Ivan's simple-minded statements concerning the lunar orbit reveal his naive faith in a pantheistic God, and he is looked at with disbelief by the educated Captain. To Ivan, God is revealed in nature. Note in particular that the Captain's sneering about Ivan's ignorance does not disturb Ivan at all. As in his later discussion with Alyosha, Ivan reveals an instinctive faith which needs no sophisticated theological argument. He is full of old Russian peasant superstitions, and Solzhenitsyn considers such faith to be superior to an adherence to the superficial rules of the Russian Orthodox church or to Alyosha's impractical Baptist beliefs.
Solzhenitsyn's distrust of intellectuals is once again shown. Here, in the discussion between the Captain and Caesar Markovich about Potemkin, another film by Sergei Eisenstein, Ivan overhears the part of the discussion which deals with a graphic visual scene in the film, in which the sailors on the battleship Potemkin are fed rotten meat, crawling with maggots. While the two connoisseurs discuss the artistic merit of this scene and other scenes in the film, they conclude, as an afterthought, that the prisoners in their own camp would eat such meat if it were served to them, presumably without revolting, as the sailors on the Potemkin eventually did. The reality of prison camp life, however, is far harsher than the "artistic imagery" of a film or a book; this may be a comment by Solzhenitsyn about the fact that even a starkly realistic work like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is incapable of adequately describing the grim reality of an isolated, freezing cold Siberian prison camp.
