…about the origin of the universe: in a comment a day or two ago, Jack quoted this from Benedict XVI's Introduction to Christianity. I think it deserves emphasis:
Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, of a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence.
One of many things that occur to me on reading this is that if you really make it your foundational premise for looking at the world, the whole evolution-vs.-creation controversy just sort of disappears. It remains interesting, to be sure, for those with the intellectual urge to look further into how it all developed.
More importantly, I don't see how one can believe this and contemplate it without experiencing a sense of joy. It is inconceivable that the One who brings all else into existence is not more than they in every respect, including goodness, and that he would not will their ultimate good, however long and dark the road might be upon which he has set them. In my end is my beginning says Eliot (I forget where he borrowed it from). And it seems to me that the end, in the sense of ultimate purpose, of all things is implied in this statement about their beginnings. And all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
This was written forty years ago when Benedict was just Josef Ratzinger, a theologian. Presumably it was written in German, and that term "being-thought" is probably one of those German compounds that often strike me as faintly comical: "Dasein-gedanke" or something.
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