My wife is a JW, and is teaching our eight year old daughter JW beliefs. I am trying to teach her about evolution and critical thinking skills. Here is a conversation we had today (as best I can remember it):
Daughter: "Why do bad things happen?"
Me: "Why do you think bad things happen?"
Daughter: "I don't know, I've only heard one opinion so far, that Satan causes them."
Me: "So do you think an invisible person goes around making bad things happen?"
Daughter: "Well, he's not a person, he's an animal, and he sends his demons to do bad things."
Me: "An animal?!"
Daughter: "Yes, I saw a picture of him as a lion, laughing while he made a man look at people having sex on the computer."
Me (wondering how on earth she knew what the man in the picture was looking at on the computer): "I see, so that's one possibility I suppose - invisible people or animals go round forcing people to do things. But how do we know whether that's true? There is no way to test for sure whether they really exist."
Daughter: "Well why do people get cancer?"
Me: I explained basics of cell division and that it sometimes just goes wrong - "it doesn't need an invisible person to make it go wrong, things do just go wrong sometimes."
Daughter: "Why do people grow old and die?"
Me: I explained about telomeres, likening them to the ends of shoelaces, and that when they get too short the chromosomes unravel and can't be repaired, again pointing out that it doesn't need an invisible person or animal to come along and make it happen, it is just part of how our bodies work.
We then got onto talking about evolution, and I said that unlike these invisible people there is lots of evidence for evolution. She then put on a defensive playground voice, saying "yeah? Prove it! You have to prove that we're wrong and you're right."
I pointed out that JWs have to prove these invisible people are real, I don't have to prove that they're not, and then explained some of the evidence for evolution (bacteria, viruses, fossils, Italian wall lizards, even geographical distribution). I don't know how much of that sank in. Then she asked (again with the defensive playground sing-song voice): "Where did the first human come from then?"
We have discussed that several times before, she knows about gradual evolution, and the common ancestry of apes and humans, but I showed her one of those pictures where a gradient goes from red to blue and pointed out that there was no single point where the colour changed from red to blue. That jogged her memory ("oh yeah, I forgot about the apes") and hopefully gave her a way to visualise gradual change.
Now I'm questioning whether I handled it well enough, or what else I could say. She's very bright, but she is still only eight! Even though she rarely goes to a meeting, she identifies strongly with JWs because I am the only member of her immediate family who isn't a JW, and most of her school friends are muslim, so she likes the idea of belonging to a religion. How would you answer questions like that in a way an eight year old can understand?
