How do you explain the creativity in the world? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
Something refreshing about Graffin’s book is that you read him talking about the Big Bang Theory and how some people talk about what he says are obvious absurdities in the Big Bang Theory, such as all the matter in the universe being in one dense point. They look at this and see the hand of God at work. Graffin then says he thinks they are free to do so.
One of the new atheists would never write that sentence, or if they did, they would also include right after it a remark about how stupid these ignorant theists are. It’s sad that something that stands out in Graffin’s book is really how much he seems to go out of his way to NOT be antagonistic towards the other side. If only more on his side were like this.
After describing much of the history of the universe, Graffin says that at no point is God’s intervention necessary. The question is, why should I think it would be? This would be like saying a Rube Goldberg machine needs no inventor because once the cycle is set in motion, the inventor never has to directly intervene. As a Thomist, the main method of God’s providence is that God sustains the whole system keeping it in existence, a question that Graffin never seems to have considered.
On a side note, he says that he wasn’t much of a student in school until he started studying evolution. At that point, he got all A’s. I can say I was not so much of an academic really, until I discovered apologetics. Find what your kids are passionate about and get them learning about it. If they are passionate about video games or anime or football and are reading books and learning about it, go with it.
Much of this chapter is spent describing Graffin in a South American rainforest doing research on a topic. This is certainly interesting reading if you care about this kind of topic, but nothing that is relevant to our purposes here. I write this mainly so you can know that there is a lot of good material in this book that I will not cover.
At the end of the chapter, he does say that in both religion and science, it is easy to get caught up in authoritarian leaders with ulterior motives. Yes. In every field of study, there are bad eggs that want to use the study for their own purposes that are hardly virtuous. We must always be on the lookout for them.
I say that last part because I am going through a book now on the origins of religious liberty and how they came from Christianity. In reading about the Reformation time, I think “Wow. The Protestants did some awful things to Catholics.” Then I think, “Wow. The Catholics did some awful things to Protestants.” Could it be the problem in any area is the people?
Just a thought.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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