“The Foundation of the World” (Eph.1:4)
“In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was
God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through
him, and without him was made nothing that has been made. In him was
life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the
darkness; and the darkness grasped it not” (Jn.1:1-5).
With
these words about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and our Lord and
Savior, St. John begins his Gospel. And St. Paul declares:
“Blessed
be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with
every spiritual blessing on high in Christ. Even as he chose us in him
before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without
blemish in his sight in love. He predestined us to be adopted through
Jesus Christ as his sons, according to the purpose of his will, unto the
praise of the glory of his grace, with which he has favored us in his
beloved Son” (Eph.1:3-6).
Our
Lord fed the hungry multitudes in the wilderness with bread and fishes.
Through the Holy Scriptures and the teachings of the Church founded by
Jesus Christ, the Holy Catholic Church, He nourishes us with the Word of
Truth. Our Lord tells us:
“If
you abide in my word, you shall be my disciples indeed, and you shall
know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (Jn.8:31,32).
We also have Our Lord’s words to Pontius Pilate:
“Thou
sayest it; I am a king. This is why I was born, and why I have come
into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the
truth hears my voice” (Jn.18:37).
We
human beings need the guidance of our Good Shepherd, because it is so
easy for sheep to go astray. But God has also given us minds that can
understand the truth when it is clearly demonstrated. We must believe
what the Church teaches, but we also must believe what we can know by
natural means through the sciences, when we use our brains properly.
True science does not contradict the teachings of the Church. But there
is also pseudoscience.
Recently
I have heard some discussion about the flat earth theory. It is
important to bring this up, because to believe that the earth is flat,
and not a sphere like the other planets, requires a whole different way
of looking at the universe. Those who ascribe to the flat earth theory
claim that the earth is not a sphere that turns on its axis, so that the
sun rises in the east, and sets in the west. The sun is said to be much
smaller than believed, and much closer to the earth.
I
grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, where there is no place more than
thirty-five miles from the ocean. I have been told that if you are at
the shore watching a sailboat heading out to sea, after a while it seems
to be sinking. Eventually, all you can see is the top of the mast, and
that soon disappears. But the boat did not sink. It simply disappeared
below the horizon, because the surface of the earth is curved. The same
phenomenon may be observed anywhere in the world, because the earth is a
sphere.
There
are many communications satellites in space in orbits encircling the
earth. To deny this would be absurd, because our whole communications
system depends on satellites that receive and send signals from the
earth below and transmits them around the world. You can watch the news
live from London, Moscow, or Beijing. You can telephone your grandmother
in Australia or Norway. Pictures of the earth taken from these
satellites show that the earth is a sphere. The astronauts who traveled
from the earth to the moon could see the earth from space for
themselves. And they have not reported seeing that the earth is flat,
like a pancake. The earth is a sphere! The earth is NOT flat! And not
everything about space travel comes from the Disney Company, or
DreamWorks. The following is from an article by Douglas Main:
“‘With
extraordinarily few exceptions, no educated person in the history of
Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that
the Earth was flat,’ historian Jeffrey Burton Russell wrote in 1997. ‘A
round Earth appears at least as early as the sixth century B.C. with
Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus,
among others in observing that the earth was a sphere.’ By the first
century A.D., ‘the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated
Greeks and Romans’” (Douglas Main, Newsweek, 1/28/16).
As for the Church, we have no less an authority than St. Thomas Aquinas:
“Thomas
Aquinas (1225 – 1274), the most important and widely taught theologian
of the Middle Ages, believed in a spherical Earth; and he even took for
granted his readers also knew the Earth is round. In his Summa Theologica
he wrote, ‘The physicist proves the earth to be round by one means, the
astronomer by another: for the latter proves this by means of
mathematics, e.g. by the shapes of eclipses, or something of that sort;
while the former proves it by means of physics, e.g. by the movement of
heavy bodies towards the center, and so forth.’ Lectures in the medieval
universities commonly advanced evidence in favor of the idea that the
Earth was a sphere. Also, ‘On the Sphere of the World’, the most influential astronomy textbook of the 13th century and required reading by students in all Western European universities, described the world as a sphere.” (Flat Earth, Wikipedia).
We give praise and thanks to God for this marvelous and beautiful earth:
