“The idea of a universal Mind, or Logos, would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of theory.”– Sir Arthur Eddington
Years ago, I taught a high school history of science course for a secular classical academy in Louisville. Although our textbook was not by a Christian publisher, it was quite good in acknowledging the convictions and perspectives of the various founders of modern science, many of whom were theists or even Catholics. Among other things, the textbook delved at length into the career and
achievements of Father Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), the Belgian physicist and priest who first posited the Big Bang theory.
Hence I was especially surprised to read one student’s response to an essay exam question about Fr. Lemaitre: “Lemaitre started out as a Catholic priest,” wrote this student, “but later on he decided that Science gave better answers, and then went on to became a great scientist.”
I was so startled by this answer that I had to back and look through the book again. Had I missed something? While the assigned text had given no grounds whatsoever for such a remark, I was so taken aback by its breezy, self-assured tone that I considered doing some additional research into Lemaitre’s biography on my own. Did this student somehow know something about Lemaitre that I didn’t?
Instead, however, I merely underlined the remark and, upon returning the student’s exam to him, asking what his basis was for his remark. His expression could not have been more befuddled if I had told him that the world was flat: “You mean … he was a priest his whole life?” This was a diligent student, by the way, and I am sure he had done the reading; it simply hadn’t sunk in.
Such anecdotes swiftly debunk the assumption that only religious people are influenced by dogma. In spite of the plain text, which had explicitly related Fr. LeMaitre’s belief that faith and reason are compatible, this student took it as self-evident that a devout priest could not possibly cherish science, must less make a major contribution to it.
At the outset of his new book Science at the Doorstep to God, subtitled Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death, Father Robert Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D., addresses such erroneous modern dogma. Said dogma, notes Fr. Spitzer, owes more to the success of atheist propaganda than to the statements of actual scientists. For every Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins, there is a Copernicus or Sir Arthur Eddington.
And given that the claim at stake is whether real scientists can believe in God, it is not hitting below the belt to observe that the actual achievements of Sagan and Dawkins are decidedly modest in comparison to the aforementioned believers. The pious Copernicus (who may have been a priest, although that has been disputed) opened his discussion of The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) with a tribute to the pope, and it was the theist Eddington who first confirmed relativity theory by demonstrating the curvature of light by gravity.
Anticipating the contention that Copernicus, Eddington, and the many other theist-minded titans of the Scientific Revolution were merely expressing residual cultural conventions of their day, Fr. Spitzer point to a 2009 Pew Research survey indicating that a majority of scientists “profess belief in God or a spiritual reality,” as well as to the candidly expressed opinions of numerous 20th-century Nobel Prize winners who worked well into the past century.
“We must admit that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge,” insisted biochemist Christian Anfinsen, who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in RNA; Nobel laureate co-inventors of the laser Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow more or less agreed. Lists of spiritual-minded scientists hardly constitutes a proof, of course, but they do make the reader wonder.
If the general public had not been so bombarded with the idea that science equals materialism, if people had been more aware that God was important not only to Sir Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal, but also to Townes and Schawlow, might prevailing attitudes toward religion today be somewhat warmer? Long before average American is mature enough to think about the question, he has been beaten over the head with the image of a cold-blooded man in a lab coat who disdains the human experience—from religion and philosophy to art and poetry to love itself. Granted that this dehumanizing image may have proven somewhat self-fulfilling in places such as Silicon Valley, at the very least it can be said to misrepresent science’s origins in classical Christian culture.
Besides clarifying the attitudes of scientists toward metaphysical questions, Fr. Spitzer addresses those questions himself by surveying topics such as scientism, proofs for the existence of God, current theories about the beginning of the universe, the multiverse concept, and the nature of the soul as illuminated by philosophy, neurobiology, and near-death experiences. The text avoids any polemical tone, instead relying upon straightforward lines of reasoning, like the following:
If science must be falsifiable, then scientism (the view that every truth claim must be subject to scientific validation) must be false. Think about it: If science is dependent on the principle of noncontradiction and mathematics, and if these two truths are not not falsifiable by observational data (which is needed to be scientific), then mathematics and noncontradiction cannot be scientifically validated. Thus, scientism rules out the truth of the preconditions for science itself–noncontradiction and mathematics.
