My son is getting older, and the things that he hears are finally rattling around and sticking in his noggin’. That’s a good thing, but that introduces problems and issues that I have been wrestling with myself.
I’m an engineer. I work in things that exploit all the knowledge that mankind has gathered over the millennia. I am a problem solver. I use logic, experimentation, experience, and in many ways, the scientific method to fix the issues that I have to solve. For most of my life, I have been a religious believer. Truth is garnered by feelings, impressions, and the world has magical elements. Holding those two propositions in my mind as fundamental axioms has caused me no end of strife and conflict. I have built hedges around portions of my mind to keep the two from being in conflict and that has worked for a long time.
My son asked me a question. He’s seen the astronomy shows that I watch. He understands many of these concepts. “How long until the sun explodes and when it does, is that how Heavenly Father is going to cleanse the earth?”
Aside from this being a question that I might have wrestled with a couple of decades earlier, and here my 11 year-old is asking me this question, I really didn’t want to answer it. I quickly dismissed it, and I’m sure he was taken back by my abrupt reply.
That wasn’t fair to him. Those are the kind of questions I want him to ask. I want to deal honestly with him and perhaps let him know and understand that some of these questions aren’t easily, nor answered in a way that may or may not be harmonious with the people we know and love. Later that night I took him aside and answered the question, to the best of my ability.
People have different outlooks on life. The way we come to answers may be different. I think that science doesn’t posit God because there is no real place for magic. There is no place for an infinite being in an ultimately closed system. Religion doesn’t answer many of the questions we are asking. I don’t think there are many places for dinosaurs in a religious worldview. We can try to justify things, and that works for some. Perhaps the earth being cleansed by fire is nuclear war or the sun expanding into a red giant. Either one is a horrific event, especially the red giant event as the earth would be consumed by the sun and who wants to inherit a pile of ash, meek or not?
You can believe what you will. You can change your beliefs. I have. I’ve changed my beliefs and outlook many times. My political views are quite a bit different now than they were just a few years ago. I told my son that he can choose what he believes. He doesn’t have to take my word for it, his mother’s, his Sunday School teacher, or his school books. Find out what works for you, so you don’t have that internal conflict, that cognitive dissonance that people tend to get when you are told and believe different things. Growing up religious in a secular society presents its problems. How we deal with it is an individual matter. I wish I could give my son a good, concrete answer, but I can’t. I’m not there yet myself.
