Dear Friends,
Thanks to everyone who helped with the Fall Spaghetti Dinner. As always, people had a great time working together and welcoming guests from all over the city. I enjoy being one of the official schmoozers. Gives me a chance to connect with friends old and new and to promote All Saints School. If you were at the dinner, then you saw the students from All Saints working the tables providing water and coffee and doing clean-up. They worked hard and were quite polite while doing it.
The schmoozing also has me encountering all kinds of questions and stories that arise in the lives of people. One issue that came up a couple times on Sunday was the question of how to respond to adult children who have decided that they are atheists. They said their children told them that they came to that decision because they could find no tangible proof for the existence of a God.
While I respect people’s search for a God, I think people often give up too soon. Today, I ran across an interview of Michel-Yves Bollore who recently published in Europe a major work entitled God: The Science, The Evidence. The preface is written by Nobel prize winner and physicist Robert Wilson, and around 30 other scientists, from a variety of fields, contributed to the book. It is being translated into English. For those of you who have friends or children who are atheist, here are a few things he said in the interview:
From the Renaissance until 1900, from Copernicus to Freud, all the discoveries seemed to say that it was possible to explain our world and the universe without a creator God. After Copernicus came Galileo, then Newton, Laplace, and then Buffon – who told us that the Earth is much more than a few thousand years old – and then evolution, with Lamarck and Darwin…All the intellectuals thought that the more we know, the more science we have, the more it is certain that “God is dead” and does not exist at all. Surprisingly, though, exactly the opposite happened. After 1900, one discovery after the other has done exactly the opposite, saying that it is no longer possible to explain our universe without a creator God. And this is a story that we want to tell people, that for four centuries people have told you that the science says that God does not exist, and now it is the opposite, and science is providing evidence that there is a creator God.
After talking about the differences between the view that there was a creator and the view that “it” just happened he says: It is interesting that we continue to speak of believers and non-believers, because that is completely wrong. We who believe in the theory of God’s existence, know what we believe. But the materialists don’t realize that they are placing their belief in things that are completely crazy. They believe that our universe has no beginning, when almost everything demonstrates the opposite; they have to believe in a multiverse, which is science-fiction science; and they have to believe that life appeared from matter, which seems very difficult. Saying that our book defends the reasonability of the existence of God is not enough. There are two plates on the scales, one has plenty of evidence, and another, for materialism, is completely empty, so the reasonability today is to hold and believe that God exists.
The book apparently goes through the evidence and he concludes, you might be tempted to think that there is nothing one can do, because you will never have certainty. But when you have a set of several pieces of evidence, coming from different fields of knowledge, all in the same direction, then you can say “Yes, I have a certainty.” The same applies in justice, where people are convicted based on evidence that provides certainty “beyond any reasonable doubt.” This is where we are. We cannot say we are giving a demonstration of the existence of God, because this is impossible, but we can say that science and reason are bringing much independent and converging evidence that God exists.
Surprisingly, a section of the book is about the miracle at Fatima which was witnessed by more than sixty thousand people – believers and unbelievers alike. He says in the interview, Now, if you take the miracle of Fatima itself, there are only five reasonable explanations, without God: one, nothing happened; two, a meteorological event; three, a cosmological event; four, a collective hallucination; or five, fraud. There is nothing else. If you can discount all of these possibilities, then there is only a supernatural explanation. If we are being reasonable, why should we refuse that?
I look forward to reading it when it is published in English and then I will have something to give those who think their search for God has ended.
Peace,
Fr. Damian