science

Engaging both our physical and spiritual natures helps us to embrace wonder!

The feeding of the five thousand that we encounter in today’s Gospel from John is reported in each of the four Gospels. This point is relevant because biblical scholars look to the multiple attestation theory as one means as to whether an account in the Gospel record is more or less plausible. Having the same account present in each of the four is strong evidence in support for that event happening.
From a different perspective, there are those that embrace a scientism that they will not believe in anything that can not be measured, experimented upon, or proven within the realm of the five senses. For those ascribing to this strict interpretation, religion and accounts of miracles are often dismissed as superstition, that if something indeed did happen, there is a scientific explanation to dismiss the miraculous. Even some believers may discount the record of the feeding of the five thousand as more of a symbolic representation of the generosity and service encouraged by Jesus such that everyone gave their small share and there was enough for all, not that he actually was able to multiply the bread and fish.
These perspectives of downplaying the miracle of multiplication seek to reduce or limit Jesus to just his humanity, but he is so much more. Jesus is human, fully human, yes, even more so after his resurrection, but he is also fully divine. Coming to understand the wonder of the unity of the divinity and humanity of Jesus can help us better understand the reality of our world and the whole of the cosmos.
One of the core aspects of who we are as human beings is that we are people of wonder. The physical sciences are tools that we have in our toolbox that we can access to help us to understand our physical realm, while at the same time we also have spiritual tools that help us to receive insights from both physical and spiritual realities. The physical sciences actually emerge precisely because of our spiritual pursuit to understand the wonders of God’s creation. In accessing both faith and reason, we come to have a broader picture, more pieces of the puzzle in which to put together and better experience our world.
When we limit or explain away the miracles of Jesus we rob ourselves of a more accurate picture of reality. One concrete example of this is when our third president, Thomas Jefferson, took a sharp object and painstakingly cut out verses from the Bible and pasted them to blank pages. He did so in columns of Latin and Greek on one side of the paper and French and English on the other. This eighty-four-page tome is commonly called the Jefferson Bible, but the president titled it: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. This text offers a human portrayal of Jesus that dismisses anything divine.
If we remove ourselves from the divine such that we experience, explore, and think from the perspective of the finite material realm solely, we will miss a deeper expression of who we are as human beings and much of the joy and gift of life. It stands to reason then why we would find it hard to believe in miracles, the mystical, and the spiritual. The miracles are not a self-aggrandizing move on Jesus’ part, but a move of love and empathy. Jesus is moved, time and again, to reach out in love, to care for and support those who are in need. They are also a foretaste of heaven. Jesus entered into our human condition, fully divine to become fully human. In doing so, he opened up heaven for us.
We need to resist the temptation to write off too quickly the miracles of Jesus. May we also not dismiss the gift and value of the sciences. By approaching our world with a both/and approach, we will get a better understanding of and appreciation for not only the gift and wonder of creation but also who we are as human beings. God has imparted within us the ability to access and develop both our faith and reason, to think critically, and to pray and meditate more deeply.
Jesus as the firstborn of the new creation embodies the reality of the fullness of who we are called by God and in the depths of our souls, aspire to be, human and divine. Jesus is still present to us today, knocking on the doors of our hearts, minds, and souls. If we only follow the moral and social teachings of Jesus, as did Thomas Jefferson, we will experience some benefit but we will limit ourselves by cutting out the very life force that sustains those virtues we hope to aspire to and we will not understand the ground and foundation of those morals and social teachings in the first place.
We will access more of the fullness of all that God the Father offers us when we open the door to his Son this Easter Season and invite the Holy Spirit in. Let us continue our journey, to read and pray together the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. May we resist rejecting outright what we do not understand or comprehend, and instead be willing to ponder the wonders that God seeks to unfold for us, the gift of God’s grace building on nature, the reality of God-incidences all around us, and embrace the eternal foundation and ground of our being which is the Trinitarian Love of God. In this way, we will then come to know and love God, so we can  serve him and one another better,
Photo: A moment to be grateful for the wonder of God’s creation.
Link for the Mass readings for Friday, April 17, 2026

To understand better, we need to breathe with both lungs of faith and reason.

Asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come, Jesus said in reply, “The coming of the Kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘Look, here it is,’ or, ‘There it is.’ For behold, the Kingdom of God is among you” (Lk 17:20-21).

Many of the Pharisees were scrutinizing Jesus’ every word and action, unfortunately, with a hard heart. They were closed to the reality present before them because they were looking for ways to accuse him, to catch him, to have cause to show him to be a fraud. They were closed to the actual events happening around Jesus that the blind saw, the deaf heard, the lame walked, lepers, were healed, the dead had arisen, and the poor had the good news proclaimed to them (cf. Matthew 11:5).

They missed the very reality that the Kingdom of God was in their midst. We see this very much today through the mental posturing of “scientism”, the belief that the only reality is that which can be measured empirically, through the five senses. Scientists have brought about many advances and innovations that we enjoy today, yet there is a reality beyond the physical. This is the spiritual, which transcends the three-dimensional reality that we experience and are aware of through our senses. We understand the world around us better when we embrace both science and theology, the physical and the spiritual, as well as embrace the gifts of our reason and our faith, our faith which is not irrational but supra-rational!

If our mind is closed to an idea, a reality, and/or a belief we will not only resist believing, we will also seek rationalizations to explain it away as did some of the Pharisees. From a hypersensitivity to accept only the physical, we can brush off acts of synchronicity as mere coincidence. Yet, if we are open to the spiritual reality of interconnectedness beyond that which we can measure finitely, these incidences can be termed, God-incidences.

We cannot solve or prove God like a problem because God is not in the genus of being, he is not an animal, a human, an angelic, spiritual, or even a supreme being. There are no words to adequately describe God. This is why pronouns are woefully inadequate as well, for God is neither male nor female. We can say more about what God is not than what or who God is! The best attempts we have are that God is an Infinite Act of Existence or to use the phrasing of St Thomas Aquinas, Ipsum Esse Subsistens – The sheer act of ‘to be’ itself, or as God said to Moses, “I am, who am” (Exodus 3:14). God is completely transcendent, beyond categories, beyond the genus, beyond the grasp of our finite minds, and yet, we can experience him because as St. Augustine thought, God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.

We will not encounter God by forcing God to come to us on our own terms, by attempting to force-fit God into our finite conceptions. God meets us where we are and as we are, on his terms. As we open ourselves to his presence, accept his invitation, he then helps us to expand, to experience more broadly, who we, others, and our world are. We experience this best when we truly love, when we go out from our own self-centered stance to will the good of another, to love. We become more when we follow what truly brings us joy and fulfills us. We encounter God through embracing the wonders of his creation!

As Jesus said to Philip, “Whoever has seen me, has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). The Kingdom of God is among us because Jesus is who he said he is. Jesus is fully God and fully man in our midst. By his very presence, he shows us that there is no opposition or competition but a union between heaven and earth. We will never fully comprehend God, but we can come to know and understand God, ourselves, and the world around us better when we breathe with both lungs of faith and reason, embrace our intellect as well as our spirit. As St. John Paul II stated, “Faith without reason is superstition” and as attributed to Albert Einstein, “Reason without faith is boring.”

Photo: Just three of the many Catholic scientists, Fr. Georges Lemaître, founder of the Big Bang Theory, Louis Pasteur, inventor of pasteurization, and Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel, father of genetics.

Link for the Mass readings for Thursday, November 13, 2025