Science Was Born of Christianity:
The Teaching of Father Stanley L. Jaki
Science Was Born of Christianity
The Teaching of
Father Stanley L. Jaki
STACY A. TRASANCOS
The Habitation of Chimham Publishing Company
© 2014 by The Habitation of Chimham Publishing
http://www/[email protected]
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Paperback
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Trasancos, Stacy
Science Was Born of Christianity
ISBN: -13-978-0-989996-1-1
Library of Congress Control Number 2014940470
1-Science – history 2-Christianity 3-Philosophy
© 2013. E-book - All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.
© 2014. Paperback book - All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.
Disclaimer: The author takes sole responsibility for the views expressed in this book and seeks to remain faithful to the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church.
Cover image is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art, The Adoration of the Shepherd, Charles Le Brun (1619–1690). The work of art itself is in the public domain in the United States, and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years or less. The original painting, as of the publication date of this book, is located in The Louvre or Louvre Museum, Paris, France.
To my children.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.
Amen.
Acknowledgements
The research for this book was compiled for a master’s thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Theology from Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut. I would like to thank my research advisers, Dr. Alan Roy Vincelette, Ph.D., who is an Associate Professor at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California, and Dr. Donald DeMarco Ph.D., who is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International and Professor Emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario. Both professors provided guidance in the compilation and presentation, softened a claim here and added another section there, all while allowing me the freedom to write with my own voice.
I am grateful to Dr. Sebastian Mahfood, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Vice-President of Administration, Director of Distance Learning, and Director of Assessment, for the organization and execution of the distance learning program at Holy Apostles. The program has matured in the three years I attended (from the comfort of my home and with babies in my lap), and he is undoubtedly committed to furthering the excellence of the college.
I thank my husband, Jose Trasancos, for his love, support, and patience during the time I devote to studies. We both share an admiration for Fr. Jaki, this priest and physicist we never met. My husband indulges the continuance of my education and the building of my personal library, a patron if ever there was one.
I thank the people who read and edited this book. Mr. Antonio Giovanni Colombo read several drafts to provide feedback on consistency with Fr. Jaki’s work since he was a friend of Fr. Jaki’s and manages the collection of Jaki’s work at Real View Books. Mr. Colombo also provided help with the accuracy of the sources and references.
I thank my friend, prayer partner, and fellow scientist, Dr. Walter Bruning, for his continual straightforward feedback on the tone of my writing and for his encouragement in my faith and intellectual pursuits.
I thank Dr. Jeff McLeod, an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychology at St. Mary's University of Minnesota and faculty member at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches at the St. Paul Seminary in the Archbishop Harry J. Flynn Catechetical Institute. He encouraged me to keep writing and to view the questions of science and religion in a broader context. I do not think Dr. McLeod ever had a word of criticism, but his feedback demonstrated that he always understood what I was thinking, which is wonderful feedback for a writer.
I thank Associate Professor Emeritus of Theology at Christendom College, Dr. John Janaro, for graciously offering to read my draft with an editorial eye and for discussing the meaning of science according to Fr. Jaki. Dr. Janaro knew Fr. Jaki and worked with him to publish his work during his lifetime.
I thank Mr. John Darrouzet, a Hollywood screenwriter and accomplished lawyer, who gave me enthusiastic feedback on this book from a layman’s perspective. He understands my passion for communication in plain language.
I also thank Mrs. Cynthia Trainque, a friend and fellow theology student, for her guidance on writing the introduction.
Royalties from this book go to a friend, a United States military veteran and single mother, beginning on its publishing date, December 6, 2013, the Feast Day of St. Nicholas, and extending for as long as she accepts the gift.
Finally, I thank you, the reader, for giving me a chance to explain why I admire the work of the shepherd Fr. Stanley L. Jaki.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Who Was Fr. Jaki?
Chapter 1 – “Science”
Why Does This Definition Matter?
