Reduced to its religious and moral significance, miracle, for Jesus,
was the answer to prayer, as M. Menegoz (_pp. cit._ pp. 19-29) has
clearly shown, and this altogether apart from the phenomenal mode in
which the answer was produced. God only manifests Himself in
extraordinary events in order that we may learn to recognise Him in
ordinary ones. The child asks, the father grants; but the child does
not trouble himself about the means by which his wishes are gratified.
The pious man adores the ways he cannot comprehend. This confidence in
the love and justice of God may be accompanied in the mind of the
apostles and of Jesus Himself by imperfect or erroneous scientific
ideas as to the mode of divine action in Nature. But it is not
_solidaire_, with them, and may easily be detached in order to bring it
into harmony with the views of our present science, as in the mind of
Jesus and the apostles it was in harmony with the science of their
time. For piety, the laws of Nature which have since then been
revealed to us in their sovereign constancy, become the immediate
expression of the will of God. The Christian submits to them
instinctively, saying: "Thy will be done." Which is only saying that
these laws, which are sometimes spoken of with a sort of horror, as of
a blind and brutal fate, become religious and are consecrated in the
eyes of piety by a divine authority. Why then should not piety offer
to science and its revelations of Nature the same frank and joyous
welcome as that accorded to them by scientists themselves? The
opposition established by scholasticism between faith and science, is
it not as irreligious as it is irrational, and has it not been one of
the chief causes of the death of theology in the Church and of the
triumph of incredulity in the present age?
While developing themselves on parallel lines, can science and faith
remain isolated? Man is one, and his scientific activity, like his
religious activity, tends to a synthesis. The synthesis will be found
in a teleological consideration of the universe. This universal
teleology, faith predicts it, science labours to realise it. It can
only be established by this twofold concurrence. Without faith,
knowledge of the universe is impossible; without phenomenal science all
interpretation of the universe becomes illusory. Faith, therefore,
must become more and more an act of confidence in God, and the
scientific study of phenomena ever more profound and rigorous. Of
course the teleological synthesis will never be completed here below,
but it will always find a provisional and satisfying conclusion in the
act of confidence and adoration towards God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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