A man walked into church after Mass today
and, on being asked if he might return, declared himself an atheist and only
believed in empirical evidence. My response was a bit fumbled (‘could have done
better’) and, on reflection, I realised how shallow was his statement.
We believe in so much you can’t ‘prove’ –
love, joy, happiness - we believe liars and those who offer the promise of
riches, in political dogmas and promises. Yet some people say they cannot
believe in God – in the notion that there might be One who invites us to live
up to what we have the potential to be; One who invites us to believe that we
have the potential to be ‘God-like’; One who offers a way that sets self aside
for the sake of the other. One who invites us open ourselves to encounter
beauty, wonder, mystery. Doesn’t science also believed in those things?
‘All religions, arts and sciences are
branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling
man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading
the individual towards freedom.’
— Albert
Einstein
‘Scientists [still] refuse to consider man as
an object of scientific scrutiny except through his body. The time has come to
realise that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains
unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things;
mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve
the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world. ‘
— Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin
‘I find it quite improbable that such order
came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a
mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is
something instead of nothing. ‘
Alan Sandage
(winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy)
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