HELENA: Mr. Alquist, are you a believer?
ALQUIST: I don’t know. I’m not quite sure.
HELENA: And yet you pray?
ALQUIST: That’s better than worrying about it.
HELENA: And that’s enough for you?
ALQUIST: It has to be.
I was reading through this play fairly quickly, but when I hit this line, my eyes got snagged on it, and I had to scroll up and reread the whole section again. The conversation between Helena and Alquist switches topics from Robots to religion, from man-made scientific experiments grounded in atheism to Christian faith. Even if Alquist is agnostic, he prays anyway, if only to distill his worries for the human race.
That admission is jarring, at least to me. How many “religious” people are out there, myself included, that pray for the sake of quieting doubts, lulling themselves into a false sense of security, deluding themselves that they are doing it out of faith? This quote caught my attention because it made me feel guilty.
But then, Helena asks if false hopes through prayer are enough, and Alquist responds, “It has to be.” This short statement confirms that Alquist does have faith in him, that he places his trust in a prayer he knows has no physical backing. Even if he claims his reasoning for praying is because he’s “old fashioned” and that it’s “better than worrying,” he puts his complete trust in a God he doesn’t fully know, because he knows he can’t depend on humanity.
Alquist knows the only thing the human race has left is hope, but he can also see the hope is unrealistic, and that the only action he can take is to pray, as futile as that may be.
Source: RUR (Čapek)