Dear Father Roy Cimagala

With great interest, I read your article: WE NEED TO STUDY THEOLOGY published in BusinessWorld ( May 11, 2005 ). You mentioned and I quite agree that there are lots of people who are real giants in the fields of modern technology and other sciences. Regrettably however, I am unable to agree with you that such scientists and technologists are ‘like babies or pygmies with clearly stunted growth in matters of faith and religion.” For my part, I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher. In fact, I am a high-school dropout. But as you are an expert in theology, perhaps you might be of great assistance in answering for my own enlightenment, the following theological questions: If God were the Designer of nature, how come He had to design 23,000 different kinds of beetles? What went wrong with the first beetle design? Or, if the human body were God’s design, how come there exist about 2 billion kinds of virus, germs, and bacteria living inside our body that will eventually self-destruct whether we have free will or not? If God created everything, including space and time, where was God located before he created space, and when was it before he created time? In fact, if everything needs a creator, who or what created God? The sun is a giant star that it can take one million ( 1,000,000 ) planets the size of earth and fit them all inside it. The sun, however, may be large but it is not the largest star in the sky. According to the science of astronomy, there is an even bigger star called Betelgeuse. It is 500 times larger than our sun. Comparatively, therefore, we humans are like the size of tiny parasites living on this grain of sand called “planet earth.” In this connection, what was God’s size when he created man in His own image and likeness? How could Adam and Eve be guilty of anything original, such as the Original Sin, since before everything else there was, first and foremost, - the Original Creator? God’s first Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” Can you explain where those “other Gods” came from? Who created them? God was often personally involved in human affairs during the days of biblical antiquity. How come he is no longer personally involved in human affairs in any shape or form in these days of scientific modernity? If moral values were universally planted by God, then all people would believe the same things. There could never be disagreements over right and wrong. There would be no need for laws, courts, and battlefields. Can you explain why the history of the world has been a history of conflicts between moral values in God’s name? According to the National Catholic Almanac, God is “almighty, eternal. Holy, immortal, immense, immutable, incomprehensible, ineffable, infinite, invisible, just, loving, merciful, most high, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, patient, perfect, provident, supreme, true.” Can you explain: how was it possible for theologians to have declared God’s incomprehensibility and simultaneously list twenty-two additional attributes? If God cannot be comprehended, what’s the latest findings from the study of theology? Indeed, what’s new with God? If God were immutable and therefore cannot change the past, the present, and the future as God saw it, doesn’t that make our prayers utterly worthless because when we pray, we are asking God to change his mind? If God so loved the world, why does he tolerate the devil to inspire the believers of the same religion hate each other like we all do as a matter of survival in this only Christian country in Asia? Christ said that if someone smite thee on the right cheek, turn the left cheek also. What is so noble about turning the other cheek, if one knows that each time he does so, he piling up greater rewards in heaven, while the one who strikes is earning his rewards in hell? If Christ died on the cross to destroy the devil, how come the devil is still alive and quite a success inspiring the Filipino to grace not the growth of human civilization but only to be a disgrace in the rat race for eternal salvation? Theology is not what we know about divinity. It is what we do not know about humanity. As theology, however, is still at the very foundation of our system of education, is it any wonder that we come out of our schools not as fruitful thinkers in love with our country, but only as fruitless believers in love with divinity? Yours Faithfully, Poch Suzara