but for some reason I didn't get to this one.  I'm only a few chapters in now, but something got my attention.

The novel is about the collapse of an Andean bridge in 1714 that killed five people, and the friar who decides to find out why God chose to kill them, by collecting information on their lives.  At the close of the first chapter, the narrator (whom I don't take to be Wilder himself) addresses rhetorically the question of why the disaster happened:

Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

"On the contrary" threw me.  There are no contraries here: both of those cliches -- the first from King Lear, Act IV Scene 1, the second from the gospel of Matthew, chapter 10 verse 29 -- say essentially the same thing: all suffering is the result of divine action.  Shakespeare's Gloucester is more negative about the idea, Matthew's Jesus means to be reassuring, but both assume that gods are behind everything that happens.  Wilder's narrator disavows any conclusion, but the way the "contraries" are framed seems to me to load the dice somewhat.

God Giving Us the Finger

One of my Facebook friends from high school, now the wife of a Methodist minister, complained yesterday because some newscaster on MSNBC called the Oklahoma tornado "the finger of God reaching down out of the sky."  One of her friends agreed: "What a stupid thing to say!! As if God would intentionally destroy...sheesh...."  This baffled me: which god were they talking about?  Certainly not the god of the Christian Bible (Hello! The Deluge?), who not only would but has "intentionally destroyed" on numerous occasions.  For once I restrained myself and didn't comment.

This, you see, is one of the reasons I have never felt I was missing anything by not being a religious believer.  I'm not sure it really gives much comfort in times of trouble; I haven't observed that religious people, for all they claim otherwise, really draw any kind of strength or wisdom from their beliefs.  One of my favorite examples is C. S. Lewis, who to judge from A Grief Observed, went to pieces when his wife died of cancer.  In the end he accepted a belief that he had often rejected, that God is a cosmic sadist who inflicts pain on us for our own good -- but it's up to us, not to him, to deal with it constructively.  If we fail, it's our fault; if we succeed, to him goes the glory.  This sort of thing doesn't make Christianity look like something I need.

I don't mean only Christianity, of course.  Reading up on Christopher Isherwood recently, I wondered how much Vedanta really did for him.  From the biographical and autobiographical materials I've read about him, it seems that his years of greatest involvement with the movement coincided with a lot of heavy drinking and emotional instability.  No doubt he'd have said what devotees commonly say: that he'd have been so much worse off without the spiritual shelter Vedanta gave him.  I suspect that the booze and the promiscuity may have had their benefits, and that a lot of what's touted as spiritual growth is just getting older and less inclined to indulge in drama.

Still, something else is going on with those comments on the Oklahoma tornadoes.  My friend and her friend were objecting to a central doctrine of their religion: that Yahweh is not merely the creator but the sustainer of the world.  Nothing happens without his knowing it, and since he is omnipotent as well as omniscient, nothing happens without his permission and collaboration.  This isn't a religious invention like the Immaculate Conception, it's a biblical doctrine, most poetically expressed by Jesus himself, Matthew 10:29: Not a sparrow falls without your Father in Heaven knowing it.  An omniscient, omnipotent being is responsible in a way that no mere human being can be, yet believers makes excuses for the lapses of their gods that they'd never tolerate if they were made for a human malefactor.

A common evasion for this problem is the claim that God can't intervene, because it would interfere with our free will.  I don't buy it for several reasons: first, if so, then why do Christians pray in order to ask for his intervention?  Second, why then is the Bible (and Christian lore) full of stories where God did intervene?  Third, doesn't this excuse pose insuperable difficulties for the Christian doctrine of Heaven, where no one will suffer?  Either there's no free will in heaven, or the Christian god doesn't mind interfering with it.

Though I discuss subjects like this as an atheist and therefore an outsider, the problem of suffering has been addressed by many believers.  When I see believers misrepresenting their own tradition, as my friend did, I won't be put off from criticizing them by the assumption that an outsider has no business criticizing insiders.  (Christians have never let any such consideration inhibit their criticisms of other religions!)  I know very well that other insiders would raise and have raised the same objections I do -- it's often from such insiders that I've learned these objections.  This same friend, upset by some of my criticism of Christianity, told me that if I'd just become a Christian I wouldn't be so critical.  That would be true only if I let groupthink and moral laziness accompany my conversion, which often happens but isn't inevitable.  The prospect certainly doesn't make becoming a believer any more attractive to me.

This is why I'm critical of my fellow atheists when they cast all believers as unthinking sheep.  Many are, maybe most, but not all; believing in a particular god or joining a cult is not an excuse for this kind of dishonesty.  And atheists aren't immune to it either, alas; we just tend to exercise it with different imaginary friends, called "Reason" or "Evolution" or "Science."  The only way to think critically is to do it, not to join a club.

The Ocean or the Tiger?

I went to see Ang Lee's latest film Life of Pi today, because Samuel Delany had made some comments about it on Facebook.  Be warned that spoilers will follow.  If you haven't seen the movie yet and want to see it with a minimum of foreknowledge, stop reading now.  Of course many people who see it will have already read the novel it's based on, which I hadn't.  According to some of the comments on Delany's posts, the film stays pretty close to the book.  (Which means, thankfully, that I shouldn't have to read it myself.)

