The creation account in Genesis is a stirring, poetic narration of God — the Divine Artist — fashioning the universe and the world into wondrous being.
Tag: philosophy
Philosophy talk at Blessed Sacrament Parish in Madison
Fr. Dominic Holtz, OP, will be giving a talk called “What has Aristotle to do with The Gospel? Philosophy and the Christian Faith” on Friday, Aug. 25, at Blessed Sacrament Parish, 2116 Hollister Ave. in Madison in the assembly hall.
The Avengers and Nietzsche
C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their colleagues in the Inklings wanted to write fiction that would effectively “evangelize the imagination,” accustoming the minds, especially of young people, to the hearing of the Christian Gospel.
Accordingly, Tolkien’s Gandalf is a figure of Jesus the prophet and Lewis’ Aslan is a representation of Christ as both sacrificial victim and victorious king. Happily, the film versions of both The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia have proven to be wildly popular all over the world.
The sciences and God
Given the ruminations of Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, one might have thought that the absolute limit of scientistic arrogance had been reached. But think again.
Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, has asserted that “science” is on the verge of providing a complete understanding of the universe — an explication that precludes the antiquated notion of God altogether.
Limitations of the sciences
Before addressing the God issue, let me make a simple observation. Though the sciences might be able to explain the chemical make-up of pages and ink, they will never be able to reveal the meaning of a book; and though they might make sense of the biology of the human body, they will never tell us why a human act is moral or immoral; and though they might disclose the cellular structure of oil and canvas, they will never determine why a painting is beautiful.