Something can’t come from nothing, can it?”
I sip at a can of Miller Lite and futilely try to think.
This is why I have given up the Big Questions.
“I don’t see how,” I admit.
“Sort of like, what began in the beginning?”
“God did,” Sarah says firmly. Holding a spatula so old it precedes her birth, she turns over ground beef in the skillet. We are having spaghetti again.
“But surely not just six thousand years ago,” I say, shaking my head.
“No reputable scientist believes that.”
Smelling the meat, Woogie begins to whimper. I doubt if he’s lost any sleep over the Creation. I stroke him with my foot to hush him. Sarah says, “That’s not true. In our creation science trial even the judge who ruled in favor of the evolutionists admitted in his written opinion that no scientists have been able to explain away the discovery of the existence of radioactive polonium haloes in granite and calcified wood that call into question the inference from carbon dating methods that the earth is ancient.”
Good Lord! What’s she talking about? They are already working on her. I don’t want to get into a scientific argument I’m sure to lose.
“Even assuming you’re one hundred percent right, you just can’t isolate the one blip that nobody understands and say that justifies disregarding the overwhelming body of knowledge on the subject.”
Stubbornly, Sarah shakes her head.
“It’s not knowledge; it’s theory. You just want to be on the side that appears intellectually respectable. You’re worried about what people think. If a bunch of Harvard scientists came out and said they had just discovered evidence that the world was only about six thousand years old, soon you’d start saying the same thing.”
I get up to set the table. She’s probably right. Most lawyers are suckers for authority figures. That’s how we earn our living. I feel a little tension in the room, but she doesn’t appear to be getting angry.
“Maybe that’s true,” I admit.
“But they all say the earth’s several billion years old.”
Sarah drains the boiling water from the spaghetti, and a cloud of steam rises from the sink. A documentary on Channel 2 a few weeks ago portrayed the earth dramatically cooling down after its fiery formation. Needless to say, this one re-created the beginning of life without reference to the book of Genesis. Vapor rises into the air that condenses into rain. Lightning flashes, and somehow chemicals interact, and poof! life begins. It makes more sense to me than some giant in the sky scooping up clay and molding a human who comes to life.
“You’re just afraid of looking silly,” she says benignly dishing the noodles out onto the plates.
“It’s more comfortable for you pretending you sort of under stand science when you really don’t. All you’re doing is taking someone else’s word instead of the Bible’s.”
I bring the meat over to the table. She’s right again.
I still don’t understand why the earth rotates. No Clarence Darrow or even a William Jennings Bryan, I’d be a liability to either side of a debate on the subject. Actually I’m more interested in how much time Sarah will be spending away from me than what she is being told, which, obviously, is quite a lot, if she already has been briefed about the evidence at our own monkey trial.
Since Sunday she has spent a couple of hours every day out there, even though Norman told her she should wait.
“Citing authority is about all lawyers know how to do,” I concede.
“One good precedent is worth ten pages of legal arguments.”
Tasting the spaghetti, Sarah seizes the opening I’ve given her.
“And the Bible is the oldest precedent you could possibly cite.”
Dan, my childless expert on child rearing since Rainey’s defection, tells me the more I argue (even if I knew what I was talking about), the more she will resist. But I want to cry out the obvious, which she surely knows:
the first monkey trial showed how badly eroded the Bible’s authority is for the purpose of demonstrating the origin of life, and the trial in Little Rock wasn’t any different.
I mutter, “It’s old, all right.” I guess I do care about appearances. I don’t want Sarah to be so out of step with the mainstream that she spends her life trying to defend something most of the country outside the South discarded long ago. She is too young to get stuck with such a narrow outlook on life. I thought people were supposed to be liberal when they are young and turn into conservatives when they get old. Maybe the country has become so threatening with its steady diet of violence, drugs, and sex and out-of-control economic problems that some kids will jump at the chance to bypass the complexity and uncertainty of reality for some definite answers. I know Sarah’s answer already.
The Bible is God’s truth.
Sarah puts down her fork.
“What you can’t or won’t see is how meaningful the Bible becomes when it is believed,” my daughter lectures me, “and not just taken as metaphor or statements of faith.”
Despite Dan’s injunction not to argue, I protest, “But for something to be meaningful, surely it has to make sense and be true.” As my voice gets high, Woogie stirs restlessly under the table. He doesn’t like conflict either.
Sarah moves her glass of milk around on the place mat as she responds, “When Jesus died on the Cross for us, it didn’t make sense, did it?”
I suppress a sigh. Shut up right now, I tell myself. A total no-win situation. She wants to argue with me. It will be a test to see if she already knows enough to beat the old man. What she doesn’t know is that it will bruise our relationship, and that’s the last thing I want to happen. I’m already losing Rainey. I can’t afford to lose Sarah. I try a question, myself.
“Isn’t the reason Jesus died a question of theology?”
“No!” Sarah practically shouts, her food forgotten.
“It’s what gives my life meaning.”
I have lost my appetite. Maybe all of this is rebellion.
I am not going to fight with her. If she wants to become an evangelist, I’ll try to learn to live with it. I’m just afraid she is going to miss so much of life. The world is a larger place than Christian Life, our house, and her school.
“You’re going to end up like Leigh Wallace,” I say stupidly, my voice trembling. Who am I kidding?
Of course, I dread the thought of her cutting herself off from the twentieth century; it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise. True enough, so much of what exists is banal or even hideous, but at least some people weren’t afraid to think and experiment. Why throw them out?
Sarah gets up from the table, knocking her chair back against the wall.
“That’s the most absurd thing you’ve ever said!” she storms at me.
“If Leigh hadn’t turned her back on Christian Life, she wouldn’t be in the situation she’s in now.”
I stand up, too, and take my plate over to the sink.
“Most people can’t live all their lives shut up in a little cocoon. Not at your age. Now is the time for broadening yourself, questioning things. The way you’re going about this is to shut yourself off. For God’s sake, Christian Life is a fortress. It might as well be patrolled by security guards. That’s not living; that’s hiding.”
Sarah follows me over to the sink.
“I suppose what you do is real living, huh?” she yells.
“After Mom died, you’d have brought a prostitute to the house if you thought you could’ve gotten away with it. You make a living defending people who spend their lives doing evil things, and then you use people who care about you to help get them off. You finally find one woman who’s good for you, and you risk giving her AIDS and jerk her around like a puppet! If that’s what you call living, who needs it?”