The Universe and The Waltons

I don't know if there was a cause-effect relationship; I think it had more to do with my son being sick for the last four or five days, and being on vacation at the same time--thus he's spent a lot of time daydreaming recently.  But it might have had something to do, also, with the fact that we were watching The Waltons this evening.  It's a slow-paced TV show about life in the Great Depression for one rural Virginia family, in which a lot of big-picture questions come up, questions about right and wrong, life and death, truth and lies...my son suddenly asked, a propos of almost nothing:  "Mommy do you know who created the great orb called the Universe?  God?"  The next question out of his mouth was, "Mommy, do you know when the first humans came to Earth?"

I was stumped, both times...I guessed 3 million years ago, for the second question.  (Okay, now that I've looked it up:  the latest scientific research suggests that while the ancestors of homo sapiens have been around for at least 2 million years, homo sapiens itself has existed for about two hundred thousand years.)  I didn't have an answer for the first question.  Which proves, I guess, that I'm an agnostic.

My son is not.  I turned things around and asked him, "Who do you think created the universe?" and he said, very quickly, "God."

The thing to know here is that my son is a very cheerful guy, who doesn't spend his days lost in serious thought--in other words, he's a normal six-year-old.  But I do think that all six-year-olds, even normal ones, spend at least part of their time asking the big questions--they're not afraid of them, and aren't afraid of being criticized for the wrong answer.  Their thoughts are, therefore, far more interesting than the typical grad student's.

I remember asking the same kinds of questions when I was his age.  The big one for me was, when you travel all the way to the end of the universe, what do you see there?

Actually I posed this question to my son this evening, and he had another answer.  "White."

He could be right.  I hope he gets to find out.