Posted on 06/12/2005 7:27:56 PM PDT by betty boop
The “Cartesian Split” Is a Hallucination; Ergo, We Should Get Rid of It
by Jean F. Drew
The Ancient Heritage of Western Science
The history of science goes back at least two and a half millennia, to the pre-Socratics of ancient Greece. Democritus and Leucippus were the fathers of atomic theory — at least they were the first thinkers ever to formulate one. Heraclitus was the first thinker to consider what in the modern age developed as the laws of thermodynamics. Likewise Plato’s Chora, in the myth of the Demiurge (see Timaeus), may have been the very first anticipation of what later would be referred to as the quantum world. Plato’s great student Aristotle was the first thinker to put science, or “natural philosophy” as it was then called — and ever after was called, until the 17th century, when philosophical positivism became influential — on an empirical, experimental basis.
Thus science was born in the ancient world of the classical Greeks. What motivated the great thinkers of this yet-unsurpassed era of human intellectual achievement was the irrepressible, inexhaustible eros, or desire, to understand the Universe, and thereby to understand man’s place in it. In this process the Greeks confronted a two-fold problem which Plato spent a lifetime elaborating. On the one hand, the original “pull” that drew these thinkers into their quest for knowledge of the Universe — or Cosmos as the Greeks termed it — was ontological. On the other hand, in order for the quest to become intelligible to the thinking subject and thus communicable to others, the engagement of epistemological issues was totally unavoidable.
By ontology we mean “the science of being”: that is, the science of what “is” or what exists, how it came to be, and by what rules or laws it is organized. By epistemology we mean the “science of knowledge”: that is, what can the human mind know, how does it know it — and by what means can such knowledge be verified.
To the Greek mind, the Cosmos was a single, unified, living Whole that is ever so much more than the mere sum of its parts. Rather, all of its parts were thought to be ordered and ultimately harmonically, dynamically unified into a single universal body according to a single universal blueprint. Likewise the sum total of true knowledge, or episteme was thought to be an undivided whole.
Fast-Forward to the Sixteenth Century….
According to Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, “The most fundamental aspect of the Western intellectual tradition is the assumption that there is a fundamental division between the material and the immaterial world or between the realm of matter and the realm of pure mind or spirit. The metaphysical framework based on this assumption is known as ontological dualism. As the word dual implies, the framework is predicated on an ontology, or a conception of the nature of God or being, that assumes reality has two distinct and separable dimensions. The concept of Being as continuous, immutable, and having a prior or separate existence from the world of change dates from the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides. The same qualities were associated with the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and they were considerably amplified by the role played in theology by Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy….
“Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton were all inheritors of a cultural tradition in which ontological dualism was a primary article of faith. Hence the idealization of the mathematical ideal as a source of communication with God, which dates from Pythagoras, provided a metaphysical foundation for the emerging natural sciences…. [T]he creators of classical physics believed that doing physics was a form of communion with the geometrical and mathematical forms resident in the perfect mind of God.”1
In the 16th century the great French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Rene Descartes still recognized an ontological dualism that distinguished between body and mind, matter and spirit. And as Wolfgang Smith points out, Descartes, like Galileo and Newton, “is sometimes willing to resolve philosophical difficulties by recourse to Deity.”2
Descartes was a passionate champion of the idea of universal mechanics. He strove to lay down the theoretical foundations for “a rigorous mechanical science, based upon mathematical principles which would be able to explain the workings of Nature, from the movements of planets to the fine motions associated with animal bodies.”3
Descartes’ world is a mechanical world, “…made up entirely of ‘res extensa’ (the later Newtonian ‘matter’), moving in space according to mechanical laws. All the rest is to be relegated to ‘res cogitans’ or thinking substance, which exists in its own right as a kind of spiritual entity.”4
On this point Wolfgang Smith observes, “It is noteworthy that Descartes came to this res cogitans at the outset of his meditations through the famous ‘cogito ergo sum.’ It appeared to him as the one and only immediate certainty, whereas the existence of a mechanical universe, external to the res cogitans, was to be arrived at later through a logical argument, in which the idea of God and His veracity plays the leading role.”5
As Wolfhart Pannenberg writes, Descartes maintained that the idea of God “is the prior condition in the human mind for the possibility of every other idea, even that of the ego itself.”6
Thus Smith exclaims, “It is indeed a remarkable irony that the basic premise of modern materialism should initially have been founded upon theology!”7
Descartes’ model of the universe as essentially mechanistic — constituted only by “matter in its motions” moving according to the physical laws — was taken up by Newton and, in due course, became the preeminent idea in all of modern science up to recent times.
