#729 When Science Hits The Wall: Piety, Father Georges Lemaitre, and the Big Bang

A universe with a beginning is a strange kind of good news and it’s not just for physicists. We sit down with historian and prolific author Russell Lawson to follow a 2,500-year thread most people never hear: for centuries, doing science was often understood as a pious act, a way of reading creation with awe, patience, and humility. When that older posture fades, we don’t just lose “religion” we lose meaning, purpose, and the courage to ask the biggest questions. 

We dig into the cultural turn Lawson calls modernization: the move from rural life to industrial cities, from silence to constant noise, and from “God’s providence is real” to “humans can fix everything.” That modern mindset can feel powerful, but it can also leave people stuck in cognitive dissonance...resulting in anxiety, and spiritual exhaustion... especially when the heart is searching for love and the mind is still searching for truth. 

Then we get concrete with science and the Big Bang. Father Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest and mathematician, helps introduce the idea of an expanding universe and a real beginning. The more astronomy pushes toward the singularity, the clearer the limit becomes: science can trace physical evidence back to a start, but it cannot answer what came before time. That boundary doesn’t destroy science; it invites humility and opens a sane conversation about God. 

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Transcript

Welcome And Meet Russell Lawson

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Claymore Become Who You Are podcast, the production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. I'm Jack Riggert, your host. I'm excited to be with Russell Lawson. Russell is the author of two dozen books. He's taught school in New England, Oklahoma, Ontario. He is a self-proclaimed compulsive writer, writing on scientists, explorers, missionaries, the history of America, Europe, and the world, the history of ideas, particularly Christian ideas. He lives and he grew up in Oklahoma, is married, has three grown sons, two dogs, two cats, a convert to Roman Catholicism. It was after he was married with three children that he had a born-again experience and became Catholic. Russell, you just wrapped up a four-month series called The Pious Scientist for the Catholic Exchange. What inspired you to trace the relationship between faith and science across 2,500 years? Quite quite a quite a project. And why did you decide to end the whole series with Father George Lemaitre and the Big Bang?

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Well, I've been looking at the relationship between piety and science for a long time. Originally, when I was in graduate school many, many, many years ago, I began to look at the uh theories behind science because I um I went to a school where the professors believed that history, I'm a historian, that they believed that history was a science. And so I wanted to find out, well, is history a science? And so I spent a lot of time reading about the theory of science, although I'm not a trained scientist, but I read about the theory of science and discovered some of the changes that had occurred in science since World War II and the atomic bomb. And uh from there I began to um study a lot about science and connect it with uh Western thought, and I did a uh uh PhD dissertation on a congregational minister who uh lived in Boston. And when I did that work on him, he was a minister, but like a lot of scientists in early America, uh the scientists were amateurs, they weren't professionals, and they tended to be the well-educated that came out of Harvard and Yale and some of the schools at that time. So most of the most of the congregational ministers in uh 18th century New England were scientists, and that's what he was. Interesting. Uh he wrote um uh books about the flora and fauna of New Hampshire, the geography of New Hampshire, and he wrote about the history of New Hampshire. He saw them all connected together, in other words, human history and natural history.

Science As A Pious Act

SPEAKER_00 2:54

And so I learned a lot from that because I what it taught me was that before about late 1800s in Europe and America, uh, before, you know, in other words, about 150 years ago, scientists tended to be amateurs, they weren't professionalized yet, they weren't connected with universities, um, they weren't these specialists like we have today. And scientists were generalists, they were naturalists, they um spent a lot of their time looking at all different aspects of science. They looked at human science and biology, and they looked at physics and chemistry and geography, and even considered history to be a science, because science meant an inquiry into the human or natural past. And if you go back to the, I thought I betcha everyone has heard of Herodotus before. He was the, he's often called the father of history. He lived in the fifth century uh BC, uh, and he wrote a book called Histories. He just titled it Histories. And the Greek word for that is not um learn about all the names and dates and spit it back on a test. That's not what he meant by history, which is what a lot of people think history is. He meant inquiries. That was the the actual um uh literal translation of the Greek was inquiries. And by that, if you read Herodotus' history, you'll find that he is not only interested in human history, but he's also interested in everything. So even the supernatural history. So as I uh have studied these, I have slowly begun to examine Christians who were scientists, and I begin to realize that for both scientists before, like I say, after the Civil War, they believed that science was a pious act. In other words, the reason why you engaged in science was not not because you were trying to publish some sort of intricate study of something, but you were studying science because you wanted to understand everything and you wanted to understand the creation. You wanted to understand why God made the creation the way it is. So to study the creation, in other words, to study science meant that you were actually uncovering uh truths about God is is a passage or a means, so to speak, you know.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

