Commentary on Psalm 10

THE ESTIMATE of God as a “distant hypothesis” is the characterization by Card. Ratzinger of present-day thinking in most parts of Germany. The same could be said of wide areas of the affluent Western world, where wickedness runs rampant to the accompaniment of condescending references to God. There are still some voluble atheists around, but as a rule God is dismissed with quiet ease, while a broad spectrum of wicked actions are spoken of with indifference. Moral relativism rules with an intolerant absolutism. The decibels of moral indignation are reserved for genocides, usually called “ethnic cleansing,” but not consistently. Some people are more expendable than other people. And “the murder of the innocent,” an expression of this psalm, is not a label to be used in “nice” circles in reference to partial birth abortion.

Psalm 10 would not, of course, be genuine if it contained anticipations of the modern disease of utter skepticism. Whoever was the author of this psalm, he would not consider even for a moment that the wicked might be in good faith. As portrayed in this psalm the wicked deny God, though they are not really secure. Although they say that “God does not exist,” they are more intent on assuring themselves that “God forgets,” that “He does not see,” that “He will not punish.”

The wicked’s hollow boasting, “Never shall I falter, misfortune shall never be my lot,” might have been exposed by the psalmist for what it is worth, had he not been overwhelmed by the wicked’s readiness to pounce from his hiding place on any and all: The poor, the common folk, the ordinary toiler—all seem to be “devoured by the pride of the wicked.”

All this misery reflects an internal affair of the people, unlike the scene presented in the previous psalm in which the misdeeds of the nations are the cause of agonizing complaints addressed to God. But the resolution of the problem points in this psalm, too, in much the same direction. Here, too, the psalmist begs God to finish off all the wicked, to save all the innocent, and on a very short run at that. To be sure, even in the New Testament we have to pray that God’s kingdom may come and that we may be delivered from the Evil One. But we are not instructed to beg God that He should do wholesale justice right now or even within the foreseeable future.

We are always tempted to pray for precisely that. May the recitation of this psalm, which pleads in an almost naive way for the rapid elimination of all wickedness that rends society apart, be a much needed reminder of the need for a patient endurance of the wicked. This endurance we must turn into a virtue, and all the more so as Jesus himself warned: “In patient endurance shall you possess your soul” (Lk 21:19).

~Stanley L. Jaki: Praying the Psalms: A Commentary, Psalm 10.

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Psalm 10

Revised Gail Psalter

O LORD, why do you stand afar off,
and hide yourself in times of distress?
The poor are devoured by the pride of the wicked;
they are caught in the schemes that others have made.

For the wicked boasts of his soul’s desires;
the covetous blasphemes and spurns the LORD.
The wicked says in his pride, “God will not punish.
There is no God.” Such are his thoughts.

His path is ever untroubled;
your judgments are on high, far removed.
All those who oppose him, he derides.
In his heart he thinks, “Never shall I falter;
never shall misfortune be my lot.”

His mouth is full of cursing, guile, oppression;
under his tongue are deceit and evil.
He sits in ambush in the villages;
in hidden places, he murders the innocent.

The eyes of the wicked keep watch for the helpless.
He lurks in hiding like a lion in his lair;
he lurks in hiding to seize the poor;
he seizes the poor one and drags him away.

He crouches, preparing to spring,
and the helpless fall prey to his strength.
He says in his heart, “God forgets,
 he hides his face, never will he see.”

Arise, O LORD; lift up your hand, O God!
Do not forget the poor!
Why should the wicked spurn God,
saying in his heart, “You will not call to account”?

But you have seen the trouble and sorrow.
You note it; you take it in your hands.
The helpless one relies on you,
for you are the helper of the orphan.

Break the arm of the wicked and the sinner!
Pursue their wickedness till nothing remains!
The LORD is king forever and ever.
The nations shall perish from his land.

O LORD, you have heard the desire of the poor.
You strengthen their hearts; you turn your ear
to give right judgment for the orphan and oppressed,
so that no one on earth may strike terror again.