By the eighteenth century, the idea of any metaphysical basis for “natural philosophy” had increasingly fallen into disrepute. The term itself disappeared from use, replaced by the word “science.” Mechanics was increasingly regarded as “an autonomous science,” leaving no role for God. The great French mathematician Pierre-Sinon Laplace was enormously influential in this transition. As Nadeau and Kafatos observe:
“Laplace is recognized for eliminating not only the theological component of classical physics but the ‘entire metaphysical component’ as well. The epistemology of science requires, he said, that we proceed by inductive generalizations from observed facts to hypotheses that are ‘tested by observed conformity of the phenomena.’ What was unique about Laplace’s view of hypotheses was his insistence that we cannot attribute reality to them. Although concepts like force, mass, motion, cause, and laws are obviously present in classical physics, they exist in Laplace’s view only as quantities. Physics is concerned, he argued, with quantities that we associate as a matter of convenience with concepts, and the truth about nature are only the quantities.”8
Thus the science of Nature is reduced to a quantitative mathematical description. This positivist vision of physical reality denies Nature any meaning other than the mathematical formalism of physical theory employed in its description.
The False “Cartesian Split”
Here we see the emergence of the full-blown body-mind, matter-spirit “Cartesian split,” as we have called it. The great success of the mathematically-describable “matter” side of the epistemological divide evidenced by a long series of brilliant scientific achievements utterly displaced the “spirit” side and eventually relegated it to virtual oblivion. Science was understood to be about the elucidation of quantities; questions of meaning were no longer relevant.
Thus the current orthodoxy of science reduces to four basis premises: “(1) The physical world is made up of inert and changeless matter, and this matter changes only in terms of location in space; (2) the behavior of matter mirrors physical theory and is inherently mathematical; (3) matter as the unchanging unit of physical reality can be exhaustively understood by mechanics, or by the applied mathematics of motion; and (4) the mind of the observer is separate from the observed system of matter, and the ontological bridge between the two is physical law and theory.”9
On this formalism, even “the mind of the observer” is reducible to the operations of physical-chemical laws: The modern-day scientific materialist insists that mind is only the epiphenomenon of the physical-chemical activity of the brain. This conclusion is seemingly inevitable, given the utter collapse of the “mind” or “spirit” side of the Cartesian divide, which historically has always connected man to a metaphysical, immaterial reality beyond the physical world. And yet notwithstanding (4) above, this scientific formalism evinces a paradox, a seeming self-contradiction: The formalism requires the observer to be not outside the material system he observes; for the observer himself is completely reducible to its rules. He is just another “cog” in the universal, physical machine. So how can the observer be “separate from the observed system of matter?”
I am not aware that this question has been much engaged in recent times. Suffice it to say that this formalism gives short shrift indeed to the problems of mind, consciousness, intelligence, free will, and even human existence per se. And these are the necessary qualities of “the observer,” in order for there to be an observer.
The grip this formalism has on the biological sciences seems particularly unfortunate. For example, consider a case from embryology:
“Geneticists appreciate that cell differentiation utterly depends on cells knowing how to differentiate early on and then somehow remembering that they are different and passing on this vital piece of information to subsequent generations of cells. At the moment, scientists shrug their shoulders as to how this may be accomplished, particularly at such a rapid pace…. As for the orchestration of cell processes, biochemists never actually ask the question.”10
Notwithstanding, as the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins freely admits, “Exactly how [cell division] eventually leads to the development of a baby is a story which will take decades, perhaps centuries, for embryologists to work out. But it is a fact that it does.”11
It seems obvious that cells “knowing” and “remembering” are not processes that can be conveniently reduced to the comparatively simple operations of physics and chemistry. Nevertheless, this is precisely what Dawkins seems determined to do — which is why the needful explanations will take “decades, perhaps centuries” to work out. The possibility that the explanation cannot be given in terms of the force-field driven reactions of physics and chemistry alone is one that Dawkins seemingly refuses to entertain. But if this observation is valid, then maybe it wouldn’t just be decades or centuries, but maybe never, before an elucidation can be given on this basis. It seems a scientific materialist like Dawkins seemingly, simply refuses to entertain this possibility.
