Cardinal Schonborn has been delivering a series of catechetical lectures on Creation and Evolution since last October, in large part as a response to the controversy raised by his articles for the New York Times and First Things.

The fourth lecture in this series, "He upholds the universe by His word and power" has just been translated into English. The previous lectures in this series are available through our online texts section.

"He upholds the universe by His word and power"

Is there any point in praying for good weather? In the late 1960s I heard a lecture by a theology professor who explained to us students that it is completely senseless to pray for good weather; since the weather is entirely determined by inner-worldly causes, God does not intervene and everything plays out according to natural laws. This is why there is no point in praying for rain or sunshine.

If a mother is sick with cancer, is there any point in her children and her husband praying for her to be healed? Suppose she is healed: has God intervened or have the forces of nature acted in a healing way? Suppose she is not healed: what kind of God is it that ignores the tears of the children and the pleading of the husband? Can God not help? Then He is impotent. Does He not want to help? Then He is cruel and merciless.

Praise of the Creator

Does God act in the world today? Our faith takes this to be an elementary truth. To believe that God exists is also to believe that He acts, and not just now and then, not just sometime back at the beginning, but constantly, since everything has its origin in Him and since He upholds everything and directs everything to its end. Is this faith just an arbitrary assumption, a kind of drug for numbing ourselves a little in this trying world, an "opium of the people," as Karl Marx (1818-1883) called religion? Does this faith have any basis that shows it to be reasonable, meaningful, beautiful, and good?

Read the rest of this lecture.