Praying the Psalms

Initials from the beginning of psalms in the St. Albans Psalter. (Wikisource)

I (Ben) recommend Fr. Jaki’s Praying the Psalms because I found this book quite helpful with understanding the Psalms in a way that enables me to pray them more meaningfully. . .

Praying the Psalms: "Since the psalms are Old Testament prayers by origin, their teaching is very incomplete about trials, whose full meaning was revealed only through Christ's suffering. The psalms contain only faint hints about the fact that from God's perspective life really begins with death. But the psalms remain unparalleled expressions of souls who struggle to hold on to God no matter what and who experience moments of surpassing joy. The purpose of this fine book is to help Christians grasp the basic meaning of each psalm so that the act of praying them might truly become an elevation of the mind to God. After providing general background on the psalms, including reflections on their use as both Jewish and Christian prayers, Stanley Jaki offers commentary on each individual psalm. He avoids exegetical minutiae, providing instead precisely enough explanation of the original cultural and theological setting of each psalm to let the usefulness of praying any of them fully emerge. A widely respected Christian scholar, Jaki has recited all 150 psalms once every week for the past sixty years. As a result, his book not only offers learned insight into the meaning of the psalms but it is also built on personal experience, making it a powerful devotional tool. Readers will find here helpful pointers for turning the recitation of the psalms into living prayers relevant to today's troubled world." (Real View Books)

Praying the Psalms:
a Commentary by Stanley L Jaki

● Available from Real View Books

About RVB: "Real View Books is a publishing company, founded by Stanley Jaki, established to print books that are significant to the understanding and defense of Christian doctrine and culture. A good number of books of Father Jaki on Science and Religion, and on Theology are also printed by Real View Books, and are available on this site."

"The creative science of Galileo"

“A perusal of Galileo’s “Dialogue” should make it clear, except to closed-minded Humeans, that the creative science of Galileo was anchored in his belief in the full rationality of the universe as the product of the fully rational Creator, whose finest product was the human mind, which shared in the rationality of the Creator.”

~Stanley L. Jaki: The Road of Science and the Ways to God, Chap. 7.

Portrait of Galileo Galilei, by Justus Sustermans.
Oil on canvas, 1636; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

John Paul II: Science

“SCIENCE encourages legitimate human curiosity to know the universe and to admire and contemplate its beauty and goodness. In this way we enter into communion with God himself, who looked upon what he had created and saw that it was very good.”

~Pope St. John Paul II: Discourse to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Sept. 26, 1986.

Lemaître: "The radius of space began at zero"

"The radius of space began at zero; the first stages of the expansion consisted of a rapid expansion determined by the mass of the initial atom, almost equal to the present mass of the universe. If this mass is sufficient, and the estimates which we can make indicate that this is indeed so, the initial expansion was able to permit the radius to exceed the value of the equilibrium radius. The expansion thus took place in three phases: a first period of rapid expansion in which the atom-universe was broken into atomic stars, a period of slowing-down, followed by a third period of accelerated expansion. It is doubtless in this third period that we find ourselves today, and the acceleration of space which followed the period of slow expansion could well be responsible for the separation of stars into extra-galactic nebulae."

~Monsignor Georges Lemaître: La formation des nebuleuses dans l'univers en expansion, Comptes Rendus (1933), 196, 903-4. Trans. Helge.

Lemaître and Einstein

John Paul II: On the limits of natural science

Pope St. John Paul II

“TO DESIRE a scientific proof of God would be equivalent to lowering God to the level of the beings of our world, and we would therefore be mistaken methodologically in regard to what God is. Science must recognize its limits and its inability to reach the existence of God: it can neither affirm nor deny his existence.”

(L’Osservatore Romano, 7-15-85, Italian edition)


 “ANY SCIENTIFIC hypothesis on the origin of the world, such as the hypothesis of a primitive atom from which derived the whole of the physical universe, leaves open the problem concerning the universe’s beginning. Science cannot of itself solve this question: there is needed above all that human knowledge that rises above physics and astrophysics and which is called metaphysics; there is needed above all the knowledge that comes from God’s revelation.”

