Dear Friends,
Many of us get a chance to see new sights during these summer days as we travel on vacations with
family and friends. We go to National Parks or to foreign lands or pause for just a bit to look at some local
natural beauty. I hope these moments of encountering natural beauty bring you into a deeper relationship with
the God who created them.
I recently had a discussion with a young man who was struggling with believing in God. Part of his
struggle was that he thought there was some kind of fight between faith in Jesus and science. He assumed the
Catholic Church was opposed to the scientific theories of evolution or the big bang. He was quite surprised when
I said the Church does not have a problem with those. In fact, the originator of the Big Bang Theory, Georges
Lemaître, was a Catholic priest. The use of the word “day” in the book of Genesis in the mind of the church does
not refer to a twenty-four hour period. A day could have been a billion years. The important point in the book of
Genesis is that God is the creator not the how of creation.
There is often the idea that great scientists are atheists. That is not always the case. Let me give you
some quotes from one of the greatest, Albert Einstein, who is often thought to be an atheist:
“I am not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child
entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows that someone must have written
those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child
dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but does not know what it is. That, it seems to
me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human beings toward God. We see the universe marvelously
arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp at the
mysterious force that moves the constellations.”
He also said: “Whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances in this domain
(science) is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence…the grandeur of reason
incarnate in existence.”
And: “My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit who reveals himself
in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of
the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea
of God.”
Here is another great scientist: quantum physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, who developed wave mechanics,
stated, “The scientific picture of the world around me is very deficient. It gives me a lot of factual information,
puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our
heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell a word about the sensation of red and blue, bitter and sweet, feelings
of delight and sorrow. It knows nothing of beauty and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes
pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to
take them seriously. Science is reticent too when it is a question of the great Unity of which we somehow form a
part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God, with a capitol G. Science is, very
usually, branded as being atheistic. After what we have said this is not astonishing. If its world picture does not
even contain beauty, delight, sorrow, if personality is cut out of it by agreement, how should it contain the most
sublime idea that presents itself to the human mind.”
Believing in God does not mean that you stop thinking. The Catholic Church encourages the search for
truth by all disciplines because she knows that the search for truth will lead to God. The deep questions need to
be asked. The search for truth can sometimes challenge our way of thinking about our faith, but in the end, the
search will lead to God.
As you enjoy the wonder of the world around us this summer, I hope it leads you to ponder this amazing
God of ours. The God who created such amazing beauty, such sublime wonder, is also the God who chose to
take on our human flesh to embrace us in love. Such a God is worthy of our praise and our worship.
Peace,
Fr. Damian