No, uh isn't it I I think it's it's worth pausing here for a second because that was not that long ago. And we assumed that there was some transcendent power and that most of them were calling God, you know, and uh we got really away from that. And and young this is very important for young people to understand this, that that this is relatively new in history of of the creation for sure, but uh of mankind. This is relatively new to push God totally out, the idea of a transcendent totally out. And I'll just say one more thing, Russell. Love to get your opinion on this. We we've taken you know the essence of meaning and purpose out of those questions, haven't we? It you know, we we we stopped reflecting on who the human person is in relation to God, in relation to all of creation and and all of history.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Yeah. Well, we've become very secular. It's not just because of the universities, it's not just because um scientists became specialized in universities. It's because of something that I like to refer to as modernization. You find

Modernization And The Loss Of Silence

SPEAKER_00 6:43

that in the mid-19th century in in America and in Western Europe and then later on in the rest of the world, you find such dramatic changes occurring going from an agricultural-based economy and a rural-based uh society to an urban society. And whenever that happens, it begins to change how people think. Um, we go from in America what is what historians often call a traditional mentality or way of thinking, or a pre-modern mentality. And in that pre-modern mentality, there was a belief that God's providence is supreme. And so if something happens, then you can you can be sure that God is behind it.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Yeah, let let me just because I I don't want people to miss this because I I was just dwelling on this myself.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

What you know, we talked about this, the you know, the industrial uh uh revolution coming from uh you know an agricultural society, uh moving into cities versus being out, you know, in the country. And I wonder Russell in you know, how much of that uh has to do with taking silence out. You know, uh you know, a man would be working, say, on his farm or in a field, or or as a blacksmith, say. He would be spending a lot of time alone, uh, you know, working on something. He's involved, but at the same time pausing every once in a while to look up, right? And of course, we didn't have air conditioners and furnaces and all these homes. So we were really affected. How how much of that is just noise, I wonder, you know, moving into an industrial factory where everything's humming and people are all around you, just noise. Uh, an urban environment where you you know your neighbors are yelling at each other through paper thin walls, and and I remember this growing up on the south side of Chicago.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

It changes you.

unknown 8:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

You know, if uh if there's a lot of different things that's that people, students can read. A really fascinating book is um a book by uh Henry Adams. He was the uh great grandson of John Adams, and he was an American intellectual in the late 19th century. Uh he wrote some fiction and he wrote some really important histories. But uh he wrote a book called Education, and it was um it was his autob autobiography. And in that book, he describes how he was born in the eighteen thirties, and he said when he was born in the eighteen thirties that God was a father and nature was a mother, and he used a symbolic term for that. He called it the virgin, and by that he meant the virgin meaning a religious virgin, or uh you could also think of it as a natural virgin, the virgin wilderness. And then as an old man, well, when he was pretty old, he went to the Chicago uh exhibition or the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and there was uh all the new technology on display. And he was fascinated by there were all these examples of electric motors, which were brand new at that time, using the power of electricity to to actually uh mechanize things and mechanize work. And he thought that was another symbol, and he called it the dynamo. And so in his education, he writes that America has gone from the 1830s to the eighteen nineties, from the virgin to the dynamo. It's gone from believing that God is in charge to believing a machine is in charge. And the thing about it is the machines are made by humans. And so if you just follow that line of thought, we go from thinking that God isn't is behind everything to humans are behind everything. We can solve everything, we have all the answers. And in, you know, if you believe that, if you start to believe that we humans have all the answers, who needs God?

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

We don't need God. I mean, yeah, once upon a time, God, you know, he was the one that we all looked to, but we m we know better now. The human mind, mathematics, thinking, science, industry, applied science, technology, all of that, we can solve all the problems. We can uh we can um find uh solutions to every kind of technological difficulty. We can even leave the Earth's atmosphere. We can, you know, um uh heal people of just about any kind of disease. You don't have to pray for God to come and and heal us. We can do it ourselves. And so there's a that's what's called the modern mentality, and it's is changing how humans think about things. So, like I say, it's not just the the fact that we have universities where we have specialists that are starting to assume that that God is no longer important when it comes to trying to find out knowledge about things, but we also have an entire society that is moving in the direction of believing that God is no longer necessary. God is no longer involved. I mean, God is, you know, we we don't need God. I mean, you could you don't need God for your cell phone, I'll tell you that, or for your laptop, or if you go to work or something like that. We have machines. We get to to work in our cars, we do all sorts of stuff like that. So here's completely different mentality.

