Tale of two men on an island

Story of the Atheist and the Pastor: Is religion true or should we believe in science?

Two men end up shipwrecked on a deserted island where they must survive until hopes of rescue.

One man is an atheist scientist that doesn’t believe in God. The other man is a humble Christian pastor with little education but strong faith in a creator that loves him and wants a relationship with him. In normal life, these two men were opposed to each other as enemies. They simply don’t mesh. Like oil and water, they do not go together. They don’t mix.

Now facing each other after a wild tropical storm that overturned their ship and killed everyone else on board, it’s just the two of them. And they have to survive until some form of rescue hopefully comes.

The morning after the initial storm had ended when they woke up and realized it was just the two of them remaining and no one from the ship made it to the island, they were disheartened to see that of all people they could have been stranded with, they each were stranded with their polar opposite in life. Right away, with little time having passed since they pulled themselves up from the sands of the shoreline, they couldn’t agree on a method for saving themselves. They didn’t like each other when they were in the “real world” or when they were on the ship, and it appeared it would be no different now that they were stranded together.

The pastor wanted to pray and find guidance from God. The scientist saw this as nonsense and asked the pastor: “If there was a loving God, where was he when the shipwrecked? Why are we in this mess? If your God was so good and loving, why did he allow this to happen.”

To which, the pastor replied: “You’re looking at this all wrong. Don’t you see that God is the one who saved us? If it wasn’t for God, we wouldn’t be alive!”

“Nonsense!” The atheist shouted. “Complete nonsense! You can go on serving your fairy-tale gray-haired man in the sky, but I am going to use my common sense and brain to carve out my survival. Help will come! But it won’t be because you’re praying to some make-believe sky daddy up there in the clouds. People like you disgust me! Religious types bury their heads in the sand and ignore this giant glowing thing called REALITY! You can keep that nonsense away from me, you stay on your side of the island.” With this, the scientist drew a line in the sand along the shoreline. The island couldn’t have been more than a few football fields long from one end to the other. However, it was packed full of trees with a small jungle beyond the shoreline.

“You stay on that side of the island!” the scientist said. “I’ll stay on this side.”

“That’s fine by me!” the pastor said. “I didn’t want to be around a godless heathen atheist, to begin with. You’re negative and your science is going to be the death of you. And then you’ll have God to answer when you cross over to the other said.”

At this, the atheist scoffed and laughed and picked up a handful of sand and threw it at the pastor, walking away.

The pastor looked on and looked upward. 

He immediately began to pray.

During the course of these two men’s stay on this tropical island somewhere out in the deep blue Pacific Ocean, both of them struggled tremendously. On their separate sides of the island, they each sought out their survival as best as they could.

The atheist, being a scientist, tapped into the wealth of knowledge he had about nature and the workings of science. He spent his days creating traps and weapons to kill his food. He had some survival skills from his days in the boy scouts, so he used them intelligently to create shelter, build a fire and find safe drinking water. 

Nevertheless, resources were scarce. Trying to survive in the wild is extremely challenging when you’ve been completely sheltered most of your life like a person living in modern society.

It was no better for the pastor, who, having some camping and hunting skills from his childhood as a youth growing up in the church, did everything he could to find food, water and shelter. He was able to create a spear to spearfish and find a stream with safe drinking water. But he, too, had become so accustomed to modern life that carving out an existence on this island, as the days turned into weeks and the weeks became months, was utterly brutal.

Nevertheless, as time went on, the two of them managed to survive and co-exist on separate sides of the island. The scientist, despite his ability to think, sometimes did too much thinking. There were times he spent days trying to perfect a device or make a trap that failed to produce any food. Likewise, although the pastor didn’t have many skills to live in the wild, he somehow managed to be in just the right place at just the right time.

He managed to catch a lot of really, extremely, lucky breaks that the scientist did not. And while he would never be able to prove it was his prayer, his relationship with a power greater than himself that was helping him when he absolutely needed it the most, he knew.

He didn’t have to have proof that his luck was tied to something greater than himself. He simply had faith and that faith is what kept him alive.

Near the end of this story, I will just say that both men barely survive. 

The rescue did eventually find them. They had been in a chartered ship that had a tracking device and there was a rescue crew that went out to see if anyone had survived. However, it was nearly a year before the two men were found. The island was extremely small and the ship had wrecked a great distance away; it was off its normal course to begin with because of the storm. But the rescue crews were relentless and when they found the two sole survivors and rescued them, they were amazed at how the two men had made it.

They were even more amazed, however, when they heard the two men’s stories and how they managed to survive apart from one another. The scientist, using practical science, was able to apply known physical scientific laws to etch out his survival, though he barely survived.

The pastor, having tremendous faith in something greater than himself, caught a lot of lucky breaks and barely made it as well. Both men, believing the other to be an idiot, lost a lot of weight on that little island. Both men, believing the other to be blind, were in fact both blind themselves because as the rescue workers simply put it:

“If you had merely worked together, the two of you wouldn’t have struggled so much. It’s great that you were able to survive. However, if each of you would have seen the value of the other, you would have thrived!”

In other words, life doesn’t have to be so black and white. Humans are the ones creating the dividing lines. I use this simple story to illustrate our modern world, especially here in America, where we have two dividing paradigms. 

Each one believing the other to be wrong is missing the bigger picture.

If we could only work together, we would stop fighting and struggling, and learn to thrive!