35
FATHER STANLEY L. JAKI: EVOLUTIONIST
Paula Haigh
I. First Principles and Paley’s Stone
The Purpose of it All (Regnery Gateway, 1990) is certainly Fr. Jaki’s most brilliant tour de force.
George Sim Johnston in his fine but totally uncritical review (Catholic World Report, Nov. 1991, pp. 69-70) says:
A fatal flaw of our culture is its commitment to a world view which rejects any knowledge other than the “scientific”. That science itself in no way warrants this savage reductionism is the crux of Fr. Jaki’s message.
If this is really the crux of Fr. Jaki’s message, then no one could disagree with him on any rational grounds.
However, it is my contention that what Fr. Jaki means by science and the progress of science is not entirely clear. That he accepts the scientific method of empiricism seems evident from all his works, and it is also my contention that this method, by rigorously and on principle, ruling out God is a self-inflicted reductionism, not only savage but diabolical in origin. That Fr. Jaki’s emphasis is primarily upon technology and applied science rather than intellectual disciplines seeking truth and from which certain practical advantages may or may not proceed, seems confirmed by the opening chapter of Purpose which gives an account of scientific progress starting from the Voyager-2 space probe and working back to the steam engine.
Fr. Jaki seems to disavow the forms of progress that the 19th century delighted to see as manifestations of humanity’s forward march: Condorcet’s “progress of reason and the defence of liberty ... with man restored to his natural rights and dignity...” (p. 5); the steam engine, the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace in England in l85l, the proliferation of the railroads, and finally the “Social Gospel” and “economic theory of progress and purpose” put forth by Marx end Engels. (p. 14) Fr. Jaki does not identify himself with any of these.
Perhaps Fr. Jaki comes closest to telling us exactly what his idea of progress is when he quotes Newman (p. 16) as to the contrast
between the essentially non-progressive character of the humanities, above all of theology, natural and supernatural, and the progress, mostly a process of accumulation, of the sciences.
Newman is, of course, a highly esteemed Catholic author and historical theologian, an authority for some kind of progress. He lived and breathed the air of the rationalist’s dogma of progress and his Development of Christian Doctrine (l845) was certainly one of his century's prize productions.
Also, Newman was most astute when he recognized the cumulative character of the physical sciences as opposed to the unchanging, non-progressive nature of literature and the arts and of theology. That insight is echoed in clearer and more certain accents by Dr. Jerome Lejeune in his book, The Concentration Camp (Ignatius, 1990, p. 132):
The cleverest discussions can change nothing. The ethical committees will solemnly proclaim their contradictory oracles and the anxiety will remain: technology is cumulative, wisdom is not.
Then what remains for us?
Wisdom remains for us.
If the technicians fail to recognize this, we have everything to fear from a denatured biology, but if the physicians remember it, the most sophisticated technology will remain at the service of the family of man.
An unforgettable wisdom that summarizes in a single phrase, the standard by which all will be judged:“What you have done to the least of my brothers, you have done to me.” (Matt. 25-40)
What is needed for the salvation not only of the sciences but of the entire world is the wise control of all things by a true and living theology, the science of Wisdom par excellence.
Dr. Lejeune tells us in a few simple words, unmistakably clear and emphatic, what we will never find straightforwardly expressed in all the pages of Fr. Jaki’s scintillating prose.
Fr. Jaki concludes the first chapter of Purpose, which is titled “Progress with scant purpose”, with one of his usual pirouettes:
In view of this obvious debacle of secularism, nothing would be more tempting than to turn to the sacred as the true foundation and safeguard, historically as well as conceptually, of belief in progress … (p. 30-31)
Why tempting? Perhaps if Fr. Jaki told us why, he would find himself caught in his own contradictions.
But he rejects as a temptation that supernatural wisdom that Dr. Lejeune so keenly knows to be our only salvation.
