Catholic and Enjoying It!
over at The Catholic Weekly is up:
Babies come from mommies and daddies, cars come from builders, and trees come from acorns.
And though adults may simply rest content with that explanation, little children inevitably ask, “Where do the parents, builders, and acorns come from?”
And so we find that everything participates in a ‘Great Chain of Being’ which takes us further and further into the past until we get to the Big Bang itself.
In the normal course of events, absolutely nothing in Nature is unhooked from that chain.
Everything in this universe is caused by something else in this universe which is caused by something else in this universe and so on and so on.
Our awareness of this is so fundamental that when something does break that Great Chain of Being (as, for instance, the miracle of the loaves and fishes does in John 6:1-14), we have to find an explanation for it by either saying, as Christians do, that the God who is beyond Nature miraculously added some links to the Chain, or else we must say, as skeptics do, that it has some sort of natural cause (i.e., people sharing lunches, or a big lie by the apostles who were yanking our Great Chain of Being).
The one thing nobody believes in is what philosopher Peter Kreeft calls the ‘Pop Theory’—that things like loaves and fishes just pop into existence for no reason at all.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In