Loving Sheldon

I don’t know if you all watch or not but I love the show, Young Sheldon. The little boy who plays Sheldon as a child is so great but more than that I love the message the show sends. If you are a fan then you already know that Sheldon doesn’t believe in God, he believes in science. Now before you all get upset as to why I would love a show where the main character doesn’t believe in God let me tell you why.

Even though he doesn’t believe in God you will find Sheldon sitting in church with his mother every Sunday. In fact, int he first episode he volunteers to go to church with his mother. It is mentioned that he doesn’t believe in God and he says that while that it is true he believes in his mother. Church leaves this little boy with way more questions than answers.

I love how he is willing to take on Pastor Jeff and tell him he is wrong. Not to mention when Pastor Jeff gets the better of Sheldon’s reasoning Sheldon plots to annihilate him the next week. The questions Sheldon answers are not out there. Although I will tell you that my favorite part is when Pastor Jeff is talking about God creating the Earth and such. He tells Sheldon that the word was God and Sheldon ask if the word was “Kaboom” cause of the big bang.

Pastor Jeff tells Sheldon that Charles Darwin believed in God and Sheldon asks if he was right about God but wrong about evolution. The pastor says correct and then moves on. That leaves Sheldon thinking and in my home brought up a slew of questions. So I went in search of answers. I read through so much stuff that at one point I wasn’t sure what he believed. Let me say this, his own writings, left me uncertain about so much. In the end all I was left with was a conflicted history of Charles Darwin and little else. At one time he did in fact believe in God but by the end of his life he didn’t.

My thoughts on evolution are simply that it is possible. The bible tells us that God created man but I heard a scholar once (I can’t remember her name now) say that the bible is an idea and not necessarily a historical record. The reason that stuck with me was it was at a time when my faith was at its lowest. I had pretty much written God off in my life. I was never going to be able to live up to what the bible said I should be. On top of the fact that God had abandoned me. It struck me as she was correct. While there are events in the bible that can be historically traced not all of them can be. Some things have a poetic license at times.

After all did David really beat a giant? Or was it simply that this army was larger and better trained? Was Goliath simply a large man compared to David’s teenage self? That seems much more likely to me. There are many accounts in the bible that could be explained by science that we now know. Does that make any of them less miraculous? No, I say it doesn’t. After all even if Sodom and Gomorrah were in fact destroyed by volcanic eruption something had to ensure that the volcano erupted at that exact moment. Noah couldn’t have known that there would be a flood if there was no God. Maybe he had an intuition but that feeling or knowing had to come from somewhere.

As far as evolution goes I have not idea where I stand on that. It could have happened that way or maybe it happened just as the bible said it did. I don’t think that it should be important when it comes to my faith. Regardless of how man came into being what is important is that we did. I think Sheldon had it correct when he quoted Blaise Pascal:

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.