"Science encourages legitimate human curiosity"

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

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

"Troubles gathering below the horizon"

"UNDOUBTEDLY, the history of the Church shows some splendid phases. One of them was the phase running from about 1860 to 1960. It was a phase of unusual cohesion in the Church. Just before it got under way Newman could already register that "never was the whole body of the faithful so united to each other and to their head. Never was their a time when there was less error, heresy, and schismatical perverseness among them." But in the same breath he also saw troubles gathering "below the horizon." In fact during the last twenty-five years of his life, he repeatedly voiced his apprehension about a very trying phase to come in Church history."

~Stanley L. Jaki: "Peter's Chair: A Professional Chair?" in The Gist of Catholicism and Other Essays.

"The essential mark of tyranny"

"MEN DO NOT rebel against the old; rather they rebel against the new. They turn upon something when they find that it has them in a trap. They do not revolt against something that has been unpopular. They revolt (and very rightly) against something that has been popular. They hated Charles I. because they had loved Elizabeth. They killed Louis XVI. because they had been killed for Louis XIV. In fact, this is probably what is meant by that seemingly meaningless phrase, the fickleness of the mob. It probably means that the mob is quicker than other people in discovering that man has walked into a man-trap. England went mad with joy for the English Monarchy, because the Armada had not conquered England. And then England suddenly went mad with rage because it discovered that (during that exciting interlude) the English Monarchy had conquered England. We had escaped the snare of Philip; we walked into the snare of Elizabeth; we broke out of the snare of Charles I.

"This is the essential mark of tyranny: that it is always new. Tyranny always enters by the unguarded gate. The tyrant is always shy and unobtrusive. The tyrant is always a traitor. He has always come there on the pretence that he was protecting something which the people really wanted protected -- religion, or public justice, or patriotic. Men staring at the Armada did not watch the King; so they strengthened the King. Later when they watched the King they unconsciously strengthened the aristocracy. Again, when they attacked the aristocracy, they did not watch the big merchants who were attacking it -- and who wanted watching. All tyrannies are new tyrannies. There are no such things really as old tyrannies; there are hardly any such things as old superstitions.

"For instance, the decorous Victorian woman is hardly as old as Victoria; she is much newer than Sophia Weston, or Portia, or Rosalind. You do not know a tyranny until it is on top of you; until it has you in a trap. The tyrant is not present until he is omnipresent. There is one moral to these evident facts of history. When you look for tyrants, do not look for them among the obvious types that have oppressed men in the past -- the king, the priest, or the soldier. If you do you are merely looking at the Spanish Armada while England is being turned into a despotism behind your back. Monarchy was once a popular organ; yet it was turned against the people. Remember that newspapers are popular organs that may be turned against the people. Whatever the new tyrant is, he will not wear the exact uniform of the old tyrant. The new tyrant may wear any uniform; he may wear the beard of Dorie or the skirts of Mrs. Eddy. But if you ask me, I think it most likely that the new tyrant will wear the uniform of an ordinary prison official announcing that the sentence of 7845 had better be prolonged."

~G.K. Chesterton: "A Theory of Tyrants." In 'The Daily News,' June 13, 1908.

"Be sure that the longer you live..."

"FOR only the truly virtuous could understand Newman about a paradoxical feature of spiritual life, which he set forth in the sermon on "Shrinking from Christ's Coming." The more one prayed to see Christ and longed for His coming, the more one felt one's uncleanness and became apprehensive about that coming. Moreover, clean in one sense never become: "If by 'clean,' you mean free from that infection of nature, the least drop of which is sufficient to dishonour all your services, clean you never will be till you have paid the debt of sin, and lose that body which Adam has begotten." And now Newman lifted a bit of the veil of that drama: "Be sure that the longer you live, and the holier you become, you will only perceive that misery more clearly.""

~Stanley L. Jaki: Newman's Challenge, Ch. 2--A Gentleman and Original Sin.

Newman's Challenge

Available at Amazon

“The universe is a single jewel…”

WHILE INDIVIDUAL STARS showed a great variety of motion, such was not the evidence that began to accrue from the early 1910s on about spiral galaxies. By and large their spectra showed a red shift indicative of recessional velocity. In the early 1920s this could mean that those galaxies might not be permanently subordinate parts of the Milky Way. In other words, the mini-universe revealed itself as possibly being in the process of fragmentation, the very opposite to what a universe has to be. Also, the Milky Way itself had to be removed from its exalted status as the main part of that mini-universe to one among tens of thousands of spiral galaxies. This happened when around 1924 Hubble observed Cepheid variables in the Andromeda nebula which allowed him to establish its true distance and size. The distance turned out to be two million light years, or twenty times the diameter of the Milky Way. This showed the Andromeda nebula to be roughly equal in size to the Milky Way, and a true rival to the supposedly chief body in the visible universe.

But when the observable or mini-universe had to be divided into tens of thousands of equally big parts and cease thereby to appear as a coherent whole, another development came to the rescue of cosmic coherence. The result was nothing short of dramatic in that it gave an unsuspectedly precise grasp of the universe itself. The major breakthrough in cosmology occurred when in 1927 the Abbé Lemaître derived from Einstein’s cosmological equations the expansion of the universe and correlated that rate with data on galactic red-shifts already available. Lemaître’s conclusion should seem especially daring when contrasted with the diffidence with which Hubble and Humason published, about that time, their first analysis of those red-shifts. Even four years later, with many more data on hand, they voiced their constraint “to describe that ‘apparent velocity-displacements’ without venturing on the interpretation and its cosmological significance.” Yet the velocity-distance law contained not only the revolutionary implication that the whole universe is subject to an over-all dynamics of expansion, but also that far back in the cosmic past all thing, or the universe, had to be a very small thing.

This latter point found its first elaboration in Lemaître’s famous hypothesis of the early universe as a “primitive atom.” He did not, however, seize on the principal philosophical opportunity which this view of the universe offered. Not that the exploitation of that view demanded scientific expertise or professional training in philosophy. What was demanded could have conceivably been found in those Catholic and Thomistic circles in which Lemaître moved. Yet even in those circles where Chesterton had for some time been eagerly read, no attention was given to his most penetrating analysis of scientific laws, widely available in his Orthodoxy, first published in 1908. It also contained what in view of the late-20th-century developments in scientific cosmology should pass for a profound anticipation of their very gist:

“The universe is a single jewel and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel of the cosmos it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and price; for there cannot be another one.” (‘Orthodoxy’)

But if the universe was to reveal convincingly what precious things reveal in their smallness, namely, its exceedingly specific features, its expanding motion had to be followed up in the reverse direction.

~Stanley L. Jaki: God And The Cosmologists, Chap. Two—Nebulosity Dissipated.

God and the Cosmologists

Available at Real View Books

Big Bang theory renamed

Fr. George Lemaître

Astronomers voted overwhelmingly to give Fr. George Lemaître the recognition many believe he deserves

The membership of the International Astronomical Union has voted to recommend that the name of a Belgian Catholic priest be added to the astronomical law explaining the expansion of the universe, or “Big Bang.”

Using an electronic voting system, the IAU passed a resolution to recommend renaming the “Hubble law” as the Hubble–Lemaître Law.

The law had been named after American astronomer Edwin Hubble, although Fr. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian astronomer and priest, in 1927 first discovered the expanding universe—which also suggests a “Big Bang,” according to Science.

*Continue reading this article here.

"Mechanistic ideology"

“THE widespread taking of mechanistic physics for the truth of a mechanistic philosophy proved to be, so warned no less a physicist than W. Heitler, “a superstition far more dangerous than the one about the existence of witches: It leads to a general spiritual and moral drying-up which can easily lead to physical destruction. When once we have got to the stage of seeing in man merely a complex machine, what does it matter if we destroy him?” In another context Heitler praised Dostoevski for foreseeing a global destruction as a consequence of the mechanistic ideology spawned by misguided reflection on science throughout the 19th-century.”

Stanley L. Jaki: The Purpose of it All, Chap. 6—Heuristics of Purpose.

At Real View Books

“The fact of evolution”

“IN another lecture I took up the design argument. Here, too, I presented my own ideas couched in views or comments made by various people during the previous hundred years or so. I made much of Darwin’s contradictory statements about design and purpose, to say nothing of natural selection and chance. The topic demanded more space, but it was not for another twelve years that I had the opportunity to devote a set of eight lectures to the design argument taken as a particular aspect of the much broader question of purpose. I have, however, made it clear that, regardless of the defects of the mechanism of evolution, the fact of evolution had to be held by a theist even more firmly than by a materialist. For a materialist merely the power of matter is at stake, whereas for the theist the honor of the Creator as one who can endow matter with all the power proper to matter.

“Clearly, a notion of a Creator who had to interfere with natural processes whenever a new species was to arise, had to appear unworthy of God, who can and ought to be worshiped, and a theology that has such a God for its object. By evolution I simply meant that the powers of matter are wholly sufficient to account for any material transformation insofar as it is observable and measureable, be it the transformation of species. For the scientist any species as such has to be a strictly material entity. In that respect the competence of the scientist is unlimited. By the same token, the scientist cannot argue against some non-material directive force in nature as long as that force remains non-material, that is, metaphysical. Such a force cannot be considered non-existent just because the scientific method forecloses it being observed, weighed, and measured. Philosophy is required to prove the existence of such a force, though without ever attributing to it any material characteristic. The scientist may safely ignore it, though to be consistent he should also say that he cannot observe life. Life is not merely the motion of bits of matter and the replicating of their configurations. Fully satisfactory thinking about evolution implies the often frustrating recognition that one has to handle at the same time two balls, standing for two mutually irreducible sets of concepts.”

~Stanley L. Jaki: A Mind’s Matter: An Intellectual Autobiography, Chap. 6—The Gifford Lectureship.

Theological liberalism

“THE wages of theological liberalism are not only spiritual death, but also a chronic and contagious intellectual schizophrenia.”

~S.L. Jaki: A Mind’s Matter: An Intellectual Autobiography, Chap. 9—Biblical Matters.

Creation and Scientific Creativity

“JAKI…roundly rejects chance as an explanation for processes in the cosmos, let alone an explanation of the cosmos itself. Making chance the ultimate explanation reduces the cosmos to less than a sheer mechanism: it empties of coherence physical processes and poses an inherent threat to the purposeful nature of science. In this connection a principal target of Jaki is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics in general and of Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty in particular. The essence of that interpretation, Jaki insists, is not science but philosophy, indeed a philosophy of anti-ontology. Once viewed in this light, the principle of uncertainty becomes, when taken for the overthrow of causality, a cheating with real matter. For, to quote Jaki, “if the inexactitude in measurement means inexactitude in ontological causality, then in each radioactive emission a fraction of real matter, however small a fraction, becomes unaccounted for in the sense of being an uncaused entity that can come and go for no reason whatever.” The chance proclaimed by the Copenhagen interpretation is, according to Jaki, “a philosophical ghost residing in the shadowy realm between being and non-being.” Jaki makes it clear that it is a fallacy to deduce an ontological proposition from the use of a purely operational tool, a fallacy made easier by the inroads of idealism and pragmatism into scientific thinking. Jaki’s sensitivity for the crucial role of ontology comes through just as well in his stricture of Darwinism whose essence is “that there are no essences except one essence which is sheer matter.””

~Paul Haffner: Creation and Scientific Creativity: A Study in the Thought of S.L. Jaki, Chap. 3—Pitfalls and Prospects of Science.


Available at Real View Books and Amazon

Cosmic Background Radiation

“By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like a dot; by thought I encompass the universe.”

(Pascal, Pensées No. 265)

“THE STORY of the 3^oK cosmic background radiation is well known through able popularizations. Possibly the best of them has as title, "The First Three Minutes," a first-rate misnomer. It can easily create the impression that science can specify the first moment of physical interactions, let alone the very moment of creation. It is also misleading because it draws attention away from what should seem to be most significant in the 3^oK radiation. That radiation is a supreme evidence that speculations about the primordial structuring of the universe are on the right track in more than one sense. No track could be straighter, narrower, more specific, or, from the point of view of man, more consequential. The track leads to a primordial condition of the universe which can be told in a few lines, almost in a few words, illustrating the stunning power of the mind to conquer the universe. That it takes only a few words stands to reason. The more specific an entity is, the fewer words it takes to identify it. The identity tag for the universe in its primordial state need not contain more than the following data: one proton, one neutron, and one electron for every 100 million photons, and the whole conglomerate at a temperature of about a hundred billion degrees. Such are the necessary parameters for the genesis of all chemical elements forming the actual universe. Had any of those parameters been different, however slightly, the formation of the actual set of elements could not have taken place, the universe would not be what it is, and we humans could not be part of it as our physical make-up is based on that very same set. ... Such is the background to the emergence in modern cosmology of the so-called anthropic principle. . . .”

~Stanley L. Jaki: Angels, Apes, & Men, Chap. III. 
(Sherwood, Sugden & Co. 1983)

The Realist Guide to Religion and Science

Recommended Reading:

The Realist Guide to Religion and Science
by Paul Robinson

● See this book at Amazon
● At Gracewing Publisher
● Read the Foreword by Rev. Dr Paul Michael Haffner

Paul Robinson clearly presents the teachings of Fr. Jaki for a general audience.

Darwin’s materialism

“Christians cannot, of course, be expected to display superhuman insight at every new turn taken by intellectual fashion. Nor can they be held accountable for Darwin’s motivation, which was not so much scientific as countermetaphysical. The inept philosophizing of Darwin and Darwinians is not of Christian provenance. Christians are certainly not the source of the stereotyped descriptions of Darwin as the genius who staked everything on natural selection. Compared to another issue, natural selection was relatively unimportant for Darwin. That other issue was special creation. Darwin left no doubt as to the lesser importance he attributed to natural selection. His statements are, however, misleading if taken at face value, namely, that his overriding concern was the overthrow of the special creation of each and every species. It is safer to say that Darwin wanted to discredit the notion of creation as such. He realized that creation and evolution are not mutually exclusive, but materialism and creation certainly exclude one another.”

~Stanley L. Jaki: Angels, Apes, & Men, Chap. II—Glorified Ape.

The faith of Darwinists

“RESPECTABILITY of Darwinist philosophy has a lively resource in the contemporary slighting of man’s intellectuality, which is also discredited through self-styled rationalistic trends in philosophy, be they variations on phenomenalism, logical positivism, or empiricism. Those who truly value the intellect have been intimidated, in such an atmosphere, from using it as a prime proof that, for all his animality, man is very much more than an animal. Yet admirers of man’s mind stand on vastly firmer ground than do their opponents. On what ground could a mere animal resort to what Huxley [T. H. Huxley] called “an act of philosophical faith,” to secure credibility to a pivotal point of Darwinism, the emergence of life out of non-living matter? How could a mere animal resort to what is called “analogical reasoning” and use it as a substitute for factual evidence?  Clearly, man’s mental powers demanded a better account than the epiphenomenalism proposed by Huxley. He has little right to paddle in such shallow waters after he declared that “belief, in the scientific sense of the word, is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations.” The ease with which he proposed epiphenomenalism as the explanation of the brain-mind relationship, and the ease with which it was received in his camp hardly suggests profundity of thought. Sophisticated shallowness (especially evident in the so-called identity theory of the mind-body relationship) characterizes most efforts to avoid dualism. To make matters worse, dualism is often equated with its Cartesian form which is surely unworthy of serious consideration.” 

~S.L. Jaki: Angels, Apes & Men, Chap. Two—Glorified Ape.

Available at Real View Books

Creation, Christianity, and Islam

"The customary designation of the dogma of creation as a Judeo-Christian tenet raises therefore more questions than it settles. In view of the foregoing it will not perhaps appear a rank exaggeration to call the dogma of creation out of nothing, the only creation worth considering, a Christian dogma. To call that dogma Christian just because it became universally known and widely shared through the spread of Christianity, is a failure to see beneath the surface. Christianity was able to carry that dogma far and wide only through the strength provided by faith in the Incarnation. Not surprisingly, it is again the dogma of the Incarnation which helped Christians to unfold the full meaning of the dogma of creation by vindicating the true nature and dignity of created minds in the cosmos, a point, as will be seen, of crucial importance for the fate and fortunes of science. While belief in the immortality of the soul is a minor and peripheral phenomenon within Judaism, it is the very core of Christianity and precisely because of belief in the Incarnation. Without such immortality no meaning can be given to the reality of Christ between his death and resurrection, nor to the meaning of many of his words, such as for instance, ‘Today you shall be with me in Paradise,’ words spoken to the good thief facing with Jesus an imminent physical end. No wonder that from reason’s probing into the mystery of the Incarnation there also derived a view of man as a person with inalienable dignity.

"Creator, God Incarnate, creation out of nothing, immortal soul, and human dignity are notions that form a closely knit unit, a fact well attested by the story of the dogma of creation. A milestone in that story is the Fourth Lateran Council (1214) which made the expression ex nihilo an official part of Christian dogma. The move may appear ‘a most serious mistake’ to anyone suspicious of philosophy in the articulation of faith. The expression ex nihilo is indeed very philosophical in comparison with the purely biblical phrase ‘Maker of heaven and earth’. These efforts follow Christianity as a perennial shadow which bears witness to the grim resolve of human nature to oppose both Creation and Cross. In the decades preceding the Council the resolve saw a violent resurgence with Cathars, Bogomils and their kindred on the rampage. For them matter was either unreal or was evil, and in the latter case a principle on equal footing with God, the Creator. The resounding voice of the Council was clearly in order.

"Another, anything but crude trend at its peak at that time represented perhaps an even greater threat to Christianity and rationality alike. Its source was the wholesale surrender of Islamic intelligentsia to the Greek world-view steeped in the dogma of the world’s eternity. The chief spokesmen of that intelligentsia, Avicenna and Averroes, settled problems of the relation between revelation (faith) and philosophy (science) with recourse to the principle of triple truth. One truth, given in the plain words of the Koran, was for simple folk; another for theologians interested in distinctions; a third, or highest form of truth, for philosophers who had already found it in Aristotle. That the chief opponents of this trend were mystics—Al-Ghazzali and Al-Ashari, who rejected all philosophical approaches to points of faith, above all its chief point, Creation—shows that monotheism in its Islamic form was incapable as it was in its Judaic version from becoming a vehicle of the dogma of creation in a way consistent with revelation, with reason and with that notion of an orderly world which is demanded by science. It was no accident that Al-Ashari was forced to propound an atomistic notion of creation, according to which the world is created anew by Allah at every moment and that there was no causal connection between any two momentary worlds. Such worlds could in no way constitute the cosmos needed by science."

~S.L. Jaki: Cosmos and Creator, Chap. 3—The Dogma of Creation.  

From the Vatican...

“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 John Paul II, Discourse to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Sept. 26, 1986.

“MAN learns from two books: the universe, for the human study of the things created by God; and the Bible, for the study of God’s superior will and truth. One belongs to reason, the other to faith. Between them there is no clash.”

~Pope Pius XII: Address to the Pontifical Academy of Science, Dec. 3, 1939.

Einstein, Maxwell’s Equations, and Relativity

“But if light, a form of electromagnetic waves, was propagated in a medium at absolute rest, the type of rest synonymous with the ether, then those equations [Maxwell’s] did not retain their form (beauty) if expressed in a frame of reference moving at a steady velocity with respect to an observer assumed to be at rest. Unlike leading physicists of the time, young Einstein seemed to have been led by the conviction that by safeguarding the invariability of Maxwell’s equations he saved their essential beauty and that this was of far greater importance than absolute rest and ether. Beneath his subconscious dissent from the prevailing preferences there lay a commitment to the beauty of the universe, a commitment with a distinctly metaphysical character of which Einstein became aware of only years later.

"In the eyes of many physicists Einstein’s move emptied the universe not only of the ether but also of its intelligibility and unity which, in the form of a hallowed scientific dogma, had been equated for the previous 300 years with mechanical interaction. Actually, Einstein’s move made the genuine content of the term universe more unified than ever, and also far more intelligible and meaningful. Indeed, the first step in saving the beauty of Maxwell’s equations was the unification of the speed of light by the postulate that its value remains in a vacuum always the same, regardless of the velocity of the emitting source, a postulate inconceivable within classical mechanics. An equally startling though logical consequence of Einstein’s procedure was the unification of matter and energy. Their equivalence became a common place through the formula E = mc² . Another, and no less important consequence was Einstein’s almost immediate interest in extending his work from frames of reference that moved with respect to one another at any given velocity, to frames of reference accelerated with respect to one another. Such an acceleration was exemplified by the gravitational field produced by any mass. Unlike Special Relativity, General Relativity had therefore to have momentous cosmological consequences. They were spelled out by Einstein himself in 1917 in a paper in which for the first time cosmology came into its own, that is, achieved the status of a scientifically consistent discourse.”

~S.L. Jaki: Cosmos and Creator, Chap 2—The Cosmos of Science.  

Christ and Creation

“AT THE HEART of Christian message stands the person of Christ, who is ‘the image of the unseen God’ (Col 1:15), and he ‘has become our wisdom, and our virtue, and our holiness, and our freedom’ (1 Cor 1:31). Jaki makes it clear that ‘the Christian certitude about the rationality of nature, about man’s ability to investigate its laws, owes its vigour to the concreteness by which Christ radiated the features of God creating through the fullness of rationality which is love.’[13] Christian rationality was something very different from the Greek variety, for the Greeks tended either to extreme mechanism or to pan-teleologism (the stance which saw purpose everywhere). From Socrates onwards, it was the problem of pan-teleologism which prevailed, bringing with it a cosmology which was ‘a mixture of rank subjectivism and inescapable determinism’. Lacking in the Greek conception of the rationality of the cosmos was an understanding of the freedom of man and the contingency of things. ‘Conviction on both points was secured only by Christianity for which the freedom of man is an indispensable tenet,’ as is also ‘the contingency of a world which is created.’[14]

According to Jaki, the crucial contribution of the New Testament to the doctrine of creation is pivoted in the efforts of John and Paul to safeguard monotheism by attributing to Christ the work of creation, a work most specifically tied to the Father in the Old Testament. Such is the gist of his quoting St. John’s portrayal of Christ in whom ‘all beings came to be; not one being had its being but through him’ (Jn 1:3). The same is true of his quoting Paul: ‘For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth: everything visible and invisible; . . . all things were created through him and for him’ (Col 1:16). This notion of creation through Christ eliminated the specter of a duality between the Father and the Son while the portrayal, specific to John, of Christ as the ‘only-begotten Son,’ posed a powerful barrier within Christianity to those inroads which pantheism made within other forms of monotheism.”

—Paul Haffner: Creation and Scientific Creativity: A Study in the Thought of S.L. Jaki, Chap. 4. (Christendom Press; 1991)

The Savior of Science

Christo Pantocrater

The socio-economist Gunnar Myrdal . . . lived long enough to see that reason alone was of very limited effectiveness to solve the problem of poverty and other even greater problems. His last years were a period of disillusion. The world, he remarked, was “really going to hell in every respect.” It was not hope but grim resolve that made him add: “We must not let the injustices of the world take over.”

Hope was not so absent in Einstein’s often quoted remark: “It is easier to denature plutonium that it is to denature the evil spirit of man.” Such a view implied that there was something enduringly defective in man’s readiness to choose life instead of death in more than one sense. That Einstein did not spell out that process of changing one’s nature in terms of love, let alone of Christian love, cannot be simply ascribed to his being above all a man of scientific intellect. Such a man was Bertrand Russell, the co-author of Principia Mathematica, who in 1950 spoke of Christian love in terms that would have done credit to the finest and most orthodox Catholic theologian. The most informative thrust of his words, which I have quoted on more than one occasion, is not that they represent a rebuttal of his life-long crusade against religion and certainly against Christian religion which he had earlier denounced for its “deprecation of intelligence and science.” Nor should that thrust be seen in his biting reference to the cynicism with which, he knew, much of academia glorying in science would greet his words. Not even his acknowledgement of Christian love as an already very old and still indispensable commodity which provides a “motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage” constitutes the thrust in question. The thrust is carried in his emphatic statement that only by having Christian love shall one have “an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.”

Honesty borne out of that love, which demands utter unselfishness, will help one to reconsider cultural history, global as well as Western, and straighten one’s resolve to discard hardened clichés, however hallowed. Some of the most misleading among those clichés relate to the historiography of science, burdened as it is with many vested interests. The importance of the historiography is amply revealed by its taking on the role which the study of classics played until recently in the formation of Western cultural consciousness. A principal cliché in that historiography is that science is the savior—a tragic absurdity if one considers the great, potential and actual, setbacks dealt to science by those who presented it as the ultimate and only truth available for man. Condorcet, Comte, Mach, Spencer, the “scientific” Marxists (Lenin, Stalin, Mao), logical positivists and Darwinian paradigmists proved themselves chief enemies of science as they tried to substitute it for Christ and everything He stands for. Unlike those misguided and self-anointed spokesmen of science, the truly anointed Mashia or Christos followed a course of proper priorities as befitted One who existed prior to any and all. That course revealed its uniqueness by providing real sense for human history. Modern historiography owes its birth to that sense which also became the matrix for the only viable birth of science. This is why Christ rightly looms large, before eyes sensitive to His unique grandeur, as the Savior of Science.

~S.L. Jaki: Excerpt from The Savior of Science, Chap. V—The All Saving Love. 

The Savior of Science
by Stanley L. Jaki

The Savior of Science is available at Amazon and RVB.

Stanley L. Jaki

Stanley L. Jaki

Fr. George Rutler

by Fr. George Rutler - April 21, 2009

The first impression really was the lasting one in my instance with the Rev. Stanley L. Jaki (1924-2009). More than 20 years later, I vividly see him sitting me down on the porch of a house in Princeton and telling me that religious freedom was the most important teaching of Vatican II and that, in his view, Pope John Paul II's "Achilles heel" as a philosopher was phenomenology.

Father Jaki was a genius and, as true humility dispenses with modesty, he would not have denied it if someone were rude enough to ask, though he would have thought the question more silly than impolite. Suffering fools gladly was not his charism, nor was debate a genre comfortable to him. More than ruffling feathers, he plucked them, and he could turn callow undergraduates to melted butter when they used non sequiturs.

Like his two surviving brothers, he was a Benedictine of the tenth-century Archabbey of Pannonhalma, where he lived through World War II, being ordained in 1948. After receiving a doctorate in theology in Rome, he came to the United States and taught in Pennsylvania, but that ended when he lost his voice after a tonsillectomy. His speech returned, unforgettably, a few years later, but the voice was raspy and must have been a trial to him. No longer able to teach, he studied at Fordham for a doctorate in physics with Victor Hess, who had received the Nobel Prize in 1936 for his discovery of cosmic rays. Then he founded, with six other Hungarian priests, a priory in Portola Valley, California, where he was bookkeeper from 1957 to 1960. He did further studies at Stanford and Princeton and went on to lecture in universities around the world, publishing some 40 books, including his brilliant Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh.

He died in Madrid at the age of 84 only a few days after having lectured in Rome as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science. It distressed some – including Chauncey Stillman, who had endowed it – that he would not take a chair in Roman Catholic studies at Harvard, for they thought Father Jaki would restore it to its original purpose; but he was loyal to Seton Hall, where he was Distinguished University Professor. All this while he was under obedience to the archabbot of Pannonhalma, whose abbey he helped with the proceeds of the largest monetary award in the world, the Templeton Prize.

Father Jaki's great lights were Newman and Chesterton, about whom he wrote books from his unique perspective as a philosopher of science, but his intellectual father was Pierre Duhem, mathematician and physicist. He even wrote a book about Duhem's hobby of painting landscapes. That spectacular French pioneer in thermodynamics and hydrodynamics paved the way for Father Jaki's perception of the essential role of Christianity, and in particular medieval scholastics such as Oresme, in providing the mental and cultural matrix for the development of modern physics.

"Science lives by hope no less than religion." The Duhem-Quine thesis, which posits an alternative to Popper's method of distinguishing science from pseudoscience, was, I am sure, at least in its method of observation, behind Father Jaki's claim that Gödel's incompleteness theorem applies to "theories of everything" in theoretical physics.

Father Jaki was the bane of editors, writing brilliantly in English but with thoughts within thoughts and rambling asides that he refused, with the ferocity of a Hungarian hussar, to have retooled. In one book on which we collaborated, he asked permission to add a "small footnote" to one of my paragraphs. Upon publication, I found myself calling Kant a rank amateur in science and recommending Father Jaki's translation of Kant's "shockingly incompetent" cosmogony. It was by far my most erudite footnote, though I had not written it. He also highly disapproved of Rahner's "Transcendental Thomism," which he called "Aquikantianism," a neologism that I mentioned to a professor of theology in Oxford who, while poles apart from the Benedictine in most matters, deemed it a brilliant confection.

Father Jaki knelt for a holy hour every day and kept rosaries in his pockets for people to join him in prayer. While only a brave man would challenge points dear to him, I remember Father Jaki on long summer days talking with children as if time did not matter; when, as pianist, he played Chopin and Liszt, he seemed the most docile of men. In electing Newman and Duhem and Chesterton for mental fraternity, he was organizing in subconscious hope what might be a convivium in the heavens of the Savior of Science.
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About Rev. George William Rutler

"A new situation"

“A new situation has come about within the Christian community itself . . . with regard to the Church’s moral teachings. It is no longer a matter of limited and occasional dissent, but of an overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine.” So stated Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Veritatis splendor. The situation is indeed very new. Church historians may not agree as to how far back in time they should go to find a situation similar to the one described in the Encyclical. But they would certainly agree that no Encyclical issued during the last 200 years contains a statement even remotely so ominous.

~Stanley L. Jaki: The Gist of Catholicism and Other Essays, Chap. V—Liberalism and Theology.

The Gist of Catholicism
and Other Essays

Real View Books