Loco Parentis: He’s a Believer
Last year, a school district not too far from us became the first in the nation to require that science teachers instruct students in “intelligent design” as well as evolution. This year, the fight over ID — the theory that life is just too darned complicated to be the result of Darwin’s survival-of-the-fittest schema — has heated up to boiling, with arguments from everybody from George W. Bush (“Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought”) to Bill Maher (“Intelligent design is supported by guys on line to see The Dukes of Hazzard”) to my dad. “Intelligent design?” Dad says. “What about the appendix? What’s so intelligent about that? All it does is go bad and burst.”
One might think that Marcy, with her fervor for order in the universe — and the living room — would be drawn to the concept of intelligent design. One might also surmise that Jake, slovenly and disorderly, as random as a tumbleweed, would adhere to the lovely chaos of Darwinism. As H. Allen Orr put it in the New Yorker recently, “Evolution has no goal, and the history of life isn’t trying to get anywhere.” Jake doesn’t seem to be, either. Oddly, though, on the big questions, Marcy shuts down first. “If the universe began with a big bang,” says Jake, “where did the stuff that made the bang come from?”
“It didn’t come from anywhere,” says Marcy. “The bang brought everything into being.”
“But something had to make the bang.”
“No it didn’t. The bang was the beginning.”
“Then what made the bang?”
“Nothing made the bang. The bang made everything.”
“But there had to be something to make the bang.”
“You are so incredibly stupid,” Marcy says.
If God made us, then he gave us the God gene — but only some of us. Very Old Testament of Him, and it does help to explain the Middle East. If God didn’t make us, then the God gene evolved — which means it must serve some evolutionary purpose. When you’re the youngest and your sister picks on you and your dad says you spend too damned much time on the computer and your mom yells at you for making a pizza in the oven when it’s 100 degrees out and then leaving the oven on for the whole two hours she’s at the doctor so that by the time she gets home the entire first floor is like Death Valley, it helps to feel that there’s a greater power, and that the meek will inherit the Earth — that a shaft of sunlight could be the stairway to heaven.
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” Jake asks one night at supper, when it’s just him and me.
I shake my head. “Nah. When it’s over, it’s over. How about you?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s kind of funny that every single civilization has come up with the idea that when you die, you’re not really dead.”
“People are afraid of dying,” I say. “And it’s easier to get them to do what they’re supposed to when they’re afraid.”
“Heaven and Hell,” says Jake. “Isn’t that what Christians believe in?”
“Yup. The Rapture. When the trumpet blows, all the believers will rise up to heaven.”
“And the unbelievers?”
“They’ll be left here on Earth, and there will be wars and tsunamis and hurricanes and stuff like that.”
He stares at me. I’m aghast at my own glibness. You forget, when you’re old and cynical, the rawness of a child’s mind. You think you’re being intellectually honest, and liberating your kid from centuries of benighted superstition. But what if you’re only making him afraid of the dark?
E-mail: hingston@phillymag.com
