Sunday Sermonette: The Curate's Egg
“All you need to know that God exists is unaided human reason.”
The nine o’clock Sunday Mass, held in the basement known as the Lower Church, was designated the Children’s Mass. The liturgy was simplified for young believers, and a phalanx of nuns from the convent next door served as overseers and wardens. This was the Mass celebrated by the popular priest, the young athletic one fresh out of seminary. In Catholic parlance, he was a curate, an assistant to the parish priest.
“Where do chickens come from?” asked the curate.
“Eggs!” responded the kids in the front pews.
“And where do eggs come from?”
“Chickens!”
“Nope, my pocket. Do you believe I have an egg in my pocket?”
The youthful congregation looked dubious. Did priests even have pockets? Pushing aside his chasuble and pulling up his alb, we discovered that he wore ordinary street clothes under the long white robe and colorful poncho. He reached into his pocket and produced an egg.
“There, you see? But I didn’t make this egg. A chicken made this egg. And another chicken made the egg that hatched and laid this egg. And so on, as far back as you want to go. But somebody had to make the first egg. Eggs don’t just happen, not even in my pocket. The world didn’t just start spinning all on its own. Someone had to push. Someone had to be there in the beginning. Who do you suppose that was?”
And so it was that while still in grammar school I was introduced to the thirteenth century philosopher, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and his proof of God as Uncaused Cause, the First Mover. The Church has always claimed that God could by known by the light of unaided human reason, and Aquinas claimed to prove it with what is now called the Cosmological Argument in his Summa Theologica, written between 1265 and 1274 CE.
I wasn’t about to disagree. I was a kid; in front of me was a priest who for some unaccountable reason kept eggs in his trouser pockets, and the source of the argument was the greatest mind of Holy Mother Church. It never occurred to me to do anything but accept this wisdom unquestioningly.
Forty-five years later, the me who was once a little boy sitting on a hard pew has his hand in the air and is waving it frantically.
The answer is, I don’t know, and neither do you, and neither did Aquinas. The question is begged from the beginning. Why should there be a “who” that set the ball rolling? Then follows the special pleading: If everything has to have a beginning, where did God begin? Maybe the universe has no beginning. “Universe” doesn’t mean “this object,” it means “all that is.” It’s a lot harder to wrap your brain around (actually, it’s pretty much impossible), but how does an incomprehensibility called “God” explain an incomprehensibility called “universe”?
It is natural to feel a sense of wonder and awe when thinking about the cosmos. The numbers alone boggle the mind. 13.75 billion years old, 93 billion light years in diameter (at least so far as we know today), and yet the Big Bang theory says that it was all once contained in a space about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The Big Bang is a complex theory that I do not even begin to understand, but here’s the important thing: Scientists and atheists do not have faith in the Big Bang the way believers do in their Prime Mover. If tomorrow we found evidence that the universe was eternal and banana-shaped, there would be great rejoicing. New information! New areas to explore! New knowledge to be gained! Another discredited theory would be tossed in the dustbin of scientific history. Science, after all, is not facts to be memorized, but a method of investigation.
Even if I were to accept the attempt to define God into existence simply by applying that word to the arbitrary termination of an infinite regress of cause an effect, what does that definition tell us? What information do we gain?
Absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. It answers no questions, it adds no information, it gives us no useful data. All it does is allow you to take a word heavily freighted by eons of cultural baggage and load on another steamer trunk.
There’s an old George du Maurier cartoon that appeared in Punch in 1895.
Right Reverend Host. "I’m afraid you’ve got a bad Egg, Mr. Jones!"
The Curate. "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellect!"
The idea that the existence of God can be established by unaided human reason using flawed explanations like the Cosmological Argument is like that egg. When part of an egg is bad, the whole is bad, and no amount of humility or deference can change it.
The nine o’clock Sunday Mass, held in the basement known as the Lower Church, was designated the Children’s Mass. The liturgy was simplified for young believers, and a phalanx of nuns from the convent next door served as overseers and wardens. This was the Mass celebrated by the popular priest, the young athletic one fresh out of seminary. In Catholic parlance, he was a curate, an assistant to the parish priest.
“Where do chickens come from?” asked the curate.
“Eggs!” responded the kids in the front pews.
“And where do eggs come from?”
“Chickens!”
“Nope, my pocket. Do you believe I have an egg in my pocket?”
The youthful congregation looked dubious. Did priests even have pockets? Pushing aside his chasuble and pulling up his alb, we discovered that he wore ordinary street clothes under the long white robe and colorful poncho. He reached into his pocket and produced an egg.
“There, you see? But I didn’t make this egg. A chicken made this egg. And another chicken made the egg that hatched and laid this egg. And so on, as far back as you want to go. But somebody had to make the first egg. Eggs don’t just happen, not even in my pocket. The world didn’t just start spinning all on its own. Someone had to push. Someone had to be there in the beginning. Who do you suppose that was?”
And so it was that while still in grammar school I was introduced to the thirteenth century philosopher, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and his proof of God as Uncaused Cause, the First Mover. The Church has always claimed that God could by known by the light of unaided human reason, and Aquinas claimed to prove it with what is now called the Cosmological Argument in his Summa Theologica, written between 1265 and 1274 CE.
I wasn’t about to disagree. I was a kid; in front of me was a priest who for some unaccountable reason kept eggs in his trouser pockets, and the source of the argument was the greatest mind of Holy Mother Church. It never occurred to me to do anything but accept this wisdom unquestioningly.
Forty-five years later, the me who was once a little boy sitting on a hard pew has his hand in the air and is waving it frantically.
The answer is, I don’t know, and neither do you, and neither did Aquinas. The question is begged from the beginning. Why should there be a “who” that set the ball rolling? Then follows the special pleading: If everything has to have a beginning, where did God begin? Maybe the universe has no beginning. “Universe” doesn’t mean “this object,” it means “all that is.” It’s a lot harder to wrap your brain around (actually, it’s pretty much impossible), but how does an incomprehensibility called “God” explain an incomprehensibility called “universe”?
It is natural to feel a sense of wonder and awe when thinking about the cosmos. The numbers alone boggle the mind. 13.75 billion years old, 93 billion light years in diameter (at least so far as we know today), and yet the Big Bang theory says that it was all once contained in a space about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The Big Bang is a complex theory that I do not even begin to understand, but here’s the important thing: Scientists and atheists do not have faith in the Big Bang the way believers do in their Prime Mover. If tomorrow we found evidence that the universe was eternal and banana-shaped, there would be great rejoicing. New information! New areas to explore! New knowledge to be gained! Another discredited theory would be tossed in the dustbin of scientific history. Science, after all, is not facts to be memorized, but a method of investigation.
Even if I were to accept the attempt to define God into existence simply by applying that word to the arbitrary termination of an infinite regress of cause an effect, what does that definition tell us? What information do we gain?
Absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. It answers no questions, it adds no information, it gives us no useful data. All it does is allow you to take a word heavily freighted by eons of cultural baggage and load on another steamer trunk.
There’s an old George du Maurier cartoon that appeared in Punch in 1895.
Right Reverend Host. "I’m afraid you’ve got a bad Egg, Mr. Jones!"
The Curate. "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellect!"
The idea that the existence of God can be established by unaided human reason using flawed explanations like the Cosmological Argument is like that egg. When part of an egg is bad, the whole is bad, and no amount of humility or deference can change it.