BIG BANG, SMALL FAITH: What Three-Body Problem Says About Believing in Higher Powers When the Universe is Actively Trying to Kill You

by Saptarshi Sarkar

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve had what I call a “Goldilocks approach” to belief in God: atheism seemed too cold, organized religion too hot, and agnosticism? Just right — at least, right enough for me to sleep at night. I’ve always felt most comfortable in the gray spaces, seeing both the sense and the senselessness in rituals, wondering if maybe the universe was run by a benevolent, invisible hand, or maybe by nothing at all except entropy and the occasional cosmic joke. And if I’m being honest, I was mostly okay not knowing, content to drift through the big questions as if my uncertainty itself was a kind of answer.

Then Netflix dropped The Three-Body Problem onto my screen, and my vague, comfortable uncertainties found themselves under attack in the best way possible. The series hooked me instantly with its ominous countdowns, dead birds plummeting from the sky, and VR worlds that made my own existential dread look quaint. But as tends to happen, a quick scroll through Reddit’s bottomless r/threebody threads quickly told me the show was just a glimpse of the mind-bending masterpiece Liu Cixin had written. So, after a speed-run through the inevitable spoilers, I got the book.

What I didn’t expect was how profoundly this story would rattle the things I’d always taken for granted about faith, fate, and the very notion of cosmic order. Because in Liu’s universe, the question isn’t just, “Is there a God?” it’s, “If there is one, is He on our side, or is He just really, really bad at His job?”

Reading The Three-Body Problem felt less like reading a novel and more like taking a masterclass in existential humility. Starting with Ye Wenjie, whose life story is a crash course in cosmic disappointment, I found myself asking not just whether a higher power exists, but whether believing in one changes anything about the universe’s indifference. Her father — an upright scientist, beaten to death in front of her for daring to defend the laws of physics serves as a grotesque reminder: the universe (and sometimes, society) does not reward virtue or faith, but randomness, violence, and, occasionally, a good hiding spot. The faith she loses isn’t just in God, or country, but in any system that promises justice.

I related to Ye more than I expected, though I’ve never had to operate a radio telescope in a frozen military outpost. Her brand of despair is relatable, especially for anyone who’s ever looked up at the night sky and wondered why it all seems so empty. When she receives the first alien message from the Trisolarans and against the pleading warning embedded within replies, she’s acting out of a kind of cosmic exhaustion. “If humanity is this broken,” her logic goes, “maybe help, even from the unknown, is better than endless chaos.” It’s a move that’s as desperate as it is brave, and it got me thinking: every time I mumble a “maybe” in the direction of a higher power, am I not doing something similar? Calling out to the void, just in case something out there is listening, even if it’s just bored aliens on a three-star diet plan.

And what aliens. The Trisolarans are less “little green men” and more “existential killjoys.” Their world is governed by the utter unpredictability of three suns — chaos is a basic fact of life, faith in stability is a joke, and survival means adapting or dehydrating yourself into a jerky-like state for millennia. If there’s a God in their universe, He’s either on permanent vacation or has a peculiar sense of humor. There’s no grand plan, only physics, probability, and the raw scramble to exist another day.

I noticed, as the story went on, that the Trisolaran worldview started to bleed into my own. I found myself wondering why, whenever faced with catastrophe, humanity so quickly resorts to magical thinking, to faith in higher powers, to desperate prayers. The Trisolarans never had gods — they had numbers, equations, and an iron belief in their own adaptability. Is faith, then, just a byproduct of not knowing enough? Or is it a kind of cosmic coping mechanism, a way to keep ourselves sane when the universe offers no guarantees?

Wang Miao, the hapless nanotech scientist at the heart of the story, becomes a perfect stand-in for every curious, anxious agnostic. When he sees the mysterious countdown appearing wherever he looks, it’s a cheeky stand-in for the existential deadline ticking away above all our heads. His journey is not one of finding faith, but of watching the curtain pulled back to reveal that there are no gods — just cosmic bureaucrats and quantum saboteurs, sending entropic gremlins (sophons!) to mess with your experiments. The Trisolarans don’t punish or reward; they just want to shut us up.

And then, there’s the clincher: the introduction of the Dark Forest theory. The universe, the story suggests, is a vast, silent wilderness, not because there are no other civilizations, but because every civilization knows to keep its head down. If you shout, you die. All those centuries of hoping that our prayers are heard, that someone out there is listening? In Liu’s vision, shouting into the cosmos is a good way to get vaporized. Suddenly, faith feels less like a virtue and more like a liability.

This is where The Three-Body Problem really got under my skin. It didn’t just challenge my agnostic leanings — it made me wonder if the very act of hoping for meaning is, itself, a kind of cosmic self-delusion. What if we’re alone? What if the universe is, as the Trisolarans seem to have learned, fundamentally indifferent, or worse — hostile? What if there’s no plan, no god, just a vast chain of accidents, some of which, like life on Earth, are deeply improbable but ultimately unremarkable?

I’d like to say this realization left me depressed. But weirdly, it did the opposite. There’s a strange, liberating humor in seeing how humanity, faced with annihilation and cosmic apathy, continues to improvise, adapt, and sometimes crack terrible jokes. It’s not that I suddenly stopped caring about the big questions, or that I stopped occasionally whispering into the void. It’s just that I realized the universe doesn’t owe us answers. If God exists, maybe He really is just bad at multitasking, or likes to watch from a distance. If He doesn’t, that’s okay too because it means whatever meaning we find, we build ourselves.

So yes, these days I still call myself agnostic, but every time I look up at the stars or fumble through the day’s absurdities, I do so with a little more of Ye Wenjie’s gritty realism and Wang Miao’s bemused curiosity. I think about the three-body chaos swirling overhead, about the cosmic silence that might be self-preservation rather than loneliness, and about how, maybe, the act of not knowing is itself the most honest faith there is.

The Three-Body Problem didn’t answer my questions about God. If anything, it made them bigger, weirder, and a lot more fun to ask. And somehow, between the existential dread, the cosmic jokes, and the defiant hope of a species that refuses to go quietly, I found a new kind of comfort. The universe may be hostile, random, or indifferent but as long as there are stories like this, and people eager to keep questioning, maybe that’s enough divine spark for me.