How often do you get to hear from an inventive surgeon, a compassionate pastor, and a saint on religion and science? Yet there existed a man, Luke, who was both a distinguished physician and a doctor of souls. He lived well into the twentieth-century to see the horrors done by men who became atheists and sought the political and economic systems to justify their metaphysics.
Wisdom! I will attend.
As usual, the words of the Saint will appear in italics and my response will be below it.
Saint Luke the Surgeon says:
We are certain that apart from the material world there is an infinite and incomparably superior spiritual world. We believe in the existence of spiritual beings that have higher intellect than us humans. We believe wholeheartedly that above this spiritual and material world there is the Great and Almighty God.
Here the scientist, priest, and saint points out an essential feature of reality: it has two parts. We experience this all the time. You are reading my words though I am not with you. You are dealing with ideas and ideas are not matter or energy, though these words have been captured in symbols that provoke the proper ideas in you if I have done my job as a writer.
The pixels on your screen are there: matter. The ideas are there: spirit. Just as the image of the saint, the icon, is not the saint but points to the saint, so the words are not the ideas but simply what provokes the ideas in your soul.
The Surgeon is right: there is a complex spiritual reality all around us that we ignore at our peril. God, the Great and Almighty, is the chief reality that should not be ignored.
What we doubt is the right of science to research with its methods the spiritual world. Because the spiritual world cannot be researched with the methods used to research the material world. Such methods are totally inappropriate to research the spiritual world.
This is so obvious that it would seem the sainted surgeon should not have to say it. You cannot put a number, a person, or an idea in a test tube. Science is a great and good tool to study what science can study. It can find the material basis for our experiences, but it cannot capture those experiences. Science can see my brain respond to the color yellow, but it does not know the magic of a poem about daffodils.
You cannot take a picture of an angel as an angel or look at God as God.
How do we know that there is a spiritual world? Who told us that it exists? If we are asked by people who do not believe in the Divine revelation, we shall answer them thus: ‘Our heart told us’. For there are two ways for one to know something, the first is that which is spoken by Haeckel, which is used by science to learn of the material world. There is however another way that is unknown to science, and does not wish to know it. It is the knowledge through the heart. Our heart is not only the central organ of the circulation system, it is an organ with which we know the other world and receive the highest knowledge. It is the organ that gives us the capability to communicate with God and the above world. Only in this we disagree with science.
The Surgeon points to two good ways of knowing: science for the physical world and the “heart” for the psychical world. There is knowing what a things is made of, the work of science, and knowing what a thing is the work of the heart. There is knowing what is in the material world and knowing what should be by way of the heart. The cosmos is far too complex for the simplicity of one way of knowing.
Praising the great successes and achievements of science, we do not doubt at all its great importance and we do not confine the scientific knowledge. We only tell the scientists “You do not have the capability with your methods to research the spiritual world, we however can with our heart.
There are many unexplainable phenomena which concern the spiritual world that are real (as are some type of material phenomena). There are therefore phenomena that science will never be able to explain because it does not use the appropriate methods.
The Surgeon points out that the interaction between the two worlds is hard to explain but not mysterious. We, humankind, live with the dualism daily. We think and we act. Ideas trigger material change when the surgeon opens a body to remove a cancer. Finally, the “laws of nature” are regularities in the actions of the Divine Mind. God need not “suspend” the laws of nature, as if He is breaking His own rules, but merely chooses to act differently than He usually does.
He most often will let nature follow the course He sustains, but other times He intervenes for the love of His creation.
Let science explain how the prophecies appeared on the coming of the Messiah, which were all fulfilled. Could science tell us how the great prophet Isaiah, some 700 years before the birth of Christ, foretold the most important events in His life and for which he was named the evangelist of the Old Testament? To explain the far sighted grace possessed by the saints and to tell us with which physical methods the saints inherited this grace and how they could understand the heart and read the thoughts of a person they had just met for the first time? They would see a person for the first time and they will call him by his name. Without waiting for the visitor to ask, they would answer on what troubled him.
Here the Surgeon cites two types of prophetic miracle: Biblical and in the life of the Saints. The Bible did foretell the coming of the Suffering Savior and the life of Jesus did match it. A skeptic can attempt to explain this away by claiming that the writers of the text “retrofit” the life of Jesus to the prophecy, but not why those same people would die for the lies they told. Whatever else one might say of the Gospel writers, they claimed to be eyewitnesses to a remarkable life and they died for their testimony.
But we need not go so far. I have, myself, experienced remarkable insight from servants of God who have helped me. One such person came to me, not knowing me, and spoke to my heart exactly what I needed to hear and added details that have come to pass over time. This person gained no money from me, no prestige, and asked for nothing. He helped me and then slipped out of my life forever, but to this day what he said to me continues to come to pass.
And I am not alone. I could multiply such stories countless times from close personal friends. They could all be lying or be self-deceived, but only someone mad with skepticism would think it.
If they can, let them explain it to us. Let them explain with what method the saints foretold the great historical events which were accurately fulfilled as they were prophesied. Let them explain the visitation from the other world and the appearance of the dead to the living.
They shall never explain it to us because they are too far from the basis of religion- from faith. If you read the books of the scientists who try to reconstruct religion, you will see how superficially they look at things. They do not understand the essence of religion yet they criticize it. Their criticism does not touch the essence of faith, since they are unable to understand the types, the expressions of religious feeling. The essence of religion they do not understand. Why not? Because the Lord Jesus Christ says ‘No one can come to me unless My Father who sent Me draws him to Me.’ (John 6:44)
Sadly, this is very true. Go read atheist writings, even of non-believers, and a tone deafness to the depth of religion will appear. There will be anger and a list of “theistic achievements” but no understanding of the music of faith. They know the words sitll, but they have grown tone deaf.
Of course, I am often tone deaf myself. The great mystery of faith, of the deepest feelings of the human heart, is often beyond my materialistic heart. I prefer to drown myself in the noise of television, canned music, or consumption of stuff. Still when I go to church today and force myself to be silent, I will hear the bells of heaven in the voices of the choir.
There is Jesus and Jesus will be real to me.
So it is necessary that we be drawn by the Heavenly Father, it is necessary that the grace of the Holy Spirit enlighten our heart and our mind. To dwell in our heart and mind through this enlightenment, the Holy Spirit and the ones who were found worthy to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, those in whose heart lives Christ and His Father, know the essence of faith. The others, outside the faith cannot understand anything.”
Philosophically I have faith that is seeking understanding. I have experienced something so real I find it hard to doubt even when I try. Why try? Faith loves wisdom and seeks knowledge. Together my community turns to God and seeks Him and together we find Him when we dialog together honestly. We do no “pray away” our problems, many based in a broken physical reality, but we do pray to see God. Seeing God places our problems in perspective.
We are drawn to the Father by the life of the Son and gift of the Holy Spirit. We are awash in reason, life, and power. We do not forget the physical, God forbid, but we do not limit ourselves to it. In this way we make sense of the daily miracle of love in a body and a body in love. . . . we glory in our duality as children of God.
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