Friday Links
October 10, 2025
Ballyduff, Co. Kerry, Ireland
Ernest Hilbert Reading at Fergie’s
Does God Exist?
A Voice from Deep Space
“The Dream” by Paul J. Pastor
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
How Muriel Spark became a late bloomer
Ernest Hilbert Reading at Fergie’s
Does God Exist?
Science and religion have never been easy bedfellows. As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1820, priests “dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight”. Five centuries of scientific breakthroughs — from Galileo to Darwin to Crick and Watson — have eroded our belief in the divine.
But now, according to a new book, a “great reversal” is under way. Science, its authors argue over 580 pages, has come full circle and “forcefully put the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table”.
In a striking challenge to the academic consensus, two French authors, Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, argue that the latest scientific theories lead to only one logical conclusion: an all-powerful deity created the universe and all life within it.
A Voice from Deep Space
A Voice from Deep Space is a documentary film about three atheists who converted to Christianity, one a scientist. And don’t forget to support independent artists and arts organizations whenever you can. If you want a better culture, you need to help make a better culture and artists will help do that. (Pro tip: Most politicians won’t.)
“The Dream” by Paul J. Pastor
I woke, and all the kingless world was bleak. I slept, and earth was governed by the meek.
Read the rest HERE and buy the book HERE.
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Since then, the Sun Miracle of Fatima has gained a reputation as the final boss of paranormal experiences, the ultimate challenge for would-be skeptics and debunkers. It’s not hard to see why. The witnesses included journalists, atheists, prominent scientists, and people who freely admitted that they had only attended in order to laugh at everyone else when nothing happened. There are far too many of them to dismiss, and their reports are surprisingly close to unanimous. People in nearby towns who knew nothing about the miracle claimed to have seen the same thing, seemingly ruling out mass hallucination. There are photographs - too low-tech to clearly visualize the sun, but clear enough to show a crowd pointing at the sky in astonishment. For one hundred eight years, believers and skeptics have written magazine articles, scientific papers, and at least a dozen books on the topic, mostly without progress.
How Muriel Spark became a late bloomer
The end was important to Spark for religious, as well as aesthetic, reasons. Unlike the plot of a novel, we know how our lives will end. Spark started writing fiction after she converted to Catholicism; her endings are not just entertainments, they are moral statements. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Girls of Slender Means, and The Driver’s Seatare directly about death. Murder haunts The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Loitering With Intent, one of her best novels, opens in a graveyard. Memento Mori is about the inability of secular people to face the fact of death. She wrote a biography of Emily Brontë, a novelist and poet obsessed with death, and one about Mary Shelley who courted the poet Percy Shelley over her mother’s grave. Death and the dead were essential to Spark and often brought her novels to life.
