The God Squad: How to deal with son’s doubts about God

Question: My 12-year-old son has been telling me he’s having doubts about the existence of God.

He says there’s no proof that there is a God. I tell him that when you look around and see the beauty of the world and the wonder of the universe, you have to imagine that God is behind those. Even Einstein believed!

I tell him some things are “unknowable” and can never be “proved,” and that’s where faith comes in. He seems to be struggling with this and has brought it up many times. I really don’t know what else to tell him. Can you help?

— Anonymous, via [email protected]

Answer:

Let me suggest several “moves” (that’s what I call answers to questions we can’t really answer). I’ve previously offered these moves to others with the same question.

The first move is to answer his questions with a question.

I must give credit to the Buddha for this one, since it was the answer he gave to his disciples when they asked him if the world was created or eternal.

He answered, “Of what significance is this question for you?”

I understand that your son is questioning the existence of God, but why is that question important to him? You need to discover the question behind his question. Perhaps his question is about morality. As Fyodor Dostoevsky supposedly wrote, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

I say “supposedly” because Dostoevsky never wrote those words in his novel “The Brothers Karamazov.” They do however express the view of Ivan in the novel and those words are wrongly quoted by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, which gave rise to this tradition.

In any event, the point is that many people struggling with the constraints of the moral life feel that one reason to do good is that God is watching and taking names. If that’s your son’s view, remind him that doing the right thing just because it’s right is enough of a reason. Leave God’s punishments out of the calculus we make about our moral lives.

Perhaps your son’s question is about life after death. He may be wondering if death is indeed the end of us. In a choice between heaven/hell on one hand and worms on the other, I choose heaven/hell, but even here I’m open to a world where I’m wrong and the worms are licking their lips waiting for my demise.

I hope for heaven, but I don’t live what I hope is a moderately virtuous life just because I want my heavenly ticket punched. I live a decent life because it’s right to be kind, and it’s even more right to be kinder than necessary because everyone is struggling with something big.

Your son says there’s no proof for the existence of God.

Ask him, “What do you think would constitute such a valid proof?”

Seeing a watch proves to me that there’s a watchmaker and seeing the world and our bodies and the perfection of nature proves to me that there’s a world maker in exactly the same way. If that doesn’t work for your son, ask him how he explains order and hope and love and self-sacrifice and courage.

There’s a tendency among all adolescents and adults who are stuck in adolescent adulthood to become frustrated when the great mysteries of existence are not amenable to instantaneous solutions. The antidote to this intellectual impatience is intellectual patience and the simple wisdom gleaned from a life lived in a noble manner.

To this very point, have him read, or read to him this letter, written by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke to a young poet:

“I would like to beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Here’s hoping that someday all of us, including your son, will be able to live our way into the answer.

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