Chapter 2 – “Was Born”
Stillbirths in Ancient Cultures
Egypt
China
India
Babylon
Greece
Arabia
The Biblical Womb
The Prophets
The Psalms
Wisdom Literature
Early Christianity
The Christian West
Adelard of Bath
Thierry of Chartres
Robert Grosseteste
William of Auvergne
St. Albertus Magnus
St. Thomas Aquinas
Roger Bacon
Siger of Brabant
Étienne Tempier
Jean Buridan
Chapter 3 - “Of Christianity”
Chapter 4 – Critics
Chapter 5 – What Now?
Bibliography
Foreword
Foreword
I warmly recommend this book written by Stacy Trasancos on the Christian basis and inspiration for the birth of modern science according to Fr. Stanley Jaki OSB, the great philosopher of science and theologian, member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Templeton prize-winner. The author has made a great effort and has succeeded in making Fr. Jaki’s ideas available to a larger public. Her goal is to inform more people about what Fr. Jaki actually meant by this claim that Christianity stimulated the birth of science because it is significant for people (young adults especially) to understand that faith and science are not opposed, and are indeed complementary. Also Stacy realizes that it is necessary to set the record
straight, because so many people, even Catholics, misrepresent what Fr. Jaki actually concluded about the birth of science.
In a world swirling with relativist and materialist notions concerning the origins of the cosmos and of the human person, Stanley Jaki has offered scientists, philosophers and seekers alike a way out of this morass. He explains how the idea of the beginning of the cosmos, which is so much part of Christian tradition, stands in sharp contrast to the scene outside of Christianity where many world religions and world-pictures had great difficulty in maintaining that the world actually began. Even for many people today, the world is eternal in the sense that it simply is. The world was often regarded as eternal in seven principal ancient cultures: Chinese, Hindu, Meso-American, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek and Arabic. From the cosmic imprisonment represented by all these world pictures, Christianity was to bring liberation. All ancient cultures held a cyclic view of the world, and this was one of the beliefs that hindered the development of science. This cyclic pessimism was decisively broken by the belief in the unique Incarnation of Christ; thereafter time and history were seen as linear, with a beginning and an end.
If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, this implies that it arrived more recently at its unique viable birth. The beginning of science as a fully-fledged enterprise can be said to have taken 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 local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on 7 March 1277 condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of the creation. These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God the Creator 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 has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Thus the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.
In the Middle Ages, ideas about the created universe had developed which were greatly conducive to scientific enterprise. The philosophical vision of the Christian Middle Ages perceived the cosmos as demythologized, free from the capricious whims of pantheistic voluntarism reified in pagan deities. This world vision included the idea that the cosmos is good, and therefore attractive to study. Also the universe was considered to be single entity with inner coherence and order, and not a gigantic animal which would behave in an arbitrary fashion, as was often believed in antiquity. The unity of the universe offers a challenge to investigators to search for the connections in nature and make them explicit. Further, the cosmos was seen to be rational and consistent, so that what was investigated one day would also hold true the next. This encouraged repetition and verification of experiments. The world picture also involved the tenet that cosmic order is accessible to the human mind, and needs to be investigated experimentally, not just by pure thought. The world was considered to be endowed with its own laws which could be tested and verified; it was not magical or divine. In addition to these ideas, medieval Christendom also was imbued with the concept that it was worthwhile to share knowledge for the common good. Finally the cosmos was seen as beautiful, and therefore investigation of it gave a participation in such beauty which elevated the mind and heart of the believing scientist to the Creator.
In short there is truly a mine of wisdom in these pages, and Stacy Trasancos has not only faithfully transmitted the teaching of Fr Stanley Jaki in a form which may be readily digested by today’s public, but she has also carried out a service to the intellectual peripheries of society, which are hungry for the truth of the Gospel, as Pope Francis would put it.[1]
Rev. Dr. Paul Haffner,
President, Stanley Jaki Foundation
Invited Lecturer Pontifical Gregorian University
Associate Professor, Duquesne University Italian Campus
Rome, 19 March 2014
Solemnity of St. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church
Introduction
Introduction
It is a daunting task to analyze the work of a scholar and formidable researcher as profound as the late Father Stanley L. Jaki. He was a Benedictine priest, theologian, and physicist who was awarded the 1987 Templeton Prize for being a leading thinker in areas at the boundary of science and theology. One of Jaki’s most useful teachings was the application of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem as a “cudgel against those scientists who try to shore up their materialism with their ‘final’ cosmologies.”[2] Such theories in physics must be heavily mathematical, and thus, per Gödel’s theorem, they cannot have in themselves proof of their own consistency. Neither can Creation be fully grasped by physics, since scientists cannot go outside the cosmos to measure it. It is akin to a child trying to prove a final theory of how his house works when he is incapable of toddling outside its doors.
