Would Genesis be a way to teach science to Kindergarteners?

Journal On Lawn's Journal: Would Genesis be a way to teach science to Kindergarteners? 5

Journal by On Lawn on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @12:16PM

Cosmology, evolution, paleontology, are all fields of science where we can peer into the past after countless thousands of hours spent in painstaking effort to deduce physical cues from the world around us. We can look past history to see human families and sociality extending more than a hundred thousand years with the tools, bones and footprints they left. We can look even farther into the past before humans even existed and see a continuity of primordial evolution that takes us back to the dawn of life. By looking at the artifacts in the cosmos we can peer into a few hundred thousand years from the Big Bang that gave us a cosmos to look at.

The story in Genesis is one example of a creation story with a different lineage. We can see that it has roots in oral traditions which were captured sometime at the dawn or early morning of history. These stories were told in part to entertain and what I take to be a genuine desire inform neolithic to bronze age gatherings,

I don't have any experience with what that audience would be looking for. But I do know kindergartners, and they like to be entertained and informed, and are on the dawn to early morning of their discovery of writing as well. So if I'm going to judge the usefulness of Genesis chapter 1 in its natural setting, the closest I can get in this thought experiment is a class of kindergartners. With the lights turned off, ready to wow them at every turn, and hopefully avoiding the quagmire of scientific dulldrum.

So how does the story hold up? How well would Genesis work as a entertaining and informative story to give a good sense of what the creation was like?

Lets start with the god in the room ... it is generally held that if you mention God it is a religious work and not a scientific one. Describing a process as "then a miracle occurs" is admittedly bad science.

However, I can't help but notice how well children respond to people guiding them or representing something mysterious in a narrative. Every children's story needs a mentor / guide figure. This can be the conductor on Dinosaur Train, or Dora the Explorer, but at that age they seem to understand a story better if a person plays the roll of something difficult to understand.

Even as adults, we personify things we don't understand well, Maxwell conjures up a demon for his famous thought experiment on thermodynamics. Atoms "want" to live in the lowest state and have their electron shells filled. Its not a hard and fast rule, and a lot of mathematics can be easily summarized by just saying it is a very human like preference.

When looking at creation, we are looking at the reason we can thank for being alive. Things didn't have to happen this way, and the many times that chance broke our way can be come across as being guided by a very human preference that we wind up existing. There is an appreciation and awe that for my audience just writes itself as a ready made personification.

Whether that is a childish thing that can be done away as we learn to express things in more mechanical and mathematical terms, or a real set of fingerprints for a divine being, is a question that we all will wind up grappling with. And most importantly, one that can be put off until the children are older for the purpose of this thought exercise.

At least to start with. We'll just have to go verse by verse to see if this all works. But the fact it has a character as the face we can ascribe our awe and appreciation to is not in and of itself a deal breaker in my book.

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