The movie presents itself as a story that "will make you believe in God." But, given the two stories that the plot hinges on, it seems to do the exact opposite--the story of the boy, the boat, and the tiger forming a precise allegory of the failure of all religions to promote humane behavior in the hidden story we are told, at the end, "actually happened" and that was so monstrously awful it had to be replaced with the hallucination we are given instead. They couldn't have come up with a better script promoting atheism if they had gotten Christopher Hitchens to write it. By the way, as a movie I rather enjoyed it--though I would have liked a film that at least tried to do what it set to, rather than the opposite, atheist that I am. But it seemed to have given up on that before it even got started.

I'd differ with Delany on something trivial but still, I believe, significant: the movie tells a story about a story that "will make you believe in God."  I presume that applies to the novel too.  I'm always skeptical about such stories,  The first such a one I encountered was Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, part of which consists of two characters telling each other how things happened, seemingly making up their reminiscences on the fly, and the reader is supposed to marvel at the instability and unknowability of reality that this represents.  Like Einstein or Heisenberg, or Schroedinger's Cat.

In Life of Pi, a young novelist beset by writer's block is told by the title character's uncle that Pi has a story to tell that will make the listener believe in God.  The novelist visits Pi, who obligingly tells his story, which makes up the bulk of the film: the only survivor of a shipwreck that killed his family (mother, father, older brother) and the entire crew of a Japanese freighter en route from Manila to Canada, the teenaged Pi found himself in a lifeboat with a survival kit and the company of a hyena, a rat, a zebra, an orangutang, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.  After a few days, the survivors are reduced to Pi and the tiger.

Pi's family had run a zoo in Pondicherry, India, and were shipping the animals to Canada for sale. During his childhood Pi had become fascinated by religion.  His family was nominally Hindu, but he came into contact with Roman Catholicism and Islam, and engaged in some simple if precocious questioning.  Convinced that animals had souls, Pi tried to make friends with the tiger; his father intervened before he lost an arm, and gave a young goat to the tiger, which killed it in front of Pi.  This convinced the boy that there was no meaning in the world, and he spent several years studying listlessly, finding meaning only later when his heterosexuality erupted in his late teens, just before the family emigrated.  It's hard for me to take the boy's disillusionment very seriously.  After all, carnivores and their prey are part of the Cycle of Life, God's Will and all that.  If the tiger had taken Pi's arm off, that would be God's will.  I'm always bemused by believers' self-serving selectivity about matters like this.

Trying to survive at sea, Pi reaches a modus vivendi with the tiger.  But he still struggles with the meaning of it all.  Occasionally in extremity he cries "I surrender!" to the god or gods he imagines in charge of his situation.  I found this perplexing, though of course it's a common reaction.  After all, if there's an omnipotent, omniscient being running your life, what does it care if you surrender or not?  What does it care if you issue ultimata or collapse in a crying heap?  If you survive, is this (as Pi seems to conclude) a sign that the gods were taking care of you?  If so, why did so many other people fail to survive?

Some commenters on Delany's post invoked the book of Job, which is not very helpful.  Like Pi, it's a fable: Yahweh and Satan bet on what will happen if the righteous and blessed Job loses the protection Yahweh has so far granted him.  Satan kills off Job's family, destroys his chattels, and afflicts him with boils.  Job denounces Yahweh's injustice in eloquent speeches, and his friends reprove him: You must have done something wrong, they tell him, or God wouldn't have done this to you.  (Notice that no one blames it on Satan, quite properly.)  In the end Yahweh speaks to Job from the whirlwind, challenging him to fisticuffs and asserting his power (but not his justice); Job crumbles and admits that he is a mere worm.  Yahweh growls at Job's friends, who he says have not spoken of him what is right, as Job has, and then restores Job's fortunes, and they all live happily after.  The end.

The difference in the story of Job is that there is no real question why Job suffered.  He didn't do anything wrong; God was just trying a little experiment.  He could as easily have gone on protecting Job.  And if Job, who was fabulously righteous, could be tormented so, there's no reason to blame the suffering of other people on their lesser righteousness.  Many interpreters have tried to get around the book's conclusions, but they've never convinced me; I follow the philosopher Walter Kaufmann, whose interpretation in The Faith of a Heretic (Doubleday, 1961) still makes the most sense to me.

Pi was eventually washed up on a Mexican beach.  In the hospital he was questioned by Japanese insurance investigators who wanted to know why the ship went down; this question is never answered, since Pi couldn't have known why.  The investigators questioned the truth of his tale, so he invented a new one in which his mother, one sailor, and the French cook survived with him, but the cook killed the sailor and Pi's mother and then, guilty for his crime, let Pi kill him in turn.  The impression is given that the investigators accepted this grimmer, grittier version, but their report (which Pi produces and shows to the novelist) concluded that Pi made history by crossing the Pacific in a lifeboat with only a Bengal tiger for company.

Like Delany, I can't understand how anyone could find support for belief in gods in either story.  Life of Pi has a New-Agey, culture-of-therapy smugness about it that nearly drove me from my seat a couple of times.  Quite typically, it doesn't go very far in the edifying explanations it considers.  Again, possible spoiler:  Pi happened to survive the sinking of the ship because he was delighted by the storm and went above to watch it; his family drowned in their cabin.  Maybe his suffering in the lifeboat was God's retribution for his having escaped God's will, which was that he should have died with his family?  Why even suppose that the gods are on the side of human beings?  The humility that the faithful proudly claim to possess and practice tends to fall by the wayside when they consider their place in the universe.  Which is no doubt very comforting, but doesn't strike me as very profound.  I don't object to "spirituality" in films or other art; I just hope for something better than the usual pompous cliches, which is all that Life of Pi offers.  The photography and special effects are pretty, but I have this thing about substance too.