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.
___________________________________
© 1996-2018 The Mary Foundation · 501(c)3

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

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.

___________________________________

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."