The Big Bang And Father Lemaitre

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Yeah, so I think this is this is where the Big Bang comes in. You know, it it's amazing. So I just had a this conversation with uh with young people and and let's call them 18 to 35 or so. Yep. And I and I asked them when I walked in, I said, okay, guys, I know there's a lot of noise, a lot of confusion, a lot of things going on, you know, and some of you are waking up and asking what the truth is, but some of you have been sitting with that proverbial frog for so long, you you have no idea, right? We everything that you just said. And it's very difficult, right? It's you know, the psychological term going on with them, uh Russell, is cognitive dissonance. You know, this is anxiety and depression and even suicidal thoughts because their heart's not aligning with everything out there. You know, you're you're you the human heart is so it's looking for love, huh? It's and and reason is seeking the truth. You know, what is the truth of things? And so what I told them, Russell, it's very interesting what you brought up, and I'm and I'm thinking about the big, you know, transitioning into the Big Bang here, but what I told them is what happens if that anxiety, that kind of even depression you feel, it's not something wrong with your heart. The mental illness is out there. And because you're sitting with the proverbial frog, because you're not asking what the truth of things is, you're feeling this, right? And the human heart was made for more. And so this was my question to them. I said, you know, anybody here create the universe, raise your hand. Nobody? Anyone here, you know, write meaning and purpose into this big story that we came into. We were exploded on stage at one point called Your Life at one point of history, and uh, and we didn't put the meaning and purpose into this. Yet we're so proud, right? We're so proud that we think we created all this. I said, go outside and look at the stars, will you please? And and tell me how much we created. So let's talk a little let's talk a little bit about that that Big Bang, right? Because this is what happened to science. It finally hit it hit a wall, didn't it, uh Russell? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Yeah. Well, I think that the Big Bang just means that uh scientists began to um believe that the universe actually started with something. In other words, it wasn't eternal. Uh for a long, long time, uh going, I mean, through the centuries, not Christians, but a lot of other thinkers believed that the universe must be eternal and that there wasn't a really a start to it. And there were a lot of scientists that believe this too.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Even Einstein really took that on, right? I mean, he really thought that, hey, this is a stagnant, uh static, I should say, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:09

Steady state, they often called it. And it uh um, but there was, you know, there's a Christian foundation for the notion of creation. We find it in the Old Testament, of course, but you also find it in great theologians like uh Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, and and so there was a Roman Catholic name Georges Lemaitre, who uh who lived in Belgium, and he was a fantastic scientist and a fantastic mathematician, and he was tackling uh a lot of very complex issues, and he sort of uh hypothesized and thought to himself, uh, well, what if the universe, which he began to believe was expanding, it wasn't just uh the same all the time, but it was actually expanding.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

And just to put a little color on, don't stop that thought, uh Russell. I'm sorry to do this to you, but I just for our audience, I I there he was a contemporary of Einstein. This was not so long ago. No, and uh and Einstein didn't initially agree with it, but go go go ahead. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Yeah, it's you know, it's I mean, really, I I know that for us, it seems like a hundred years ago is a long time, but it's not when it comes to human history, it's not at all. And um, so this man lived and he came up with this theory, he's you know, generally a ballpark figure about 1930. And because he believed, he started to believe, and there are others who believe this too, and an expanding universe. An expanding universe implies that it used to be much smaller. And so if you go back to the beginning of it, it implies that something just occurred that made it expand. And he hypothesized what he called the primeval atom. Um, in in this, he believed that there could have been something just right at the beginning that was uh um the start, and he didn't he didn't imply that it was a divine thing or anything like that, but some sort of material basis to the universe, and he believed that something could have happened that caused the universe to actually um you know quote unquote explode or actually begin to expand. And this is a a revolutionary idea because it was a belief that the universe A was not just always the same, and B, it um was expanding, and C, it began with something. In other words, it was created. It you know, created is a more okay, I used the wrong word. He might not have used that word. It began with something. It began with some sort of material something that just

Evidence Ends And Mystery Begins

SPEAKER_00 18:00

blossomed from that.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

It seemed like an explosion of some creative explosion of some point in that.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

People started to call it a big bang, but he didn't call it that. No, he didn't. That's what some people called it Big Bang, meaning that there's a beginning. Scientists call it a lot of times, I love this word, they call it the singularity. And the singularity is this something that starts it all. The something that all of a sudden it changes, it explodes, it expands. And, you know, 14 billion years ago or whatever their ideas are now. But they cannot answer what was before. They don't know where it came from, like primeval atom or big bang or singularity, whatever you want to call it. What came before? They don't know. Why did they not know? Because there's no physical evidence for it. And scientists deal with physical evidence. They deal with material physical evidence, they don't deal with supernatural, they don't deal with something you can't see, they don't deal with, you know, metaphysics or anything like that. They deal with what you can see and what you can trace. And you have to be able to trace it. So they're like scientific historians. They want to go back, and astronomers want to go back and see if they can find the origins of the universe. That's what they're trying to do in their studies right now, to find the origins of the universe, or maybe just shortly after the Big Bang, what was happening at that time. But once they come to that point of the start, they don't know how to go any further. They can't go any further because there's no scientific evidence for it. And so for a lot of scientists, it just becomes, okay, well, we've reached the start. We can't do anything more. It's ludicrous to even ask the question of what happened before then, because there's no scientific evidence for it. There's no physical evidence. And so they just decide to not mess with it.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Which is so important for our audience, we have to start to explain this to younger people and share this story that they grew up at a time where we stopped asking that question, just like you said. Yeah. And now we say, no, let's ask. And it's fascinating that that when the Hubble telescope, and now we have an even more powerful telescope, and we start to be able to measure this. It was nuts, right? And we actually know today there is a that that that there was a time where time began. And you just go, that's wild. They could actually say there is a time, and boom, we could see it right there, can't we? It it it it's it's pious, it's piety, it's it's the awe and wonder, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:42

That's what St. Augustine in both in his Saint Augustine wrote a lot. His two most famous books are The Confessions and the City of God. In in both of those books, he describes that awareness of his to know that he is actually thinking about a creation. He's talking about the creation is the beginning of times, when God makes time. That's what we humans are, you know, we live in time. We struggle like crazy. And in fact, it's impossible for us to break away from time. It's something that just dominates us. Every minute we we change, every moment we change. And Augustine dealt with all these questions. It's fascinating what he wrote.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

What a mind, Russell, right? What a mind. And and you're talking about the third and and going into the fourth centuries, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:33

About 400 400 AD.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

Yeah. Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

And he's asking those specific questions. Even a thousand, two thousand years before that, people were asking those questions too. I mean, the Greeks were the great questioners. Yeah. And he was heavily influenced by those uh different thinkers. Yeah. And not all scientists, by the way, just might want to add this that not all scientists right now are sitting around being atheists and secularists and stuff like that. A lot of scientists believe in uh a lot of scientists are religious, a lot of them are theists, a lot of them are Christian, a lot of them are Roman Catholic. And why? Because they know that science is a tool that's important, but it doesn't answer everything. Okay, it answers some things, but it doesn't answer everything. And to do that requires piety. It requires humility. That, okay, we humans cannot know everything. We can't. We have to give it up. That's what a piety is to give it up to that being that is way beyond us, as St. Answ called him, the being beyond which we cannot conceive. And we have to give it up to that being. And so a lot of scientists today are still theists and they're still Christians. They're not all walking around believing in atheism and secularism. It's just that there are a whole lot who do, and they often unfortunately teach in some of the big universities, and they often teach in the big uh Langrain universities.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

And that was going on even in uh Lemaitre's time, right? You you write you right that he was uh very careful. In fact, you want to talk just a little bit about that, how how he wrote that fifth paragraph and then took it out to you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

He was he was obvious, I mean, he was obviously a man of faith and everything, but he was also a scientist and he knew just like a scientist today, I mean, if you read a scientific paper right now, and if someone brought up the word God, they'd be horrified. Uh they wouldn't publish them. And for him, even a hundred years ago, he was afraid that his ideas would not pass muster among the scientific community if he brought in the supernatural. So even though what his private uh beliefs were, you know, would believe in a supernatural, but he didn't in science, in the scientific papers, he did not want to bring in God or the supernatural or anything like that. But why? Because nobody would they wouldn't respect him, they wouldn't believe him. I mean, if you're looking at physical evidence, and that's what physics is doing, you can't start bringing in something that's not physical.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

