Ultimately, there is no way of knowing for certain anything about creation using the methodologies we humans have constructed for exploring knowledge. Those methodologies have been wonderfully successful in enlarging our empirical understanding, and woefully inadequate in every other area. That is to be expected. Scientific methodologies were never constructed to deal with the issues of God, conscience, morality, or love. This is not remarkable or even notable; it is simply a given, well understood by every serious philosopher.

What is remarkable, what is most certainly notable in the last 200 years or so, has been the importation of scientific methodologies into areas for which it is not equipped to deal. Some things cannot be computed, no matter how advanced the program or the methodology. Such is our love (self-love?) for these devices of our own ingenuity, that some believe that all knowledge must be subsumed under its rubric, and that those areas of understanding that lie outside its purview are of no great significance. Yet even those areas that lie with the range of scientific exploration recede from us the closer we get to them; the uncertainly principle ensures that.

Those issues that lie outside computation are at the heart of our existence. Why then do we insist that those things that lie at the core of what it is to be human yield up their secrets to mere methodology? That will never happen. The only answer to issues which are unknowable by methodology is by revelation. Science will never go there. Yet is precisely there that we must go for answers that are otherwise unknowable, and there’s the rub. All religions claim revelation, so where do you go to find truth? You examine the claims, using rationality as your guide.

Buddha claimed to have taken nothing but two drops of water in four years while meditating to find enlightenment.  Anything else he said, no matter how fair sounding, has to be filtered through this absurdity. Mohammed claimed to be a paragon of moral virtue, yet among his many wives and concubines at 55 was the six year old daughter of his best friend. Anything else he said has to be filtered through this uncomfortable detail. Vishnu claims to be interested in the affairs of man, but eight of his last nine ‘incarnations’ were all about protecting  the kingdom of the gods from attack by evil forces. Where is the concern for mankind in that?

Christ claims to be “the way, the truth and the life” for all who put their faith in Him, and that “no one comes unto the Father, except by me.” To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, only the foulest wretch who ever lived, or a complete madman, along the lines of someone who thought he was a poached egg, could say such things if they weren’t true. And yet Christ’s life shows none of the excesses of a fevered brain, only the most settled and kindly spirit, given to compassion and the needs of others. A truly remarkable life, as anyone who has read it would attest.

And yet this ‘man’ healed terminal disease at a touch, calmed raging waters with a wave of his hand and brought the dead back to life at a word. Nor are these things to be lightly dismissed, although many of the brightest minds have tried. They have either come to grief at the effort or ended up soundly converted by the incontrovertible evidence of the truth of these events. Nor does the story end there, because millions have put this ‘man’s’ word to the test in their own lives, and the change has been dramatic.

For some reason beyond scientific explanation, Christ has made an enormous difference, not just to individual lives, but to the entire culture of the West. You see that here in the East, how there is something missing from their culture, something that doesn’t allow them to ever get ahead of their own greed, indifference and self-absorption and ‘fate’. Science will continue to advance, and I welcome it, since all knowledge leads to a knowledge of God, and only the weak-minded fear it. But science will never have the answers to what troubles and heals the human heart. Only Christ can meet that need. Only Christ can make the difference.