(The Discourses of the Popes from Pius XI to John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences 1936-1986, p. 82.)

~Pope St. John Paul II 

"The enthusiasm for Darwinism"

“The enthusiasm for Darwinism of the advocates of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of a master race is all too understandable. Marx was quick to notice the usefulness of Darwinist theory for promoting class struggle, and Hitler volubly echoed Darwinist views very popular among German military leaders prior to the First World War as justification of their and his plans.”

~Stanley Jaki: Cosmos and Creator. 

Genesis 1: A Cosmogenesis?

BY REV. STANLEY L. JAKI, OSB
Reprinted from the August/September 1993 issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review

Genesis 1: A Cosmogenesis?

“Nihil pulchrius Genesi, nihil utilius.” Nothing more beautiful than Genesis, nothing more useful.

Genesis 1 is the most newsworthy chapter in the Bible. There can never be more fundamental news than that all depends on God because he made all, indeed the all, or the universe. This news did not come from any of the sages of ancient cultures. Genesis 1 is the most memorable source of that news, though in a way which has been all too often taken for a confrontation with news science seems to provide about the origin of the universe. Legion is the number of exegetes and theologians who in modern scientific times wanted to appear more newsworthy by showing that there is an agreement, a concordance, between the majestic diction of Genesis 1 and the science of the day.

The latest frenzy along these lines was sparked by the news, disclosed at the Spring 1992 meeting of the American Physical Society, that irregularities were discovered in the 2.7°K cosmic background radiation through a satellite in charge of COBE, or “COsmic Background Experiment.” The discovery merely filled a gap in an already impressive evidence about the so-called Big Bang theory of cosmic development.

The term Big Bang may mistakenly suggest that it is about the absolute origin or beginning of things. Rather, it is merely about the fact that science can trace cosmic processes to 15 or so billion years back in the past and that the farther back into the past those processes are traced, the more crowded upon one another they are found to be. At that distant point all matter existed in the form of an extremely condensed radiation. Does this mean that Moses, or whoever wrote Genesis 1, received an early revelation about the 2.7°K cosmic background radiation or about Maxwell’s equations of electro magnetics?

However, really serious questions arise. If one gives a scientific twist to “Let there be light,” then consistency demands that the same be done through the rest of Genesis 1. One should then answer scientifically the following questions: How could the earth, a planet, come before the sun? How could plants, which live on photosynthesis, thrive prior to the sun’s appearance? What constituted the outer confines of the upper and lower waters? Last but not least, in what sense can the firmament, produced on the second day, be an object of science?

Read the complete essay at Homiletic & Pastoral Review

"The existence of God"

"For reasons inherent in the method of physical science, no watertight proof of the existence of God can be built on its data and conclusions. But this also meant that no refutation of the existence of God could be built on physics either."

~S.L. Jaki: in The Absolute Beneath the Relative and Other Essays.

"Shortsighted humanists"

"... investing science with a prophetic and messianic role has not been the doing of science. Exact science, or rather its best cultivators, have never claimed that role. Exact physical science came into its own when during the seventeenth century it eliminated from its ken questions about existence, meaning, purpose, and the like. No wonder that sensitive physicists instinctively reject appeals from shortsighted humanists to do science in a so-called meaningful, or prophetic way. The cultivation of that meaningfulness is the business of the philosophy of being, or metaphysics, and of religion, if one wants to go even further. This is not to suggest that science is not full of philosophical presuppositions. But philosophy as such is not a direct part of the scientific strategy of exploring what can be known quantitatively about nature and existence."

~Stanley L. Jaki: in Chance or Reality and Other Essays.

