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Aim: To make students fall in love with God, and with His Church. Everything else is secondary.
"Everything we will talk about here... is very serious. Which is not to say that it is grim. That is to say, that it matters."
Now, I actually don't really like the idea of this class existing. Not because we shouldn't talk about religion more, but because we don't talk about it nearly enough.
Where does everyone go to school?
Now, I don't know all your teachers, I don't know what they believe, I don't know for certain what they teach in the classroom, but I wager: they never talk about God, do they? And they probably never talk about not only how He matters, but how He is passionately in love with the world. They probably don't talk about how He relates to the subject matter. In fact they, or your friends, or people on the internet, might even besmirch God.
The bible is the greatest love story ever told. Imagine this: God is completely self-sufficient. He didn't need to do anything. He could have sat in heaven by himself. He could have stopped at making angels. But he took the risk to make man - a creature so divine, and yet with its own will. He gave us free will. "If you love someone, let them go", have you heard that? That's what God did. (REFERENCE?)
Why? Because God is Trinity. People always say "it's hard to explain the Trinity" - it really isn't. Just remember that God is so very very very good. God is Father - what do fathers do? They have sons. And the son loves the father, who loves the son - this is the spirit they share. This is the Godhead. This is what we were made in the image of. This is what we are trying to become. This is what we are meant for: love. And we don't mean that in a mushy gushy way. His love was borne on the Cross.
Okay, okay, you know all that. God is love. Great.
But what does He love? He loves the world. God is passionately in love with the world. So much that he gave his only son (REFERENCE). God cares for the flowers. (REFERENCE)
God cares about math. And history. And language. And music. and.. and...
If you think that God is an oppressive tyrant, I can see why this would sadden you. But we do not have a tyrant, we have a loving father. Who is strict and stern at times - for our sake.
We're led to believe there's the religion box, and then there's the rest of the world. That there's this church building you do stuff in, and then there's the rest of life. (REFERENCE: Pray ceaselessly)
"The first gulp from the glass of the natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you." - Heisenberg
If we go back to the 1800s, the "scientific consensus" was the Newtonian view of the universe: the world was infinite, static, vast, and empty. Everything moved predictably like clockwork. There really wasn't a central point or edge of the world. And so, there's no need for religion, man doesn't really matter...
But then Einstein published the Special Theory of Relativity, which has been a much better model for phenomena that scientists see. I'm not an expert physicist but one consequence of this is that time and space themselves had a beginning.
Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian physicist and Catholic priest, hypothesized that "all the matter in the universe was originally concentrated into an incredibly dense 'primeval atom' that exploded to produce the world we see" - sound familiar? That's the Big Bang theory.
Most scientists didn't like this. "To deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the very foundations of science", said Germany physicist Walter Nernst.
This is a breakthrough in viewing the world, but the world around us hasn't realized and appreciated it - because they do not see that God would be the source of this.
(Genesis 1)
Then, we have quantum physics, which isn't really a theory in physics, but a theory of physics. It's a totally different way of looking at things. Scientists began thinking of matter as packages of energy called quanta. And as they've experimented they've noticed a lot of weird things. Particles will do different things depending on if they're observed or not. Particles can become "entangled". Light behaves both like a wave - and like a particle. All of this just brings Newtonian physics to rubble. Of course it's still useful for most everyday calculations. But when it comes to explaining the fundamental realities of the world, it just falls flat.
Quantum particles can seem to "know" and correlate with each other seemingly simultaneously and instantaneously. Something very much "beyond" us is going on.
Newtonian physics asserts that everything is deterministic - as if there's no God, or God just wound the world up and walked away. But the reality is this: scientists cannot tell us what will happen, but only what might happen, because at the most fundamental level, the universe is free from "law". Einstein called this spooky.
"Quantum mechanics is very worthy of regard. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the right track. The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I in any case am convinced that He does not play dice."
Bohr replied: "Don't tell God what to do!"
One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality. Again, horrid news for an atheist. Wonderful old news for us.
"The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can clearly say and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely and uninteresting and trivial tautologies."
Max Planck, the "Father of Quantum Mechanics" tells us:
All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. Since there is neither an intelligent not an eternally abstract force in the whole universe... which moves of itself... we must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit. This is the matrix of all matter. Not the visible, transient matter is real, true, manifest ... but the invisible, immortal spirit is the real thing!
Every cosmic reality that exists owes its existence and characteristic to the act of creation - not an event in the past, but an ongoing action of God in the present.