And and at that time, now we science has come further since then, and and like I mentioned, we could actually measure that now, this expansion of the universe. So we've been able to prove that. But at that time, even Einstein, I I have a little quote here. Einstein reportedly told uh uh Lemaitre, you're or at least said this out loud, your calculations are correct, but your physics is uh abominable. And then later on, though, he comes around and then he says this. He calls uh Lemaitre's model the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation ever heard. I think this is important to bring up because you you can show, you know, we think we got the science. We can't even talk about it. And here's even Einstein opening up his mind to a whole this is the big deal, right? From uh from the static uh uh universe to an experience. Expanding. This is a big deal.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Yeah. Einstein's fascinating guy. I'm not um well trained in science, be able to read his papers and relativity, but he wrote other things for lay people. He wrote a book on relativity, and he wrote all sorts of different essays, and I've read those. And if you read Einstein's uh books and ideas that are meant for lay people, uh he is someone who's open to uh the possibility of further answers. I mean, that's one thing that's cool about him. He's open to it. He hasn't decided to just close the door. He's interested. He's interested to know what might go beyond physical forces. And so, you know, there's a famous quote from him, I want to know the mind of God. And that's a cool quote. Um, and it means that Einstein, you know, he wasn't much of a theist, but Einstein was someone who did believe that there is something perhaps more that we don't know. And he's and any of scientists who's willing to admit that to me as someone that's very important and someone to respect because they actually know that there's just so far that science can go. You know. I've I've been uh influenced a lot uh by my older brother. My older brother is a physics, a physics professor, and I wrote my paper on George Lemaitre and sent it to him and I said, I want to find out, does this make sense? He went back and said, Oh yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Okay. I mean, you know, you could do a few more things, but you know, I don't want to make it a scientific paper. But he he's someone who who believes uh he's a he's a Christian, and he believes that he said uh he one time he told me that if you look at all the intricacies that scientists tell us about everything, biological and physical and chemical, that the chances that all of this could have come and come together to what we are living right now and the complexity of all the beings in the complexity of the universe, he said the chances that that could actually come about, the odds are just so beyond, so beyond conception that there's got to be something that created this. There's just got to be. It can't have all come together like this in such a way, uh, just by accident. It just can't. And so that's something that's really meaningful to me. Yeah, it can't come by accident. It just can't. It's got to be something more. And that's where we get into piety, because piety is all about that awareness and that feeling. And and for a lot of uh people today, what you're talking about when they're they're they're you know, sort of enclosed by the world and they're enclosed by machines and enclosed by noise and enclosed by technology and all the the noise, as you call it. Yes. That if you can just if you can break away and have that sense of piety, that there is something more, okay, something more than what's in my four walls. There's something more there, there's something more out there. How do you find that something more?

Read Augustine Job And Scripture

SPEAKER_00 28:20

How do you do it? Well, you could do it by meditation, and prayer is a form of meditation. But I think that one thing that um a lot of people have lost sight of now is that the key to really finding out more is you've got to read. You have to read. And it's not just like reading your news feed on a f on a phone. You gotta read. You gotta sit down and read the great works. You gotta sit down and read St. Augustine. You gotta actually read what the Bible says. You know, the Bible, St. Augustine himself, when he was a kid, uh, he read the Bible, the version that they had at that time in Latin. And um he said, Oh my gosh, the stories in this thing. I mean, it's ludicrous, okay? I mean, what are we talking about? People walking on water? I mean, give me a break. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna listen to any of this. But then as time passed, he began to change his mind about things. He began to open his mind to the possibilities of things, and he began to be aware of the fact that this book, this Old Testament and New Testament, actually has so much knowledge in it that it can teach us so much. A lot of people think the Bible is just like this old thing, right? I just got through reading the book of Job again, uh, because I wanted to write something for Catholic Exchange about it. And so I reread the book of Job. The book of Job's so wonderful. If anybody read it right down.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

It's a long book and it's amazing. It's worth it's worth reading for sure.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

