Daniel O’Leary's very significant contributions in your paper on "New windows open to the faith” (The Tablet, 20 September) and his previous "Divine evolution" are as timely as they are urgent and challenging. To see God and the doctrines of our faith from an evolutionary perspective opens up a whole new dialogue and horizon. The simple image of creation, fall, redemption and a second coming are now inadequate as a human story. An emerging universe calls for a deeper metaphor that embraces a dynamic self-organising world ripening from within over billions of years. We need a new cosmology and language wherein myth, mysticism (without the mist!) and metaphysics will address the issues of our day. Without a big picture we are very small people!
Fr Declan Boland, Strabane, Co Tyrone
The classic abhorrence that science has of mystery does not allow it to resort to the comfort of some dues ex machina which is the “evolutionary” theory. Moreover, the very notions of space and time are mysteries in themselves – space which is as logically infinitely divisible as it is infinitely extensive and where before and afterwards constitute the ultimate intellectual contradiction of time. We must admit in all humility that life as we perceive it, in our briefest of brief appearances on our tiny planet, is in every way enfolded in deepest mystery.
Fr Bernard Boylan, Hampton, Middx
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