Reconciling Biology to the Insights of Quantum Theory
One gets the very strong impression that, today, scientific materialists working in the field of biology, and the Neodarwinists in particular, are extraordinarily resistant to the idea that quantum theory has anything at all to do with their discipline.
And yet everything that we observe in our 4-dimensional (S1 + S2 + S3 + T1) reality rests upon, depends on, what is going on in the “microworld” of quantum activity.
Quantum theory — and also relativity theory for that matter — places the observer squarely into the game of reality, in such a way that one is tempted to say that it is the observer himself who “constructs” the reality he observes.
Moreover, the microworld of quantum theory speaks the language of universal fields, of quantum indeterminacy, of non-local action, of superposition (“quantum entanglement”), of superluminal velocities, of the primacy of the observer — that is, of all sorts of “bizarre” phenomena which are not at all observable in the macroworld of four-dimensional reality.
Analogically speaking, it’s as if many present-day biologists wish to look only at that part of the iceberg that surfaces above the waterline, considering that the submerged yet immense depths supporting the iceberg’s visible tip are irrelevant to their concerns. And then they think they can arrive at an explanation of life and evolution by remaining blind to the deep structure of reality on which everything in the Universe is ultimately based.
Notwithstanding this seeming tendency, consider the following:
-- In the 1920s, the Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch postulated that “a field, rather than chemicals alone, was probably responsible for the structural formation of the body.”12
-- Italian physicist Renato Nobili amassed experimental proof that [field-borne] electromagnetic frequencies occur in animal tissues.13
-- Russian Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi postulated that protein cells act as semiconductors, preserving and passing along the energy of electrons as information.14
-- F.-A. Popp postulated a field of electromagnetic radiation as the “mechanism” that somehow guides the growth of the cellular body.15
And then there is British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who argues that biochemical processes associated with “gene activation and proteins no more explain the development of form than delivering building materials to a building site explains the construction of the house built there.”16
Lynne McTaggert writes,
“…Sheldrake argues … Current genetic theory … doesn’t explain … how a developing [living] system can self-regulate, or grow normally in the course of development if a part of the system is added or removed, and doesn’t explain how an organism regenerates — replacing missing or damaged structures…. Sheldrake worked out his hypothesis of formative causation, which states that the forms of self-organizing living things — everything from molecules and organisms to societies and even entire galaxies — are shaped by morphic fields. These fields have a morphic resonance — a cumulative memory — of similar systems through cultures and time. So that species of animals and plants ‘remember’ not only how to look but also how to act. Rupert Sheldrake uses the term ‘morphic fields’ …to describe the self-organizing properties of biological systems, from molecules to bodies to societies. ‘Morphic resonance’ is, in his view, ‘the influence of like upon like through space and time.’ He believes these fields (and he thinks there are many of them) are different from electromagnetic fields because they reverberate across generations with an inherent memory of the correct shape and form. The more we learn, the easier it is for others to follow in our footsteps.”17
Sheldrake writes:
“One fact which led to the development of this theory is the remarkable ability organisms have to repair damage. If you cut an oak tree into little pieces, each little piece, properly treated, can grow into a new tree. So from a tiny fragment, you can get a whole. Machines do not do that; they do not have this power of remaining whole if you remove parts of them. Chop a computer up into small pieces and all you get is a broken computer. It does not regenerate into lots of little computers. But if you chop a flatworm into small pieces, each piece can grow into a new flatworm. Another analogy is a magnet. If you chop a magnet into small pieces, you do have lots of small magnets, each with a complete magnetic field. This is a wholistic property that fields have that mechanical systems do not have unless they are associated with fields. Still another example is the hologram, any part of which contains the whole. A hologram is based on interference patterns within the electromagnetic field. Fields thus have a wholistic property which was very attractive to the biologists who developed this concept of morphogenetic fields.”18
Hello, can we say “field-mediated collective consciousness,” anyone? At least as a scientific hypothesis worth pursuing?
