I have had two strange conversations lately.
Without revealing any personal or embarrassing details about when they took place or with whom, let me say that one was with a theoretical physicist convinced that he could prove God existed by means of empirical observation, using a God-proving machine. He did not describe details of the machine’s operation, so do not ask me.
The other conversation was with a skeptic who held that if God were real, He would make His existence too obvious for doubt; and since He has not, He is not.
Both these positions run afoul of the Catholic teaching that God, as the First Cause and Last End of all things, can, from created things, be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason, even if other details of His divine nature cannot be.
On the one hand, First Causes and Last Ends are not open to empirical senses, even if created things are; on the other, what human reason can know, it can know, not must know. Reason cannot be forced.
The first conversation was neither interesting nor rewarding, since when I asked the physicist how empirical proof can prove a non-empirical reality, or how physics can prove a metaphysical proposition, I was brusquely informed that metaphysics was a null-set, matter without content, and that philosophy was merely abortive and lazy form of physics. I asked politely for his empirical proof that all philosophy was physics, and was belittled for asking, but not answered. Instead the man waved his credentials at me, and boasted many a boastful boast about himself.
I suppose if, like a stage-magician yanking a white hare out of a tophat, he can yank God Almighty out of the mouth of a cyclotronic supercollider or radiotelescopic dish, complete with roaring throne and blazing coronet and living creatures many-winged and filled with blazing eyes, surrounded by fiery rainbows, emerald and amber and jasper, and wheels within wheels and thunders and quakes and voices like the rushing of mighty waters, so that all the skeptics fall groveling on their faces and beg the mountains to fall on them, in such as case as this, our bold scientiferrifick pioneer of empirical theology will have a good and proper right to boast.
How can one not help but wish such a windbaggish crackpot good luck? We all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
The second conversation was more interesting, because at least it gives one pause. Is there something God could do to make Himself too obvious for doubt? I suggest that depends on one’s standard for doubt.
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