The First Cause

Do you remember reading this last year, from Fr Ronald Knox, The Creed in Slow Motion? It talks about the same thing the Pope is talking about. Though God by definition can't be "proved" by experiments, anyone who looks at the universe and thinks like a scientist will eventually find themselves thinking about Him. It is quite unavoidable.

It's an inveterate habit of man to ask "Why?" Most of us have been told off about it in the nursery, and discouraged from doing it. I remember once travelling in the train with a small boy who pointed to the clock in Banbury station and asked, "What does that clock say?" And the mother said, "It's a quarter to two". And the small boy said, "Why is it a quarter to two?" A child like that grows up Into a scientist, and spends its whole life asking why. All our science comes from the human habit of asking for the reason of everything, our ineradicable belief that every event must have a cause.

And when we've pushed that habit as far as it will go, all we have done is to weave long chains of causes, each one depending on the next. Why did you twist your ankle? Because the low gate into the garden was shut when you didn't expect it to be. Why was it shut? To keep the little pigs out. Why were the little pigs running loose? Because there wasn't enough feed for them if they were put in a sty. Why wasn't there enough feed for them? Because ships get torpedoed in the Atlantic. Why do ships get torpedoed in the Atlantic? Because we are at war with Germany. Why are we at war with Germany? And so on. The series of causes stretches back and back, and you never get to the end of it.

But, you see, it can' t really be infinite. Because an infinite series of causes all depending on one another wouldn't be a sufficient explanation of anything. Somewhere, at the end of that chain, there must be a First Cause which is not caused by anything which went before it. And that First Cause is God. His face looks down at us, as we try to run away from him, looks down this long avenue of causality, and reminds us that he made us; we did not make ourselves.

"All right," says the scientist, "we won't talk about causes and effects, if it has these uncomfortable consequences. We will content ourselves with observing the pattern of things as we find it in our experience; the wonderful order there is in nature, and so on." But, you see, that doesn't make them any better off. Order can only be the expression of a mind; and who was it that put that order into nature, which we discover with our scientific instruments? If you take a razor-blade, and a blade of grass, and put them under a powerful microscope, you'll find that the edge of a razor-blade isn't really straight at all; it's all hopelessly jagged and uneven, so that you can't imagine why your father doesn't cut himself shaving every morning instead of just some mornings. But the blade of grass is still absolutely even all along, not a dent in it. Now, who did that? Not you or I.

The more we try to map out the pattern of nature, the more are we driven to the conclusion that it exhibits the working of a Mind greater than any human mind. And this creative Mind we have to call God. We have looked along a fresh avenue of experience, and still we see his face looking down at us through the trees.

End of This Lesson