I just heard this little tale on another forum.
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I have a 9 year old son and for much the same reasons as Hitchens sends his daughter to a quaker school, my son goes to a catholic school here in Canada. Essentially, the school was closer, it was brand new, there was much better equipment and offered a French immersion starting at grade 4.
However, obviously I don't want him indoctrinated, but nor do I want him shouting out to the teachers that they're full of crap when ever they speak of religion. So I've encouraged him to ask questions when they tell him stuff about the bible that doesn't make sense. The other night he arrived home and they had done the story of Noah's Ark. I asked him what he thought about it; ie. if he thought it was true and he said that the teacher told them it was. (or led them to believe it was true at least)
So, at that point I brought him to the computer and sat him on my knee and told him we'd try to figure out if it "could" happen. I looked up the supposed dimensions of the Ark, then the number of total mammals, invertebrates etc. on the planet. Then I picked a few different kinds of animals and we looked up how much they ate per day, as well as what they ate, how much waste they produced etc.
It diden't take long to prove that, number 1, they couldn't fit all the animals on there. Next we looked up the height of the tallest mountain on earth, figured out how many hours were in 40 days, divided the number of feet above sea level by the hours, then by 60 to figure out how much it would have to rain per minute for 40 days to fill that much of the earth with water. Then we looked up the heaviest 24 hour rain fall ever recorded and found it was about 90% less per minute than it would have taken to do the '40 day world fill'. Then we looked up cloud composition and how thick the cloud cover would need to be to unleash this massive downpour..
Anyway, you get the point. After we were all done I asked again if he thought the story was true and he replied that it couldn't be and we proved it. I then reinforced that he should always be skeptical of things that didn't seem true, if they seemed far fetched he should think about them and try to figure out first if they even "could" happen.
A couple of days passed and my critical thinking exercise came back to bite me in the butt. My son comes up to with his calculator in his hand. "daddy, how many people are there on earth".. so I checked google and gave him about 6.5 billion. So then he punches the numbers in a bit, writes some scribbles down and comes back over to me,
"Daddy; how is it possible for Santa to deliver gifts to 75,231 people per second?"
Most people are slightly disappointed when their kids no longer believe in Santa, they feel that "the magic" is gone; My kids discovery of the impossibility of Santa will go down as one of my proudest moments.