Chesterton, a Seer of Science

Recommended reading:
Chesterton, a Seer of Science
By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki

"Cherished for his Father Brown detective stories, admired for his sword-play of words in his weekly column in the Illustrated London News, with thirty or so books of his still in print more than sixty years after his death in 1936, Chesterton is still to be recognized the philosophical genius he was. Owing to his genius as a philosopher, Chesterton was also a seer of science. This may surprise even most Chesterton aficionados and may throw into a rage not a few professional authorities on science. But Chesterton's many statements on science prove that he had a penetrating and prophetic vision of what science was truly about and what it was not and could not be. The evidence is laid out by an internationally known historian and philosopher of science, who groups under four headings Chesterton's pertinent dicta. He was an incisive interpreter of science, a resolute antagonist of scientism, a penetrating critic of evolutionism, and, last but not least, an inspired champion of the universe. Compared with most modern scientific cosmologists, Chesterton is a true giant of cosmology, a subject which sorely tests the ability of the scientist as a philosopher." 
─ Real View Books 

“Something absolute may be lurking beneath relativity theory”

“EINSTEIN’S work on relativity was not yet completed when it began to be taken for the scientific proof of the view that everything is relative. Such a view, widely entertained on the popular as well as the academic level, is now a climate of thought. A stunning proof of this is a full-page advertisement in the September 24, 1979 issue of Time magazine. It proclaims, under the picture of Einstein, in bold-face letters the message: EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE. The basic rule of in advertising, it is well to recall, is a reliance on commonly accepted beliefs, on generally shared cravings, hopes, and fears, or, in short, on the prevailing climate of thought.

“The claim that something absolute may be lurking beneath relativity theory, may therefore be surprising, though not original at all. That Einstein’s Relativity Theory implies elements and considerations that are absolutist in character was voiced by Planck as early as 1924 in an address “From Relativity to the Absolute,” which quickly acquired world-wide publicity. 

“. . . For us, late twentieth-century men, Newtonian science is a thing of the past. Everybody knows that Newton has been superseded by Einstein, but very few people know the true reason for this. The usual reason given is that Einstein showed everything to be relative. Nothing could be further from the truth. Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is the most absolutist theory ever proposed in the history of science. In fact, the entire success of Einstein’s theory is that it is absolutist. According to it, the value of the speed of light is independent of any reference systems and therefore has a value which is absolutely valid. According to the same theory, all inertial and accelerated reference systems are absolutely equivalent.”

~Stanley L. Jaki: The Absolute Beneath the Relative and Other Essays, pp. 1-2, 65. (1988)

"The very essence of science"

"NEWTON'S greatness lies, first, in his claim that his laws of motion are universally valid and, second, that he had shown something of that universality. I mean his proof that the motion of the moon is governed by the same acceleration as is the fall of an apple or stone to earth. This coupling of the earth and of the moon was a bold step into the universe of things. It revealed in a single stroke the very essence of science, which is the universal applicability of its laws."

~Stanley L. Jaki: The Absolute Beneath the Relative and Other Essays.

"All great creative advances of science..."

"SCIENCE found its only viable birth within a cultural matrix permeated by a firm conviction about the mind’s ability to find in the realm of things and persons a pointer to their Creator. All great creative advances of science have been made in terms of an epistemology germane to that conviction, and whenever that epistemology was resisted with vigorous consistency, the pursuit of science invariably appears to have been deprived of its solid foundation."

~Stanley L. Jaki: The Road of Science and the Ways to God.

The Road of Science and the Ways to God

The Biblical Basis of Western Science

REV. STANLEY JAKI

SCIENCE may be a refined form of common sense, but at times all-too refined. Some basic laws of science can, of course, be fully rendered in commonsense terms. One gives the full truth of the three laws of thermodynamics by saying that, first, you cannot win; second, you cannot break even; third, you cannot even get out of the game.

Those three laws mean that ultimately all physical activity tends toward an absolute standstill. This is true even if the present expansion of the universe were followed by its contraction. The next cycle of expansion-contraction would be less energetic, and the one after that even less so. Physics, the most exact form of science, tells us, if it tells anything, that all physical processes are part of a one-directional, essentially linear process.

Scientists were not the first to perceive that such is the case. In a more commonsense form it was the Bible that first spelled out this unidirectional process of everything. First, there is creation, then cosmic and human history, all tending toward a final judgment and to a final consummation for all in a new heaven and a new earth.

