It might have something to do with actual encounters with the God who is.
Dont have any experience with kids but its important i think to maybe talk to them about God ,so im glad when parents do that.I hope you find what you need and do your best for your kid!! Take care!!!
Blessings in your teaching of your unusually thoughtful son. My kids have also expressed concerns about their belief in God. I, too, sometimes have difficulty dealing with questions of Deep Time. In similar discussions with my dad when I was young (I don’t think I was that perceptive that young, though!), he seemed to agree about mystery, but emphasize areas we could perhaps conceptualize more easily…not just the concept of God as originator, but more as of ultimate friend of the poor, lawgiver, hope of the downtrodden, parent, and a source of meaning.
Sometimes the Lewis books, like Space Trilogy, and George Macdonald’s children’s stories, help me in this way. “The Boyhood of Ranald Bannerman” explores some existential questions.
I also bought the “Science Geek Sam” book and my 13 year old has read portions of it. It has been good. I have read it twice to help me with communication.
My boys have struggled in particular with God’s existence (my eldest has Aspergers, and that often causes some difficulty with abstract concepts of God). At 13 and 10, it has been a blessing and a humbling experience to think over a discussion, and admit I don’t know the answer. It us sometimes more difficult as our church is YEC and very much uninterested in admitting those grey areas…not to blame them, but it’s a growing experience for all of us to explore honestly what we don’t understand. My dad, though very intelligent and well educated, was also very honest that he didn’t know many answers, however. I think that in the end, that helped my faith.
Austin Fischer’s quote,
Most doubts—like most monsters—are not that scary in the daylight. Most Christians can deal with inevitable doubts as long as there is room for doubt. But when a system is enforced that leaves no room for doubt, benign uncertainties can mutate into faith-destroying monsters
Is helpful…he also wrote that it is not doubt, but the perception that we are not allowed to doubt, that destroys faith.
Greg Boyd, in “Benefit of the Doubt,” wrote that the God who gave us minds to question, loves to see us use them and ask questions.
Thanks
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Eternity is the ultimate, neutral fact.
Hi @kglahoda! This is not just something 9 year olds are going to have trouble with. I have trouble with it sometimes! And I sense maybe that in struggling to answer for your son, you want something more solid for yourself. I’m with ya!
To answer your request, Natasha Crain has a great book, Talking with Your Kids About God. It’s really for parents, and “the existence of God” is the first section.
Please allow me, since I have struggled with this myself, to develop a bit the point I keep coming back to: “what is the alternative?”
@Klax is correct and I would go further! By our science we are now confronted with the inescapable fact of the Big Bang, and along with that there must be some kind of infinite (outside our universe), eternal (preceding our universe), immaterial (not made of quite the same stuff as our universe) source that gave rise to our universe. So if you dismiss God, the problem does not go away! Something IS out there which is beyond space, beyond time, and not made of our matter. The question remaining in light of the Big Bang is, “can we know anything more about the infinite, eternal, immaterial?” The Bible claims God has stepped into our reality to tell us about himself.
Part of what the Bible tells us are that God is intentional (He chose to create) and relational (trinity). You can point out that no other species on our planet has these qualities quite like we do (other species adapt to their environment, we adapt our environment to ourselves), and the Biblical claim that God endowed humans with some part of himself has a rational logical flow to it. Humans since time immemorial have believed these properties in us came from some kind of deity. This provides a much more sound ontological foundation for those properties in us than having them “emerge” from matter. If there is no god, they would ultimately be just illusions. So choices, love, truth, meaning, reason, friendship, etc. would be all mechanical extensions of matter that improve survival rates, neurons firing providing an illusion of these things with no knowable relationship to objective reality. In contrast, the testimony of our own inner being tells us “there is something real in these!” And this aligns beautifully with what the Bible says about God and us. This is like a CS Lewis quote (roughly), “I believe in God like I believe in the sun - it’s too bright to look at, but by it I see everything.”
Taking a step upward from this into philosophy, the more basic question is why anything exists at all. As Francis Schaeffer pointed out, what we’d expect is that nothing would exist and no one would exist to know that nothing exists. That’s what we’d expect! Existence itself is the truly big mystery. We’re stuck trying to figure out something useful when all categories of answer are impossible for us to truly fathom.
Well, these are a few late night musings. God bless you and your love for your son, to seek out more meaningful answers to his questions! I hope that something in the responses proves helpful for him, and maybe also for you.
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I am a Trinitarian Christian but I do not believe in a “Triune God.” I believe in an infinite God. The original formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity is that Father, Son, and Holy spirit are separate persons but only one God. The number three doesn’t really come into it, and is more a matter of our own limited understanding and experience of God rather than any limitations upon God Himself. Making this about the number three tends to modalism as people struggle to understand, why three? But it really isn’t about the number three.