It's all about a guy who's totally arrogant. He's totally he's got all the answers, he knows exactly what's going on, he's a he's a just person. He doesn't deserve any of the stuff that's happening to him, which a lot of people believe today. I don't deserve this. Why is this happening to me right now? And then he finally comes to realize that the power of God is there. And and he has this moment of, oh my God. And now I realize that my life is in the hands of God, that God's providence, and this is a series that I wrote for Catholic Exchange before this one on Catholic um Pious Scientists. I wrote a series on providence, looking at the history of providence uh over the last 2,000 years. In other words, God's role in things. And and Job finally just comes to the realization that a lot of people can't really do right now. And that is that God is there and God is behind it all, and you just have to accept it, and you have to put yourself in the hands of God. That's a form of piety, really. It's a piety to be pious is to put yourself, your soul, and your body in God's hands, and allow God to basically take control. And that's a form of piety that it can work for anybody. You don't have to be because everybody else is secular, because everybody else is a materialist, and because it just seems sort of weird and corny to actually believe in this thing called God, that you you don't want to do it because it's not fashionable. And you but at the same time, you also don't want to do what's fashionable a lot of times, and that is to have uh let's put a corny religion. Uh a religion in which you know Jesus says like right here, and he's sitting next to me and I put my arm around and didn't have a conversation with him or something like that. I mean, God is much more than that, okay? And Jesus is much more than that. The piety is that ability to see the distance, and that's what Job couldn't do initially. He couldn't see the distance. And Augustine couldn't do it either. He couldn't see the distance. And then something happened to them. Augustine had this wonderful conversion experience where in the space of four seconds he was in he was in a garden of a friend and he was blowing his head off. He was crying because he didn't know what to do with his life, and he heard a child's voice say, Take it and read. And he happened to have a copy of Paul's letters next to him. He picked up Paul's letters, he opened it up, he read a verse from it. Everything changed. Everything changed for him.

SPEAKER_01 32:49

He knew that God was there. That's almost too good to be true, you know, but that's the very logic of Christianity. That we can actually consume him, actually take him, right? And so this intimacy, this is what we're talking about. You know, when when you start to say what is the truth of things and start to look out to your point too, and the and this distance, but also that God wants to fill that and come in and touch your heart. I remember, you know, saying uh Augustine, you know, he never married that woman that he lived with for 15 years, had a son out of wedlock, was a very worldly person, to your point, Russell. And then he starts to say nothing's working. So what is the truth of things? I think if we always just keep our minds open to what we're talking about here, like, okay, I'm making some progress. What is the truth of things? Listen to your own heart, spend some time in silence. Because it here's my point. We're made for the truth. So that when you hear, like St. Augustine, when you hear it like Job, when you hear like Jack or Russell, when you hear the word, it touches you at a certain time, a certain place in your life, a certain place in history, and you go, I know that's the truth. I I speak to guys that I do this for a living, right? I speak to people out, I'm I'm speaking in churches, right? You're writing about it all the time. It happens so often. Everybody that has the this this you know Catholic uh lens was touched with an encounter, an encounter of of uh of God himself an encounter, and they know it. They know they were touched.

SPEAKER_00 34:34

Right, yeah. Yeah, and he's a good example also for people today because he was famous, he had a great career going, he uh you know, whine women and song, so to speak. Um, but he was completely miserable. It didn't make any sense.

SPEAKER_01 34:50

Sound like anybody we know in in today's time, Russell? Yeah, I mean really.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

I mean, he was miserable. And so then what made him give up the misery was this personal connection that you're talking about. All of a sudden, the fame, the fortune, none of it mattered. Okay, and that's what I think a lot of people could really use that today. I mean, I can I use it, I have to use it all the time. I have to constantly ground myself because we live in a time when, as Augustine said, because of time, we are constantly thinking about how important our society is or how important what we're about to do is. And to ground yourself and then to realize that it's all part of God's plan, some it somehow or another brings that humility to you, to where you're starting to think to yourself, well, you know, maybe it's not as important as I think it is. You know, what is important?

SPEAKER_01 35:49

Somebody wants to read you you're talking about what to read, and you know, sometimes John Paul II can be a little difficult at times to read, but I I he wrote this encyclical, Fides and Razio, Faith and Reason. I think if people are looking for something to pick up, I think that's very readable. And he's talking about what we're talking about here, and and and you know, he'll interject a lot of scripture into all the work he does. I think that's something you could meditate on. You know, uh Russell, sit and meditate on that.

SPEAKER_00 36:19

You know, Pope Benedict, he wrote some really good stuff. Pope Benedict was a a writer and a scholar, frankly. Uh, and then he became Pope. And he wrote so many different books.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

He never wanted to be Pope, by the way, for people, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:32

If you don't know that he he accepted the role. They accepted what got away.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

He wanted to get out, Russell, well before John Paul died. He he would ask John Paul, and John Paul wouldn't let him retire, you know. I know, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:45

So those are the his first people often think that maybe the popes aren't great writers, but they actually are.