Likewise, an effort to represent Jaki’s teaching when one is not Jaki, but instead a student attempting to understand and convey what is gained from his findings, also has a feeling of incompleteness to it, an inability to wrap arms around the whole of it and comprehend it adequately, and thus, a hesitation to go from reader and explorer of his work to writer and analyzer reflecting on it, such a sentiment Jaki would perhaps appreciate since he was also fond of Blessed John Henry Newman’s saying, “Nothing would be done at all if a man waited until he could do it so well that no one would find fault with it.”[3] The same is no less true, obviously, for a woman.
The first time I read Jaki’s book The Savior of Science, I knew I was reading something significant. It was during my tenth pregnancy and first graduate theology course. Having left a position as an industrial research scientist to become a full-time homemaker, my interests as a Catholic convert turned toward the intersections of science and religion. I recognized the scientist in Jaki right away; but it would take some years for me to grasp the theological and historical implications of his claim about the birth of science. I not only tried to understand it with the mind of a scientist and a theologian, but also with the heart of a mother; that is how the “birth” and “stillbirth” analogies put forth by Jaki most vividly took root in my mind.
I understood from my first reading of Jaki’s book that he was arguing that science was intimately connected with Christianity, but when I tried to articulate how “science was born of Christianity” after being “stillborn” in other cultures, I was unable to satisfactorily grasp the whole idea and explain it in a substantial way. Jaki not only argued that Christianity in the Middle Ages contributed to the rise of modern science and that the Church was a patron of science, but he went even further; he argued that there had to come a birth, the birth of the only begotten Son of the Father as a man, to allow science to have its first viable birth. To argue that is not a trivial matter.
The person who wishes to understand this claim needs to first understand that it is more than a claim that Christianity informed man that he was made in the image of God and that the world was ordered. To claim that is to claim that science is a human endeavor that began with the beginning of human existence. This historical research is more specific. It is about how faith in divine revelation produced the breakthrough in an understanding of the universe that caused a departure from ancient worldviews of an eternally cycling universe, and led to the breakthrough that was necessary for the Scientific Revolution to occur. This departure, this breakthrough—this birth—was not based on observation or experiment but on faith in the Christian Creed. The purpose
of this short book, therefore, is to explain Jaki’s assertion that “science was born of Christianity,” having been “stillborn” in other ancient cultures. If by the end of the book you can at least articulate his position, whether you agree with it or not, then I have been successful.
Jaki’s work has been misunderstood and often misrepresented. It is at risk for being marginalized or even dismissed altogether. His conclusions are, in my opinion, increasingly relevant as scientific advances are made. It is also important to know why Jaki did this work. Jaki furthered this particular assertion not so that Christians could triumphantly prove the superiority of Christian thought, an often made dismissive assumption, but because science of the future depends on an understanding of what science is and how it came to be. So much of modern humanity is affected by science and can even be destroyed by science. If science is to progress and to benefit the human race, it must return to the protective mantle that Christian thought provided it when it was born.
Why does this matter? It matters because science today is returning to the pantheistic, pagan, or atheistic thought of ancient times—times when science did not thrive as a self-sustaining enterprise that discovered physical laws and systems of laws, but instead viewed the world as unpredictable, unknowable, and magical. This view will be explained as it is the essence of the argument. To understand this claim is to understand why the Catholic Church has a legitimate right and authority to challenge scientific conclusions which directly contradict divinely revealed dogma. It is also to understand that to approach science in this way is to approach it the same way scholars did when modern science was born, thrived, and matured. It is to understand how to sort through the issues in the frontiers of science. That is the reason this claim, when presented correctly, ought to be of interest to people whether Catholic or not. Furthermore, this claim well may prove to be a useful tool for evangelization if presented carefully.
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