Savior of Science by Stanley L. Jaki

From the Publisher

In The Savior of Science Jaki illumines one of the best kept secrets of science history - the role theology has historically played in fruitful scientific development." "The volume begins by portraying a most-neglected yet all-important facet of cultural history - the invariable stillbirths of science in great ancient cultures, including Greece, China, India, and the early Muslim empire. This overview provides the background for the first major thesis of the book: belief in Christ, the only begotten Son of God - a belief absent in all these cultures - secured for science its only viable birth in a period beginning in the High Middle Ages." "In the second part of the book Jaki continues his critique of science history with a number of meticulously argued theses about Christian monotheism. These include the view that Christian monotheism provides intellectual safeguards for the cosmological argument (an argument powerfully supported by modern scientific cosmology), that Christian monotheism vindicates the sense of purpose destroyed by materialist theories of evolution, and that Christian monotheism secures firm ethical guidelines against fearful abuses of scientific know-how.

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To speak of Christ, the Savior, also as a Savior of Science, may sound a jarring note in this world ever more saturated with science. To be sure, the claim that science alone can save mankind is less voluble today than a generation, let alone a century ago. A sobering reappraisal of science has been going on in the measure in which public opinion has been awakening to the ecological crisis and the irrationality of the arms race. It is increasingly conceded that moral strength to cope with these and many lesser though still great problems cannot come from science, which was and still is instrumental in creating them.

Insofar as science is not a mere tool but intellectual creativity it is intertwined with presuppositions that have distinctly ideological character. Here too more is conceded nowadays than a generation or two ago when science and positivism (be it in the guise of pragmatism, empiricism, or operationism) were fairly synonymous. That science is not irreconcilable with the ideology par excellence, or Christianity, can be heard in circles where not too long ago a perennial warfare between the two was the standard perspective. That science did not suddenly start with Galileo's inclined plane is a point that can be found in more recent better-grade college texts on early modern intellectual history. The reason for this is that even some prominent scientists have taken note of extensive historical findings about some medieval predecessors of Galileo.

To say medieval is almost to say Christian and in a rather dogmatic sense. The medievals certainly took it for a dogmatic verity that the universe was created freely and rationally throughout, the only kind of universe that lends itself to scientific investigation. They certainly did not endorse the idea of a necessarily existing universe which invites an a priori approach to nature and nips empirical research in the bud. But what is distinctly Christian in the idea of a contingent universe? Did not Whitehead tie the Scholastics' insistence on nature's rationality, as a factor crucial for the future of science, to their belief in the absolute Lordship of Jehovah? The Scholastics would have been the last to claim that Jehovah, or Yahweh (He Who Is), was a divine name first invoked by Christians, although they were the first to sense the inexhaustible philosophical significance of that name so unique in the history of religions.

But was the name Jehovah as much of Hebrew make as it is often assumed? Jewish and especially those Christian theologians who plead the cause for natural theology, can hardly answer with an unqualified yes. Clearly, if both Old Testament and New Testament authors could charge the pagans with moral responsibility for their failure to recognize the only author of nature, then the natural recognizability of that divine name is somehow conceded. Christians have the added problem when it comes to Christ. His miracles are the kind of empirical facts over which science claims exclusive competence. The exact measure to which the rise and growth of empirical method contributed to the de-Christianization of the Western world may never be settled but the measure was not negligible. De-Christianization means above all the taking of Christ for just another ordinary empirical fact.

Many cultivators of that empirical method would have expressed themselves in much the same way in which Darwin did in a context of which only a small glimpse has so far appeared in published form. The context is Darwin's only and very brief written reflection as to what to do with Christ. In 1879, more than forty years after he had turned his back on Christian faith, synonymous for him with a rigidly literal reading of the Bible, he most likely did not think that, as he answered the agonizing questions of a seventeen-year-old German student, he was giving his own reply to Christ's historic question, "And you, who do you say I am?"

The first communication of W. Mengden, the student in question, to Darwin was prompted by the awe which countless others, young and old, felt on reading The Origin of Species, Darwin asked his son to send in reply a brief note which did not settle matters for his correspondent, still to reach his 18th birthday. "I have," he wrote to Darwin on April 2, 1879, "read in your writings a few things which I as a seventeen-year-old could not of course understand. Because of Haeckel's words that ‘evolution is the true road to knowledge,' and because of his Schöpfungsgeschichte [History of Creation], and also because of the talk of many who certainly cannot really understand you, I became confused and seized by doubts. Therefore I make bold to ask you whether strong belief in your theory is compatible with belief in God, or whether one has only the choice between your theory and belief in God, or whether those who believe in your theory can and should also believe in God as well?" Behind those agonizing questions lay young Mengden's convictions—many other readers of the Origin had similar feelings—that only Darwin could answer those questions, that he alone held the key to truth. "Should you," the youth continued, "take my questions to be impertinent and should you prefer not to answer them, please, I beg you, forgive me. I wanted to have the truth and, only because I know no one apart from you who could be of help, did I dare to make this request."

