By Elizabeth Peck

Foreword

Some fundamental misconceptions about the Catholic faith seem, in my experience as a secondary-school teacher of Religious Education and as a catechist, to be held by many Catholics of all ages, as well as by many people who reject Catholicism. For example, students often say that they don’t believe in God because they believe in the Big Bang and/or in evolution. In addition, many young adults seem to have absorbed by osmosis various fundamental ideas from our broadly secular culture, such as the belief that the only facts are those that can be proven through science and that therefore goodness and beauty are completely subjective, and that we alone create and determine the meaning of our lives and our identity. As a result of beliefs like these, another major obstacle to embracing religious belief seems to arise, namely apathy. Religion, after all, is completely unimportant, if there is no objective truth to be found other than physical truth, and the meaning of life is simply what you decide it to be.

I have aimed, over the last decade or more, to address this apathy and these misconceptions primarily through teaching secondary level Religious Education, but the fact has persistently occurred to me that prevention is better than cure; as a general principle, over-writing a misconception is significantly more difficult than teaching a particular view from the outset. I wanted to create something, therefore, that would help at the level of primary Catholic education. God Is Not A Man In The Sky and the accompanying notes are the result of this desire. 

Their principal aim is to give Catholic parents and catechists a tool that they can use in their teaching of young children, to prevent particular misconceptions from arising in the first place, and to help children grow up understanding why religious faith, why God, matters. For this reason, key ideas to point out or discuss with children are noted along the way. In addition though, I hope that the book may also be useful in the area of adult faith formation, as the theological and philosophical explanations may be useful to those seeking either to learn the basic tenets of the Catholic faith, or to deepen their existing understanding of it. I hope too, of course, that the book may also be of interest to those many Christians with whom Catholics share so many fundamental beliefs.

The specific misconceptions the book seeks to address are:

• Misconception: Science and religion are incompatible. 
• Truth: Science and religion are not in conflict. Rather, they help us to access different aspects of truth.

• Misconception: God is some kind of man in the sky; or he is one giant ‘thing’ among the many things that exist.
• Truth: God is Love, Truth, Beauty, Goodness; he is Being itself. He is also the Holy Trinity.

• Misconception: To say that God created the universe means only that he brought the universe into existence; God was the first cause that ‘started it off’.
• Truth: Creation is not a one-off event in the past. God did bring the universe into existence out of nothingness (ex nihilo), but he also sustains the universe in existence.

• Misconception: We create our own meaning in life, and our identities; we create our very selves through our choices. There is no right or wrong about the purpose of our lives, or who we say we are, or choose to be.
• Truth: We have been created by God in his image, as human beings. We share with Jesus and with all people a common human nature, the fulfilment of which will bring us true happiness in the form of eternal life, union with God.

• Misconceptions: Sin is the breaking of a rule, arbitrarily imposed by God and/or the Church; or conversely, there is really no such thing as sin at all. Sin is an out-dated or even meaningless concept, and morality is just a matter of opinion, not of fact.
• Truth: We are created to be in perfect relationship with God and all of Creation. This is the same as saying that we were made to fulfil our human nature. To be in perfect relationship with God and all of Creation is to be fully human, and fully alive. Sin is when we fail to fulfil our nature; it’s when we damage these relationships.

• Misconception (or rather, as will be explained, a Thomistic interpretation of the Incarnation, which could instead be considered from a Franciscan point of view): The Son of God became human only because God wanted to mend the relationship between himself and humanity, which had been damaged by sin. If people had not sinned, the Son of God would not have become Jesus. 
• Truth (or, the Franciscan view): The whole universe was created for the sake of the Son of God becoming human, because God loved all Creation from all eternity. The universe exists only because of Jesus, not the other way around.

• Misconception: Jesus is the Saviour and Redeemer of either a small number of people, or of humanity as a whole, but not the rest of Creation. 
• Truth: Jesus is the Saviour and Redeemer of all people and all of Creation. All relationships between God, people, animals, and all things, are damaged by sin. The forgiveness and healing brought by Jesus heals all of them; God will be united with all of Creation at the end of time.

