Philosophy, Fate or Faith?

 

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The apostle Paul had sensibly travelled far south to Athens following hostility to his message in northern Greece. While waiting for his friends, Silas and Timothy, to catch up, Paul, like any other tourist today, looked around the city, viewing the Acropolis, etc. He was quite moved by what he saw. 

 

Athens was then the cultural centre of the Roman Empire. It had been the cradle of democracy and was the centre of learning in just about every field of human interest: philosophy, music, theatre, religion, mathematics and science, etc. It reads like a list of university departments. Indeed, says the Bible, the whole city seemed to be given over to the full-time pursuit of novelty, ‘hearing and telling some new thing’. 

 

Paul followed his normal practice of preaching in the synagogue to Jews and Gentile proselytes. Still, in order to meet others, he went to the marketplace – The Agora - with its public debating place, the Hyde Park Corner of its day, and engaged in street preaching and debating with people he met. 

What Albert Einstein really said!

 

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Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, ‘Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.’ From these words, many people have got great comfort and encouragement, and rightly so. However, there’s every indication that this quotation is, in fact, a fake as far as Einstein is concerned. The quotation is not in any definitive, authenticated list of Einstein’s many sourced sayings or quotable quotes. Actually, the first written reference you can find to it is in a book written by Matthew Kelly, published in 2004, nearly half a century after Albert Einstein’s death in 1955. 

 

However, at the same time, there are quite a number of genuine Albert Einstein quotations about spiritual matters. Let’s have a look at some of them for a few minutes. The first area we’ll look at is Einstein’s view of the universe and its creator. 

Climate Change

 

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I’m sure you’ve noticed that commenters on weather conditions in the UK over the last few years increasingly include such words as ‘brightest, coldest, driest, dullest, hottest, stillest, wettest, or windiest’. Even the most sceptical among us must surely recognise that extremes of weather are unmistakably the order of the day. 

 

Most people put this climate change down to global warming – currently running at about 1.5 degrees Celsius per century. Over the same time scale as this so-far relentless increase in temperature, the global carbon dioxide level has risen by over 22% and is still increasing, in fact, accelerating! As this is due to human activity, the story would seem clear – carbon dioxide is a so-called greenhouse gas that causes a temperature increase and that, in turn, results in a disturbance of the earth’s weather systems. Really, something should be done about it. However, some people are still not convinced. 

Getting a Deep Clean

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 In January 2016, in N. Ireland there was an outbreak of a bacterial infection called Pseudomonas Aeruginosa. In a two-week period it caused the death of three infants. This infection causes breathing difficulties and tissue damage. It is reported that the bacteria can take hold in areas such as sinks and in water pipes with stagnant water and can live for several days on various surfaces. A university bacteriologist reportedly said that this is a bug which is very common in nature. The hospital ordered a deep clean of the neo-natal ward involved and succeeded in eradicating the infection.