The point is, given its presuppositions, Darwinist evolutionary theory has absolutely no use for such a hypothesis: The doctrine calls for random mutation plus natural selection — premised on the purely physico-chemical “behavior” of matter — which supposedly explains everything about the evolution of the biota. Forget about fields, forget about information: It’s a “billiard ball,” mechanistic, purely material universe governed by chance unfolding under the exclusive influence of the physical laws. And that’s that. End of story.
Which is deliberately to turn one’s back to what Niels Bohr recognized as “the very nature of quantum theory,” which
“… forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealizations of observation and definition respectively. Just as … relativity theory has taught us that the convenience of distinguishing sharply between space and time rests solely on the smallness of the velocities ordinarily met with compared to the speed of light, we learn from the quantum theory that the appropriateness of our visual space-time descriptions depends entirely on the small value of the quantum of action compared to the actions involved in ordinary sense perception. Indeed, in the description of atomic phenomena, the quantum postulate presents us with the task of developing a ‘complementary’ theory the consistency of which can be judged only by weighing the possibilities of definition and observation.”19
Classical physics — which arguably deals only with “the tip of the iceberg” of reality — is a workable approximation of the doings of Nature that seems precise only because the largeness of the speed of light and the smallness of the quantum of action give rise to negligible effects. In other words, classical physics and chemistry work just fine at the level of the macroworld.
But the effects produced in the microworld (i.e., the quantum world) and the world described by relativity theory are there nonetheless. It’s just that the quantum of action is so small as compared with macroscopic values that obtaining reliable results respecting the behavior of macro-objects is not affected by it. And the speed of light is so great that we need not take it into consideration in most of the “macroworld” problems that we wish to solve.
Bohr, father of the Copenhagen Intrepretation of quantum mechanics — a world-class epistemologist as well as world-class scientist — concluded that “quantum mechanics [and not classical mechanics, which Bohr regarded as a “subset” or special case of quantum mechanics] … is the complete description, and the measuring instruments in quantum mechanical experiments obey this description. Although we can safely ignore quantum mechanical effects in dealing with macro-level phenomena in most cases because those effects are small enough for practical purposes, we cannot ignore the implications of quantum mechanics on the macro level for the obvious reason that they are there. Bohr argued that since the quantum of action is always present [and always subject to Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle and likewise Cantor’s incompleteness principle] on the macro level, this requires ‘a final renunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality.’”20
The problems of Life, its origin, and laws; and of consciousness, informative communication, intelligence, so far have been devilishly resistant to explanation by the “rules” of the macroscopic world — that is, by the physical and chemical laws alone. Studying the behavior of a classical gas cannot give us much insight into the “mysteries” of biological self-organization, or explain the ability of living systems to be self-mobilizing, “choosing” systems. For gases and lifeforms are entirely different “orders of being.”
The “Cartesian Split” Is a Hallucination; Ergo, We Should Get Rid of It
It seems that if ever there is to be an explanation of “the tricky machinery of Life,” it will not be found in classical physics. Quantum physics is what opens up the vast new vistas needed to engage the problem of the emergence of Life, and to explain its behavior.
That, in the opinion of the present writer, is sufficient reason to recognize the so-called Cartesian Split — which attempts to divide natural science from the “spiritual sciences” — as a total illusion that we’d best be rid of, for two main reasons that presently come to mind.
(1) Quantum theory (and also relativity theory) places preeminent emphasis on the role of the “observer.” This observer is an intelligent agent. That being the case, he is firmly planted on the Geisteswissenschaften side — that is, on the “spiritual side” — and not the Naturwissenschaften side — that is the “natural sciences side” —of the Cartesian divide. It seems science needs a better method to re-integrate the observer into its formulations than it now has. It is a profound fallacy to regard the observer as the mere product of physico-chemical actions. The “problem of the observer” simply cannot be comprehensively, logically understood in such terms.