• Misconception: Christianity has nothing to do with Judaism.
• Truth: Christianity is intimately connected to Judaism; it is the fulfilment of Judaism.

• Misconception: The Eucharist is a symbol of Jesus’ Body and Blood, and of his self-sacrifice on the cross. 
• Truth: The Eucharist is literally Jesus’ Body and Blood, and the Mass is a literal re-presentation of Jesus’ sacrifice. 

• Misconception: The matter the universe is made of, material things in general, and our material bodies, are fundamentally worthless or even inherently evil. They are to be rejected, transcended, or escaped.
• Truth: God created all material things out of love, and they are intrinsically good.

• Misconception: The real self is the soul, and the material body is not truly part of your identity; rather, it is a merely a vessel for the soul. Only your soul will go to Heaven.
• Truth: A human being is a body-soul union. The body is part of who a person is, and it matters, just as the soul does. The resurrection is a bodily resurrection, not a disembodied, purely spiritual one. 

• Misconception: Human nature, the very essence of what it means to be human, is corrupt and utterly sinful.
• Truth: Human nature is fundamentally good. Jesus fulfilled this human nature perfectly, and he is the ‘template’ upon which all other humans are created. 

• Misconception: Evil is a thing; it’s an entity in itself.
• Truth: Evil is always a lack of something that should be there. Human sin is falling short of what we should be. The less we fulfil our human nature, the more grave the evil is.

Please note that to help navigate the text, an index of themes is provided at the end of these notes.

Page 1

Our universe has not always existed. It had a beginning; it was created by God. This book will tell you who God is, why hecreated the universe, and what the meaning and purpose of our lives are.

1A.
The main aim of the book is to talk about these ideas, and even more specifically, it is to express the truths listed in the foreword.

It all started long, long ago, ‘before’ the beginning of the universe. Before there was anything at all to be seen, or heard, or to take up any space, or to use up any energy, there was God. God has always existed. God is eternal. But who is God?

1B.
The term ‘before’ the beginning of the universe isn’t technically accurate, because time started with the universe, but it is basically impossible for us, as temporal beings to avoid thinking like this.

The key points being made by these pages, and therefore the key truths to emphasise to young readers, are that God is beyond the universe, and therefore beyond time and space, and that God created the universe.

Relevant biblical texts include Genesis 1-2, the Creation narratives.

Page 5

God the Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all love each other perfectly, and are in relation to each other. In fact, God would not be God if he weren’t in relation within himself!

5A.
This is not really an adequate description of the Holy Spirit, but nothing is! Again though, the key point being made is that God is love. He is not a thing or a human.

5B.
This page is also making the important point that relation is of God’s essence; God simply wouldn’t be God if he weren’t the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all in a perfect loving relationship with each other.

To explain a bit further: in Christian theology, though stemming from the philosophy of Aristotle, the term ‘essence’ means the fundamental nature of a thing. If a feature or attribute is of something’s essence, it means it is a characteristic that the thing or being must have, to be that thing, as opposed to being a different thing. For example, it’s part of the essence of a triangle to have three sides. If you had a shape with fewer or more than three sides, you wouldn’t have a triangle. A term that goes along with ‘essence’ is ‘accident’. In Christian theology, the term ‘accident’ refers to a feature a thing might or might not have, which doesn’t affect what the thing is. To go back to the triangle example: if you had a blue triangle and then you added some red and made it a purple triangle, either way you’ve got a triangle. You haven’t changed the essence of it – you haven’t changed what the shape is. You’ve only changed the accident of its colour.

So, to bring this back to God: it is of God’s essence to be in relationship. The relationship within God – the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – is of God’s essence. It is not only ‘accidental’. Perfect loving relationship is part of who God is, and not just a nice feature of God that may or may not have been.

5C.
This is important because it helps us to understand who God is. It also helps us to understand who we are too, because we are made in God’s image, and so we too are relational beings. Part of what it means to be human is to be in relationship.