If Darwin's brief answer, penned on his behalf by his son, Francis, his future biographer, offered any truth, it was hardly the truth the young student looked for. What Darwin's answer seemed to offer with one hand, was taken back with the other. "Mr. Darwin begs me to say that he considers that the theory of evolution is quite compatible with belief in God; but that you must remember that different persons have different definitions of what they mean by God."

Possibly, because of the ambiguity of the answer, young Mengden contacted in person Haeckel in nearby Jena and posed him similar questions. As the youth reported in his third letter, dated June 2, 1879, to Darwin, Haeckel expressed agreement with Darwin on God, an agreement which, in view of Haeckel's monistic pantheism, could but make one doubt that Darwin himself endorsed belief in a personal God, the God Mengden obviously had in mind. Haeckel, however, was unambiguous with respect to Mengden's question about his and Darwin's belief in Christ: "He, [Darwin]," so Mengden reported Haeckel's reply, "cannot believe in the supernatural." This brought things to a head: "I therefore come to you for the third time, asking and begging, so that your kind reply may provide a directive that tells me what I should believe. Please, in your great kindness, don't brush me aside, keenly as I realize that my requests are improper and impertinent, because I know not where, apart from you, I can get hold of the truth."

With this the letter reached the crucial point, or Christ. "Please tell me," the youth continued, "can one believe in Christ as described in the Bible? What should one, according to your opinion, grant to Mr. Haeckel and what definition of God is appropriate to be held by one who accepts your theory?" All this had an existential backdrop: "If you, however, are kind enough to be generous with your answer, would you please tell me what one should think about life after death and whether one should expect to meet others in afterlife? This question has agitated me anew because, owing to the death of my best friend, I have been in the grip of most serious thoughts." Most accounts of spiritual crises set off by Darwin's theory have yet to match the plain but incisive reflections of a youth not yet out of high school or gymnasium.

By 1879, Darwin confessed that his "theology was a muddle." But he never saw with any comparable accuracy the muddle of his thinking about the scientific method. Was it a method or a "road-guide" into a specific area, the mechanism of evolution, or was the scientific method a guide about everything under the sun and even above it? Was it a method about something specific, or about everything that ever exerted the human mind? Not having even a modest amount of clarity about the limits of the validity of the scientific method, Darwin once more asked his son Francis to pen, on his behalf, a short résumé of his views on the bearing of evolutionary theory on matters theological, Christ not excepted: "I am much engaged, an old man, and out of health, and I cannot spare time to answer your questions fully,—nor indeed can they be answered. Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any revelation. As for future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities."

Darwin's reply is important partly because it is very typical of views prevailing in a secularist culture about Christ and afterlife, a culture that claims to be scientific. A further importance derives from the extent to which Darwin's theory advanced the secularization of the modern world. Last but not least, Darwin's reply gives a glimpse of the Achilles' heel of that culture boastful of its empiricism. Darwin most likely thought that the strongest point in his reply related to that caution which familiarity with scientific method should generate. He did not suspect the extent to which the same familiarity could also give rise to an unwarranted discrimination among various kinds of facts and to a shocking insensitivity to the countless facts of history which, unlike "the facts" of science, do not repeat themselves.

Among those unrepeatable facts of human history— individual and social, obscure and famous—none created as much of a stir as the fact of the Prophet from Nazareth. Men of power, men of learning, men of violence, men of lust, men of political madness, all tried to dismiss that fact, time and again, as a mere myth of no consequence. Nobody in Domitian's entourage had the slightest second thought as the Emperor treated with contempt the simple relatives of "Christos" presented to him. Within two hundred years, the Empire had to fix on its standards the ignominious cross which that "Christos" alone turned into a token of victory.

The commodity of second thought has not been more plentiful in times that are known as the progressive de-Christianization of the Western world. All too often camouflaged in scientific garb, it is a process which effectively hides from view facts that are neither of the making of science, nor can science make anything of them. A "scientific" stance that stimulates insensitivity to those facts is a parody of science, worthy of being called plain antiscience. All the more so because among those facts belong also some facts of scientific history, facts so very different from the facts of nature. A close look at the "unscientific" facts of the history of science, which is offered in the subsequent pages, must have in its focus the fact of Christ if that fact is indeed the most significant fact of history.

The resulting view that Christ is the Savior of science in that full sense in which He is also its Creator in the first place, is not expected to gain quick and broad acceptance. The "received" view about the birth of science is too entrenched even among those who think they have rendered their due not only to science but to Christ as well. As to those who do not think that anything is to be rendered to Christ, they will remain glued to their positions to the end of time. This was clearly foreseen by Christ, the Prophet who most explicitly predicted endless struggle on this earth. The work of Redemption was to go on because as long as there were men, they were to be redeemed from their captivity to dark forces, intellectual and other. This most scientific 20th century has yielded to those forces on more than one occasion and in enormously tragic ways because of the colossal role of science. Serious and lasting reduction of that role presupposes a new thinking about science, a thinking which must focus on the origin of its object if it is to go to the heart of the matter.