(2) Each and every one of the eminent, world-class scientists cited in this article was also a world-class philosopher, consciously or unconsciously. Not a single one of them failed to touch on the most fundamental problems of ontology and epistemology. And the insights of each of these great thinkers shaped the evolutionary course of human knowledge — of the total episteme or, in the German, the Wissenschaft — in the most profound ways.
At the end of the day, it seems profitless to split the “knower” from “the known.” For the knower — the observer — is on the one hand a part and participant of the system that he observes; and on the other, his observation constitutes — or has profound implications for the further development of — the system he observes.
Yet effecting such a division is exactly the program of the “Cartesian Split.” Thus the present writer considers the split to be false, and ultimately tending to divide a man against himself — as well as dividing man from Nature itself, of which man is plainly, ineluctibly “part and participant.”
* * * * * * *
ENDNOTES:
1Nadeau, Robert and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, p. 83f.
2Smith, Wolfgang, Cosmos and Transcendence, p. 29.
3Smith, op. cit., p. 28.
4Smith, op. cit., p. 29.
5Smith, ibid., p. 29.
6Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Toward a Theology of Nature, p. 42. 7Smith, op. cit., p. 29.
8Nadeau/Kafatos, op. cit., p. 85.
9Nadeau/Kafatos, op. cit., p. 84.
10McTaggert, Lynne, The Field, p. 46.
11McTaggert, Lynne, op. cit., p. 46.
12McTaggert, Lynne, op. cit., p. 47.
13McTaggert, Lynne, op. cit., p. 49.
14McTaggert, Lynne, ibid., p. 49.
15McTaggert, Lynne, op. cit., p. 47.
16McTaggert, Lynne, op. cit., p. 46f.
17McTaggert, Lynne, ibid., p. 46f.
18Sheldrake, Rupert, http://www.sheldrake.org/papers/Morphic/morphic1_paper.html
19Nadeau/Kafatos, op. cit., p. 91.
20Nadeau/Kafatos, ibid., p. 91.
* * * * * * *
copyright 2005 Jean F. Drew. All rights reserved.
I have previously stated that you are not to ping me. If it occurs again I will refer the matter to the moderators.
The 'shrooms Huh? They were always the worst.
I would very much appreciate a source so that I can explore it further. I'm particularly interested in how it relates to Greene's work on Planck scale physics leaving "an observable signature in the cosmic microwave background radiation".
IMHO, because of dualities and mirror symmetry we ought to expect such relationships.
Very, very good!
Ping for later.
Must have seem a boojum...
*sigh* SEEN a boojum...
Perhaps the rejection thereof would qualify.
This is all nonsense.
"Science" -- organized thinking,
rigorous thinking --
was born where ever
sailing cultures exchanged goods
with diverse cultures.
China, India
and even Polynesia
(to name just a few)
achieved amazing
things. Focusing on the Greeks
is just a structure
academia
has settled on to present
a view of history
that's "cleaned up," without
loose-ends and turns its focus
to "workable" myths.
Children are prone to such a device, only to return with bitter castigations, right? lol... Human intelligence has merely scratched the surface of all that is, has been and will be...keep scratchin'
A reference to Guth's inflation idea.
Greene mentions that we can see, with the Hubble, only 10-30 of the whole universe. I don't know why somebody else can't even mention this now and then. The universe is not 14 billion light years in radius. That is only the minuscule part that we can see. It ought to be important in our mental image of the universe that we can see only such a small piece of it and the rest is forever out of sight due to the limitation of the speed of light.
Concerning light, dimensions and time - we should spend more time discussing null paths.
By all indications though, the calculation of the age of the universe is accurate.
Ignoring dark matter and all that, we not only can't see the entire universe, we can see so little that it could be rounded off to zero. We can see essentially none of the universe.
On that basis we assume the laws of physics are uniformly the same everywhere!
Try "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene
Recommended for the advanced amateur.
That is one of my favorites, too! A great place to start - Greene is the most charismatic physicist known to me.
Fascinating article; I'll have to read it in depth later.
Bad theology and philosophy. Descartes' philosophy represented a giant step downward from the common sense philosophies of Aristotle and Aquinas.
