WEDNESDAY REFLECTION
Mid-week Reflection
5th May 2021
Did you ever hear the story of the extremely clever student of philosophy who sat down to breakfast with his dad? His mum brought them in tea, toast and two boiled eggs. The university student said to his dad, “I can prove to you that there are four metaphysical eggs in that bowl. Whereupon his dad, an ordinary hard-working man, said, “ Well I’ll eat these two eggs and you can eat the metaphysical eggs!” Sometimes students confuse facts and theories. A fact is that which is. A theory is that which could be….or may not be.
As a young student, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, became convinced that in searching for truth the philosopher and the scientist were searching for God….whether they realised it or not. Perhaps that is borne out in Albert Einsein, the theoretical physicist, known for developing the theory of relativity and for important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics. A self-proclaimed agnostic, yet he wrote, “Science without religion is lame….God….created the world according to an orderly plan. It is the scientist’s task to discover it.” Pascual Jordan also a physicist and co-founder of quantum mechanics, began talking of a ‘creator-God.’ Astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington stated, “Modern physics leads us necessarily to God, rather than away from God. ”Nobel Prize winner, Max Planck declared, “For the believer God is at the beginning and for the physicist, he is at the end of all thinking.” I could go on but you get the point.
Fear not that science and religion contradict each other. They do not. They go together like fish and chips, salt and pepper, bacon and eggs! One last amusing but touching quote. This from another physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Werner Heisenberg. “A first drink from the glass of natural science makes you atheistic but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting.”
Monsignor Monaghan
