Preparing for the Miraculous

eing human and the copernican principle 127The radical materialism of some Enlightenment philosophers,added to the general attitude of pragmatismand scepticism – the right to question anything now declaredto be the birthright of any human – led inevitably tothe decline of the angry and vengeful God of the Hebrews,whom Christ’s Father of Love had not succeeded in replacing.Moreover, experts now investigated the text of the Biblewith the same objectivity as they examined any othertext, and found numerous surprisingly human featuresin the “Word of God.” This, and the increasing resistanceagainst the very human and corrupt mammoth institutionthat was the Catholic Church, led in the 19th century to“God’s funeral,” the title of a book by A.N. Wilson in whichhe writes: “It seemed as if there were no good argumentsleft for religion. If, either for emotional reasons or becauseyou believed in religion as a socially conservative cement,you wished to preserve the forms, you could only do so atthe expense of the intellect.” 9In the present era of “postmodern” confusion, accordingto the Aurobindian view not the symptom of decadencebut the sign of transition and rebirth, most of these problemsand unresolved tensions between science, religion andspirituality remain not only alive, they also spread, carriedby the necessity of scientific education or training, throughoutour technological world. In this situation the words ofGeorge Tyrell are worth remembering: “One has to passthrough atheism to faith; the old God must be pulverizedand forgotten before the new can reveal himself to us.” 10“Knocking Man off his pedestal”In 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus, in his Revolutionibusde Orbium Coelestium published when on his deathbed,9 A.N. Wilson: God’s Funeral, p. 441.10 Id., p. 461.