I reflect as again we celebrate Christmas how rarely religion features
in my social conversations.
Even so, when it does crop up, and of
course I speak of England where I live, it is remarkable to me as an
Irishman how many thoroughly decent folk proclaim that religion is the
cause of all wars.
That seems a bit unfair when you consider how much of our system of
justice springs from our predominantly Judeo-Christian heritage.
Even at
a most superficial level, I have never heard anyone state that the vast
carnage of the two World Wars of the last century were caused by any
religion.
In September last, Stephen Hawking, Professor of Applied Mathematics and
Theoretical Physics at Cambridge – considered by some to be the
cleverest man in the world – announced not merely his questioning the
existence of God; he pronounced from the arcane area of his subjects
that God does not exist.*
My betters have informed me that Stephen’s research focuses on the
mismatch between quantum physics (the physics of subatomic particles)
and the physics of the super-large (stars and galaxies) and the way
these appear to obey different scientific laws.
That’s about as much as I
can take in on this subject.
That mismatch prompted another eminent scientist, the late JBS
Haldane, to comment that “the universe is not only queerer than we
suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”.
Big Bang Theory
Now, Hawking is fascinated by the Big Bang theory and believes that the
deeper understanding of this, according to his 1988 A Brief History of
Time and the Theory of Everything would enable us to see into the ‘mind
of God’; that physics was on the verge of making theology and philosophy
redundant.
You cannot claim that this man is a stick-in-the-mud.
Yet while ‘pure’ scientists (and physicists seem to be the purest)
rightly explore questions about the physical universe and its possible
causation, what they will not answer is the why of the universe.
A thousand years ago St Symeon, the New Theologian in Constantinople,
asked succinctly, “What can a plough know of its maker?”
So, it looks,
for the moment, as though God-believers can stand down in their active
(tolerant) opposition to the citadels of fanatical atheism perhaps best
exemplified by Richard Dawkins and his God Delusion. Dawkins has to live
too.
Most God-believers are beset at times in their lives by doubt of His
existence and freely admit to this.
Faith is believing without proof, we
humans suppose.
The proposition that God does not exist smacks of
hubris.
If we cannot have certain proof of the existence of God, it is
also true that we do not have proof positive that he does not exist.
But
many of us are happy to have faith (not ‘proof’) in God’s existence and
leave it to the theologians and philosophers to argue about an
historical (e.g. Biblical-type) proof.
We do not seek to pillory
non-believers into adopting our religious faith.
I write as a Christian and declare myself as one when occasionally formally asked.
As an Irishman, it is well-nigh impossible in the present era not to
touch on the travails of the Roman Catholic community in Ireland, shaken
to its foundations by the paedophile priest scandal.
Those priests who
committed those horrible offences were not carrying out the teaching of
the Catholic religion but were disobeying its precepts.
It has to be
said also that those who were senior Catholic clerics who knowingly
failed to report offences to the proper authorities – the gardaí and
appropriate senior clerics – also failed the children and failed their
Holy Church.
Human frailty
No human being or human organisation can be without human frailty, which
doesn’t mean the passive acceptance of evil deeds nor, for instance,
unquestioning observance of priestly celibacy and the wisdom thereof.
Perhaps Pope Benedict the 16th, a most erudite theologian, will find a
new way forward, such as he has shown over the use of condoms in certain
situations.
Tiny incremental changes in these tortured areas are hugely
difficult to achieve.
Speaking personally, I have long regarded the Irish brand of
Catholicism as rather different to that of, say, England, France or
Italy.
To my generation, growing up in Dublin was to know that ‘The
Index’ had only one meaning (not the alphabetic listing of a book’s
content) – a list of books banned by the Irish Catholic Church and that
ban being implemented by the State on its behalf.
So, for instance, Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea and Sigmund
Freud’s standard works were unobtainable legally in the Republic.
On the
lighter side, possession of a blacklisted book immediately raised one’s
street cred as one’s acquaintances sought to borrow it.
If one
succumbed, the danger was that you would never again see that book as it
circulated in the ether of Éire.
McQuaid’s reign
Not long ago, in a remote part of France, I encountered a Canon of the
Anglican Church who has been heavily involved in ecumenism over decades.
He actually mentioned Archbishop of Dublin McQuaid’s reign in the 1950s
and ’60s as memorably associated with the stringent observance of the
ban.
Another item which still irks (with me, anyway) was the Irish
Catholic disapproval of reading the greatest book in history, the Bible.
But please do not imagine that I lay awake nights worrying about such
things any more than the next young man.
Sometimes when we are younger
we have a greater capacity to accept things as they are, rather than how
they might or should be under a different dispensation.
When I returned
to Ireland in 1968, after an absence of seven to eight years in
England, those irritations mentioned had gone.
Earlier this year, listening to a BBC Radio 4 broadcast, I heard a
clergyman declare that Catholicism in Ireland was “the most catechised
and the least evangelised” in the Catholic world.
This was for me
something of an epiphany moment: what had been an inchoate grasp for me
was beautifully clarified.
Later, a priest friend enlightened me that
the radio voice was that of the present Archbishop of Dublin.
The ending of Philip Roth’s earliest novel, Portnoy’s Complaint,
springs to mind.
The young central figure tortured by temptations of his
flesh and his interminable psychoanalysis hears his analyst pronounce,
“now perhaps maybe to begin”.
As for me, I mustn’t worry too much about
Stephen Hawking.
SIC: IMT/IE