I knew it would happen. I knew my son would eventually start asking me questions I can’t begin to answer. Now that he’s four, it happens more and more frequently. Here’s a recent conversation about one of life’s biggest existential questions (see end of post for article on neurological underpinnings of the human quest for God):

Oscar: Is God really small?

Me: Some people think so. Other people think he’s really big. Or she.

Oscar: Where God lives?

Me: Um.

Oscar: Why no one has seen God?

Me: Um. I guess maybe he’s invisible.

Oscar: Why God’s invisible?

Me: Maybe he doesn’t want people to see him.

Oscar: Why he doesn’t want people to see him?

Me: Maybe it’s a test to see if people can believe in him, even if they can’t see him, like Santa Claus.

Oscar: I believe in Santa Claus. But I don’t know what God’s like.

Me: Me too.

Oscar: Why some people think God’s big and some people think God’s small?

Me: Um.

Oscar: But a long time I know Santa Claus. I knowed Santa Claus all the time. I can guess Santa Claus but I can’t guess God.

Here’s an interesting article by Robin Marantz Henig, published in The New York Times in March of last year, about what anthropologist Scott Atran calls “belief in hope beyond reason”–the human inclination to to believe in God, or something God-like, despite our inability to scientifically validate the existence of a “higher power.” Particularly baffling is the magic-box experiment, wherein students are asked to put certain items–their pencils, their drivers’ licenses, their hands–into a box which they are told is a relic from Africa. They are told that, if one has negative feelings toward religion, anything he or she puts in the box will be destroyed. You might find the behavior of the atheists interesting.

I’m not sure why my son has been asking me about God. I don’t even know where he picked up the terminology, how he has a context out of which to construct these questions. All I know is that I have no answers that are sufficient, and that he, like me and everyone else, will have to figure it out as he goes along, and try to make some sense of what is either an unfathomable mystery, or a myth, or a simple fact of life, depending on one’s perspective.

Henig’s article is a lengthy, meaty, rather fascinating one, and I can’t begin to go into its various angles on the subject here. Instead I’ll just quote from the beginning–in which our human hunger for a God is boiled down to a matter of synapses, a natural offshoot of neurological wiring–and encourage you to read the article in its entirety:

These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.