The man on the island

Once a man and boy lived on an island where they had both been shipwrecked.
But the boy, seeing idols on the island left behind by a lost civilization became interested in God.
"Were we made by a God, father?", he asked, "Was this island and the sea beyond made by a god?".
"No", said his father, "We evolved from the lower animals. There is no God. He is just a fairytale made up by men who find reality too harsh to deal with".
But the boy wouldn't give up his belief in a God and started to spend a lot of time with the old idols, talking to them and making offerings to them, praying to them and asking for a ship to come that would save them both.
So the father got out his books on human and natural history that he had saved from the shipwreck and he taught his son on one hand, Darwins theory of evolution and, on the other hand, how religion, through history, had been the cause of injustice, persecution and war.
But then one night they both heard drums booming from the other side of the island.
The old islanders had come back and were holding rituals with their idols.
"We should go and see, father", said his son, excitedly.
"No", said his father, frightened of the natives, "I don't want you going anywhere near those savages and their dark supersitions. Stay here with books of science, in the light".
One day however, the boy went missing.
Frantically, the man searched the island for him, calling his name.
"I told him not to go wandering off", he said to himself as he searched, "I told him. Anything could have happened to him. He could have been eaten by wild animals".
But where ever he searched, he could not find the boy, living or dead.
Finally however, a horrifying thought took hold of his mind.
"The natives! The natives!", he thought, "They've killed my boy. They've probably eaten him. The cannibals".
And loading up two old muskets with gunpowder and shot, he went to confront the native islanders.
"Where is my son?", he screamed at them, walking into their village, "Did you eat him? Did you sacrifice him to your gods? Tell me?".
The Native people only looked at him bewildered, not understanding his words but thinking that he might be mad.
Suddenly, however, his son appeared beside him.
The man was overjoyed and he threw his arms around his son.
"Son", he said, "What happened to you? Why did you run off? I was so frightened".
"You don't still believe in me do you father?", asked the boy.
The man was confused.
 "What are you saying?", he asked.
"The truth is I was never real. You made me up in your mind because you couldn't bear the truth that your real son died in the shipwreck and you couldn't bear being alone on this island", said the boy.
"Its not true", said the man.
But then he felt the boy in his arms start to become less solid and, looking at the boys face, he saw it become as transparent as a reflection in a pane of glass.
"Its not true", he said, sinking to his knees and sobbing into the dirt.
"Reality can be cruel; can be callous and unfair like the worst of tyrants", he heard the boy saying, his voice becoming mixed in with the sound of the wind, "And anything so cruel and unfair deserves to be challenged; deserves to be questioned. Maybe I am real?".
"No. No you're not", said the man, shouting angrilly at the phantom, "I know that now".
Getting up off of his knees and looking around him, he realised that the native peoples had gathered round him and were looking at him pityingly.
But he did not want their pity.
He felt embarassed to be pitied by them; those people he had always looked down on.
He ran back to his side of the island and tried to bury himself in his books, looking for answers.
But there were no answers and no god for him to scream at and blame; just awful miserable, unfeeling reality.
Just then, however as he was screaming at a painful nothingness in the sky, suddenly he saw, in the distance, a ship.
"That can't be real", he thought, "Its just another illusion created by my mind".
But it was real.
A ship had finally come to save him.
"Perhaps prayers are answered, after all father", he heard his son say.