Explaining Christianity to a 5-year-old atheist

This is in response to a lot of questions Andrew had about whether Christianity makes sense or is worthy of concern.(The challenge was to EILI5, I suppose this is as simple as I can make it for now.)  I am coming at this in an admittedly unorthodox way. I don’t know that I believe in a personal God, or even really know what that could mean, so setting aside this fundamental Christian doctrine, i.e. whether God is either personal or ethical. I will try to put the other rudiments of Christianity in a way that would make sense to the average five-year-old (or 35-year-old) deist, atheist, or pagan.

Sin is not making mistakes, it is part of our nature

Christian J, commented on my post about evolution.  In light of the conversion experience I had in November, my eyes opened to a a real vacancy within current Mormon practice and how the Gospel is taught to children. There is something that most Mormons just don’t get, or at least they don’t talk like they get it.  They are often very hostile to it. I believe that a big part of the problem is the LDS understanding of sin. I want to be clear that I think that the problem is not in the LDS scriptures, it is in what is taught in primary. Mormons describe sin as crime, i.e. intentional disobedience to a law.  I think this is a fundamental mistake that has dangerous psychological ramifications.  This recent conference talk “Avoiding the Trap of Sin” which I chose at random from the LDS website gives a absolutely run-of-the-mill-LDS description of sin. Elder Mazzagardi explains:

I asked my blue-eyed, cheerful, and innocent granddaughter how she was preparing for baptism.

She answered with a question: “Grandpa, what is sin?”

I silently prayed for inspiration and tried to respond as simply as I could: “Sin is the intentional disobedience to God’s commandments. It makes Heavenly Father sad, and its results are suffering and sadness.”

Clearly concerned, she asked me, “And how does it get us?”

The question first reveals purity, but it also reveals a concern for how to avoid involvement with sin.

Elder Mazzagardi gives a typical Mormon caveat about the “trap of sin” and points to how a child might avoid involvement in sin:

When I was a teenager, my curfew was 10:00 p.m. Today, that is the time some go out in order to have fun. Yet we know that it is at night that some of the worst things happen. It is during the dark hours that some youth go to places with inappropriate environments, where music and lyrics do not allow them to have the companionship of the Holy Ghost. Then, under these circumstances, they become easy prey to sin.

This teaching and counsel seems like commonsense to a Mormon, and it is absolutely typical of what is taught in church. Mormons should realize that from a Christian point of view, it is near madness.  Believing that we can “avoid involvement in sin” is a misunderstanding of Christianity.

Learning from Atheists: Evolution might bring Mormons closer to Christ

Pascal’s thought: “The sages who have said there is only one God . . .  have seen by the light of nature that if there be a true religion on earth, the course of all things must tend to it as to a center. The whole course of things must have for its object the establishment and the greatness of religion. Men must have within them feelings suited to what religion teaches us. And, finally, religion must so be the object and center to which all things tend, that whoever knows the principles of religion can give an explanation both of the whole nature of man in particular, and of the whole course of the world in general.

And on this ground [atheists] take occasion to revile the Christian religion, because they misunderstand it. They imagine that it consists simply in the worship of a God considered as great, powerful, and eternal; which is strictly deism, almost as far removed from the Christian religion as atheism, which is its exact opposite. And thence they conclude that this religion is not true, because they do not see that all things concur to the establishment of this point, that God does not manifest Himself to men with all the evidence which He could show.

But let them conclude what they will against deism, they will conclude nothing against the Christian religion, which properly consists in the mystery of the Redeemer, who, uniting in Himself the two natures, human and divine, has redeemed men from the corruption of sin in order to reconcile them in His divine person to God.

The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him. It is equally important to men to know both these points; and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can free him from it. The knowledge of only one of these points gives rise either to the pride of philosophers, who have known God, and not their own wretchedness, or to the despair of atheists, who know their own wretchedness, but not the Redeemer.

And, as it is alike necessary to man to know these two points, so is it alike merciful of God to have made us know them. The Christian religion does this; it is in this that it consists.”

My thought: A peculiar aspect of Mormonism and many fundamentalist Christian faiths is the refusal to accept the theory of evolution as a viable explanation of the origin of human nature.  What evolutionary biology tells us about human nature is that it is our nature to be evil, to oppose God, and oppose the Law.  This is a truth that is very Christian, but something that has been denied vehemently since Plato.  Most Mormons are very much with Plato on this point.

If Mormons were able to embrace evolutionary biology more completely I think they might come closer to understanding original sin, and then recognize the reality of the escape from original sin.

 

Evolution vs. Bronze-Age creation Myths

Carlosbyu, believes in a theory of creation that I described as “stupid.”  Gap theory has been an accepted answer to explaining very old bones starting in the 1600s. (And Carlosbyu, my friend, I meant no personal disrespect in describing your theory as “stupid”.  The best people I know have stupid theories about scientific and philosophical subjects.)

I remember reading as a child that Brigham Young’s explanation was that God had, in fact, taken parts of older worlds and put them together as this world, dinosaur bones at all. By that time I fully believed that evolution was the best way of explaining the material cause of human life.  But I knew that it did not explain the efficient cause of existence, nor the final cause, or purpose, of human life.

Brigham’s was a clean way of solving the problem, if laughably implausible. I actually admired it for it’s audacity and simplicity. It was a prophetically audacious way of saying “creation theories don’t matter”.

Tim’s question of Carlosbyu, as I am sure it would be of Brigham Young:

“If God was using pre-existing elements to create the earth we inhabit, why didn’t he break the dinosaur bones down to the most basic and unrecognizable forms? Why leave them in tact at all?”

Tim’s question begs mine: Why did an all-powerful God use the 13-Billion-year process of evolution to create the universe rather than popping it into existence like Bronze-aged creation myths depict? The answer to both of these questions is “strange and inscrutable are the ways of our Lord.”