As an astrophysicist and tutor from my graduate school days once told me and my fellow students, it was an act of faith for Copernicus to assume that the universe is rational.
Although the book is primarily a multifaceted work of scientific apologetics, Fr. Spitzer does sometimes engage in some speculation, for the intellectual pleasure of it, as when he looks at evidence for UFOs:
Many Christian churches and the Catholic Church make no declaration about alien visitations but remain open to whatever science might observe and validate. Scientists are divided about the reality of alien visitations, but most believe that there is not enough current evidence to validate them. If visitations are truly occurring, we would have to believe that these aliens are beneficent and moral, because with technology capable of rapid interstellar (and possibly intergalactic) travel, they would be “light years” ahead of us, meaning they could easily dominate the entire planet within a few minutes. Their restraint in doing this implies that they have a moral compass and a desire to allow less developed intelligent life forms to flourish.
This reflection may seem optimistic, yet it does highlight the shortcomings of generic sci-fi “space invasion” scenarios, as in the film Independence Day, the highest-grossing film of 1996. Such unimaginative scenarios gloss over the inconceivable powers any alien invaders would have in comparison to humanity. Were mankind to contend against beings capable of crossing the gulfs between stars, the result would look less like natives contending against colonial powers than like mortals contending against Olympian gods.
Even if there are no little green men out there, we may take it on faith that there are indeed extraterrestrials–and more things in heaven and earth than have been dreamt of by natural philosophy. And Fr. Spitzer is a sure guide, whose deep faith and love of science disarm the numerous the prevalent but tired secular dogmas.
Science at the Doorstep to God: Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death
By Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J
Ignatius Press, 2023
Paperback, 315 pages
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About FAITH, science has this problem that the singular Incarnation is a once-in-history event and cannot be replicated, say, in the lab under controlled conditions—for either scientific verification or rejection. The scientific method, itself, does not apply (a blind spot which, however, is super-technically curious about lab analysis of the Shroud).
And, about ALIENS, maybe we should not infer too much about a restraint that is “moral” or anything more than only calculated? So, what are we to think about the singularity of the Second Person of the Triune One freely (!) submitting to total self-donation (!) in our corner of a physical universe filled with 100 billion galaxies, each with an average of 100 billion stars, and surely a handful of habitable planets…
Here are some thoughts (slightly edited from a posting on 06-26-20):
(1) Have any possible and only technologically advanced civilizations in the cosmos also been GIVEN, by the transcendent God, a duplicate washroom key—-for the Beatific Vision? Or, is there a glass-ceiling threshold for this kind of “intelligence” as more than rational expertise, and enabled and governed more from above than from below?
(2) How might any implied cosmically-multiple polygenesis square with terrestrial Original Sin (just a quaint cult narrative?) plus the SINGULAR redemptive act of the incarnate Jesus Christ—-a “person” both fully human and fully divine and more than a role model—-on Calvary? Is our familiar and universal capacity to sin (!) against God (!) a unique and more-than-technical endowment, inseparable from a freely given and unique Redemption of creatures by the absolutely transcendent Creator(!)?
(3) Or, is any such Redemption both multiple across space and time and still ONE ACTION (not assembly-line produced), just as every Mass (capital M!) around the world is both the unbloody renewal and extension (!) of the SINGULAR Calvary (not our mere replicas)? Or, does the heart of God expose itself only here, in backwater Jerusalem, because none of those other hypothetical intelligences ever had the added “capacity for God” and then to fall?
(4) Or, instead and with Blessed Duns Scotus, might Christ have become incarnate here and even elsewhere (?) ABSENT our very local and particular need for salvation history, this by an action of overflowing generosity that includes, but is not limited to our fallen need for damage control?
(5) Or, despite hypothetical technical superiority elsewhere, is our creaturely access toward beatitude still a most singular gift into the divine life of the Triune Creator of the cosmos? Pope Francis would readily baptize a Martian, he once said, but Pope St. John Paul II proposed a distinctive “ONTOLOGICAL LEAP” (sometimes fatally mistranslated as only an “evolutionary” leap) into our radically gifted spirituality within the Other.
Instead of “moral” restraint, then, maybe the extraterrestrials are only highly evolved insects with opposable thumbs, and with respectful antennae toward the primal power of the universe packed into our nuclear weapons? The homeward voyage to the super anthill would be a bumpy trip with a flat tire or worse.
