The Higgs Boson "God Particle": Of All Things Visible and Invisible
. . . The short answer is "no." Imagine for a moment that you're on an archeological dig on the outskirts of Rome. Standing in your carefully excavated hole, your spade strikes a metal box. Inside you discover a small, worn chisel, and a note written in 16th Century Italian: "Herein lies my favorite chisel." The note is signed, "Michelangelo Buonarroti." Well, if you're an art historian, what you now hold might be priceless. If you're also a person of faith who has viewed the magnificence of Michelangelo's Pieta, you may treasure this forever as one of the tools used to create a work of artistic genius. Your discovery might land on a shelf with your name on it in the Vatican Museum. There will be no doubt that what you discovered is a tool used to create an inspired work of art, but it is not itself the art's creator. . . .
E.T. and The Fermi Paradox: Are We Alone in the Cosmos?
. . . For Father Georges Lemaitre, for me, and now for my friend, Joseph, there comes a point when "a profoundly improbable sequence" of events crosses a border into the profoundly impossible. Science has promised a better explanation for centuries, but it hasn't ever delivered one. Creation and our Creator become the sole rational explanation for what seems otherwise irrational and impossible: life itself, and not just life, us! - the impossible mathematical odds against the very existence with which we ponder Him. And thus far, at least, we ponder Him alone. "I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details." Albert Einstein . . .
And Death's Dark Shadow Put to Flight: Advent Hope for the Fall of Man
. . . Our materialistic culture has absorbed and transformed just about everything spiritual that we should associate with Christmas. I wrote a few weeks ago in "At the Twilight's Last Gleaming" that religion has been slowly stripped from the public square in our culture, and too often what remains is the intolerance of extremism used by the media to paint religion as destructive. We have a daunting challenge if future generations are to believe in anything worthy of belief, and that challenge is met within our own hearts and souls. We cannot bring into our culture that which we do not yet have in ourselves. In no time is this more true than in Advent, now reduced to the commercial selling of a "holiday spirit" that requires little more depth than an annual unprecedented spending spree. Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way to the cash register, and the Season of Giving and Taking is fulfilled. . . .
Does Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?
. . . I do not count Stephen Hawking among them. Contrary to what the news media is lifting out of his latest book - and out of context - Stephen Hawking does not denounce God, nor does he claim to have proven that God does not exist. The exact quote that so many in the media now read into from his WSJ article cited above, and from his book is this: "The discovery recently of extreme fine tuning of so many laws of nature could lead some back to the idea that the grand design is the work of some grand Designer. Yet the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator." . . .