Monday, December 15, 2003

The Fascinated God, again...

I wrote the pastor of our parish, thanking him for shedding some light on this book which concerned me some time ago. I read this in our parish bulletin on Sunday.
The theme of my retreat turned out to be a lot of reflection on the primal question of whether God is real as we profess our faith in God, or have science and human rationalization eliminated any need for including God in our understanding of our life and our universe.

I prayerfully responded to two books that I read there. One was by a priest who wrote, surprisingly, that God could not be considered a creator God because scientists have proven (so he says) that our universe could not have had a first cause, but just happened to come into existence with a "big bang".

With this as one of his premises (misguided as it was), he proceeded to disprove or undermine every pillar of our Christian faith--to the point where he had nothing left but "a fascinated god" who was interested in us human beings but could not do anything to help us, much less redeem us from sin and bring us to eternal life.

The author has put science ahead of what we believe to be God's revelation of truth to us through his Word and through the Church.

Reading this book made me want to argue with the author for sure, but mostly I felt sorry for him and sad that he had seemingly lost confidence in our Christian faith and our Catholic teaching about God.

The only problem I see now is that the priest who wrote the book, "The Fascinated God", has been invited to give a homily during our Christmas Novena, (along with a couple of protestant pastors)...Maybe he will be selling his book at a discount during his 'reflection'?

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