SPEAKER_01 36:53

Yeah. I always say I I love to listen to John Paul II, but his writing could be pretty, pretty dense. And Pope Benedict the uh I didn't like listening to him as much, just the way he, you know, he he would speak. Uh nothing against it. I uh he just wasn't a John Paul as far as a speaker, but as a writer, he knew he was he could write as dense as anybody, but he didn't. He he uh he often unpacked it for uh his the the audience and I th and I love to read him. Look look at that first encyclical. Your your new series coming out is going to it was based on that uh that encyclical. And that's that's a very accessible, beautiful uh encyclical. Somebody wants again. I I'm bringing it up because if somebody God is love, and in essence is the name of it. It's really nice. It's really good. That's another book for people to read because because as we wind down here, I want to bridge that gap. You know, the the human heart was made for more, and we could sense this. And I want people to to sit back and say, why am I anxious? You know, instead of going on medication, instead of trying to numb myself, I am going to look out at the world and say, you know, the the the world was created good. Uh let me assume that. And something went wrong because they could see the evil, good and evil out there, Russell, and they're trying to make sense of it in their own lives. You know, John Paul would say it's when the human heart uh plus your experience of life, right? This battle between good and evil you see all around us, and it's touched by the gospel. That's what we're talking about here at the end, right? It's touched by the gospel in such a way you have that aha moment, almost like a big bang going off in your own heart, Russell. What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_00 38:38

Well, that's true. And

Love As Peace In Anxious Times

SPEAKER_00 38:40

you know, the uh I'm a convert to Catholicism, and one reason why I am, because I've experienced other Christian denominations. The one thing that Roman Catholicism has is they have a real strong sense of love. That's what most of the encyclicals of deal with that kind. They deal with love. They deal with the love of God for humans and humans for God. They also deal with the love for creation, that we have to really we have to embrace creation. We have to embrace creation and love. We have to embrace other animals with love, we have to embrace everything with love, because that's what the whole thing's all about. And that's one thing I discovered in I used to walk into other uh religious services, and now for the past 25 years, when I walk into a Roman Catholic Mass, the one thing I sense is I sense the love there. And I I didn't always sense that in some of the other Christian denominations. I mean, they all have nice things to them, of course, but I didn't always sense that. And that's the one thing I sense with Roman Catholicism. That's the one thing we all uh we really have to always remember. Every day I have I remember this, every day I pray about it. And that is I know that God loves me, but not just me. God loves me, he loves my family, he loves all humans, he loves all animals. And that just that sort of helps to pacify me with all the angst and everything going on. If I just think about that, that's something that just seems to sort of bring a peace to me a little bit. So that just just reflecting on love is often not a bad way to deal with any kind of problems that you might have.

SPEAKER_01 40:28

I'm going to just bring up and then let's get some of your uh contact information. Uh I want to make sure we get your website, but I do want to put a quick plug-in for for our apostolate here too. The Claymore Battle Plan Handbook, a spiritual uh battle for spiritual battles for young people. Anyways, I want the people that are following us on here to to look at Act 38. I I call them Acts, Russell, instead of chapters, uh because they're short. But this one is this one is titled The Mystery of Love Science, Faith and Truth. And I I want to make this connection as we go out because God is love. And as you study, get into your faith, uh read books, keep that lens going because that's something about that when you open yourself up to the love of God Himself. Jesus said to ask, seek and knock, huh? And even if I don't know what I'm doing, we always ask these young people, just hey, fall down on your knees before you look at that phone in the morning, open yourself up and we show them how to do that. And even if you don't know, it doesn't matter. We're like the prodigal son, he's always the father's always waiting for us. And so how do you know? You gotta spend some time and and and they'll find some peace, won't they, Russell, if they do that.

SPEAKER_00 41:42

Sometimes if you're if you want to know God's love, you can step outside and you can be just outside and be aware of the entire creation. And if you don't feel love, then you're not you're not feeling anything. It's it's there. It's it's always there. You can feel it anytime you want to.

