Dad, is God real?

This is question my 9 years old asked me and took me days to make a bedtime story for her:

Imagine you are 3 years old again.

Last month, we watched the spaceship rocket Test Flight 22 by spaceX. One of the biggest objects on Earth, one of the most complex engineering projects ever built by human, but it fires up and dance into the sky so naturally. It’s beautiful, with fire shooting out from the bottom. We both are amazed…

You are 3 years old and ask, “Dad, who made this rocket?”

I smile and say, “it took thousands of smart people working together for over 10 years. They failed a lot and learned. They actually didn’t start from scratch and used work of thousands of people who came before them. They learned from earlier rocket scientists who started building rockets over 50 years ago, tested ideas, built smaller rockets blew up, and kept improving and sharing ideas with others. It’s a complex and long scientific process. It is like evolution.”

But you’re little, so you look confused with that answer and ask again, “But who really made it? Just tell me the person!”

I get it. You want a name.

So I say, “Elon Musk.”

Now you have your answer.

“Oh! Elon Musk is like a superhero! He made the rocket! I want to be like him.”

As humans, we always want to find one person to admire. We want a hero, someone we can point to and say, “They did it.”

That is why we want to believe God created this world.

There are people who look around and ask, “Who created this world?” If you explain Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Big Bang, how single-celled organisms evolved over millions of years into plants, animals, and humans, they look at you like 3-year-old child.

But if you skip all of that and simply say, “God created it,” they smile because they have their answer.

The question is:

Do you want simple answers, or do you want real answers?

What do you want to be?

A person who goes to a church, mosque, or temple and reads the same book over and over, accepting that God created everything?

Or a thinker like Darwin, Hawking, Einstein, and other scientists who spent their lives trying to understand evolution, the Big Bang, gravity, relativity, and the nature of reality itself?

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