An Eight-Year-Old’s Theology

I’ve always thought that my daughter was fairly sophisticated in her thinking for her age, but recently my far more active and somewhat less talkative boy has been the one who has been pushing my envelope. In the past four months he’s asked me two questions and posed one philosophical/theological conundrum, all three of which have had me scratching my head trying to answer him in a way that is 1) honest; 2) Age appropriate; and 3) satisfactory to him. Ultimately I’m not certain that I ever meet the final criterion, because I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that he’s much brighter than I am.

At any rate, I thought I’d share his questions and reflections with the three of you who read my blog regularly and with the other six or so who read it occasionally.

A few months ago we had the following conversation.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, Buddy.”

“I don’t know if I should ask you this question I want to ask.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think it’s a question I should ask.”

“Hmmm. I think that any question that you ask honestly is a good question.”

“OK. What would have happened if God had chosen to be bad instead of good?”

This one blindsided me because it came immediately after we had been reading a Cat in the Hat book about the solar system that was produced by the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I guess was ready for a cosmic question, but not quite one so cosmic as that. My actual answer wasn’t very good. I think I said, “Well, I guess we’d be in a world of hurt. If God was bad, then this world would be a much worse place.” That really isn’t an adequate answer for several different reasons, but for the moment it seemed to console him. It made me reflect, however, upon the question. In the following months I posed the same question to a number of friends. I got roughly the following answers, none of which is completely satisfactory:

The Linguistic Ontological Answer: “Good” comes from “God” and thus if “God” were bad “good” would be “bad,” and we wouldn’t know the difference.

The Evil is Not Creative Answer: If God were bad, he wouldn’t have made us, so we wouldn’t know.

The I don’t believe in God anyway answer: Nothing. (With an additional rebuttal to my original answer by saying that the world IS a pretty awful place and from the perspective of most of humanity – which lives in poverty, deprivation, and suffering – and a number of cruel animal examples – notably cannibalistic primates and various parasites – if there is a God, he did a pretty horrible job.) Ouch.

After thinking about it, I told him that I thought that God was good in his very nature, much like a snowman is by nature cold and wet, and that he would not choose to be bad because that would be like a snowman choosing to be dry and hot. Nathan thought that was a pretty good answer.

His second theological musing came as I was tucking him into bed on a Sunday evening. “Dad,” he said, “I’m afraid that I’m like the children of Israel.”

“How so?”

“Well, sometimes I try really hard to believe in God, but I’m not sure that I do.”

I was thinking, “Sounds familiar” because I’ve felt the same way at various times in my life, but I’m not certain I could articulate it as an eight-year-old. My answer was to hug him and say, “When you don’t believe in God, believe in the people around you who love you, and keep being kind to other people, treasure the goodness that you find in others and keep seeking to find God, and you’ll be OK.”

The final question came tonight on our way home from Thanksgiving. We had just stopped and had a nice dinner and were heading home, when Nathan said, “Dad, Mom… I have something to say and it might make you angry, and it might make the guy in the sky angry, too.”

“Oh really, and what is that Nathan?”

“Well, Do we just worship God because he’s powerful? Would we worship him if he weren’t powerful?”

That is sort of what he said, it wasn’t quite that clear at first. We spent the next ten minutes or so clarifying what he meant exactly, and ended up talking, with AE’s translation about the difference between the Christian God and the gods in Greek myths and the legendary Pokemon’s – at least I think that is where Nathan’s hypothetical “Fire God” concept originated. Eventually we settled it to the questions above.

My answer was “Yes and no. We do worship him because he’s worth worshiping, but not just because he’s worth worshiping. We also worship him because we have a relationship with him. It is like our meal tonight. I paid for it, and you are thankful to me for paying for your meal, for making certain you get from place to place, and for giving you a place to sleep at night, right?”

“Yes.”

“So you thank me for those things, and you obey me, most of the time because I have the power to give you those things and other things and to punish you if you disobey me by taking stuff away from you?”

“Yes.”

“But, would you still love me if I didn’t have any money and I couldn’t give you all of those things.”

“Yes.”

“Well that is sort of how it is with God.”

I’m still struggling about whether that was an adequate answer. There are some difficulties with it, because if we felt that God had lost status – that say, some other God had come in and shown conclusively that he (or she) was equal in power to the God we’ve worshiped all of this time – that our “worship” of him would be qualitatively (and perhaps quantitatively) different. Another equal god or a rival (an evil, but equally powerful adversary like the Ahura Mazda – Ahriman Zoroastrian dyad) who conclusively existed would change the formula and make our religion a different sort of enterprise altogether. It would be rather like the somewhat commonplace trope in fantasy that deals with religious concepts but which is not inherently religious (like Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series or Robert Heinlien’s J.O.B.: A Comedy of Justice or even a good bit of Neil Gaiman’s works) that says that multiple deities may exist but that their power is predicated upon the number of believers that they are able to muster at any given time. That is not the mainstream Christian belief, and it isn’t mine, but if it were true, and I came to know it to be true, then it would change my outlook immensely.

I didn’t say that to Nathan, but I’m fairly certain that we’ll be having quite a few conversations about this in the future. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he has inherited, along with my inquisitive nature, my tendency for finding holes in the paradigms that we live by. May the Lord bless him and keep him. He’ll need it, and so might we all.