“The Hard Problem” is Tom Stoppard’s first work for the stage since 2006′s fantastic “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and like “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” it asks whether there’s such a thing as a soul, or whether a human being is just “a pinball machine which thinks it’s in love.”

But where the earlier play offered a clash between Marxist materialism and the pagan ecstasy of rock music, “The Hard Problem” is a more blunt and programmatic conflict between evolutionary biology and a sort of heavily diluted Christianity, set in a brain-science research institute.

I saw National Theatre‘s broadcast production from London to international movie theaters, which closes May 27. ”The Hard Problem” is short—only 100 minutes—and it feels undercooked compared to Stoppard’s other work. The problems and stakes are often

Read the article “Tom Stoppard Plays With God” on theamericanconservative.com.