Questions and Faith

I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday.  As is often the case with such revelations, it began with a question from one of my kids.  My daughter, resident question asker and philosopher, posed a question about how long the earth was around before people lived on it.  I thought she had just been watching the Science channel or something so I simply said, a really long time, and proceeded to offer what I understand about the process of planet formation (which is not that much, so it only took a minute).  Then she asked her follow up, "so how come the Bible says it was only a few days?"  Then I remembered  that she is reading her new Bible that the church gave her for going into third grade, it's a "real" Bible, not an illustrated, clipped into stories, kids version.

It's always fun when, as a seminary educated, professional Bible interpreter (aka Pastor), you try to communicate the vastness of creation to an eight-year-old who just read Genesis 1.  They really ought to have a class like that in Seminaries.  I understood, in that moment, why people always want to take the literal route in understanding Scripture, you do open the door to all sorts of doubt about what you know and what you don't know about God.  Maybe it's just my opinion, but the idea of a God who would work for billions of years on a burning hunk of rock hurtling through a frigid vacuum, to create a primordial goo, where a few organic chemicals can eventually coagulate and form amino acids and where those fairly basic chemical structures could eventually, by some happy accident, begin to self organize and replicate into proto-life forms that would then slowly, through a mysterious process, called evolution, begin to variegate into multiple life forms, and within a relatively short period of time you had a staggering variety of these life forms, ranging from the extremely simple to the fairly complex, all fitting into a purposeful creative vision...

Well that's just amazing, and holy, and every bit as glorious as the six day version.

But back to my daughter, miracle of God's creative will that she is, sitting there with all her complex cellular processes happening, having evolved a large brain capable of processing verbal and written language and formulating questions about the formation of the universe, at eight years old.  She is wondering, given the special place that this book has in her life, and in the life of our family: is it true?

I understood why it's so tempting to go the easy way and forget about the billions of years, and the primordial goo, and amino acids and dinosaurs and all of that and just make up stories that fit into a simpler vision.

Then I remembered that even though her brother has logically built a rather ironclad legal case against the existence of Santa Claus, based on keen observation and sound deductions.  Even though he has presented her with said ironclad arguments, my daughter still chooses to believe.  Her faith is strong enough to assimilate the facts and keep knowing the real truth.  Eventually she's going to give up her childlike belief in fairies and flying fat men, but I want to start to build a solid logical ground for faith in God before that happens.  I want to be clear about the difference between reality and fiction. I want to take God out of the realm of fiction in her mind.  She needs to hear now that there is more to truth than just facts, and that stories are not just means of conveying information, they provide structure and meaning to our lives.

Unless I help her start to grow in faith that is rooted in reality, rather than fiction, her faith is going to get ripped away from her.  Unless I help her understand that stories can be true in more than one way, she's going to learn eventually that nothing is really trustworthy.

By helping her appreciate the wonder of life, where a few slimy molecules can eventually become a person who can imagine God saying "let there be light," I hope I'm helping her to realize what a miracle she is. And how her questions teach me more than my answers teach her.