Don't Be Shallow, Read Aquinas.

Dawkins

I know this blog's been a frivolous mix of aliens, guns, boots and horses recently, so here's a bit on St. Thomas Aquinas to even things out. It's from the Chicago Daily Observer and argues against the widespread notion that God is a superstitious idea that's been explained away by 'science'. I've never understood how physics, chemistry and assorted technics could disprove a necessary being, and it seems strange to me that Dawkins & Co. would get so worked up about something they see as so absurd. Surely they're not threatened in any way? Regardless, I think Fr. Barron's take on Thomas is good:

"Secondly, Thomas knew that the Creator God of the Bible is the only finally satisfying explanation for the existence of the contingent things of the world. He was deeply impressed by the actual existence of those things that do not contain within themselves the reason for their being. Clouds, trees, plants, animals, human beings, buildings, planets, and stars certainly exist, but they don’t have to exist. This means, he saw, that their being is not self-explanatory, that it depends, finally, on some primordial reality which does exist through the power of its own essence. This “necessary” being is what Thomas called “God.” He was moved by the correspondence between this philosophical sense of God and the self-designation that God gives in Exodus 3:14: “I am who I am.” How significant this is in our time when “new” atheists have raised their voices to dismiss belief in God as a holdover from a pre-scientific time. Thomas would remind the Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins of the world that no scientific advance could ever, even in principle, eliminate the properly metaphysical question to which God is the only satisfying answer. God is not a superstitious projection of human need; rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing.

Thirdly, Thomas Aquinas was a deep humanist, precisely because he was a Christian. He saw that since God became human in Christ, the destiny of the human being is divinization, participation in the inner life of God. No other religion or philosophy or social theory has ever held out so exalted a sense of human dignity and purpose. And this is why, Aquinas intuited, there is something inviolable about the human person. How indispensably important that teaching is in our era of stem-cell research, euthanasia, legalized abortion, and pre-emptive war, practices that turn persons into means." You can read the whole thing here.

"How indispensably important..." well said, Barron.

Just heard that one of my old friends from England has been made a Bishop. Quite remarkable.

God bless,

LSP