About three years ago, when he was about 7 or 8, the Small Child was all excited about space… we talked about the Earth and the planets, gravity and temperatures, space shuttles and moon landings. I obtained a series of documentaries on various aspects of space to feed his enthusiasm. We watched documentaries together about the sun and the solar system, nebula and black holes, stars and supernovas and the final episode in the series was on the Big Bang Theory of the creation of the universe.
I remember a couple of days after we watched the last episode in this documentary series, the Small Child turned to me in the car on the way home from school one day and out of nowhere asked me, “Mum, if the Universe was created by the Big Bang explosion, how did God make the earth in a week?” I smiled quietly to myself, but was absolutely bursting at the seams with pride that the Small Child’s had not only noticed the anomaly in the information he’d acquired but his inquiring little mind was attempting to reconcile the two concepts, “I don’t know kiddo,” I said, “but I’m sure glad you asked.”
Skip forward several years and this morning, Mr K was talking to the Small Child about this week’s transit of Venus and what an amazing place the Universe is. He asked the now 10 year old Small Child if he believed that God created the Earth… The Small Child, who was barely paying attention as he was engrossed in a new computer game responded, “I might go to a Catholic school, but I’m going to go with the science…it’s more explicainable.”
His vocabulary needs some work but the sentiment is there. 🙂