SPEAKER_01 42:02

Yeah, yeah. And so many of these young people have grown up without uh uh with without solid families, without uh a father and mother in their home, uh born out of wedlock. And there's a lot of brokenness, Russell. So um it is important for them to experience God's love and then for you and I and the rest of us uh to reach out to them and tell them it's possible and and to share this with them. The awe and wonder of how we're created, but the awe and wonder how you're created, right? In love, by love, and for love. Genesis 1 and 2 is all about that, this this big bang explosion. We're created good and we're created in love. In fact, the human person is to make that love visible, to your point, Russell, in the visible world. But we always have to be connected, right, to the source. Otherwise, we run out. We're we're we're we're like a well that that went dry and we're trying to give something we don't have anymore. But to your point again, if you connect this way vertically, I can always receive that, and then you make it visible in the world. Go go love somebody, and you and they'll reflect this back to you. You'll experience that. I I think too many of us become selfish and nihilistic, and and we don't try to love anymore. And and we close in, right, with all these addictions and these phones bringing pornography, blah, blah, blah. And we have to just trust that there's got to be something more. Let your heart experience that, huh?

Books Websites And Final Blessing

SPEAKER_01 43:30

As we go out here, you're working on a new book. Let's talk about that. Uh, you wrote 20 books. Is do you have a favorite? Talking about young people. And when I say young people, I'm talking about young at heart. We're talking with people that are in their 70s that that have come into a new encounter with Christ, and they're like kids. It's so much fun to see them. Uh expensive. What should uh people look for when they're looking looking you up?

SPEAKER_00 43:54

The my favorite book is probably called Metamorphosis, How Jesus of Nazareth. Vanquished the Legion of Fear. It's all about how when Christ came in the first century, that the Greek philosophy and the Greek culture at the time was not providing people with a an answer in everyone, and people were afraid. And but when Christ came, he provided the answer for us. He vanquished fear, so to speak. That's a book that you can find on Amazon. It's it's called Metamorphosis. How Jesus vanquished the Legion of Fear.

SPEAKER_01 44:33

It sounds like a big name, but we can read it. Yeah, but it's not a long book. Okay, good. Good, good, good.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

And my uh you can also find out more of what I've written on uh my books called The American Plutarch. The American Plutarch, P-L-U-T-A-R-C-H, which is that's a whole nother story of why I call it the American Plutarch. But Plutarch was a great thinker and writer uh in the first century AD. And so I just called myself the American Plutarch because I write about history, I write about philosophy, I write about religion, I wrote a lot of different things. You know, I have it all up there. Doesn't cost anything, you just go in there and you can read it if you want to.

SPEAKER_01 45:15

Well, I'll make sure I get that in the show notes because I think it's so important for us. You know, we we we we have this progressive mentality that we think that we're so enlightened, but you go back to somebody like uh Plutarch and you you re you you realize these guys were pretty dang smart already. Look at we just unplugged the electricity from this world, and we're uh I we'd be lucky to be able to have what those guys uh had the way they thought, you know?

SPEAKER_00 45:43

Yeah. I also want to um note what's over your left shoulder is the Virgin of Guadalupe. Yes, yes, that's also a source of love for a lot of people. Just go to the mother and that's often a source.

SPEAKER_01 45:59

That's how we start out. We call it the Claymore 10-minute morning ritual, on your knees before the phone, and the first thing we do is the annunciation. We open up, we image that our blessed mother is kneeling with us, Russell, and we say, be it done to me according to your word. And then the second thing is from the wedding feast of Cana, do whatever he tells you. And then we just start to listen. We start to listen. The Claymore behind me, uh, that's the Claymore sword, Russell. That's where the name came from.

SPEAKER_00 46:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

Because that's the battle that's going on in our heart, right? Between being a person of love and then being a person that's grasping and taking all the time. Thank you for that. I'll get I'll get your uh website uh in the show notes. You've got a lot, like you said, on that website. I I I love it. We'll get that book in there. And thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. Appreciate it. And we'll get you back again because I I want to make that uh connection, if you don't mind, again, between this love and and and and science and what we see around us. It's very, very important to do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:57

I'm writing a hill a series on the history of love right now for Catholic Exchange. So that'd be fun. Come back.

SPEAKER_01 47:04

And you have the first one up already, right? Yep, today. So we'll we'll get the Catholic Exchange. I write for them once in a while too. So what we'll uh we'll we'll get them up. I want them to uh read that first article that you wrote now because it'll reference uh Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical. I love that. So hey you're a joy. Thank you so much, brother. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for joining us today.