Childish Faith

Here’s a fun video:

In case you don’t want to watch it: the video illustrates how 15 very common scientific illustrations are, technically speaking, inaccurate. Imprecise might be a better word. They don’t actually tell you what is going on in.

I doubt very many people watching this thought, “Oh no, my trust in science has been misguided. I will never trust another scientist again, or go to a laboratory, or read a science book. I have been lied to!” etc. etc. But how many people who grow up on the flannel-graph, children’s-bible version of Christianity allow their faith to be “shattered” because they go off and learn that things are not quite as neat and tidy and they learned in Sunday school. As a child.

That’s not to say that very real crises of faith occur, but it seems that more often than not the reasons I hear people give for their personal faith being shaken comes down to something pretty simple. Guess what? A lot of what you learned in children’s church is probably technically imprecise, just like the models of atoms we learned about in 7th grade. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing is a lie. Faith should be childlike, of course, but that doesn’t mean it has to be childish.