Contents Page….. God Exists So What? Introduction 9 (to help you get your bearings before you dive in) Chapter 1 The fall (a chance meeting, a searching question) Chapter 2 The deal (in which Peter and John agree to...
2611/2020November 26, 2020
Wealth and responsibility
We see elements of the rich man in ourselves. Our riches do blind us. We instinctively feel that the well-paid job which has come our way is ours by right, we have earned it with our studies and our work, and we fully deserve all that we get. The western society in which we live, we feel, also deserves its hard-earned place, and rewards, in the world rankings. Christ actually does really expect a greater sense of proportion from us. He requires that we be aware that our success is never ours alone – we live off the accumulated achievements...
2611/2020November 26, 2020
What’s love got to do with it?
The modern Christian, instead of simply acquiescing to a society full of often inappropriate sexual stimuli, needs to direct wider discussions as to what love is. What is the nature of friendship, of self-love, and its relationship with desirous love for another person? What are the essential ties between sexuality and one’s spiritual, physical, and mental existence? In what way does the simple gratification of instinctual drives dehumanise the person?… (God Exists – So What?)
2511/2020November 25, 2020
Could we be have been so lucky? Maybe we should thank God?
A report in today’s issue of Popular Mechanics suggests that intelligent life cannot really exist anywhere else. It refers to a recent study from the Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, in which scientists studied the likelihood of key times for evolution of life on Earth and conclude that it would be virtually impossible for that life to evolve the same way somewhere else. The Fermi paradox asks how, in an infinitely big universe, can we be the only intelligent life we’ve ever encountered? Or indeed on earth itself how humans are the only species that has ever evolved advanced...
2411/2020November 24, 2020
Real social justice
‘Among the chief distinguishing marks of all Christian social teaching include an awareness of the dignity of all human beings in the eyes of God; the importance of seeing our neighbour when we look at ourselves; the need to distribute wealth so that it does not blind us to the reality of our humanity, and to use wealth to minimise the pain and tragedy for as many as we can in this present life. Unfortunately, while this message does echo somewhat in the ears of young people, a louder message often drowns it out. Unfamiliar with the fullness or totality...
2411/2020November 24, 2020
Science or religion? – that is the wrong question
The findings of all sciences over the past century have, if anything, restored for deeper consideration the Catholic – Christian worldview of Creation. ‘An alternative conclusion from science, that this is a universe, perhaps one of an infinite number of universes, existing in infinite time, and governed by uncaring quantum mechanical laws, is one which is particularly cold and harsh. It essentially implies that we humans are cosmic accidents, the fruit of complete randomness. From there, impossible leaps are then required to explain how rationality can emerge from irrational randomness. How can a completely random universe, the result of pure...
2311/2020November 23, 2020
Do extraterrestrials exist?
The continued discoveries by astronomers of planets and moons in our solar system and of their features led to scientists believing that we shared our solar system with other un-earthly creatures. A front-page story in the New York Times in 1911 proclaimed ‘Martians build two immense canals in two years – Vast Engineering Works Accomplished in an Incredibly Short Time by Our Planetary Neighbors’, attributing the discovery to a top astronomer, Prof Lowell of the Lowell Observatory. And we complain of ‘fake news’ today! The search for extraterrestrial life and exoplanets on which such life could exist has accelerated enormously...
2311/2020November 23, 2020
What did Newman think of his contemporary Darwin?
Some people think that Catholicism had issues with evolution. Well Charles Darwin and John Henry Newman were contemporaries…… ‘Evolution is still presented today as if it were a major setback for all of Christianity, as evolution appears to contradict the message of the Bible about Creation. However, John Henry Newman, a Catholic convert, and later to be canonised as a Catholic saint, had no problem with his contemporary Charles Darwin’s ideas or with evolution per se. According to Newman ‘It does not seem to me to follow that creation is denied because the Creator, millions of years ago, gave laws...
1211/2020November 12, 2020
Religion is still ‘in’
Those who have been fooled into thinking that religion belongs to the past need to look at the facts. Some 84% of the world’s population identifies with a religious group. People who identify with religious groups are generally younger, and they have more children than those with no religious affiliation, so the world is getting more religious, not less. The Christian religion is as much part of the age of reason as modern science. Christianity lies at the roots of the age of reason. Christians believe that God gave us his reason precisely so that humans can know him. Anything...
1011/2020November 11, 2020
An interview with the author, Mark Hamilton, on his soon-to-be-released publication ‘God Exists So What?’
Thank you, Mark, for speaking to us. The title of you new book seems a little cheeky. So What is this book about? Well, the title is in two parts because the book is in two parts. The first part seeks to show that belief in God is a very natural thing, both now and always. The challenge ‘So What?’, which you describe as cheeky, is put there to catch the reader’s attention because a person often needs a jolt or a shock to move them on to address the consequences of God’s existence. Why did you write God Exists?...