This essay leaps over the singular event in the birth of Western science, the promulgation of the doctrine of creation from nothing in the thirteenth century.
...as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos)
To the popular mind, science is completely inimical to religion: science embraces facts and evidence while religion professes blind faith. Like many simplistic popular notions, this view is mistaken. Modern science is not only compatible with Christianity, it in fact finds its origins in Christianity. This is not to say that the Bible is a science textbook that contains raw scientific truths, as some evangelical Christians would have us believe. The Christian faith contains deeper truths-- truths with philosophical consequences that make conceivable the mind's exploration of nature: man's place in God's creation, who God is and how he freely created a cosmos.
In large part, the modern mind thinks little of these notions in much the same way that the last thing on a fish's mind is the water it breathes. It is difficult for those raised in a scientific world to appreciate the plight of the ancient mind trapped within an eternal and arbitrary world. It is difficult for those raised in a post-Christian world to appreciate the radical novelty and liberation Christian ideas presented to the ancient mind.
The following selection summarizes the most notable work of Stanley Jaki, renowned historian of science and Templeton Prize laureate.
How did Christian belief provide a cultural matrix (womb) for the growth of science?
In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science's unique birth in Christian Western Europe:
Jaki notes that before Christ the Jews never formed a very large community (priv. comm.). In later times, the Jews lacked the Christian notion that Jesus was the monogenes or unigenitus, the only-begotten of God. Pantheists like the Greeks tended to identify the monogenes or unigenitus with the universe itself, or with the heavens. Jaki writes:
Herein lies the tremendous difference between Christian monotheism on the one hand and Jewish and Muslim monotheism on the other. This explains also the fact that it is almost natural for a Jewish or Muslim intellectual to become a patheist. About the former Spinoza and Einstein are well-known examples. As to the Muslims, it should be enough to think of the Averroists. With this in mind one can also hope to understand why the Muslims, who for five hundred years had studied Aristotle's works and produced many commentaries on them failed to make a breakthrough. The latter came in medieval Christian context and just about within a hundred years from the availability of Aristotle's works in Latin
As we will see below, the break-through that began science was a Christian commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo (On the Heavens).
So how did it all happen? Or fail to happen?
Fr. Paul Haffner writes:
ReferencesModern experimental science was rendered possible, Jaki has shown, as a result of the Christian philosophical atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Although a talent for science was certainly present in the ancient world (for example in the design and construction of the Egyptian pyramids), nevertheless the philosophical and psychological climate was hostile to a self-sustaining scientific process. Thus science suffered still-births in the cultures of ancient China, India, Egypt and Babylonia. It also failed to come to fruition among the Maya, Incas and Aztecs of the Americas. Even though ancient Greece came closer to achieving a continuous scientific enterprise than any other ancient culture, science was not born there either. Science did not come to birth among the medieval Muslim heirs to Aristotle.
....The psychological climate of such ancient cultures, with their belief that the universe was infinite and time an endless repetition of historical cycles, was often either hopelessness or complacency (hardly what is needed to spur and sustain scientific progress); and in either case there was a failure to arrive at a belief in the existence of God the Creator and of creation itself as therefore rational and intelligible. Thus their inability to produce a self-sustaining scientific enterprise.
If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.
These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.
The rise of science needed the broad and persistent sharing by the whole population, that is, the entire culture, of a very specific body of doctrines relating the universe to a universal and absolute intelligibility embodied in the tenet about a personal God, the Creator of all. Therefore it was not chance that the first physicist was John Buridan, professor at the Sorbonne around the year 1330, just after the time of the two above-mentioned statements of the Church's teaching office.
Buridan's vision of the universe was steeped in the Christian doctrine of the creation; in particular, he rejected the Aristotelian idea [in De Caelo] of a cosmos existing from all eternity. He developed the idea of impetus in which God was seen as responsible for the initial setting in motion of the heavenly bodies, which then remained in motion without the necessity of a direct action on the part of God. This was different from Aristotle's approach, in which the motion of heavenly bodies had no beginning and would also have no end. Buridan's work was continued by his disciple, Nicholas Oresme, around the year 1370; impetus theory anticipated Newton's first law of motion.
