Apologetics

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A collaboration by Jim Barringer, Andrea Ramirez, and Robert Gordon.

Robert and his wife have a baby, Grace, who everyone agrees is the cutest baby ever born. Whenever she's trying to walk, or pushing a ball, people can't help but stare because she's just so adorable. At Chili's after church tonight, one of the teens was playing peekaboo with her. You know what peekaboo is like for kids; they think it's the coolest thing in the world when the person reappears, and they never get bored of it.

That's because children come into the world with no concept of object permanence, the idea that things continue to exist even when the child can't see them. Child psychologist Jean Piaget did the groundbreaking work in this area, demonstrating that most children master this concept sometime in the second year of their lives. Prior to that, as far as they are concerned, nothing in the world exists if they're not looking at it at that precise moment.

I personally think that sounds like a great premise for a Lovecraftian horror story: a man lives in a world where things disappear forever if he stops looking at them. The fact that children don't understand object permanence for the first two whole years of their lives fascinates and terrifies me. Andrea took it a step further and asked, "Why do you think God allowed children to be born like that? Why is object permanence something he makes us learn?"

It's a brilliant question, with an even more brilliant answer. Being born without object permanence means that, whether we're conscious of it or not, almost the first thing we learn in our lives is that something can exist even if we don't see it. Does that idea sound familiar to you? It's the most crucial building block for having faith in God. Pretty much everything else that we do in the first two years of our life is instinct: crying when we're hungry, when we've just soiled our diapers, when we want attention, when we don't even know what's wrong because we're not used to these fickle bodies yet. All of that is instinct that is not learned or taught. But object permanence is, for most humans, the very first thing that they learn all on their own, and it opens the door to understanding the existence of God. Not only is it a vital physical lesson, it's the foundation for the most important spiritual truth in the universe as well.

How very brilliant on God's part that he has so engineered us that, even before we're capable of articulating the thoughts, he is already guiding us toward knowledge of himself. It really is proof that he is condescending, in the good way - that he delights in descending to everyone's level, that he is determined to make himself known to everyone on the planet, even those who are too young to understand that he is pursuing them. The very idea makes me worship him even more for his majesty, his subtlety, and the steadfast love he pours out on everyone, including two-year-olds who can't possibly give anything back to him or even understand or respond to his love yet.

If there is any finer proof that humans were created to discover and worship God, I have yet to hear it. Glory to God!

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