Is God Blowing Bubbles?

H.G. Wells wrote an intriguing story entitled "The Island of Dr. Moreau". In it, Dr. Moreau is a scientist whose desire is to create human beings out of animals. On a small island in the middle of the Pacific, he experiments on one animal after another, each time trying to make something that is a little more human. He performs surgery on the creatures to change their appearance and mannerisms to become somewhat human like, then teaches them to speak and therefore think as humans. However, his experiments go terribly wrong as the Beast Men, as his creatures are called, revert back to their animal ways and end up being the cause of his death and destruction.

The story is narrated by Prendick, a man who, through various circumstances, becomes stranded on the island with Moreau, Moreau's assistant Montgomery, and the Beast Men. It is through his eyes that we see the tale of unfold. At first he knows nothing of what is occurring on the island, but he soon learns and finds he has no choice but to trust Moreau, even though he is repulsed by what Moreau is doing. Wells painted Dr. Moreau as being the "god" of his island. Dr. Moreau creates the beings that populate the island in "his" image, gives them laws to live by, and punishes them when they fail to follow those laws. After Moreau is killed by one of his creatures, the other Beast Men see that he is dead, but in order to maintain order Prendick informs them that he is not really dead, but has merely changed his shape for a time. He tells them, "'For a time you will not see him. He is...there'--I pointed upward--'where he can watch you. You cannot see him. But he can see you. Fear the Law.'" Is this not the very thing that we are taught about our own God? That he is "up there" somewhere and is watching us, so we should fear him and obey his law? The "god" Moreau even has a priest to preach his rules to the Beast Men. There is a certain gray-haired Beast Man that is known as the "Sayer of the Law". This law gives a list of things that they should not do, such as crawl on all fours, suck up drink as animals, or eat flesh or fish. It also includes sayings about Moreau, their creator, such as "His is the Hand that makes," "His is the Hand that wounds," "His is the Hand that heals," "His is the lightning-flash," "His is the deep salt sea," and "His are the stars in the sky." If this is not the description of a god, I don't know what is.

However, this god that Wells created has no room in his heart for love or mercy. He cares nothing for his creatures' pain. He creates them in pain to live out a life of agony as he forces them to follow laws that directly go against their innate animal desires. They have strong urges to follow their animal desires, and yet are bound by the laws he gave them to make them more human, like him. Everything Dr. Moreau does is merely to satisfy himself and his own whims and curiosity, with no real reason behind what he is doing. Prendick makes the observation that once the creatures were created in the laboratory, suffering through intense pain during that process, their tortures didn't end there as they were released to live on the island and made to continue in a life of agony. "Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau--and for what?" H.G. Wells seems to be trying to make an analogy of our own existence. We are created by God in his image, we have sinful human desires but are given a moral law that is meant to restrict those desires and make us more like God and to live more in conformity to his nature. Wells' idea seems to be that God created us merely to make us suffer through our lives following this law as Dr. Moreau did his Beast Men--for no real reason. Is our existence really as pitiful as Moreau's Beast Men? Why did he create us in the first place? Does God really care for us?

Montgomery, one of the characters in Wells' book, asks, "Are we bubbles blown by a baby?" This seems to be the very question that H. G. Wells is putting to the reader: "Is the god who made us merely playing with us? An infantile creature who could care less about the bubbles that he creates and then pops, merely to satisfy his own whim?"