The doctrine that God created the universe out of nothing and that the universe had a beginning was later to be reiterated at the First Vatican Council, against the errors of materialism and pantheism which enjoyed a new vogue at that time. In addition, Vatican I stated the absolute freedom of God to create, and made clear (against fideism) the possibility of arriving at God's existence through a rational reflection upon creation. As Jaki states: ``The Council, in line with a tradition almost two millenia old, could but insist on the very foundation of that relation which is man's ability to see the reasonability of revelation, which in turn is inconceivable if man is not able to infer from the world surrounding him the existence of its Creator.
It is precisely the inability of many scientists to trace the grandeur of the Creator in His works that Jaki opposes with great skill. He challenges the atheistic positions of R. Dawkins in the biological sphere and of Stephen Hawking in physics. He shows that the best way to unmask the thought of non-believing scientists is to show how the basis for their reasoning cannot be proven scientifically. In an unjustified way they leave the realm of their own scientific disciplines and make a priori philosophical deductions against Christian belief. Again, one example of this is the pervasive ``chance'' or ``chaos'' ideology used to ``explain'' the coming into being of the material universe, of life and of the human person. Stanley Jaki has also refuted such approaches to the cosmos and creation in his masterly work, The Purpose of It All, published in 1990.
The originality of Jaki's thought also lies in the link which he describes between the dogmas of the Creation and the Incarnation. He shows how the development of the doctrine of creation out of nothing was ``connected with the conceptual refinements of the doctrine of the Incarnation around which raged the great inner debates of the early Church.'' Jaki then discusses how the Jewish position on creation underwent a change during the first few centuries of Christianity. Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, tried to interpret the first chapter of Genesis, but his view ``showed him closer to Greek eternalism than to Biblical creationism.'' The earliest midrashim ``showed that Jewish theologians were no longer willing to uphold the doctrine of the complete submission of matter to the Maker of all.'' In the Mutazalite tradition of Islam there was also a tendency to slide towards emanationism and pantheism, as a result of endorsing the pantheistic necessitarianism of Aristotle.
Jaki clearly affirms that in Christianity, a slide into pantheism was prevented because the doctrine of the creation was bolstered up by faith in the Incarnation. Pantheism is invariably present when the eternal and cyclic view of the cosmos prevails. The uniqueness of the Incarnation and Redemption dashed to pieces any possibility of the eternal and cyclic view; for if the world were cyclic, the once-and-for-all coming of Christ would be undermined. The uniqueness of Christ secures a linear view of history and makes Christianity more than just one among many historical factors influencing the world. The dogmas of the Creation and Incarnation mean ``an absolute and most revolutionary break with a past steeped in paganism,'' and the enunciation of these dogmas and their historical impact is ``an uphill fight never to be completed.''
...
But the cosmos and all the specific laws which govern it do not form a self-explanatory system; they point beyond science and call for a metaphysical foundation in the Christian doctrine of creation. It is precisely this Christian doctrine of creation which, according to Jaki, was the stimulus for the unique viable birth of science. The Christian doctrine of creation finds its expression within the Church.
Jaki, Stanley. Christ and Science. Royal Oak, Michigan: Real View Books, 2000.
Jaki, Stanley. God and the Cosmologists. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1989.
Jaki, Stanley. The Savior of Science. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1990.
Jaki, Stanley. Science and Creation. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1974. Pertinent References and Links
Science: From the Womb of Religion by Stanley L. Jaki
The Absolute Beneath the Relative by Stanley L. Jaki
Why Catholics like Einstein by Sim Johnston
The Galileo Affair by Sim Johnston
The truth about Galileo's treatment by the Church
`Letter to My Children' by Whittaker Chambers
Science, materialism, Communism, and faith
How are we all victims of science's blindness?
Does God Really Exist? by Fr. Robert A. Connor
The self, atheism, rationalism, empiricism, and God
Pope John Paul II's Statement on Evolution
`Death of Darwinism'
the Catholic Church's position on evolution
If you have trouble finding books by Jaki, try contacting the author:
Kind of like biting the hand that feeds one... as these excerpts from Jaki make clear. Thank you ever so much for posting this, Aquinasfan!
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