Wherever we find this linear perspective we find the Bible in the background. This is best appreciated if we take a look at the cosmic view of all great ancient cultures. They are all dominated by the belief that everything will repeat itself to no end, or by the idea of eternal returns. Only on occasion does one hear about this. One hardly ever hears that this belief was responsible for the fact that science suffered a stillbirth, indeed a monumental stillbirth, in all ancient cultures.

I coined this phrase, the stillbirths of science, about thirty years ago. The phrase certainly did not catch on in secular academia. The reason is obvious. Nothing irks the secular world so much as a hint, let alone a scholarly demonstration, that supernatural revelation, as registered in the Bible, is germane to science. Yet biblical revelation is not only germane to science — it made the only viable birth of science possible.

That birth took place in a once-Christian West. Still today it is that birth that fuels neocapitalism that not only needs free markets, but also merchandise to bring to market, and needs that merchandise in ever larger quantities. Only science can deliver them. The rise of that science, so crucial for Western man and for the modern world, has distinctly biblical origins insofar as the Bible is a record of Christian faith.

Whether modern man would be willing to learn in detail about the dependence of science on the Bible is strongly doubtful. But Christians will overlook those details only at grave peril in a great cultural contestation where science plays such a prominent role. 


Genesis 1 and Science

The notion of cosmic linearity, already mentioned, is rooted in the biblical teaching of creation our of nothing. This teaching is not yet present in the classic biblical document about creation, the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, or simply Genesis 1. To read that teaching into that chapter is forgivable in comparison with efforts to see in that chapter something, namely science, which is certainly not there in any form whatsoever. The sad fact is that nothing has brought so much discredit to the Bible as the chronic effort to take Genesis 1 for a science textbook. This effort did not start yesterday. But as long as this process goes on, any argument about the biblical basis of Western science will surely boomerang.

Primarily, Genesis 1 is not about creation. It is about the importance of the Sabbath observance. In Genesis 1 God is set up as a role model who works six days and rests on the seventh. But once God is set up in this role, he is to be assigned the highest conceivable work which is the making of everything.

Genesis 1 states this in three steps, each time using the same metaphor. In English we have the metaphor lock, stock, and barrel, or the three main parts of a rifle. We often use that metaphor to state literally that we mean everything under consideration. When the Bible states that God made the heaven and the earth, it uses the two main parts of the Hebrew world view, to convey the message that God made everything. The same procedure is .repeated in reference to the work done on the second and third days, the special formation of the two main parts, the firmament and the earth. It is with the same thrust that Genesis 1 speaks of the work of the fourth and fifth days, the main decorations of those two main parts. The procedure is to assert that the object of God's work is that totality which is the universe.

The Bible nowhere suggests that the six days can be taken for six geological ages. Nowhere does the Bible suggest that we should read the modern biological notion of species into Genesis 1, where it is stated that God created all the living things according to their kind.

With all that discredit piling up on the Bible through its very first chapter, we should not be surprised that it is well-nigh impossible to sell to secular modern culture a most fundamental biblical message: the total dependence of all on God. In the Bible even the heavens and the stars are on equal footing with muddy earth in respect to their dependence on God. Within the biblical world view it was ultimately possible to assume that the heavens and the earth are ruled by the same laws. But it was not possible to do this within the world vision that dominated all other ancient cultures. In all of them the heavens were divine.

And the Greeks drew the logic of this with a particular precision, which is the reason why science suffered a stillbirth even among the Greeks of old, those mythical models of modern rationality. Within the Greek ambiance it was impossible, in fact it would have been a sacrilege, to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of an apple were governed by the same law. It was, however, possible for Newton, because he was the beneficiary of the age-old Christian faith.

The faith was Christian in that most fundamental sense, in which the Bible holds Christ to be the only-begotten (monogenes) Son of God. When faced with that proposition, a well-educated Roman or Greek had his major intellectual shock, apart from shock relating to the moral level. For in Greco-Roman antiquity, the word monogenes was an attribute of the universe itself. Therefore, such a pagan, ready to convert, had to face up to the following choice: either Jesus or the universe was the only begotten. In other words, Christian faith and pantheism were concretely irreconcilable with one another because of the concreteness of Jesus. This is why only genuine Christian faith, and it alone, can resist the modern juggernaut of nature worship.

