So at what age do you think that a child begins to understand the idea that there is more to life than just right and wrong, true and false, and good and evil?
What prompted this question was a conversation with a friend about whether it's appropriate to teach kids physics that we know is false even if it relatively accurately describes how things are. She is convinced that it should be laid out as it is from the start, but I'm not so sure. I don't think that young kids can really grasp the idea of several rights or answers that are close enough to the truth that they are useful.
The fact is that there are very few absolute truths in the world, but children don't yet have the tools or experience to really grasp that. Neither do many adults though. Hmm.
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I think that it has to do with the way physics (or chemistry, or math, or, at times, religion) is presented to kids. The problem in grade school is that the teachers often don't know that that model they are presenting is really just a model that explains some of what we observe in nature, but not all of it. So they teach it as an absolute.
This makes it so the kids feel fooled when they learn about a new, more recent model that explains more, or maybe a different aspect of the natural world. And then they feel sort of superior to everyone who still believes in that silly model they learned about before. But the root of the problem is still there - they still hold onto this idea that what they've learned is a true, literal description of the world. Really, it's just another model.
So you found out that an atom isn't really a nucleus with little electrons orbiting around it like planets. You'll find out later that the whole probability cloud thing isn't a a perfect description either. Because that's all it is. Just a description.
It's the same with religion - and you have to be even more careful there because it's way worse for a kid to lose faith in God than for him to lose faith in physics. We tell a kid that when he's baptized, his sins are washed away. If the kid takes the water he was baptized in and puts it under a microscope, be won't see his sins floating around in there. What you told the kid was true, but he may have misunderstood exactly how the mechanism works.
When you draw that little diagram with little circles for the pre-mortal world, earth, the spirit world, and the three kingdoms of glory, the kid you're teaching may not understand, although hopefully you do, that those don't actually represent 6 separate planets. But the diagram gets the point across. Then when the kid gets older and learns a little bit more about the plan of salvation, he will be able to fit new truths into the framework he built as a child.
We're pretty good at accepting that spiritual truth has to come line upon line. But I think it's the same for all truth. Milk before meat.
In answer to your first question though, I still haven't gotten to the age where I've realized that there is more to life than right and wrong, true and false, or good and evil. I think the difference is that I've come to see them as directions, rather than locations.
Regarding the right/wrong directional model (see Provo Portia for the definition of model) referred to by Crolace: just when I decide that the directions for right and wrong fall not on a one-dimensional sign post, like a number line, but rather on a two-dimensional plane, I find myself thinking that motivations included make it more of a three dimensional space. Someone might wonder if time can change what is "right" (afterall, rules and policies change) and then there are 4 dimensions. But at that point, does it all fall apart because you really can't call any specific action or decision "right" after all?
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