Last night while encouraged to discuss something instead of bothering her brother at the dinner table, our 5-year-old asked one of the unanswerable questions. No, it wasn’t the biological version, it was the existential version. The biological version might have been preferred.
I probably should have asked her more questions to figure out why she was asking this. It was just a bit too out of the blue. I don’t suspect she was coached to ask the question, but I wonder who was talking about it with her that made her start to think about it.
So where did people first come from?
As Berta puts it, walking the narrow line: Some people think that the world started out with people on it, and other people think that people evolved from apes.
Abby considered this briefly, then I asked her where she thought people came from. She said she didn’t know. And then she said something like, “First there were dinosaurs. Then Jesus. Then people.” She must be getting this from other kids. Maybe Will. It’s interesting how this worldview has made a special effort to include dinosaurs.
Afterward, I remarked how it made me sad that there are large groups of people who have devoted their entire lives to believing one thing or another, and that each of these groups believes something different from the other. So even though each one of them has devoted their lifes in the belief that they are correct, it is undeniable that at least all but one of them are wrong, and quite likely that they are all wrong.
Sometimes I think it’s better to know that you don’t or can’t know something than to cling with absolute devotion to something that could be utterly wrong. Especially something that important and at the expense of animosity toward such a large group of people who don’t share your beliefs.
Dinner was tasty. Steak and grilled green beans. Abby wasn’t a fan of her BBQ chicken (“It’s spicy”) but she ate the whole thing.
