Madam, - While Andrew Furlong is eager to debunk theology as a merely human product (Nov 4th), he exhibits but a shallow appreciation that so, even more, is the scholarship that he affects and, indeed, flaunts. He peppered his article with "scholar", "scholarship", and "research", all of them "modern". "Hubris" is the word that he brought to my mind.
Assuming that the very modern Dublin has at least one of these modern scholars, what would we think of his scholarship if he pronounced that his view of Polaris, the North Star, some 4,080,000,000,000,000 km from his own city, is superior to what is available from Cork, given that that city is all of 250 km further south?
Yet Mr Furlong would have it that the unscholarly ones that he cites in Mary Fitzgerald's articles are a long way behind his modern scholars in their understanding of the Creator or, as he puts it, the "hypothetical reality" of God.
He is a "global citizen" who thinks "in terms of a resource of wisdom and spirituality fed by the religions, by art and culture, and by history and science". He lauds the "empowering challenges that modern scholarship has been posing to all religions". Does he not see that it behoves all creatures who have been created with the intellective faculty to acknowledge their Creator? Surely real scholarship would increase, not lessen, their disempowering insight of the gap between the unfathomable wisdom of the Creator and the puny glimmerings of wisdom achievable by His creatures, however modern, however scholarly?
In every age, the true scholar knows this paradox: That which has yet to be learned has always exceeded, still exceeds and will always exceed that which has already been learned. - Yours, etc,
FRANK FARRELL,
Lakelands Close,
Stillorgan,
Co Dublin.