That is indeed the essence of the doctrine of the Trinity. And even the Biblical evidence is far from convincing. What finally convinced me of this was Philippians 2:6. But then I wasn’t raised Christian – but rather in psychology, liberalism, and criticism of the Christian establishment. I gathered my beliefs by myself for my own reasons… very different from the usual ones.
Not an issue in the context of our understanding of time in modern science, where we don’t believe in the notion of absolute time anymore. Time is simply an ordering of a set of events and there is no reason to believe that all events must be ordered together. Even in the universe it is not ordered like in a motion picture film as a sequence of snapshots strung together – but in a Minkowsky conical way.
science cannot speak to the question of God’s existence at all.
Science is the easier topic frankly for someone who is intelligent and questioning. It is ok to focus on that for a while and revisit the question of religion later. Might want to explore the world of philosophy first too as I did. An objective approach which it sounds like he favors would also want to look at ALL religion first before focusing on just one.
Mine is a masters in physics and a masters of divinity.
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Mitchell, thanks for your response. Yes, modalism is a heresy. I thought that “triune” and “trinity” were synonyms. I certainly didn’t intend for modalism, and triune wasn’t a word I used with my son. I just wrote it on here to be clear that I meant three Persons, one God.
Marty, thank you for your thoughts. Yes, you’re right–certainly ontology points back to a creator. One thing I’ve been musing about, and maybe you can help me find links to articles on BioLogos or a discussion in the forum that speaks to how people are putting together we humans as being created in the image of God while having evolved from a common ancestor.
Klax, why do you say that eternity is a neutral fact? Can you give me a little more detail?
Randy, thank you for sharing and normalizing this for me. 
I remember being around my son’s age and getting lost thinking about the other “end” of Eternity, that is to say, how could we possibly live with God forever and ever and ever… I think talking about the mystery and conceptualizing is a good point.
We love reading to them, and we’ve read both MacDonald’s Princess books. I hadn’t heard to The Boyhood of Ranald Bannerman, so thank you for that. I’ll look into it. We bought Science Geek Sam, and I plan on reading that to them. And I, personally, have been wanting to read Lewis’s Space Trilogy, so maybe we should just read that to them.
I agree–I think that it’s actually beneficial to admit that we don’t know something. If nothing else, it helps to model how not to be humility. Austin Fischer’s quote and Boyd’s concept…so good, thank you!
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Hi Kristy. It’s true of nature whether it’s in God or not. And it changes everything.
A few points I’ve noticed in bible reading. As being in a body, in Genesis God is physically present with Adam and Eve, He “walks in the cool of the Garden”. Even after they’ve sinned.
I got a lot of understanding in considering the “I AM” name of God, that God is outside of time, the Alpha and the Omega and the right now, all at the same time. You can watch physics professor Frank Tipler discuss this in physics theories watching his chalk-talk The Omega Point" YouTube
https://youtu.be/_BsOKoW9bEE, do not take the shortcut and try to watch on TED (definitely not the same).
It’s and hour long, so I don’t know your 9 year olds being able to watch all, but it is understandable without understanding all the physics. If I got it right the physics he lays out have to do with “The cause before all causes” and Jesus breaking into our linear timeline (fully God/fully human), and after the Resurrection His transformed body is fully changed.
Also, perhaps Bishop Barron on “What Does the Resurrection Mean” https://youtu.be/vjieDxvNFR0 and of the first person accounts in all 4 gospels that refute other theories on the Resurrection.
Also, Blais Pascal, the scientist, mathematician upon who’s work the math of the stock exchanges are based. <Blaise Pascal - Wikipedia > and read “Pascal’s Wager.”
This may be too much for a 9 year old, however, there is the always the “experiment” of asking God “Tell me about who you are?” It’s a relationship between your son and God. Praying for you and your dear one <3. “Lord I believe, help my disbelief.”
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There is no such thing in a linear sense.
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Yes, In his physics talk, Professor Tipler sites bible and physics theory on “the cause before all causes” of what is commonly referred to as the “big bang”.
If one looks at Newton’s objects in motion or rest, how did the motion get started?
From previous motion. There has always been motion. The BB isn’t the beginning of beginnings. There is none.
It always makes sense to ask “… and what happened before that?” To be told it is very hard to conceive of states prior to the big bang makes more sense to me than to say there just weren’t any. If we call tO the last moment at which there was purportedly nothing at all and t1 the moment at which a singularity begins to erupt, then I want to know what happened at a time half way between, and halfway between that and t0, and on and on. I just hate when people state without qualification that what is hard to conceive of was actually nothing at all. Still not buying it.
: ) nuthin comes from nuthin. But even people with qualifications somehow believe that after an eternity of nothing, something happened from it. 'cos God done it. After doing… nothing, forever. Apparently that makes sense even to qualified people!
@klax and @Dale I’m getting deja vu of this conversation from thread about 2 months ago… Please don’t scare off @believeinlove who only just joined us lol
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What, we daren’t say what has been known of God for millennia? That He changeth not. Eternity is scary, so let’s hold hands and face it together.