A belief in Jesus, in whom God created everything, is the very same belief that concretely opposes efforts to take the universe as a necessary fact that cannot be otherwise. Such efforts are apt even today to lead science into a blind alley. Two thousand years ago they caused science to suffer a stillbirth among the Greeks of old.

Only one aspect of this intricate subject can be discussed here. It has to do with the Christian, biblical teaching of the creation of the universe in time. God, of course, could have created the world eternally. This is a possibility which neither philosophy nor science can determine in one way or another. Science could prove the eternity of the universe only if it were possible to perform an experiment that would extend from eternity to eternity. Such an experiment would take a chain of an infinite number of Rip Van Winkles to perform.

The Bible strongly suggests, and Christian faith explicitly states, that the world was created in time, which means that its past history is finite. How long that history has been, nobody will ever know. We know that physical processes have been going on for at least 15 billion years. But there is no science that can pinpoint that absolutely first moment of existence. For in order to do so, science would have to be able to observe the transition from non-being into being, which is not a physical process. 


Making Science Possible

Science owes to Christian faith the very spark that made Newtonian science possible. That science is based on the three laws of motion. Once those laws were formulated, a science was at hand which from that point on developed on its own terms, with no end to its progress, with no end to its ever new findings, and with no end to the ever new merchandise it makes available for the free, and, at times, not-so-free markets of neocapitalism.

But that irresistible progress needed a spark, the idea of inertial motion, which is the first and most fundamental of Newton's three laws.

The formulation of the first law preceded Newton by more than three hundred years. It first appears in the commentaries on Aristotle's book on cosmology, On the Heavens, which John Buridan gave at the Sorbonne around 1348. By then many other medieval philosophers had commented on that book and radically disagreed with Aristotle's claim that the universe was eternal, that the celestial sphere rotated eternally. The Aristotelian world machine is a perpetual motion machine. As such it blocks the possibility of perceiving an absolute beginning for physical motion. It was, however, this perception that sparked Buridan's insight.

Unlike his many theological predecessors, he did not merely testate the fact of an absolute beginning. He also inquired about the how of that beginning. In reply he said almost verbatim: in the beginning when God made the heavens and the earth, he gave a certain quantity of motion to all celestial bodies, which quantity they keep because they move in an area where there is no friction. This is, of course, an uncanny anticipation of Newton's first law, the law of inertial motion. Only after that first law had been formulated was it possible to think about the other two laws.

Secular academia still does its very best to play down the importance of Buridan and of Pierre Duhem, who almost a hundred years ago set forth the evidence about Buridan and medieval science in huge, heroically researched volumes.

Whether a dent will be made on that resistance to the biblical origins of Western science depends, first, on the Bible being read intelligently and, second, on the history of science being studied sedulously. Both are needed if one is to make not so much a spirited, but an intellectually respectable case on behalf of the biblical origins of Western science.

In saying intellectually respectable, I also mean biblically genuine. For of all places it is in Paul's Letter to the Romans, that great document on God's grace, that we find the warning: Christian worship must be intellectually respectable. Paul's words, logike latreia, certainly do not mean logic chopping. Rather, they mean reasonable, or being respectful of reason. Why? Because God created men in his own image, an image that certainly includes rationality.

That rationality imposes nothing less than full respect for the ability and rights of reason. This is why Saint Augustine had already laid down the rule that whenever a phrase of the Bible conflicts with what can be known by reason with certainty, it is that phrase that should be reinterpreted accordingly. Otherwise, he said, infidels would raise their laughter sky high and rightly so. The rule of Augustine had already been quietly obeyed in respect to the difference between the Bible's view of the earth as a flat disk and the truth established by Greek science that the earth is spherical.