In his book about Fr. Jaki, Creation and Scientific Creativity (Christendom, 1991) Fr. Paul Haffner quotes Fr. Jaki as saying that Faith in the possibility of science is a most conscious derivative from the tenets of medieval theology on the Maker of Heaven and Earth. (p. 33)
Again, I am not clear as to Fr. Jaki’s meaning. Aristotle in the 4th century B.C., opens his major work, the Metaphysics, with the observation that “All men by nature desire to know.” If that is not the very basis for all science, what else could be?
All of Aristotle’s works, far exceeding in scientific value those of his predecessors, on such subjects as the heavens, the history and parts and generation of animals, physics and the soul -- all indicate in a most incontrovertible manner, that science in all its aspects was not only seen to be possible but was actually begun with Aristotle himself. It seems totally unreasonable to require an explicit belief in God as Creator in the Christian sense for men to believe in the very possibility of the natural sciences.
I may seem to be contradicting myself, as it has just been shown that science needs theological wisdom to be saved from itself. The way I see it is this: before the Incarnation, pagan peoples had lost the original revelation given to Adam, especially after the Flood at the Tower of Babel from whence all the nations dispersed, taking with them only remnants of the true religion; and these remnants quickly became corrupted. By the time of Aristotle, the polytheistic mythology of the Greeks no longer made sense to thinking men like Plato and Aristotle, and so they began from reason alone, discarding the childish and irrational myths. But they knew from reason alone that a Supreme Being must of necessity exist and that He is, in some way, the Cause of all things. What Aristotle did, building on that tenet alone, is a really astounding witness to the power of unaided intellect when it is submissive to reality.
The science of our times is not nearly so rational. Indeed, it is perverse in the extreme because it denies the existence of God Who makes Himself known to our reason in countless ways through His creation. Besides that, science today could have the benefit of a fully developed philosophy awl theology, had it not been willfully rejected at the Renaissance, particularly in the persons of the new empiricists like Galileo, Descartes, and Bacon.
And so there is, if you will, a kind of rise and fall in the movement of history: Aristotle was preparing the way for the great synthesis of the 13th century, and everything, from Roman times was on the way up to the apex of Christian achievement in that marvelous civilization we call Christendom, wherein Christ Our Lord was truly King of Heaven and of Earth, by right of Creation on the one hand and by right of conquest in Redemption on the other.
But since the 13th century, for many reasons, things have been going downhill. Christendom has fallen apart, Christ the King is rejected by the nations and states who must acknowledge Him and His Sovereignty if they are to be blessed by God. And perhaps most insidious of all, we have come to be dominated by a God-denying scientism, built on the three great errors of the primordial atheism of empiricism, a pagan heliocentrism, and a great new myth of evolution. All three of these errors are based in principle on a denial of the Christian Scriptures on which our Catholic Faith is based. Now science, free of all restraints from either Church or State, continues to attack not only the minds of men but their very bodies by such unnatural and barbaric practices as abortion, the implantation of organs from other species, and the euphemistically termed “fetal research” wherein the brain tissue of an unborn child is suctioned out with a plastic tube while the child is still alive in the uterus of its mother and its other organs are “harvested” in the same inhuman manner.
People of ancient times constructed idols of iron to which they sacrificed their babies, as in the furnaces of the god Molloch. The Aztecs, as late as the l520’s, were sacrificing their young people to demonic gods and tearing out their hearts while they still lived. Today, we are our own idols as men and women collaborate in the holocaust of the unborn on the altars of unimaginable selfishness. Our Lady came to save the Aztecs from their evil ways. Perhaps She will also come soon to change the hearts of modern people.
Fr. Haffner probably has the true explanation of Fr. Jaki’s idea of progress when he tells us that he, Fr. Haffner, proposes to show us the “manner in which Jaki forges the link between Christian faith and modern science. ...“ (p. 33)
That link, of course, is John Buridan’s profession of faith in the creative act of God which imparted an impetus to the heavenly bodies in the beginning and which enables them to continue in motion as true secondary causes under divine supervision. This subject has been discussed at length in Fr. Stanley L. Jaki: Revisionist and it has been argued there that any link between Buridan, Galileo, Newton and Einstein is tenuous at best and can only be “forged” by a distortion of historical facts.
