That was great! If you have time to post the other parts I’d be happy to see them.
Here ya go. Again, from the 1959 Catholic Fact book, “The Origin of Man” I find the author both rational and poetic:
The author quotes astronomer Pierre Rousseau to illustrate the materialistic point of view: “One must be the victim of incurable anthropocentrism to believe that the slightest importance attaches to the race of thinking microbes inhabiting an imperceptible globe revolving round this sun”
He answers this view as follows: “Theology in her turn will reply: One must be the victim of an excessive concern for quantity to disregard so completely the supreme importance of quality. Granted that man is no more than a “thinking microbe”, a circumstance which confers upon him not equality to, but superiority over, the entire material universe, whatever size it may be. In fact, a false problem is created by the attempt to discredit thought on account of the small space occupied in the universe by the material organism which is its vehicle……..
Indeed, it we imagine an astronomer at the eye-piece of the giant Mount Palomar telescope, it might well be asked whether the greater marvel is to be found at the eye-piece or the aperture end of the telescope.
Our contention is that it will be found at the eye-piece end. The “thinking microbe” who stands at an instrument which is the product of a wealth of scientific research and technique and of a vast expenditure of capital and human labour, the astronomer whose enormously extended range of vision plumbs the furthest reaches of space, is to our eyes a more astonishing spectacle than the huge agglomerations of atoms making up the nebulae, each one of which is but a replica of the others. We know but little about these nebulae. In particular, we do not know whether each galaxy trails, like our own sun, at least one planet inhabited by beings akin to ourselves. In this field any supposition is permissible and none is contradicted by theology. But the enormous extent of the space occupied by the stars, and the terrifying distances at which they are situated, are powerless to induce us to abandon our conviction that divine grace is superior to human nature, and that human nature with its endowment of intelligence and freedom is superior to mere matter.
In short, none of all this presents any problem. We are impressed neither by “astronomical” figures nor by the thousands of millions of years of the life of the universe compared to the few hundreds of thousands of the life of mankind. The appearance of man was a greater event than anything that has since happened on earth; and in the vast setting of the universe, the appearance of a man on the earth was a novelty surpassing all the aggregations of atoms whirling in the midst of the distant galaxies”
Cheers!