What theories for (original)sinners is Truth for saints (in Paradise).
God gives ample personal (ex. apparitions) or collective signs (ex. UFOs, ‘mass hallucination’) without ever compelling (original freedom), so that all idolators of theories can improve their concepts by accounting these aberrations. Needless to say that no theories ever outlived its proposers. But even the modified theories is maintained by God (for its own time) as a means for its followers to modify it all the way to the Truth: everything materialies by God, yet lives us up as gods.
Thus sciences and philosophies are an offshhot of original sin, created by sinners for sinners (that is all living on earth) and nothing but various kinds of erroneous Truth, so that He can maintain the original freedom to each new human life.
Great review, but not to be churlish, scientists no longer use Popper’s “Falsifiability” test any more – it was considered very weak and now there are other things like IBE (inference from the best explanation) etc. Just noting that using falsifiability to prove something about scientism is far from the slam-dunk one might think.
Father Spitzer has written several books on this topic over the years but this latest is the best and most complete. The reviews on Amazon that you will find the most explanatory are those by Charles Schmidt and Jabberwocky. The negative reviews are complaints that it is a tough read. In my own brief review I simply emphasize that it outlines an enormous scientific and spiritual revolution that has quietly developed over the last half century. After monsignor Lemaitre’s discovery of universal expansion an array of theories became popular to avoid the indication that there was an actual beginning. Scientific work recently has demolished all of them as Father Spitzer details. He also explains rigid scientific studies which confirm near death experiences and prove the existence of the soul and free will. In my own family, my sister in law experienced a NDE as a little girl when she was very ill.
And for some extra clarity because of the references to Fr. Lemaître:
The good monsignor did not discover the expansion of the universe, but what he did was make the logical connection between the expansion of the universe and what would bring about that expansion. He reasoned that since the universe was expanding while time was moving forward, if you then go back further and further in time, the universe would be smaller and smaller until it was at a small enough point that became known as the cosmic egg that had to basically explode or be exploded by some force (God or something else God arranged to bring it about) to put the expansion of the galaxies into motion. The explosion was later coined the “Big Bang” by scientist Fred Hoyle who actually set forth the name as a pejorative, but it stuck as a sufficient shorthand.
Now, even though some people did fear that the Big Bang Theory pointed to a beginning of the universe, and they worked to refute the theory and any inferences to a creator, it must be clearly understood that Fr. Lemaître NEVER wrongly claimed that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, and he even had to correct Pope Pius XII who initially made the mistake that many people still make in claiming that the Big Bang explosion event marks the creation of the universe by God (or by something else as favored by non-believers).
As Fr. Lemaître knew, there is no way to determine what may have occurred or was the reality prior to the moment of the Big Bang initial expansion event, and the dogmatic teaching that God created the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing) also makes it impossible to put a specific time stamp on when the universe first began.
Fr. Lemaître also correctly predicted that there should be some residual radiation arising from the Big Bang explosion, and his prediction was confirmed about 37 years later and just a few years or so before his death with the actual discovery of what is known as cosmic background radiation.
In 1927 LeMaitre proposed an expanding universe beginning from an infinitesimal “singularity”…
In the early 1960s, scientific PREDISPOSITIONS also had yielded to the catastrophic post-Ice Age Missoula floods in eastern Washington which in a matter of weeks carved and reshaped the lava earth crust, and (both) to the larger reality of plate tectonics and Continental Drift. In the first instance, the “channeled scablands” (with the largest now spanned by Grand Coulee Dam) seemed too “biblical” (horrors!), but earth geology now encompasses both the earlier “uniformitarianism” (analogous to a steady-state universe) and “catastrophism.”
This kind of brain transplant among scientists (imposed by real science) is described in Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962).
Today, the COGNITIVE ABUSE inflicted on the faithful is the agenda to imprint “paradigm shifts” from the natural sciences into the realm of divine revelation and theology (the “hermeneutics of discontinuity”). The always deeper “continuity,” under the guardianship of the Second Vatican Council, is the singularity (!) of the historic and yet timeless Jesus Christ.
