4. Who is God?
I gave her a short answer about many people believed that God is the creater of all life, she asked if I believed that. I explained that I beleive in evolution and daddy believes in creation/God.
I don't feel good about that response, because it reinforces the false creationist teaching that it's either creation/God or evolution/no-God. As NemGen stated, there are lots of "sides" to this question, not just the creationist false dichotomy that you just perpetuated.
True, this does not pertain directly to her question, but rather to the question that you had raised in the process: Does evolution mean that God doesn't exist? I would have prefered to have let her know that there are a lot of different views regarding that question. Some people (the most vocal ones) believe that creation and evolution are totally incompatible and mutually exclusive, such that only one but not both could be true and that if evolution is true then that means that God does not exist. Others believe that the two are compatible, in that evolution is just part of the suite of natural processes that God had used to Create. And whatever other combinations you can think of.
Deciding whether or not any of the gods exist is not a part of science, nor can science be used to disprove the existence of any god. The absolute most that science could do in this area would be to show that one does not need to invoke the supernatural to explain observable phenomena -- eg, neither Thor nor Zeus nor YHWH throws lightning bolts.
Can anyone here tell me if they have faced this delima? How did you handle it?
In our case, I had been an atheist for a couple decades already and my wife did not consider herself an atheist, yet was strongly anti-Christian, whereas I was more sympathetic to individual Christians, and even had and still have several friends and acquaintances who are Fundamentalists. Our boys only saw the inside of a church for family weddings, until we joined a Unitarian Universalist church when our older boy was about 10.
When our genius older son was about 8 or so (I guess; he just turned 26) we were watching Fantasia on the Disney Channel, in particular the Pastoral Symphony where Zeus was hurling lightning bolts down at the Bacchian revellers. As an aside, I explained to him that before they understand science, people used to think that the gods did all those things, but now we know how those things really work. He thought for a moment and asked, "Same thing with God." "Yeah, pretty much." And that was it.
Then a few weeks later at the extended family Sunday dinner, my mother-in-law used some kind of "thank God" expression and our son declared adamantly, "God doesn't exist!" They all turned to me accusingly with looks of "just what are you teaching your son?" and I said, "I didn't do it! He arrived at that himself!"
Be careful what you say to a kid.
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