CREATION – CREATOR
John Haldone, a scientist, once suggested to Monsignor Knox that in a universe containing millions of planets it was inevitable that life would appear by chance on one of them. “Sir,” said Knox, “if Scotland Yard found a body in your Saratoga trunk, would you tell them, ‘There are millions of trunks in the world—surely one of them must contain a body’? I think they still would want to know who put it there.”264
Robert Jastrow, a scientist who calls himself “agnostic” in religious matters, has written in God and the Astronomers (New York: Norton, 1978) the following:
A sound explanation may exist for the explosive birth of our Universe, but if it does, science cannot find out what that explanation is. The scientist’s pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation. This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and earth.” To which St. Augustine added, “Who can understand this mystery or explain it to others?” The development is unexpected because science has had such extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time.… Now we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, but the barrier to further progress seems insurmountable. It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.265
The story is told of a science professor who constructed a planetarium, a precisely scaled model of the universe. A student came into his office and asked him who made it. The professor said, “No one.”
The student laughed and asked again, “Come on, who made this fantastic piece of precise work?” The professor replied, “No one. It just happened.”
The student became confused and angry, and the professor said, “Well, if you can go out of this class and look at nature around you and believe it just happened, you can also believe this precise piece of work just happened without a creator.”266
“Is it hard to paint a picture?” a woman asked Salvador Dali.
“No,” replied the artist. “It’s either easy or impossible.”
The same answer holds for the creation of the universe. For God, it was “easy.” For any other person, it is “impossible!”267