The INCARNATION—the entrance of the fully divine Second Person of the Triune One, as the center of all human history—fully divine and fully human, not as a hybrid but as the Person of Jesus Christ: “The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive [!] covenant, will never pass away, and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of the Lord Jesus Christ (cf 1 Tim 6:14, Tit. 2:13)” (Dei Verbum, n. 4). The “Word made flesh”…
While theological reflection is never exhaustive, the fact and event of Jesus Christ is definitive enough for human consumption! It (He) even reveals something about ourselves: “Christ the Lord…by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to himself [!] and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, n. 22).
Too bad that this this permanent dogma—and even the non-demonstrable and first principle of non-contradiction–is so “bigoted and backwardist”. Too unable to understand process-theology and doublespeak (“time is greater than space!”). As now specifically under the inventive Fiducia Supplicans—a sensitive “paradigm shift” of singles as “couples.”
Dissent from Africa?
Well, just another face of Continental Drift, OR an affirmation of the reality of Jesus Christ and of the universal nature of Man…
The first scientist credited with discovering the evidence that the universe was expanding without specifically recognizing it as such was the American astronomer Vesto Slipher as early as 1912 and perhaps even a few years earlier. He observed the red-shifting of the galaxies, which is the mark of expansion. Perhaps somewhat ironically, Einstein’s work on General Relativity in 1915 led to the conclusion of an expanding universe, but Einstein himself rejected this part of his theory even though it was correct. In 1917, Willem de Sitter took Einstein’s theory and concluded that the universe must expand. Moreover, de Sitter also concluded that the expansion must be continuous, and his conclusion coincides with what is still recognized today as the ongoing expanding universe.
In 1922, Alexander Friedmann demonstrated that the universe, filled as it is with matter, etc., had to either expand or contract and could not be static as favored by Einstein. Moreover, based on something from a few years earlier in 1920 called The Great Debate regarding the scale of the universe, and which featured actual observations of galaxies and nebula, the claim that the universe was expanding was at that time in the early 1920s based on both theory and observational evidence.
Then in 1924, Swedish astronomer Knut Lundmark was the first scientist to actually provide observational evidence of the expansion of the universe itself, plus his calculations of the rate of expansion were found to be even more accurate than Edwin Hubble’s more celebrated calculations in 1929. Fr. Lemaître’s observations in 1927 further confirmed the findings of Lundmark and the theory of Friedmann even though his work was not based on the works of Lundmark and Friedmann.
As history has unfolded, both Hubble and Fr. Lemaître receive the lion’s share of the credit for being the first observers of the expansion of the universe, but neither of them first proposed that such was the case, plus Lundmark actually beat Lemaître by some 3 years and Hubble by some 5 years, and he deserves to be recognized as the first scientific observer/discoverer of the actual expansion of the universe.
Please elaborate on your last sentence. Thank you.
Dear ‘JJR’, such a crucial topic at this sci/tech obsessed time in history.
Important to have a clear mind re what science allows. Such as: an origin of our space-time/energy-matter universe that implies pre-existence of immense power & surpassing technical knowledge. Such as: cosmogenesis depending on an accumulation of immensely detailed yet highly diverse functional complexities that are massively improbable without supervision. Such as: the unexplained consciousness of ethically-choosing organisms (EChOs) – indeed our very selves, capable of questioning, investigating, & logically manipulating materiality. Such as: a pleonexia of galaxies & stars with planets able to sustain non-human conscious beings, capable of questioning, investigating, & logically manipulating materiality, yet no ETI evident.
These, and other possibilities of our material existence, that indicate involvement of ‘the other’, are not contradicted by science but NOT thereby confirmed as certain evidence of the metaphysical propositions of Catholicism & other religions & philosophies. Human knowledge is NEVER a safe & enduring ground for Catholic faith.
As Saint Paul teaches us in 2 Corinthians 13:8: “We cannot do anything against the truth but only for the truth.”
The Christian faith of Catholics & other Christians is based on historical events that have given us revelatory access to eternal divine truth that vastly exceeds all of the contingent truths of materiality.
In addition to the metaphysics allowed by science, depended on by various other religions & philosophies, true Christians have been supremely blessed with a powerfully intimate revelation & ongoing encounter with God who originated this universe, sustains it, gives it meaning, & guides it to its goal.