The main reasons for the absence of a true origin of modern science in Buridan or in the medieval and especially Thomistic syntheses are
1) the fact that the epistemology of modern empiricism, seen already in Galileo and going back to William of Ockham (fl. 1350) is radically separatist, pulling apart the knower arid the known in a quantitative exclusion and separating also all the natural sciences from their proper place in the hierarchy of sciences, a hierarchy that reflects the created order;
2) a commitment to the heliocentric and/or a-centric theory of the cosmos, which theory is based in a radical un-realism, a denial of the very basis for science -- the evidence of the senses processed by the intellect but unable to contradict each other;
3) an embracing of evolutionism which begins early, even with Descartes and Newton as they explain the temporal formation of the heavenly bodies. Fr. Jaki’s evolutionism shows in his “progress of science” which is a positivist progressivist view of history strongly reminiscent of that of Auguste Comte (l798-l857). This theory of history’s movement is radically opposed to the Catholic view which can be found in classical authors from Saint Augustine’s City of God to the Thomistic works of Fr. Denis Fahey (d. l955). According to this Catholic view, history is not perfectionist by any natural means and exhibits a linear movement that is filled with the swirls and eddies of falls and restorations, beginning with Creation and ending with the Day of Judgment. The kind of linear perfectionist movement seen in the accumulation of technological inventions and cultural improvements that Fr. Jaki seems to envisage for science is seen in our times to be a Frankenstein monster without any soul. The reason for this is the rejection of God in the higher wisdom of nstura1 Philosophy, especially metaphysics, and a radical rejection of the supernatural wisdom coming from divine revelation.
These three great deformities of modern science: empiricism, heliocentrism, and evolutionism, were present from the beginning and have grown apace in such a manner as to make this child of Fr. Jaki a monster that he should either disown or labor to reform, because, unlike a human child, this offspring of the adulterous Renaissance has freely chosen from the beginning to follow the disastrously wayward path it has taken.
In other words modern science could only achieve what Fr. Jaki claims to be its essential "self-propelling” dynamic "on-going” process of accumulating ever better instruments of pollution and destruction unhindered by any directives from above by having broken away from and continuing to reject the good order of the medieval hierarchy of sciences. Buridan, then, by his submission to higher authority and wisdom, marks an end rather than a beginning.
Again, Fr. Jaki seems to be saying that true and certain science can only come from Catholics. In a sense this is true, but in another sense it is not entirely so. We have seen that Aristotle and other pagans working in the strength and light of natural reason alone, without benefit of divine revelation, have left a marvelous deposit of natural human wisdom. But it is undoubtedly incomplete and often distorted; in the ancient mythologies and practices, the original revelation is even horribly corrupted. It is only in the full light of divine Faith in God’s complete revelation in Our Lord Jesus Christ that science can achieve its true and full potential.
A great fund of scientific knowledge was given to Adam in the beginning. He knew more of the secrets of nature than scientists know today, and this knowledge formed the basis of the high civilization and developed technology of the pre-Flood peoples. But all had to begin anew after the Flood, while much of the original revelation, both of nature and of the supernatural life, was corrupted and lost as tribes and nations migrated away from the centers of civilization in the Middle East. Even those centers, such as Ur, Babylon, and Nineveh, lost the true religion and degenerated, due mainly to evil rulers. The power for good as well as for evil that has been given to rulers, especially to kings, can be seen in the example of the king of Nineveh (Jonas 3:6). But the worship of Baal became widespread in the Holy Lands. Only a promised line of Semites guarded the faith and hope in the Messiah to come; and when He came, only a remnant of Israel received Him.