Unfortunately, Augustine himself did not exploit his rule with respect to the firmament, which he blandly located in a vapory layer in the orbit of Saturn. Nor was Augustine's rule heeded when it became imperative, through the work of Copernicus, to attribute two motions to the earth. With an eye on the Bible, Martin Luther called Copernicus a fool; later Rome condemned Galileo, again with an eye on the Bible. 


A God of Gaps?

The proper lesson was at long last drawn by the Catholic Church when she left Darwin alone. Darwin is still resisted by many Christians on the ground that god made all plants and animals according to their kind. They resist for the wrong reasons a Darwin who himself failed to realize that the strongest reasons on behalf of evolution were offered by the metaphysical abilities of the human mind which he tried to discredit once and for all. For only that mind can see an interlocking unity across all time and space: from subatomic particles on to the human body itself, with no gaps in between whatsoever.

Of course, evolutionary biology is far from having filled all those gaps. Some of them, buried in the past, it may never bridge. But to try to fill those gaps with a recourse to God and to the Bible, would be a most unbiblical thing. First, the history of science has provided countless examples of filling gaps of knowledge, each time exposing to ridicule a God whom some ill-advised Christians let perch over this or that gap in their science. They took improbabilities for impossibilities, which is an elementary fallacy in reasoning.

One can indeed make an impressive sport of calculating the improbability of this or that physical process. But time and again science performs the impossible. It should be enough to think of the synthesis of urea by Wohler in 1828, who in one stroke eliminated the allegedly absolute difference between inorganic and organic matter. After he did that the laughter of some materialists reached high heaven.

Another reason for holding evolution to be true relates to the emphatic affirmations in the Bible that all matter is good. By saying that matter is good, the Bible certainly implies that matter is not evil, but it also says that the edifice raised by God is as good as any other edifice which is good. But an edifice is good only insofar as it is compact, solid, consistent in its working. In other words, such a material edifice fully obeys the rationality of its architect. Why not say all of this, and in a superlative sense about the material universe made by God? Is God a second-rate architect, is God a second rate materials physicist or chemist, or molecular biologist who always has to improve on what he has done already?

Indeed, all the praises accorded by materialists to matter should pale beside the praises which Christians should accord to that same matter. Herein lies the reason why a Christian should be an all-out materialist, provided the human mind is excepted. This is why a Christian should be an all-out evolutionist, provided the human mind and the human mind alone is considered as a special creation of God.

Anything short of this would add to the materialists' laughter that reaches to high heaven. I hope that Carl Sagan is now in heaven. So God has the last laugh, that God whose infinite mercy has souls for its object. Even Almighty God cannot be merciful with mere matter. But Carl Sagan has the next-to-last laugh. This chief village atheist of our times, or rather the chief atheist performer of the village called evolutionary science, now can laugh fully, knowing that there is no Christian physics, no Christian chemistry, no Christian evolutionary science as long as these are science and not philosophies. But Sagan also laughs at his folly of having promoted the cause of an atheistic science.

This shows that nothing is so dangerous as to latch philosophies to purely quantitative considerations, which are the exclusive business of science. For unless we grant science everything which is its right, we cannot deny anything to science which it cannot rightfully claim. 


The Business of Science

Nothing which is non-quantitative is the business of science. But everything which is quantitative is its business. Non-quantitative aspects of existence, such as purpose, freedom, design, honesty, cannot he handle by science because they are not quantitative propositions. But every bit of matter is quantitative and therefore the business of science. Does not the Bible say that God disposed everything according to measure and number and weight?

Please note that the Bible does not say that measure, number and weight, or quantities in short, are everything. But the Bible says that every thing has measure, number, and weight or quantitative properties. Wherever there is matter, quantities are present. This is what gives science its unlimited competence in everything material, whether living or dead. But this is also the reason for the radical limitation of science to what is material insofar as it can be measured.

Herein lies an apparent paradox. It will certainly bother those who do not want to use properly their God-given reason. They do not have to over-exert themselves. It is enough to consider that of the various categories of human conceptualization, there is one that stands utterly apart from the rest. That category is the category of quantities. About all the other categories, various qualities for instance, it is possible to apply the phrase, more or less. Goodness can be realized in various degrees, more or less. Alertness too. Any food can taste good, more or less. But it is not possible to state about the number five that it is more five or less five.