Whilst human scientific knowledge can be indicative it is unreliable in comparison to the life & teachings of God’s best gift – Jesus Christ of Nazareth – that are clearly presented in the New Testament with its 27 texts by 9 eye-witness authors. This is a totally new order of reality. Jesus teaches us that the least believer, born again by His Spirit, is far greater than every great religious person of the past (see Matthew 11:11; John 14:28).
Christ backed-up His claim with miracles far surpassing materiality & cause-&-effect science. He gave each of us a standing offer to experience all of His promises, personally. A faithful promise, now vouched for by many millions of believers, worldwide.
Whereas faith in, & loving obedience to, Christ’s Word is a sure foundation for this life & for our eternal life; too often, faith built on ‘what science allows’ proves deceptive, even within this life.
Always hungry for The Word of Christ; love & blessings from marty
God, being a Person/Mind/Logos with no materialistic (created) essence but only existence can only be proved (known as Faith) by holy minds without much artificial/mechanical/mathematical/restrictive intelligence, the latters effectively concluded their inability for discovering God as proof while missing the fact that God is so versatile and willingly hide from revealing the Truth from sinners, for He want everyone (not just Adam) to enjoy the original freedom/sin.
Fr Spitzer has done quite a bit of exposition on NDEs and recommends a few books which detail some extensive studies of them. I’ve always wished to ask Fr Spitzer why these experiences do not seem to be very ‘Catholic’ in nature. I think it is claimed that 80% of the experiences are very positive and the persons no longer fear death. How does this affect the rigors of various religious praxis?
Shawn: The reason is original freedom/sin, whereby each of us need to freely accept the Truth and thereby God can remove the ultimate yoke of Justice amidst sinners, death, necessitated for being Truthless. All NDE, like that of Paul’s Damascus episode is necessarily like a dream, non absolute (abstract) “creation”, thereby the person need to arrive at (his own) conclusion, the truthful/holy mind eventually closer to the Truth. Remember, hitherto senseless arrangements of words, eventually made sense with his development of theology, such as risen human living in Paradise is God’s body and so on…
People need to read the second creation account in Genesis to see the relationship between science and religion. There God created the animals and Adam named them. This was a process of discovery where Adam was learning what his place was in God’s created order. It was a cooperative process between God and Adam. It was an early proto-science, in modern terms taxonomy.
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How could humankind exercise dominion over the Earth and be ignorant of the physical processes by which it functions? God the Creator is the Creator of science.
And it was only later the Adam/Eve presumed to name even God–as being themselves, and vice versa.
As if the power to name everything actually accounted for their existence(s). The original idolatry–to usurp the “name” given only much later to Moses: “I AM WHO AM,” and then represented in Hebrew scriptures only as four dots (….), the name that must not even be spoken.
And, today, too many of us think that the Mass (Consecration) is something that we DO rather than a HAPPENING done by the Triune God through the hands and words of the ordained priest. Synodalize that!
Everything in the Garden of Eden was put there by God. This was also the case with the Parable of the Wicked Tenants in Matthew 21:21-45 where the householder did all the work to establish the vineyard. Both were turnkey operations. The forbidden fruit test was whether Adam and Eve could be trusted with the things that are God’s, which they failed. The wicked tenants also proved that they were untrustworthy stewards of the householder’s property. Adam and Eve acted like the Garden of Eden was their own private property to do with as they pleased. The wicked tenants did the same thing with the vineyard. Many in the Church are proving by their actions that they are just as untrustworthy as Adam and Eve and the wicked tenants were.
It seems that some posters are very uneasy about the idea that can be physical evidence for God’s existence together with the existence of the soul and free will. Faith in the love of Jesus and the witness of holy souls together with the Lord’s own teachings in the Bible are certainly essential. They were to me when I converted to the Catholic church 53 years ago and they remain so today. One writer mentioned that philosophers and scientists are fallen men after all–an irrelevancy in view of the fact that we ALL are. The fundamental distinction that separates Christianity (and especially we Catholics) from all other belief systems is that THE WORD BECAME FLESH! This overwhelming fact leaves open the possibility that the Creator may have left some God size footprints for the edification of His children. The denizens of this age of lies have no right to try to define where we are to speak!
Dear JJR, am sorry if you’ve become angry with those who debate with you. None of us is, simply by seeing things differently to you, a ‘denizen of this age of lies’! As servants of truth, let’s always be courteously ready to learn from one another.
