Photo from NASA
Yes ladies and gentleman, it’s that that we all love, time for Jake to dazzle you all with an anecdote where something uncomfortable happens to me and I do my best to twist it into something more universal about all us skeptics in general. Admit it, you’re excited.
I’ve recently started doing some tutoring in the South Bronx, which I’m quite surprised to find I really like. The program I’m a part of is paid for through “No Child Left Behind” (restraining myself from making a comment on the previous administration…) and it’s all about getting tutors into the homes of kids from failing schools for two two-hour sessions a week. Some kids are harder to teach than others, but on the whole, I love working with the kids, and I’m finding the experience of teaching kids math and English to be a rewarding one.
Anyway, last week I’m working with my fourth grader. I’ve got kids of all different ages, this one’s my fourth grader, and anyway, she’s a smart kid. She thinks she can’t do math, she can. She reads really well, the only thing that makes her difficult to teach is the fact that she cannot, for the life of her, sit down. So we’re working on math, which she doesn’t like, and we’ve finally come up with something that she can’t immediately grasp. We’re trying to work on figuring out rates of linear change, and she’s getting frustrated because she can’t just get it, and I’ll admit, I’m getting a bit frustrated because I don’t see what she’s not getting, we’re working on this problem for close to an hour and she’s getting fed up.
“Okay,” I say to her. “Forget the books for a bit, you’ve got me here for another 45 minutes, what do you want to learn?”
“Where did the earth come from?” she asks.
So I do what I do when kids ask me questions, I answer in the same way that I do to anyone else. “Well, we know that our solar system is second generation, because of the elements that make up our planet, so billions of years ago, there was another sun and it blew up. And then, different pieces of that sun sort of came together and that’s what became the earth.”
She thinks this is neat. This is cool. And then it happens. “But was God like… the first person to die?”
Pardon?
“Cause we were talking in class, and we were talking about how God is cool, because God is the first person who ever died.”
And at this point, I’m fairly certain I’m in over my depth. Because suddenly turning to a fourth grader from a family of good Catholic Dominicans and saying to her, “Well actually, I fancy myself a methodological naturalist and am agnostic on the side of atheistic towards the existence of God or gods, so I feel your ‘cool’ God in all probability never existed.”
“That seems to be a good way to get fired,” my brain whispers at me.
“Um… let’s get back to the math question,” I tell her.
“We were talking about it in class! Because God would be the first person who ever lived, and therefore the first person who ever died! And God died by being nailed to a piece of wood!”
“So er… what’s the change in temperature between 6:00 and 6:05?”
“Because God must have died first! And came back!”
“Remember, there’s an average change in temperature of 30 degrees. Does average change in temperature make sense to you?”
Finally, she looks back at her book. I breath a sigh of relief. If there does happen to be a deity out there, I’m really glad s/he/it made the brains of fourth graders fickle.
I thought I was going to feel a bit more gray about this, but the more I think it through, the more I think I made a good move by not going after the fourth grader’s views on religion. Maybe it wasn’t the bravest choice I’ve ever made, in fact it quite undoubtedly wasn’t, but it’s not a decision I feel bad about. When I’m out in the world talking to these kids and they ask me what my ethnicity is, I’m perfectly happy to tell them I’m Jewish. For me, it’s part of my cultural identity, I also tend to throw some Yiddish into my speech every now and again, and that gives some sort of cultural leeway that allows the tutor to say “Oy” and not be Hispanic. But at the same time, if there’s any solid conclusions I’ve come to on the whole religion debate, it’s that I think our beliefs are our own business. I don’t need to go around with a shirt on that says that I don’t believe in God to every acquaintance or kid I meet, and maybe if I’d known the kid a bit better and had a bit more of a relationship with her, I would have come out with where I stand on the issue. But at the same time… eh. The people in my life that are… you know… in my life, they ought to know where I stand on this stuff. Because I don’t want to keep secrets from the people I love, I don’t want to hide what I believe, and I don’t want them to hide their beliefs from me. But the fourth grader I tutor in the South Bronx? I can let her wonder, right?
It’s all very well and easy for me to sit here in front of a keyboard and tell you what I would have done differently, but things tend to be different when you’re in the actual situation rather than just talking about it.
It’s probably safest to just avoid the conversation altogether, but I would have been tempted to at least address the logical fallacy she presented without discussing whether her religious views were likely to be correct or not.
For the sake of argument, God exists, and existed before anything else.
For the sake of argument, God is “alive” and is the “first person who ever lived”.
For the sake of argument, “God died by being nailed to a piece of wood” roughly 2000 years ago.
RE: “Because God must have died first!”
Explain the concept of a non sequitor: Doesn’t follow.
Just because God lived first, and then died 2000 years ago, it doesn’t follow that he died first.
Of course, when my Catholic niece once said to me, “Some people say the people came from monkeys.”, I did not risk opening up a can of worms by saying, “Actually, nearly all scientists agree on and say that people and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor many years ago, sort of like you and I both share a common ancestor in my mother, but much further back than that. You came along more recently than me, but you did not come from me any more than you came from a monkey.”
I instead hummed an acknowledgment that I heard her, and pointed out the Lego storm troopers she needed to shoot in the game of Lego Star Wars we were playing.
Maybe we were playing Lego Indiana Jones, and that’s how the monkey came up, and I pointed out some Thuggee she needed to take out. (A monkey will toss you the key to a gate if you toss him a banana.)