“I kind of got into a God fight in the cafeteria today,” said Delaney, six.
“What’s a ‘God fight’?”
“Well I asked Courtney if she could come over on Sunday, and she said, ‘No, my family will be in church of course.’ And I said oh, what church do you go to? And she said she didn’t know, and she asked what church we go to. And I said we don’t go to church, and she said ‘Don’t you believe in God?’, and I said no, but I’m still thinking about it, and she said ‘But you HAVE to go to church and you HAVE to believe in God,” and I said no you don’t, different people can believe different things.”
I asked if they were yelling or getting upset with each other.
“No,” she said, “we were just talking.”
“Well then I wouldn’t call it a ‘God fight. You were just talking about interesting things.”
“Then Courtney said, ‘But if there isn’t a God, how did the whole world and trees and people get made so perfect?’”
“Ooo, good question. What’d you say?”
“I said, ‘But why did he make the murderers? And the bees with stingers? And the scorpions?’”
Courtney had opened with the argument from design. Delaney countered with the problem of evil. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think my kindergarten cafeteria banter rose to this level.
“But then I started wondering about how the world did get made,” she said. “Do the scientists know?”