Navigating the relationship between science and faith can be something of a minefield. Fr Georges Lemaître (whom I wrote about last month) was not too pleased when Pope Pius XII suggested that his cosmological theory had succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux (“let there be light”) at the beginning of time. Lemaître was right to be concerned.
Centuries earlier, St Thomas Aquinas recalled a thought experiment from the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides to explain why it is impossible to prove that either the world had a beginning or was eternal. In this thought experiment, a boy whose mother died in his infancy is raised on a solitary island where there are no other children. When the boy reaches the age of reason, he asks someone whether and how people are made. When an account of human generation is explained to the boy, he rejects it as absurd. After all, from his limited experience, he is convinced that people need to breathe, eat and expel waste in order to live, and so understandably the boy thinks no one would be able to survive even one day, let alone nine months in their mother’s womb.
