Do buttercups taste of butter and other musings from the school run.

I have the pleasure of being able to take my four year old daughter to school every morning. At around 8:30am we depart, we walk, she talks, I listen, we arrive. Our conversations of late have plunged deeper into the realm of the philosophical and soterialogical. It began a few weeks back when she began an introductory propositional monologue on the pre-existence of a triune God. After some initial debate she had satisfied herself that God had simply always been there. Over the next few weeks we covered a broad range of topics including the incarnation, reproduction of Guinea pigs, and then death (following the departure of the aforementioned animal).

Yesterday we moved on to thinking about the creation narratives.  The question; Do buttercups taste of butter?  I provided an all too hasty, fatherly type answer, which admittedly was based on no prior knowledge of buttercupology.  I suggested that buttercups were so named because of their colour, rather than their tatse.  Unsatisfied with my answer and the speed at which I dismissed her apparent conjecture she objected.  Requesting additional evidence to back up my answer she asked if I had indeed ever eaten a Buttercup.  Pause.  My claim had been exposed as unsubstantiated.  I could answer the questions about the pre-existance of the trinity but was struggling with why a buttercup, doesn’t, as its name suggest, taste of butter.

I then began thinking about other things that I think are true but have not proved to myself.  The list is still open, and getting longer.

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