Barack Obama has apparently described Life of Pi as “an elegant proof of God”. But in the opinion of this agnostic – a position vilified (inexpertly) in the novel – if it is such a proof, it is in the least interesting of ways.

The story is an account of being cast away in the Pacific Ocean, relayed by Indian youth Pi Patel to employees of the company whose ocean liner it was that sank, leaving Pi orphaned and living in a lifeboat for seven months with only a Bengal tiger for company. Or so Pi would have us believe.

After listening to his tale, the men express incredulity at its fantastic nature; “we don’t believe your story,” they say, “we would like to know what really happened”. Pi suggests he knows what they want: “You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know.”

So he tells them another which, whilst more horrific than the first, is pedestrian. It offers an explanation of Pi’s ordeal they can accept, and which helps them understand the more grandiose account.

But when he is finished Pi reminds the men that they cannot prove either story is true, that they must take his word for it. They agree. He then asks, “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?”. When they reply that the first story is better, Pi replies, “Thank you. And so it goes with God.”

The novel’s ‘argument for the existence of god’, if indeed it is one, is contained in this simple exchange. The context for it is the religious life Pi had chosen to lead prior to being shipwrecked.

Much to the dismay of his father, who seems himself “as part of the New India – rich, modern and secular”, Pi embraces religion with a fervour that upsets even its local leaders. As he grows, he learns about the three belief systems available to him locally – Christianity, Hinduism and Islam – and becomes a follower of all three. His motivation, as he explains when confronted, is summed up in the words of Ghandi: “All religions are true,” he quotes. “I just want to love God.”

Pi is therefore, if anything, a believer. He explains that, if Jesus doubted, then we are also permitted to do so, but “we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation”. It is for this reason that “it is not atheists who get stuck in [his] craw, but agnostics”.

I find this somewhat back-to-front; to my mind it is the agnostic who continues to travel, looking for an answer, whereas the believer, having declared the question closed, not only makes no progress, but does not desire it.

Pi’s mistake is to attribute to the agnostic a conclusion he has himself reached; that “you can’t prove the question either way”. He therefore incorrectly assumes the agnostic ‘choose[s] doubt as a philosophy of life’, whereas in fact the agnostic does not have a ‘philosophy’ of life. Rather, they have an approach to life that does not include believing that for which they have no sure evidence.

Pi, like many believers, finds that he cannot live with an unanswered question. His language reveals that he fears he will stagnate, will become ‘immobile’. The same goes for the atheist; they feel the need to make a decision about the most unfathomable of queries.

The agnostic, however, feels no such need. The agnostic sees no imperative to make a choice – they can accept that the question cannot yet be answered. They do not choose doubt, they consider it the only rational course of action. Rather than needing a story to provide them with the strength to move through the world, they seek the best story of all: knowledge.

Pi reveals further evidence of his misunderstanding of agnosticism when he says he can imagine the death bed conversion of the atheist, interpreting the light they see as evidence of god. The agnostic, however, “if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, ‘Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,’ and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story”.

Here, he conflates ‘reason’ with ‘reasonableness’. That is, even if an agnostic held their reason to be the fount of all knowledge – and they are in no way beholden to do so by their approach to life – it does not mean they are in any way reasonable. Indeed, in a world dominated by religious believers and atheists, the agnostic appears – and is often charged with being – distinctly unreasonable. Nothing draws exasperation so much as someone who says, calmly, ‘in the case of such an important matter, I simply do not understand how you can make up your mind when the evidence is not conclusive’.

However, in his interchange with the men from the shipping company, Pi betrays the truth; it is not actually agnosticism that frustrates him, as he claims, but atheism, which he purports to prefer.

It is important to remember that the men explicitly profess disbelief, not scepticism. Pi asks them, “if you stumble at believability, what are you living for?” They reply by saying that they are “just being reasonable”, to which Pi responds that if one is “excessively reasonable… you risk throwing the universe out with the bathwater”. This is a clear reference to his earlier comments, purportedly about agnosticism, and another follows swiftly, when he says, “you want dry, yeastless factuality”.

It is the atheist that clings blindly to the evidence of their senses, to the facts at hand, to ‘reasonableness’, not the agnostic. These men refuse to believe the fantastic because it does not fit with their view of the world. An agnostic, however, would rather decline to believe either story. Or even, perhaps, accept that both are, at least in some way, true. That is, the agnostic employs reason to conclude that neither story can be proved at this point in time.

Why is the agnostic so often charged with that which should rather be levelled at the atheist? Perhaps, as is the case with Pi, because the believer sees in the atheist a like mind, someone who needs to believe as much as they do. This is, to the religious believer, a reasonable position, unlike the withholding of judgement which exasperates them so.

This exasperation is something Pi identifies in others but not himself when he criticises people who “take it upon themselves to defend God” with indignation and anger. He says they have failed to realise that “it is on the inside God must be defended, not on the outside”. But their anger and his frustration with agnostics – remember, they ‘stick in his craw’, they annoy him – come from the same place as that anger and indignation; the need to believe.

The argument for the existence of god contained in Life of Pi is successful only in the least interesting of ways, because the  scope of that existence is limited to the mind of the believer. When Pi asks the men which of the two he has told them is the ‘better story’ and says, when they reply that the more fantastical is better, “so it goes with God”, he makes it clear that the only argument he has for god is that he prefers it. He chooses a world with god in it over one without. He does not accuse the agnostic of being wrong, but simply of missing the ‘better story’.

Not only is this not proof of the existence of god as it would usually be understood – as proving that god exists whether or not anyone believes in it – it is inelegant, a mere stating of the position. ‘God exists because I choose to believe it,’ is without finesse, a mere declaration of faith which is, therefore, unassailable.

What is proved elegantly, however, is how god could easily be a fiction conjured by a mind in extremis as a method of survival. In the same way Pi constructs a fantastical journey for himself rather than face the true horror of what has happened to him, human beings, confronted by a savage existence, coupled with the misfortune of possessing a consciousness able to reflect upon it, create for themselves a refuge, an all powerful father figure that loves and protects them.

Or perhaps I’m just being too reasonable.