Prayers Are Being Answered

27 August 2026  Ephesians 4:1-24

Memorial of St. Monica

“Rather, living the truth in love, we should grow in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ….”  (Ephesians 4:15) 

Early in his career, the great British astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, was a convinced atheist. He also rejected the Big Bang as an explanation for the origins of the universe. In fact, he coined the expression “Big Bang” in a BBC Radio interview as a term of mockery and dismissal.

Later, he came to a different conclusion. His research showed that because energy levels are perfectly fine-tuned, stars produce a balanced ratio of both carbon and oxygen, the two essential ingredients for organic chemistry and life.

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. (Engineering and Science, 11/81, pp. 8-12)

He concluded that a blind, random universe could not have rigged such a delicate balance so perfectly:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. (Engineering and Science, 11/81, pp. 8-12)

He later said that a universe without something like God is as improbable as a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747.

But achieving that insight took thirty years.

Fortunately, much of Sir Fred Hoyle’s career overlapped that of C.S. Lewis, who was no scientist and didn’t ask scientific questions, but asked theological, philosophical and moral ones instead, and raised them in such a winsome way that people’s imaginations were still tantalized by the possibility of God. Works like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity have never been out of print. So while Sir Fred Hoyle was busy doing the research that eventually changed his mind, people like C.S. Lewis were busy fertilizing people’s imaginations, and keeping the possibility of God alive.

And for all that time, and more, there were the very many thatdidn’t have the gifts of Fred Hoyle or C.S. Lewis, but who kept on going to church, kept praying, kept bearing their own humble witness to Jesus, even in the face of misunderstanding and mockery, in some places in the face of withering persecution, hoping for the time when God would be a respectable explanation, and a living hope for more people again.

St. Monica is the saint who speaks for all of us in that last group. She prayed patiently and persistently, wept often and bitterly, and finally witnessed joyfully the deathbed conversion of her husband Patricius, and even more importantly, of her son, St. Augustine, whose thinking and writing are still shaping the world.

Her prayers are being answered again, in our time. A near critical mass of scientists are admitting today that the math supporting the proposition of a universe formed by random mutation and strictly material causes doesn’t work. Some are saying out loud that an intelligence providing information and direction to the universe would solve all the scientific conundrums that we now see. Some are saying out loud that a Divine Mind is the only explanation for the detailed information in extremely small places that we can now see.

Thank God for people like Fred Hoyle and C.S. Lewis. Thank God even more for the many, many people who prayed that people like Fred Hoyle and C.S. Lewis would come along.

St. Monica, pray for us.