Regarding substantial matters, Saint Paul, at Romans 1:19-20 states that certain foundational truths about God are evident to any observer. Beloved Apostle John’s Gospel contains many verses that are apposite. For example: John 8:12 – “Jesus spoke to them saying: “I am The Light of the world. . .”. John 16:8-15 makes clear the subverting character of ‘the ruler of this world’ and the necessity for us Catholics to always be open to ‘The Advocate’ who is ‘The Holy Spirit of Truth’ who Jesus sends to us to guide us into all truth.
The Holy Spirit is the voice of Jesus speaking in our hearts. As Saint Paul teaches in Romans 8:9 – “Anyone who does not have The Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him.”
It seems tragic to me that a few smart, educated Catholics (including some very eminent names) would waste their time fossicking for divine truths amidst the highly deceptive and ever-changing detritus of a materiality that’s well on its way to eternal destruction when, instead they could be cultivating Christ’s Spirit of Truth who guides us into all truth.
I agree (and have published) that as intellectual Catholics, we need to research and provide cogent consonances between the revelations we have from Christ in His Holy Word & Holy Sacrament & Holy Spirit with the amazing, ongoing discoveries of science.
As faithful Catholic Christians our orientation must be that God’s revelation always contextualizes everything that science has truly proven, without exception.
It’s never true Catholic faith when we resile to thinking science adds to God’s revelation. My challenge to those who disagree is: “Please provide a clear example of anywhere scientific worldly knowledge has added anything to God’s revelation.”
Ever seeing to hear & follow King Jesus Christ; love & blessings from marty
Amen.
Dear ‘GreB’, great to see an active Catholic mind at work in discerning God’s Word.
I especially like your insight: ‘it was a cooperative process between God & Adam’. For, it seems to me that our whole universe relies on both its God-given foundation of freedom of choice (accessible to science), leavened by God’s prevailing supervisory interventions (inaccessible to science).
Like the universe of space-time/energy-matter, Adam made an ungodly choice that required a major divine intervention, through the wonders of Christ’s incarnate life.
Incidentally, in Genesis 2:15 – שָׁמַר (shamar) is mainly exegeted as: ‘to keep safe; to watch over; to preserve; to cherish’, rather than to: ‘have dominion over’. Adam was instructed to live by comprehensive silviculture (with a single tree quarantined). Nice to imagine what humanity would have been like today if we had always supplied our needs from the fruits, nuts, leaves, & other products of a huge diversity of tree species!
Yet, the devil lurked in the paradisical garden & robbed Adam & Eve of their God-given heritage. Teaching anyone who thinks about it with a salutary lesson: whilst God is eternally pure goodness – nature is always a mixed bag of good & evil.
Am not so sure about the apparent disadvantages of: ‘being ignorant of the physical processes’. Over the last few centuries, scientific knowledge has proved a double-edged sword. History & pre-history show that, without science, our forebears often lived surprisingly rich and truly godly lives. They had bigger brains, too!
Science has enabled us to do terrible damage to other humans and to almost every part of our planet [and I’m speaking as an internationally renowned senior teacher, widely cited researcher, supervisor, & editor of science].
Thanks again, dear ‘GegB’ for causing me to think about these complex things.
Ever in the love of King Jesus Christ; with blessings from marty
Dr. Rice,
You mention “complex” things. Yours truly is reminded of what Thomas More had to say about active minds, complexity, and then something more (Robert Bolt’s wording in “A Man for All Seasons”):
“God made the angels to show him splendor—as he made the animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man he made to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind! If He suffers us to fall to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can, and yes, […] then we may clamor like champions…if we have the spittle for it. And no doubt it delights God to see SPLENDOR where He only looked for COMPLEXITY. But it’s God’s part, not our own, to bring ourselves to that extremity! Our natural business lies in escaping—so let’s get home and study this Bill [or today, Fiducia Supplicans?].
I agree, dear Peter (with you & St Thomas More & Robert Bolt) for it seems that professedly religious people like us Catholics prefer almost any activity to the simplicity of Mary of Bethany, who knew ‘The One Thing Needed’. And we will engage ourselves in almost any complex thing so as to dodge the instruction of our Most Blessed Mother Mary to: “Simply do whatever Jesus tells you to do.”
