Thank You To Our Autumn Lecture Speaker, Monica Grady

A Thank You To Our Autumn Lecture Speaker, Monica Grady

Bill Phillips

On behalf of all of us, I would like to thank Professor Grady for a wonderfully informative and, as the questions showed, stimulating evening at CPW’s Autumn Lecture on 22nd October. Professor Grady introduced awe with the images of the developing universe. We know from teaching, that awe is the spiritual aspect of science. She displayed honesty and a depth of thought in her answers to the very deep questions, the depth of which were a tribute to the stimulus she gave us. I particularly liked the tricky one; ‘How would we know if an Alien had a soul?’

I very much appreciated Professor Grady drawing parallels between Science and Faith and wondered if those parallels extended to Evolution. She identified the last mystery in Science as the future of humankind. Is there, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggested, a similar evolution in the spiritual life of faith? There certainly was in the Middle Ages when the original view of Natural Law assumed that, as the natural world was better understood, so would our ideas of the moral life change. Pope Francis appears to be taking that point of cross over between Science and Faith in Laudato Si.

When faced by such questions, it might be excusable to join Winnie-the-Pooh in a certain perplexity as he said;

‘”When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed Very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets into the open and has other people looking at it.’”

Monica gave us the chance to take out some of those Thingish Things and let others look at them.

Thank you so much.