Philip Pullman’s Problem With God
In <em>His Dark Materials</em>, now an HBO series, the author takes on organized religion. It’s not a fair fight.
I will sometimes imagine that I have a problem with the English writer Philip Pullman, best known for the fantasy trilogy . I don’t like the flavor of his frequently expressed atheism, for example; I find it peremptory, literalistic. (The idea conveyed by the great mystic Simone Weil, that “absence is the form in which God is present,” Pullman has characterized as “cheek on a colossal scale.”) And I don’t like his polemical sideswipes at J. R. R. Tolkien: “There isn’t a character in the whole of who has a tenth of the complexity … of even a fairly minor character from .” In fact, now that I think about it, these are two sides of
