Posted on 03/16/2009 1:24:55 PM PDT by NYer
For us it is just the opposite.
Ha ha. Welcome home.
Good for her, and God bless.
SnakeDoc
Anyone have a site on conversions that involved some aspect of internet communication, blogging, evangelization going on online, etc.?
Sound familiar?
Agreed.
I actually am reading two books that touch on this theme.
One is “A Grain of Wheat”, a collection by theologian Hans Urs von Baltahsar that contains a large selection of short aphorisms. Given to me by and strongly recommend by an eminent Catholic thinker and priest.
The second is “The Risk of Education”, by Luigi Giussani. Given to me by and strongly recommend by an eminent Catholic thinker and layman.
(Msgr. Luigi Giussani was the founder of the ecclesial movement of Communion and Liberation. At his funeral in February of this year, both John Paul II and then-Cardinal Ratzinger noted how deeply Giussani’s life revolved around education, and indeed much of his life and work can be summarized as a sort of pedagogical method, one that has been having a significant impact on Catholic education at all levels throughout the world. Much of that method is synthesized in Giussani’s small book, THE RISK OF EDUCATION.)
“Information” is the fly in the ointment that renders evolutionism untenable!
Despite her skepticism, she still possessed a certain openness and honesty and this is usually absent in atheists. Atheism is like a religion in itself. It is not just unbelief. It is a positive faith in the nonexistence of God.
Anyway, what does it really matter? She's found faith and God bless her on her continued journey toward the Promised Land.
But I also knew that idea did not make sense. After all, I don’t look at billboards — which contain much simpler information than DNA — and think that wind and erosion created them. That wouldn’t be rational. Suddenly, I found that I was a very discomfited atheist.
This was essentially the same intellectual path that I followed on my way back. The idea that DNA was created by the random action of weather and radiation upon dirty water just seems ludicrous to me. If that's what the data suggest, then we're obviously interpreting the data incorrectly.
I mean, imagine if a team of astronauts found a functioning digital calculator buried in a million-year-old stratum of the surface of Mars. Would they conclude the calculator was designed by some intelligent creature, or that the calculator was created accidentally by the effect of billions of years of weathering upon Martian stone? Would they try to find more finished artifacts, or would they start looking for fossil electronic devices demonstrating a gradual progression of calculator ancestors beginning with the first primitive transistors created by chance from the non-living minerals of Mars?
Of course not. The calculator in all its complexity and purposeful design would be seen rightly as incontestable evidence of the presence of intelligent life on Mars.
And yet a single biological cell is fantastically complex -- much more complex than any calculator...
"Sound familiar???" Yes indeed, dear marron. Still, I've never been an atheist in my life. So it wasn't a condition that I had to "outgrow." I started out "religious," from the tot stage forward. No religious view was then formed by any particular religious training/indoctrination. [Which I never had, BTW, after preparation for First Communion.] It just was, based on my observation of the splendor and order and beauty of Nature. It was all so magnificent, to my child's mind, that God HAD to be "behind it."
Then, the longer I lived and studied, I more I found out that my original "instinct" or intuition was absolutely correct.
BTW, I do agree with Mrs. Fulwiler's observation that Catholics are particularly good at formulating "answers [that] were consistently better than the ones from atheists. It intrigued me that Catholics could handle anything I threw at them. Also, their responses reflected such an eminently reasonable worldview that I kept asking myself: How is it that Catholics have so much of this all figured out?"
Thank you ever so much for writing!
God bless her and her husband.
God is indeed great when the eyes of such an staunch atheist can be opened.
From one Catholic convert to another - welcome home.
Ping of interest. Of particular note is the bit about DNA.
You will find several here.
I am currently reading The Story of a Soul - the autobiography of St. Therese of the Child Jesus. It is not at all what I expected.
This was the part I thought might sound familiar to you.
Creation is considered a completed act of God. However we are not God and don’t live in God’s time. We are living inside the creation and view it while it’s unfolding. Hence the human view is one of the evolution of the world. That DNA evolved is not the question. It’s WHY it was created in the first place.
Beautifully said.
Just like the billboard description in the article above, there's a huge difference between a macroscopic object and a microscopic one. For starters, the latter is affected by far more number of fundamental forces, than the latter.
When you take two baseball-sized objects, the forces beween them would be negligible. When you take two atoms, you will have to take into account electic, perfect-elastic, nuclear, etc. forces between them. The entire game-plan changes in the microscopic world.
To that, add the billions of years, trillions of interactions each day of each year, additive, gradual processes, polymers like proteins that fold, and allow additions to their branches, etc., the entire situation differs from a "wind eroding a rock into a calculator" scenario.
Just because one can't comprehend these processes and to give up and declare that a god entity, or several such entities must have been involved in the design, gives a hint that the person might really have not been an atheist, in the first place.
Only deep, personal, divine intervention can ever convert a real atheist.
No, its what drives evolution. Diesel engines evolve; they evolve according to a plan. All it takes for a diesel engine to evolve from a lump of iron ore is heat and pressure and thousands of manhours of engineering. Older models give way to better models over time and again, all it takes is iron ore, heat, pressure, and thousands more manhours of engineering.
Anyhow, thats how I see it...
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