O Ancião said…
Joe, Congratulations for this excellent site. It has indeed extensive apologetic resources. On past weeks, I´ve been following your texts and must say Shameless Popery has raised between my favorite catholic sites.
I write also for a catholic site in portuguese(http://jornadasespirituais.blogspot.com/ – In english, “Spiritual Journeys”). It is dedicated to biblical exegesis, specially of the psalms, but I always put some apologetics on it.
Keep working. Sucess on the laptop recover quest. Pray to Saint Anthony of Padua to find it again: “Cedunt mare, vincula, membra resque, perditas Petunt et accipiunt Iuvenes et cani.”
Very cool comment! It’s flattering to know that someone as far away as Brazil is reading (and enjoying!) this blog. If you’re wondering about the prayer, it’s a prayer to St. Anthony attributed to St. Bonaventure, and the part quoted reads: The sea withdraws and fetters break, And withered limbs he doth restore, While treasures lost are found again, When young or old his help implore. Very apt!
The blog he writes seems excellent, and I’m frustrated that I don’t speak Portugese. Google Translator did a pretty good job auto-translating it, but there’s obviously a bit that’s lost in translation. I like the wit of the blog, from the references to Monty Python, and the old TV show Dinosaurs, to the general light-heartedness. Also, he’s working through an exegesis of each Psalm, one by one: a fantastic spiritual exercise.
Psalm 138 inspires him to write these words, translated by Google, and paraphrased slightly by me. Psalm 138 is about how God knows everything, so he discusses the gravity of the omniscience of God:
To be omniscient with respect to the matter is colossal for human thought, but to be omniscient with respect to time is paradoxical. […] God knows the position and velocity of each particle in this universe that left the breath of his [David’s] lips (Ps. 32.3). It is a knowledge beyond all comprehension by the volume of information, but it is really intangible.
But to be omniscient with respect to time! To be omniscient is much more than to be prescient! This is crushing. To know everything and more, to know the Future. After all, this generates a paradox in time. God acts already knowing what will be. And already knowing, if He decided not to act, would He fall into a paradox? Is it reasonable to expect that the Schrodinger cat temporal apply to God? […] No. God has access to infinite probabilities, that is to elevate everything to the power infinity. But while he sees all odds, God knows for sure what happens and will happen.