Talking with Your Kids about God

30 Conversations Every Christian Parent Must Have

Natasha Crain

• Publisher: Baker Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780801075520
• eBook ISBN: 9781493412303
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Confidently nurture faith in your children--one conversation at a time

You want to pass on your faith to your children. But in today's increasingly skeptical and hostile world, how can you prepare your kids for the challenges and doubts they will inevitably face?

In a friendly, parent-to-parent voice, Natasha Crain brings clarity to this question by walking you through thirty essential conversations about God that parents and kids must have today, including discussions about

● the existence of God
● science and God
● the nature of God
● believing in God
● the difference God makes

Organized so that each chapter builds upon the last, this book provides a cumulative learning experience appropriate for home, church classes, youth groups, small groups, and homeschools. Every chapter has a conversation guide, and content is adaptable for use with kids from elementary age through high school.

Part 1: The Existence of God

Overview

A couple of years ago, my husband and I were invited to a dinner party with a few other new parents from our kids’ Christian elementary school. After we worked our way through appetizers and the requisite small talk, the conversation turned to our respective faith backgrounds. One of the moms confessed that, as much as she loved the Lord, she struggled with how to share her faith with her son—so she had enrolled him at a Christian school where others might be able to do a “better job.”

Another mom replied, “Well, I don’t worry too much about it. I just tell my daughter that believing in God is like believing in Santa Claus. Some people believe, and some don’t. It’s a matter of faith.”

I glanced over at the mom who said that, ready to laugh with her at the idea of placing God and Santa in the same category.

But she wasn’t laughing.

She had just matter-of-factly shared what she honestly thought was a helpful way of explaining belief in God’s existence to her daughter, and other parents around the table nodded approvingly. I continued poking at my salad, contemplating just how annoying I would be if I suggested we stop to define the biblical notion of faith and evaluate the differences between faith in Santa and faith in God. I concluded I didn’t want to rain on the remaining festivities, so I just kept eating—something I still regret.

If an atheist had overheard our dinner party conversation, they would have delighted in my friend’s comparison of God and Santa because that’s precisely how atheists want us to think:

God and Santa: two entities with no evidence to demonstrate their existence.

God and Santa: childish beliefs people should outgrow once they understand there’s no evidence to demonstrate their existence.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett is one of many atheists who have made this comparison, saying, “The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight—that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in.”1

Here’s the good news: atheists talk about God’s existence (or lack thereof) in specific, predictable ways. That means we have the reference point for how to prepare our kids accordingly. We don’t have to fumble around, hoping that what we’ve taught our children about God’s existence will somehow be enough to ground their faith. In fact, if we do just fumble around, speaking about God in whatever terms feel most comfortable to us—like comparing God and Santa—we may unintentionally set our kids up for spiritual vulnerability.

Knowing that atheists consistently claim there’s “no evidence” for God, we need to raise kids who understand what, exactly, that means and how to think critically about such claims. Part 1 of this book is designed to help you do just that. In these chapters, we’ll explore the evidence for God’s existence in nature and how that relates to the claims of skeptics.

If thinking about God’s existence in these ways is new to you, please don’t feel alone. While most Christians are prepared to speak to God’s existence based on their personal experiences, few have studied the objective evidence for God’s existence in nature. This independent evidence, however, is critical to understand because people can have contradictory personal experiences. For example, atheists may believe God doesn’t exist based on what they’ve experienced. By teaching our kids about the objective evidence for God’s existence in nature, we’re preparing them for a world that wants them to believe their personal experiences with God are no different from a child’s personal “experience” with Santa and that they’ll find no more evidence for God outside themselves than they’ll find for Santa at the North Pole.

Three Keys to Impactful Conversations about the Existence of God

1. Introduce these discussions by explaining why it’s so important to learn about the evidence for God’s existence in nature. Most kids will identify that they can know about God from the Bible and from their own experiences, but, like most adults, they’ve probably never had the opportunity to engage with the evidence for God’s existence in nature. To get kids thinking about the subjects in part 1, ask, “How do you know God exists?” Be sure to affirm that personal experience is important in the life of a Christian, but explain why it’s also important to understand the objective evidence God has given us in nature.
2. Clarify terms. The nuanced meaning of certain words is important for these discussions, so be sure to clarify up front what they mean (and, remember, younger kids may have never heard these words before). Key terms in this section include atheist, agnostic, skeptic, and theist. An atheist, as we’ll use the term, is someone who believes there is no God.2 An agnostic is someone who believes nothing is known or can be known about the existence or nature of God. A skeptic is a broader catchall category of people who reject the claims of Christianity (note that skepticism in general can have many meanings, but this is what it will mean in the context of this book). A theist is someone who believes in a God who interacts with his creation (for example, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all theistic faiths).
3. Help kids remember the evidence by teaching them to memorize the “big three” questions covered by chapters 2, 3, and 4: Where did the universe come from? Where did life come from? and Where did our moral understanding come from? While many other subjects could be discussed with respect to the evidence for God’s existence, these are three of the most important and frequently debated in today’s world. Even if kids don’t remember all the chapter details, the questions themselves can serve as a “mental directory” for key concepts in the future.

1.
What Can We Learn about God from Nature?

One afternoon my three kids came running into the house. My five-year-old proudly revealed a large Spiderman bouncy ball that had made its way into our backyard.

“Mommy, look! We have a new ball! It was just sitting by the barbeque!”

Rest assured, we have plenty of other balls rolling around our backyard. But, of course, the novelty of one that had suddenly appeared was very exciting.

“It probably belongs to Mason. Just throw it back over the fence,” I told them. Mason lived next door.

“But, Mommy,” my older daughter pleaded, “we don’t know it’s his, so we shouldn’t assume that and just give it to him. It could belong to anyone.”

My daughter was technically right; we didn’t know it was his. Unless he showed up and proved his ownership, we couldn’t be sure. Still, I pushed my daughter on her logic.

“You’re right. We don’t know it’s his. There are millions of possible explanations for how it got here. I heard some kids visiting our other neighbors this weekend. Maybe it’s theirs. Or maybe the wind blew it over from a house farther away. Or maybe it fell from an airplane or an alien put it there or maybe it popped into existence all by itself!”

My kids looked at me, unamused, and impatiently awaited the point they knew was coming.

“While there are tons of possible places the ball could have come from, by far the most likely place is Mason’s house. He’s the only kid in a neighboring house who regularly plays in the backyard, we know he loves Spiderman, and balls from his yard have landed in our yard before. Throw it back.”

With that, they threw it over the fence and announced they were now “totally” bored. (Without this incredible new ball, of course, there was suddenly nothing to do.)

Like the Spiderman bouncy ball, the universe doesn’t verbalize where it came from, why it’s here, and what we should do with it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t evaluate all the information we do have in nature to draw reasonable conclusions about these things.

In this and the next five chapters, we’ll be looking at the universe, life, and our innate moral knowledge—the “balls” in our backyard—to learn how nature powerfully points to the existence of God. But before we do, we need to clarify what these pieces of evidence can and cannot tell us. That’s the subject for our first chapter.

General Revelation: God’s “Word” in Nature

As Christians, we believe God has revealed himself in the inspired words of the Bible’s authors. Indeed, the Bible is our most extensive source of knowledge about him. But Christians often overlook the natural world as another important source of God’s “Word” to us.

The knowledge about God that we obtain through the observation of nature is called general revelation. Psalm 19:1–2 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.” The apostle Paul says there is no excuse for not believing in God because he has so clearly revealed himself in nature:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. (Rom. 1:18–20)

Paul goes on to say that God has also given humans an innate knowledge of right and wrong—a moral conscience:

(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.) This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares. (Rom. 2:14–16)

It’s clear that the Bible confirms God has revealed himself in the natural world and that we should expect to find evidence for him there. But what specifically can we learn?

What Nature Reveals about God

When we study the natural world, we see there’s good reason to believe God exists given what we observe. For example, when we study the origin of the universe in chapter 2, we’ll learn that science points to the universe having a beginning. It hasn’t been around forever. But things don’t pop into existence on their own. Something or someone causes them to exist. The something or someone that caused the universe to come into existence had to have been supernatural—beyond nature—since it created nature. As such, that supernatural thing or person would have to be (among other things) spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and uncaused. This description is clearly consistent with th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Existence of God
• Part 2: Science and God
• Part 3: The Nature of God
• Part 4: Believing in God
• Part 5: The Difference God Makes
• Notes
• About the Author
• Back Ads
• Back Cover