This profound difference between quantities and any other concepts may not exist for pure spirits and certainly not for God. But it exists for us as long as we are in this mortal body. Chafe as we may, we cannot do anything about the fact that God created the human mind in such a way that, for it, quantities and everything else remain in two separate conceptual compartments. In other words, what God has separated, no man should try to join, that is, to fuse together. Those busy with integrating theology and science should pause.

There were, of course, some who tried to make it appear that if you pile quantities upon quantities you get qualities and even mind and free will thrown in for good measure. Unluckily for them, they tried to write science on that basis, but only made a mockery of it and utter fools of themselves. Examples are the Hegelian Right and the Hegelian Left. They made a horrible mess not only of human life, but also of science, including the science of evolution. 


What Darwin Failed to See

It matters not that Darwin's mechanism of evolution is incomplete. It may indeed be grievously faulty. It is always useful to learn about the latest fault lines in Darwinian theory, because its materialist champions love to present it as something scientifically faultless. But this leaves intact Darwin's basic insight. Only those who are inclined to resist either facts or sane philosophy or both resist Darwin. Yet nothing supports evolution so strongly as sane philosophy and especially that biblical precept that everything God made is good and that he arranged everything according to measure, number, and weight. That Darwin failed to see this is largely irrelevant. Without any doubt he proposed his mechanism of evolution as a rebuttal to belief in God, who at that time, and certainly in Darwin's broader ambiance, was equated with the God of innumerable special creations.

It was not the first time in intellectual history that God allowed a monumental half-truth so that full truth might be perceived the more effectively. The half-truth was the combination of an inadequate mechanism of evolution with a magnificent vision of the coherence of all material beings, together with a much needed radical exclusion of special creation. Darwin's greatest mistake was that he did not take that vision for what it was, a genuinely metaphysical vision.

Metaphysics, and not so much science, is the chief rational basis for stating that the material realm is fully coherent, that is, it needs no special interventions from an outside factor, such as God, to keep it running. Science is and will remain profoundly materialistic as long as it is science and not something else. Science can be materialistic only because all matter was created by God. Only a God who is a Creator was capable of giving autonomy to his material creation without suffering thereby a loss to his omnipotence. Such a God is the God of the Bible.

We shall do the worst disservice to the idea of the biblical origin of Western science as long as we hanker to find in science that something else on the basis of science and in its own terms. For if we take the phrase according to their kinds of Genesis 1 in a scientific sense, we have to take everything there also scientifically. What is sauce for the gander is also sauce for the goose. Then we must explain how visible light came before the making of the sun on the fourth day. It is rather ridiculous to claim that the light of the first day was electromagnetic radiation, let alone that it was the 2.7K cosmic background radiation. Then some explanation has to be found for the firmament and for the astronauts. The Bible deserves much better than to be exposed to endless ridicule by taking it for a science textbook. But the Bible also demands serious intellectual effort if one is to make a case on behalf of its having served as the origin of Western science.

We must make that case partly because the future of Western culture hangs in the balance. That culture needs much more than science. We must use both the best means and also the most effective means if we want to obtain a hearing for that much more. A most effective means is nowadays a reference to science. Science, unfortunately, has become one of the three most effective marketing means. The other two are Sports and Sex, writ large. Such are the three S's that rule modern life.

Science, of course, deserves much better, and it deserves the best in the way of intellectual efforts. At times it is enough to use common sense. Science may be much more than a refined form of common sense, but in interpreting science correctly some such sense is indispensable. The Bible is an unexcelled source of common sense, and also a chief depository of information about that infinitely much more which is the Kingdom of God. To seek first that Kingdom has been the God-enjoined method of obtaining the rest, which, as history shows, includes even science.

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This essay is the text of Fr. Jaki's lecture given to the Philadelphia Society on April 26, 1997.