The Boy and I have been listening to Josh Clark’s The End of the World podcast, and it opens with a discussion of the Fermi Paradox, which the Boy tried to explain to his friend on the way to the pool this evening.
“See, the universe is millions of years old and…” he began when his friend cut him off: “No, it’s only a few thousand years old.”
“No,” argued the Boy. “It’s millions of years old.”
“No!” his friend insisted. “It’s only a few thousand years old. It’s in the Bible.”
At this point, I intervened: “Boys, stop arguing — talk about something else.”
On the way home, after dropping off his friend, I explained to the Boy what had happened, giving him a primer on young Earth creationism.
“But it’s science!” he insisted incredulously. “There’s evidence.”
“But they don’t accept that evidence,” I explained, and he had a hard time understanding how someone doesn’t accept evidence. I do too, truth be told. “It’s just not worth arguing about because you won’t change anyone’s mind who thinks that way.”
I went ahead and corrected his numbers while I was at it: “The Earth is, in fact, about 4.5 billion years old, and the universe is somewhere in the area of 13 billion years old — much older than the couple million years you were insisting upon. I didn’t correct you then because that would have meant correcting your friend, and I’m not sure how his parents would react to that.”
My parents were young Earthers, too (at least for a while), but I’m not sure how they would have reacted to me coming home and announcing that one of my friend’s father said indirectly that I was wrong and that the Earth is in fact much older than what they taught me. I don’t imagine they would have prevented me from seeing the kid again, but if it had happened again, they might have. And certainly, very fundamentalist Christians would likely make such a move, and the Boy’s relationship with his friend is much more valuable to me than what he’s been taught about the universe.
The Boy, then, experienced something like what I experience regularly: that sense when among more literalist Christians that we view the world in a completely different way.