God and Sixth graders
So, last Tuesday morning I found myself in the company of over 100 rambunctious middle school-aged students at a "Digital Storytelling Workshop" put on by "Bridges to Understanding," a local nonprofit that lets kids from around the globe share digital stories about their lives (I'm a volunteer writer for them; check out their website: www.bridgesweb.org).A group of girls, clad in "Livestrong" bracelets and sparkly hair clips, pointed me to the corner where two boys chatted loudly and in animated tones. I assumed the subject of their debate was the latest video game or movie, as these were, in face, ELEVEN year-old children.
But no.
They were discussing nothing other than the potential existence of God, the probability that evolution is correct, and the recent supreme court debate about "Intelligent Design." Ash bounced up and down in his chair, his blonde bowl-cut bobbing, as he espoused his theory that, "There can't be a God! In all of history, there is absolutely no PROOF that there was a God. The things people wrote about as miracles can be explained by nature now."
Aaron wasn't so sure. He said that even though the miracles might not have been as miraculous as the people thought, that "still doesn't mean there's no God for sure." I explained to the boys that the stance of not believing there is proof of God could leave them either "agnostic" or "atheistic." If he could be sure there was proof of no God, he could be firmly atheistic, but if he was just sure that there wasn't proof of God (but didn't have proof that there was no God) he could be "agnostic," which I explained meant that you weren't positive either way (which isn't the exact definition but it worked for us). I summed it up by saying that "no proof of God is not the same as proof of no God..."
After a bachelor's degree from a prestigious liberal arts college, this phrase took me a few minutes to figure out, yet these kids seemed to get it! Aaron felt he was agnostic and wanted to learn more before he could be sure, while Ash remained convinced that the fact that miracles didn't exist proved definitively that there was no God.
What struck me was just how excited they were about the subject. I tried to imagine what they'd be like at age 13, 15, 25, and just couldn't see for sure whether that enthusiasm would last. That got me to thinking: how much of personality is stable through time? I remember learning through twin studies in my psych classes that it's about half learned and half innate, but perhaps some are born with innate personalities which make them more suceptible to their environments, right? I think one of the frustrating aspects of being a teacher during the middle school years, where personality is still forming in some ways yet stable in others, must be not being able to see what the kids are like when they grow up. Will Aaron be a philosophy major? Will Ash end up converting to some religion after his first child is born? I'd like to know, after only chatting with them for 15 minutes!
As Ash said after I persisted in arguing that his stance was more agnostic than atheistic, "Well, this is just my first theory. I'm only eleven..." The question is: what will the theory look like at 13? | posted by Cheryl, 10/14/2005 10:26:00 AM
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