 |
| The door of the mind can be firmly closed to certain ideas |
Pablo (as I will call him) was raised in a Marxist home. He was baptized as a baby, but that was the last thing he had to do with Christianity in any real sense. His parents were unbelievers, but they baptized their kids as part of the ritual of their Catholic society. Yet all throughout his childhood, he had the ability to see a woman that nobody else could see. There was something about her not quite right. He assumed it was the Holy Virgin from Christian mythology, but the culture of his home was materialist, so he never really tried to understand what was happening.
When it came time for his first communion, he told the priest that “I’m not going to eat that sh*t.” The priest slapped him for his blasphemy. Pablo was shocked to hear these words coming out of his mouth. Where had they come from? They weren’t his own.
There were all kinds of other spiritually dramatic things that happened to him, but this morning, I can’t remember them clearly. The climax of the story came a few years later, when he was roaming the streets of his city with a couple of his buddies. This was 2004. A homeless man walked up to them, and began to speak to Pablo: “Ah, Pablo, it is so good to finally meet you,” he said. “I am here to tell you that Jesus loves you.” And then the homeless man began to tell Pablo all kinds of things about his life. He was reading Pablo’s heart, and telling him things nobody could have known other than he, least of all an indigent stranger on the street.
He told Pablo that he knew that he had been seeing a woman appear since childhood, but that Pablo needed to know that that wasn’t the Holy Virgin. That was the Evil One disguising himself to deceive Pablo. Apparently Satan had had his eye on Pablo for a long, long time.
“Finally I asked the man what was his name,” Pablo told me. “He laughed and said, ‘The Happiness of Christmas.’ I asked him what his name really was, and he said the same thing.”
After bringing this message to Pablo, the homeless man wandered down the street, and disappeared into the crowd.
“Was he an angel?” I asked Pablo.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you follow him?”
“No, he was an indigent. We were all standing there completely shocked. My two friends saw and heard all of this. It wasn’t something I imagined.”
The next morning at breakfast, Pablo’s mother asked him what was wrong. “You seem different,” she said. But nothing was wrong. Everything was finally right.
Pablo then went to a church, to Mass. “I saw Our Lord in the Eucharist, and I knew that I really was looking at the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Creator of the Universe. I knew that this was where I had to be, and I could not leave Him behind.”
Pablo was confirmed as a Catholic, and began to roam around, looking for the will of God. Eventually he ended up in Barcelona. He is married now, and is a teacher.
He was the only religious believer in his extended family. Again, they were all Marxists. But one by one, seeing the difference Christ made in Pablo, they began to convert. His father was the last holdout. But one year ago, as he lay dying from stomach cancer, Pablo’s father called for a priest, made a confession, and was reconciled to Christ through the Church. Pablo now expects to be with his ex-communist father in Paradise someday.
My question for the "atheist" or the agnostic is, given that the information about the main incident comes from an honest source and there were witnesses to the accuracy of what the homeless stranger was telling Pablo, could it be at least possible that the strange man was somehow a messenger from God?
Clearly, there are several philosophies or academic constructs that have propelled Western society - and increasingly the whole world - into adopting a materialistic mindview. Because of this mindview and that other doors that close a person off from reality, many people find it extremely difficult to accept, or admit that they could accept, the existence of the spiritual realm because it is far beyond what is "normal".
Therefore, it's natural for a person to develop the set of materialistic preconceptions based on personal experience, education and on the fact such concepts are fashionable, if not de rigueur, in society. Society makes it easy even for those from a religious background to bow to the anti-intellectual and hedonistic (meaning, in effect, anti-social) moral atmosphere, given the consumerism, the wish for material success, and the superficiality promoted through all forms of media.
It's worth spending some time checking out the filters, the blinkers, the gates, the doors that prevent a person or people generally from acknowledging the strength of information of another kind, other than what they are used to. Theists are accustomed to examining their conscience, which brings a person back to their essential beliefs. So let's look at some philosophies that have shaped Western societies and threaten to engulf societies around the world where the elites think they will be held in contempt if they do not follow the lead from abroad.
Doors that close a person to the spiritual:
1. Logical Positivism
Though he is by no means the first in this, Alfred Jules Ayer's 1936 work Language, Truth and Logic would have us accept the belief that "only knowledge that can be empirically verified is warranted or meaningful". Of course, that statement is a philosophical principle and cannot in itself be empirically verified.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was of the same school, though he had a basic agnosticism, in that we cannot know anything. Reality was made up of statements, not objects. His principle was that we could not say anything except what can be said, meaning only propositions arising from natural science were possible.
2. Rationalism
This is the philosophical position that adds human reason to the mix in that the empirical sciences and philosophy can provide sufficient explanations for all of reality. This is the foundation of the "New Atheists" who deride any attempt to undertake theology as a compelling pursuit of reality. On this basis Stephen Hawking expressed the view that physics would in time deliver a "theory of everything".
Rationalism is interesting in that its adherents are split into two camps. One party holds, as we see above, that reason is all we need to understand reality, though an objection is that it would fail to comprehend God who always remains more unknown to human reason than known. The other party has too little confidence in reason and proposes that even if there are realities above the bounds of reason we do not need a doctrine or science about such things because the natural order should be sufficient for human aspirations - we should not aim too high!
3. Materialism
Keeping it simple, "materialism is a form of philosophical monism [denying the existence of a distinction or duality in some sphere, such as that between matter and mind, or God and the world] that holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. ... Materialism is closely related to physicalism [naturalism]—the view that all that exists is ultimately physical." (Wikipedia)
4. Scientism
This belief system runs from the weak version: “Of all the knowledge we have, scientific knowledge is the best knowledge”, to the "arrogant, dogmatic, or otherwise epistemically vicious" intrusion of science into other fields of study. In response, there is the pushback in academic circles like this: "Philosophy and Scientism: What Cognitive Neuroscience Can, and What It Cannot, Explain".
Another case of dogmatic scientism comes through the writing of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett who declare that a believer in God cannot accept both evolution and that God has been guiding human development. But a mainstream Christian is freer in this matter and can accept both, though pointing out how the accepted theory is flawed in part.
In conclusion, scientists have achieved much that they can be proud of, but the history of the intellectual domain points to a close-minded materialism today that would have dismayed Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Pascal, as well as the "father of genetics", the developer of the Big Bang theory, and the head of the Human Genome Project—all of whom had a deep religious faith. For the scientist and for all of us, the challenge remains: How to account for the spiritual nature of the experiences Pablo had as a child and the encounter with the stranger as an adult?
Ω Here is a list of eminent scientists, many of them Nobel Prize winners, who have shown that their life's work incorporates having a firm relationship with God.
Ω Go to my blog here to tap into my archive of posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment