Science & the ways to God

...it fails regularly to consult the created world...

...He who says cosmos must say Creator in the traditional sense" (Cosmos and Creator...

...That claim makes some sense...

...Nor is it a single story, though Jaki does detect a principal component in the plot...

...Did it happen that way by sheer unfolding of logic...

...Iff NS, then G. Sometimes Jaki's corroborating evidence can be impressive...

...Though not true in any hard 315 logical sense, neither does the cosmos give any other compelling ground...

...other theories, for example, a serial ensemble of universes, or many simultaneous worlds, some at random with characteristics for life...

...Scientists (better than these philosophers of science) display real creative genius when convinced of the intelligibility of a nature that can be contingently discovered, splendidly illustrated by Newton in the classical centuries of science, illustrated again, in the twentieth century, by Max Planck, who launched quantum mechanics, and by Albert Einstein, who launched relativity theory...

...In The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origin (1978) Jaki claims that science was not a revolutionary development, arriving with a paradigm overthrow, a secular, mechanistic model cutting away from the Aristotelian monotheism that preceded and spawned it...

...We can only invite faith, detecting a telling Presence in a likely story...

...Even after science was launched, it has not been easy to keep these ingredients properly blended...

...Monotheism inspired science, and should continue to do so...

...Jaki tries to show that governing this history is a logic much like that which governs science...

...Perhaps we want today to interact with Darwinism honestly and critically, trying, if we believe in a Creator, to put a different face on the randomness, seeing it as a veil of creativity or noticing that it is really an admission of the inadequacies of evolutionary theory...

...Science and religion are complementary and dialectical...

...In another study of science in a cultural context, Susantha Goonatilake (Aborted Discovery: Science and Creativity in the Third World, 1984) argues that Indian science has never amounted to much because of the legacy of colonialism and a subservient mentality...

...it passively accepts phenomena as given and fails actively to think God's rational thoughts after him...

...Further studies of the primary sources appeared in translations, notes, introductions to Giordano Bnmo'sTheAsh Wednesday Supper (1975) and J. H. Lambert's Cosmological Letters on the Arrangement of the World Edifice (1976...

...A "defeatist psychological climate created by the combined impact of cyclical and organismic ideas" discouraged progress...

...Like Jaki, White connects science, monotheism, and the Genesis charge that humans should have dominion over nature...

...science with monotheism is superior to science without it...

...Too much idealism loses its way in a priori system building (Rene' Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel...

...Other provocative studies of science in a social context have produced different conclusions...

...But he pits himself against almost every scientist and interpreter of science, past and present, often with caustic denunciation...

...Too much empiricism (Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Ernst Mach) has too little faith in the creative intellect...

...The joining of the two will continue to be quite an adventure — both a logical inquiry and a journey of humans through this world they inhabit...

...The logical connections between science and religion have sometimes been wayward...

...If G, then NS...

...A Christian cosmology orients thinkers to a moderate realism, and science results...

...Meanwhile, as Jaki takes his award, monotheists — joined by many others — will rejoice at so noble an example of faith in search of understanding...

...He can attack persons as swiftly as their arguments...

...As a historian of astronomy, Jaki wrote The Paradox of Olbers's Paradox (1969), The Milky Way: An Elusive Road for Science (1972), and Planets and Planetarians: A History of Theories of the Origin of Planetary Systems (1978...

...Jaki'sdeeper agenda is really the stronger connection — any scientist who succeeds in a moderately realistic description of nature ought, by logic, to profess faith in a personal Creator...

...If G, then N. Belief in God has sometimes generated the natural science (NS) that has arisen under such conviction...

...Developing systems of ideas (like Jaki's notion of monotheism unfolding into science) are not implied by their precedents in the same way that results are implied by their causes, or premises imply conclusions...

...monotheism radically transforms that very doctrine of creation that was the inspiration of science...

...He writes with a polemical, anecdotal style, sometimes incisive in detail, sometimes also distracting, sometimes seeing what is there, sometimes seeing what is not...

...the symmetry and elegance of the thirty-two crystal classes will be there independently of whether one tracks the source to God...

...But, for all his brilliance, Jaki does not lack his critics...

...Darwin's faith was steadily eroded by his discoveries...

...314: Are the two forever entwined...

...it has no necessary existence...

...This is Jaki's schema...

...Rather, there is an unfolding of many stories, variously and partially integrated into one story that makes sense in terms of creative development...

...But what more needs to be said...

...Lynn White has blamed Christianity for the ecological crisis...

...Stanley Jaki has devoted his life to one of the most puzzling questions of history: Why and how did science appear when and where it did...

...Whatever their histories, neither is logically dependent on the other...

...Perhaps this is all that monotheists want or need — room for intelligent faith...

...As comprehensive world views, monotheism with science is superior to monotheism without it...

...Max Weber connected Protestantism with the rise of capitalism, and others have connected Protestantism with science...

...Some of the sources Jaki cites may be surprising, for example, that the Hindu-Arabic decimal system was indispensable...

...He sees, correctly, a major intellectual connection in history...

...His central theme is found in his Gifford Lectures for 1974-1976, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (1978), to which his twenty other books are largely precursors, summaries, or corollaries...

...Would-be scientists have to get rational theory and empirical observation in the right mix, and Judeo-Christian monotheism introduced the proper amount of each...

...That is why his biology went awry, Jaki says...

...Launched by monotheism — perhaps only monotheism could have launched it — science develops an integrity of its own that bears a complex relationship to the continuing parental monotheism...

...Iff (if and only if) G, then N. IffG.thenNS...

...For those who demand a complete explanation of how more evolves out of less over evolutionary time, evolutionary theism is as logical as any other option...

...In Science and Creation (1974) Jaki argues that science arose only in Europe between 1250 and 1650 because ancient cultures had an insufficient natural theology...

...In this, actors sometimes fail or lose their way, whether theologians, philosophers, or scientists...

...on the other, mere a posteriori observational data (empiricism) are also insufficient...

...Why does science come so late...

...To use Jaki's own metaphor, roads — certainly not those of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries — seldom travel over straight logical lines ("a single intellectual avenue"), although there are reasons why they weave this way and that...

...SCIENCE & THE WAYS TO GOD STANLEY JAKFS VISION OF SCIENTIFIC CREATIVITY HOLMES ROLSTON, III When a relatively unknown monk wins the world's "single, biggest annual monetary prize," the Templeton Award, $330,000 for "bridging the gap between science and religion," many will wonder what he has said that is so significant...

...What made science work once came from outside science, but this may no longer be true...

...neither nature nor science could get anywhere...

...This question, he thinks, also applies to the problem of the logical sources by which science can continue...

...Pervasive social forces do shape intellectual creativity...

...Jaki, born in Hungary, came to the United States in 1950 and is presently a historian of science at Seton Hall University in New Jersey...

...God is the only adequate hypothesis for the rational, contingent nature around>us and for the natural science with which human minds have discovered suchanature...

...If N, then G? If NS, then G? Or is this too a probability or a possibility...

...That conclusion, if sound, bridges science and theism so inseparably that it must be faced by the many scientists who think of themselves as secular, or who think of science and religion as feuding camps, or unrelated disciplines...

...out of that mix science arose...

...Jaki believes that successful scientists must have an appropriate blend of faith in the Creator and the intelligibility of creation, and one might expect Jaki to find many figures to praise...

...On the one hand, we cannot know how the world works a priori (rationalism, mathematics...

...This belief formed the bedrock on which science arose" (The Road of Science and the Ways to God...

...The natu313 ral world, rational by virtue of the creator who made it, is also contingent...

...But the evidence is not always impressive...

...A systematic departure from the ways of God would readily prevent one from traveling on the road of science," Jaki has written...

...Prepared by this massive scholarship, Jaki comes centrally to address the relation between scientific creativity and Christian theology in his Gifford lectures...

...However, given the several thousand years between Genesis and the present, one could conceive of other roots of this crisis: democracy, industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, secularism...

...Jaki chastises Darwin for his lack of faith...

...ill, is professor of philosophy at Colorado State University and the author ofScience and Religion: A Critical Survey, just released in paper by Random House, and in cloth by Temple University Press...

...If the world is rationally intelligible, a culture only needs faith to suggest that search...

...Though the latter were moderate realists, one wonders about the inspirational monotheism: Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo were convinced monotheists, but Einstein and Planck were not...

...The world order is by free creation, not by necessity...

...According to Jaki, Christian faith especially, and no other faith — certainly no non-monotheistic faith — produced natural science...

...Jaki's simple yet profound conclusion, amplified with an encyclopedic wealth of detail in over twenty books, is that there exists "a single intellectual avenue forming both the road of science and the ways to God...

...This did not occur until the High Middle Ages...

...But should we not admire Darwin because he honestly faced the difficulties his science was presenting to his belief...

...If a Creator gave rational intelligibility to the created world, that integrity will to some extent stand on its own...

...Belief in creation and the Creator was the moment of truth for science...

...Jaki, a Benedictine priest, joins Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and a dozen other notables cited since 1972 for their original insights that "advance the knowledge and love of God...

...On May 12 at Windsor Castle, Prince Philip presented Stanley L. Jaki his prize...

...Science discovers intelligible causes, but limps at discovering meanings...

...What are the relations between the once-upon-a-time context of discovery and the present context of justification...

...Jaki possesses an encyclopedic command of the history of science, and is everywhere readable and stimulating...

...A recent study is Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem (1984...

...Is there a historical and constant conjunction between monotheism and successful science, i.e., G and NS...

...It is difficult to find any contemporary theorist in evolutionary biology at ease with monotheism, much less inspired by it...

...In discussions of the "anthropic cosmological principle" (discovering finetuned arrangements in the origin and structure of the universe), theism can seem as economical as any other competing theory...

...His monotheism did not assure him of the intelligibility of a contingently discoverable nature, resulting in a biology that confirmed his belief...

...and yet neither, despite the integrity of each, is complete without the other...

...Neither Hebrew monotheism nor early Christianity produced science until they blended with a Greek philosophical emphasis on rationality, which in turn blended with something the Romans contributed (an operational emphasis on technology...

...Darwin experienced the worldview Jaki described and subsequently lost his faith...

...Humans must discover the laws of the cosmos by consulting it...

...But those who demur do so not necessarily because they "have never experienced what it means to look at the world as the product of a personal, rational Creator" (Road of Science and the Ways to God...

...But is this a logical necessity, or a probability, or a possibility...

...Jaki seems to argue that it is not enough that a few outstanding persons have monotheistic beliefs, but that monotheism must have deeply permeated a culture...

...Brain, Mind and Computers (1969) defended the uniqueness of the mind...

...Enthrallment by blind forces can produce blindness, which increasingly plagued the six editions of the Origin" (Road of Science and the Ways to God...

...Both are theoryladen enterprises that need ever and critically to review their driving assumptions...

...But the complementarity of the two is a grander claim than Jaki's claim that science is impossible without monotheism...

...To the contrary, the trouble was that his biology made the world look less and less intelligible, more ungodly, absurd, a place of random drift, an accident, and too full of suffering...

...religion discovers intelligible meanings, but defers to science about causes...

...There is something profound in Jaki's central claim, which, as historians know, is a familiar one, though never before defended with such massive scholarship...

...The problem is the mixed evidence...

...Science unfolds, but theology does not remain a constant while science grows beneath its aegis...

...What Jaki really does is tell the story of the rise of science within a Christian culture...

...Belief in God (G) implies, in part at least, the sort of nature (N) that natural science has looked for and found...

...Nature too has its history, quite as much as does the Western science that, late in history, discovers natural history...

...Iff N, thenG...

...But perhaps there are other logical and historical ingredients...

...afterward the search is self-perpetuating qua science, though perhaps not metaphysically complete without inquiry into the grounds of this rationality...

...The cosmos cries for a Creator...

...Although there were stillbirths and miscarriages, science did not become viable until the High Middle Ages...

...In the search for an explanation, the singularity of the world — singular both in its unity and in its unique, plural particulars—permits, encourages, but does not demand belief in a transcendent Ground...

...Jaki's first major work, The Relevance of Physics (1966), traced the history of physics, its relation to biology, metaphysics, ethics, and theology, and its place in contemporary society...

...Arguments of this kind are hard to evaluate...

...Then, once we have gained natural science, does natural science or the nature it discovers imply God...

...It will disturb Oriental or Communist peoples who desire science but have no interest in Jehovah...

...He cannot seem to handle them sympathetically as persons caught up in a genuine struggle to make sense of the staggering — if also rational — world science uncovers...

...But the story of science is not an implication from premises, any more than the detailed events of evolutionary history follow by implication from evolutionary theory and initial conditions on a primeval earth...

...Can religion address the question of redemptive suffering in ways that biology cannot...

...To the contrary, science was the logical evolution of the Christian belief that "the universe was the rational product of the Creator" and that Christians were to become "masters and possessors of nature...

...Leaving physics, Jaki's field of concentration, belief in a Creator may have launched early biology, but it can hardly be said that monotheism continued to inspire biology...

...The order and novelty in the world are evidence for God vs...

...The implication is neither deductive nor inductive...

...Seeing trends in history requires detecting a gestalt, tracing the contributions of many factors...

...The history of science takes narrative form...