Turtles and Frogs

The average four-year-old, supposedly, asks 437 questions per day.  Who knows where this curiously specific number came from, but I saw it on a sign at the St. Louis Children’s Museum just last week, so it must be true.  Of course, this is also the same business that believes the fair market value for one stick of string cheese is a dollar fifty, so I do have my suspicions. 

Regardless, it is nice to know that our own residential 4-year-old is quite average on even his most average day, asking more questions than we really even know what to do with.  Some of them are fairly general, “Hey, ya’ know what?” and some are quite specific, “Why don’t frogs die in the water?”

Being as he’s getting a new sister soon, he of course posed that quintessential question, “How did the baby get inside mommy’s stomach?” Like all lazy parents, we went Socratic on him and asked, “Well, how do you think the baby got inside Mommy?”  He considered this awhile and eventually decided that his mother must have eaten a pregnant bug. Granted, that is probably inaccurate, but considering how busy my wife and I have been the last few years, we really aren’t for sure how it happened, either.

The big whopper, though, came when he asked, “What is ‘revenge’?”

He had picked up the term from a recent episode of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  The turtles, as you know, spend a large chunk of their time doing what they can to keep Shredder from seeking just that, so it was a fair question.  We tried to explain the concept as well as we could without giving him any ideas about seeking his own vengeance for whatever slight his sister might commit.  We also tried to end the conversation with the standard, “And it isn’t something God wants us to do.”

He thought about that for quite some time before adding, “Then why is there even the word?”

And that’s a good question, because, why is there such a thing as revenge in the first place if God doesn’t want it around?  In fact, that’s perhaps the number one question many people have been asking for thousands of years.  If God is real, and God is good, then how can evil exist? 

Now, before continuing, let’s just reiterate something most of you already know.  I am not a theologian, so no need to take notes.  However, I personally think that one of the simplest explanations, and, thus, perhaps the best for this question in particular, comes from the world of physics. 

Many of you have probably already heard the argument that suggests that “evil” as an actual thing doesn’t really exist anymore than cold or darkness.

For example, nothing really generates cold, at least not naturally. “Cold” is merely a word we’ve come up with that describe a lack of heat.   The sun makes heat; but Antarctica doesn’t really make cold.  Thus, the colder something is, the less heat it has, not the more cold it holds.

Darkness, too, is not technically there; it’s simply an absence of light.  Using this analogy, the argument quietly moves to the realm of cosmic theology and suggests that evil is not really a “thing”; it is simply the absence of God.  The more evil an event seems to us, the further away that event is from God.

Although a tight little argument and perhaps even logical in its own right, this explanation is also quite sterile.  While this reasoning may, for some, explain “how” what we call evil can exist in a universe constructed by a benevolent deity, it still does not explain “why.”  If God is God, by his nature he could alleviate the potential for evil.  If God is good, why would he allow even a portion of his creation to make choices that lead to poor behavior?

Personally, I think the answer lies partially in that particular abstract noun, “choice.”

Without choice, authentic relationship is not possible.  Without moral agency, humans are simply clever animals, using our giant brains to manipulate the environment toward our own instinctual ends.  Without free will, in fact, it would be impossible to demonstrate moral agency in the first place.

This, then, suggests that God seeks relationship with creation, especially the part that asks hundreds of questions a day.