Yet, somehow His Mercy prevails – as an enormous, encompassing compassion.
Together in holy awe, let’s worship without limits; blessings from marty
Dr Rice, I cannot see any way, form or fashion that I expressed anger toward you or Aspiring Brother Of Jesus. Based on what you said, I remarked that I had similar influences on me as a new convert in my youth. Where do you get anger from that? You are perfectly free to express your opinions with no objections from me. After those observations I moved back in a direction supportive of Father spitzer who asserts the right to counter militant atheistic scientism on ground it fraudulently claims to own. The age of lies is obvious since Christianity is everywhere being slandered ,censored, and threatened by a convergence of evil unique to history. If father discredits any part of this let us support and pray for him while he still has the right to speak.
Nikola Tesla was the son of an Orthodox priest. His father-in-law, likewise was an Orthodox priest. Tesla proposed that his death ray could end war. He believed that he could invent a ray that could take down an enemy aircraft from a thousand miles away. Reminds me of a laser weapon.
A civilization that could cross a gulf to the nearest star would need to travel at a thousand kilometers per second for just over ten thousand years, explained the inventor of the communications satellite — Arthur C. Clarke.
It would, therefore, require an act of God for such a civilization to attain to that high of a knowledge. I’m sure that Tesla would agree with that statement.
Sir Arthur Eddington’s concept of the “universal Mind, or Logos” must have been the inspiration for Arthur C. Clarke’s “Overming” in his novel CHILDHOOD’S END,(1953), where the primary Overlord explains to the last man on the planet that “Science had destroyed all religion.” In 1954 Aldous Leonard Huxley wrote about ‘Mind-at-Large.”
Forgive the type: “Overmind.”
It is a common argument among fundamentalist protestants that religion should be simple. They throw out a lot of truth in the name of simplicity. The church has many great minds, we call them doctors of the church. They fought on the battlefields of the mind against error and the lies of the evil one. Doctor spitzer for his part has merely assembled the findings of science in our time to show that they oppose the false spirit of the age. May the intercession of Blessed Nicolas Steno founder of the science of geology aid Father in his work.
“Their restraint in doing this implies that they have a moral compass and a desire to allow less developed intelligent life forms to flourish.”
This, of course is merely speculation as there is no evidence that “they” , in reality exist.
However, the fact that the Earth has been placed in the perfect location between the Sun and the Moon to sustain Human Life, and the Earth cannot be moved from this perfect location, is evidence for the fact that a Creator must exist outside Time and Space who Created Time and Space, to begin with.
“And yet it moves.”
“And yet it cannot be moved.”
Is not a contradiction.
I saw a video presentation by a rabbi where he goes through an explanation of the names of God. This was part of a larger presentation on the Exodus and the Ten Plaques of Egypt. The original videos are no longer available, but there is a downloadable PDF online that covers the material:
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https://staff.ncsy.org/education/education/education/education/material/C8HxYivMlL/exodus-from-egypt:-the-hidden-agenda/
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He says that YHVH in the original language is an amalgam of the three Hebrew words for existence. In the PDF it says that: ‘It describes his essence. The Hebrew words for existence are “Haya”, “Yiheeyeh”, and “Hoveh” Was, Will be, and Is. If you take these words and overlay it with each other, you will get “Yud-Kay- and Vuv-Kay”. We are talking about a simultaneous existence. It is experiencing time in another way we cannot imagine. It exists but not in this world. It exists outside of time, outside of our world, outside of our universe.’
A bit too much erudite gobbledygook above. Aforementioned posts are a good example of incoding (see,there’s an example of self-referential mentation) [and another there].
We are all self-confused. And I do speak for all of you.
This is way cool. Such a rad book. Can’t wait to read it. Gonna go get it on the zon. Thanks for sharing this story and sharing your thoughts with me on this book.
I would like to thank all the posters for the thought put into their comments and the decorum with which they are presented and received. I just wandered over to this site after visiting Lifesite and ChurchMilitant, sites whose comment sections resemble nothing so much as a zoo’s monkey exhibit with a bunch of chimpanzees screeching and throwing feces at each other.
Compared to these sites CatholicWorldReport is like entering an Atheneum. Nice to know there are still thinking, polite Catholics left out there.