Character Analysis
You know the old picture of some poor undecided soul with a little devil sitting on one shoulder, whispering in his ear, and a little angel on the other? While that dynamic may not fit godless perfectly, Shin and Henry do pull Jason in opposite directions.
Pod God
Shin's not an angel, but he is a god. A pod god, that is. He tells Jason:
"From the pods' point of view, I am God. They look up and I am this great shadowy figure—[…] I provide their food and water. I control the temperature, the light, everything. I am the Pod God." (4.66)
While Shin is god to his pods, he is acolyte to the Ten-legged God. He channels the "first Book of the Sacred Text" (13.82) and receives "instructions from on high" (22.43) to climb the tower—which is a call he just can't ignore. And because of this we come to see for ourselves what Jason means when he says Shin is "obsessive" and "does nothing halfway" (4.57). Shin believes that:
[…] to really understand something you have to become whatever it is you are studying. He says he knows exactly how it feels to be a snail. "You have to get to the point where you really believe you're a snail… If you don't believe in your own snailness, you'll never understand them." (4.57-58)
Later in the story, this connection between understanding something and believing in it is translated to the spiritual realm: "'How do you know it's not true if you don't believe in it?'" (30.77), and "how can you understand something you don't believe in?" (30.79) are Shin's probing questions that get Jason to thinking about faith far more effectively than conversations with his dad, the books he's assigned to read, or the TPO meetings with Just Al. In godless, Shin embodies faith in action.
What's in a Name?
Shin's first name is Peter. Peter was the name of one of the three disciples Jesus was closest to. In fact, Jesus made a little play on words with Peter's name in Greek, Petra, which means rock, by saying that Peter was the rock he was going to build his church upon. (Not the church building, that would be painful and mean. But rather that Peter would lead the new church.) Heard of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican in Rome? Named for the same dude.
So anyway, it's interesting that Hautman snuck the name Peter in for Jason's BFF in the second paragraph, right under our noses, and then went on to call him Shin for the majority of the book.
Shin and Science
Jason tells us that Shin "thinks science is sacred. He invokes science as if it were the name of God" (1.49). Soon Shin is using the principles of trigonometry to quantify God. He's a detail-oriented guy who likes to be meticulous in his data-gathering—which is kind of ironic, because God, being by definition beyond the material realm, is one of the Big Unknowns that science cannot really nail down. Like whether a tree falling in the forest makes any sound if there is no one there to hear it.
Shin the Estivator
When Shin gets all wrapped up in Chutengodianism, he neglects to care for his pods. His gastropodarium gets all gnarly and stinky, and Jason thinks the pods must be dead. Not so, explains Shin—they are merely estivating. He explains:
"It's what pods do when things get bad. They pull into their shells and cover the opening with a cap of dried mucus. And wait. They can survive months, waiting for rain." (16.27, 29)
Gee, where have we seen similar behavior? Why in Shin himself when Henry starts picking on him in Chapter 1: "Shin, realizing that he was headed for trouble, crossed his arms over his notebook and went into his shell. […] Shin just stood frozen, staring at the ground. […] [He] didn't even blink. When he went into his shell you couldn't pry him out if you stuck a firecracker in his ear. Not until he was ready" (1.14-15). Shin freezes up like this again the first time he tries to climb the leg of the water tower.