The Duhem Society

For the feast of our patron...

2011-11-15T09:41:00.002-05:00

Today is the feast day of the patron saint of all Science, Saint Albert the Great.

May he intercede for all scientists and workers in laboratories or offices, for students of science of whatever age or degree, for professors and teachers: may we be brought to that wider vision and deeper humility which this exalted study deserves: that in our work we may glorify God and serve our neighbors.

For today, then, let us consider this excellent and cautionary excerpt from Jaki:

...the first major work of synthesis by Aquinas, the Summa
contra gentiles (completed in 1257), aimed at countering the occasionalism and fatalism contending with one another within Muslim theology and philosophy. The task, as can be guessed, centred on questions about the Creator and the nature of human intellect. The stratagem demanded that Aquinas should not be found wanting in his admiration for Aristotle, the Philosopher. In fact, Aquinas departed from Aristotle only in cases where the Christian creed allowed under no circumstance for a compromise. This attitude of Aquinas was carried over in full into his Summa theologica (completed in 1273), a work in which synthesis, not polemics, dominated. The surprising extent to which Aquinas went in accepting Aristotle’s cosmology and physics can be seen by taking a look at only one chapter in his massive opus, the 91st Question in its Third Part, where he discussed “The Quality of the World after the Judgment.” The topic, imposed by the concluding tenet in the
Christian creed, meant a most acute confrontation with the very heart of Aristotle’s cosmology and theory of motion. The contents of the five articles of Quaestio 91 show that the presence of cyclic features in the world was an unassailable truth for Aquinas, who firmly reasserted the efficient causality of a rotating sky on everything in the sublunary world. He found no fault with the generic return of physical patterns, including plants and animal species. He also went along with Aristotle on the point that the cosmos would of itself go on forever through endless begettings of individuals.

That Aquinas still had not become a hapless prisoner of the Aristotelian world view was due to his awareness of the guidelines set by the Christian creed about the cosmos. Against Empedocles’ claim about a cyclic rejuvenation of the cosmos he noted that the new heaven and earth were supernatural, “just as grace and glory are above the nature of the soul.” Against the coupling of the precession of the equinoxes with the cyclic theory of the world, his principal argument was that this would allow the exact calculation of the moment of the world’s end, in patent contradiction to the Gospel. He opposed the idea of an infinite endurance for the world through endless cycles on the ground that this would also mean that the number of the elect would become infinitely large: “But this is not in keeping with our faith, which holds that the elect are in a certain number preordained by God, so that the begetting of men will not last for ever, and for the same reason, neither will other things that are directed to the begetting of men, such as the movement of the heaven and the variations of the elements.” For Aquinas, a Christian and a Saint, the ultimate raison d’être of the cosmos consisted in its subordination to man’s eternal, unique and supernatural destiny.

This last point should also reveal a distinctly negative impact which can be exercised by tenets of the Christian creed about research concerning the destiny and duration of the world. They not only can save physical theory from an imprisonment into Aristotelian or other a priori postulates, but they can also create the illusion that some all-encompassing “final solutions” have been acquired about the physical world in the scientific sense. Aquinas is, indeed, notable for his lack of appreciation of experimental investigation. His case is, however, more that of individual temper and preference than of methodological dictates. His master Albertus Magnus, was a most enthusiastic advocate of experimental investigation and he found in the contingency of the world the justification to his prolific collection of data concerning natural history. There was no difference between disciple and master as far as the ominous cloud of the doctrine of eternal recurrences was concerned. Albertus’ dissertation on De fato shows not only his awareness of the issues at stake for humanity, but also his familiarity with the history of the question. He referred to Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Ptolemy, the Arab astronomers especially to Albumasar, and, of course, to the Church Fathers. Christian consciousness had already achieved a firm tradition in the matter.

Emphasis on experimentation was a new wine which easily could prove heady. It could produce firebrands, and Roger Bacon was one of them. Evaluations of his place in the history of science oscillate between lopsided encomiums and studied neglect. The first extreme was usually adopted by those ready to take great visions for actual accomplishments. They were joined, ironically enough by those for whom the beginnings of science coincided with the apocryphal story of Galileo and the tower of Pisa. For these the unusual friar is the classic example of a great mind struggling in the fetters of institutional obscurantism. The other extreme, the stance of silent treatment, is usually taken by those who grudgingly have come to recognize that Galileo never dropped balls to test the law of free fall and that, what is perhaps more reprehensible, he did not refer to his medieval predecessors to whom he owed so much. This is not to suggest that Roger Bacon was a forerunner of Galileo as far as the laws of motion are concerned. But Bacon’s impetuous crusading to secure the service of science on behalf of the Christian faith has much of the boldness and drama that became the hallmark of Galileo’s career. Within ten years of the composition of the Opus majus in 1267 he was imprisoned on suspicion of holding novel views.

Friar Roger was certainly not censured for his emphasis on the basic unity, interconnectedness, and interdependence of all branches of learning. There could be nothing wrong about his reasoning that since the Creator was one and there was only one creation, its understanding too had to form one single body of truth. Again, he merely echoed the Church Fathers’ somewhat naive interpretation of cultural history according to which all the science of the heathen had come from Moses, or if not, it had to be considered a form of “natural” revelation. Nor was anything shocking, in an age of great ferment, in his insistence that the Church should make the most of the Greek scientific corpus which was being rapidly recovered and translated in Bacon’s lifetime. Theologians of his time could only nod in agreement on reading his warnings about the difference between final and efficient (secondary) causes, a distinction that intended to render its due to supernatural destiny as well as to temporal endeavour. They should have felt gratified by his assertions of the forever partial character of man’s knowledge about the world and by his stricture of Aristotle’s claims about a priori, definitive verities concerning the processes of nature.

Bacon might have stunned his contemporaries by his visionary references to contraptions by means of which men would fly, speed across dry land, and see faraway objects as if they were at arm’s length, - but dreaming was not necessarily harmful. His concoction of a magic powder with never-before-experienced explosive property was a different matter, yet many an alchemist enjoyed the good will of both political and ecclesiastical potentates. At any rate, the gunpowder seems to have been the only real experimental success of the one whom some called the Father of experimental science. His continual reference to the need of experimenting had much to commend itself, but others, like Albertus Magnus, deserved no less credit on that score. There was nothing revolutionary in his, at times inordinate, praise of mathematics. To speak of mathematics as the most certain of all forms of human knowledge was a fashion of the time, and everybody saw proof of this in the superior exactness of astronomy over all other branches of science.

Bacon was not the first, nor the last, to be trapped by the glitter of perfection, but his case has a particular moral. Admiration of an outstanding perfection can easily turn into sweeping generalizations and this is precisely what happened to him. The vista of the unfailing retracement of their courses by celestial bodies imposed on his mind the idea of an inexorable determinism of events. True, he did his best to safeguard man’s freedom and moral responsibility. His prolific analysis of the influence of stars and planets could, however, easily undercut his otherwise sincere persuasion about man’s uniqueness in the inexorable turnings of nature’s great machinery. His case shows also the difference between the hapless capitulation of most Arab commentators of Aristotle to the idea of cyclic determinism and the unwavering refusal of their Christian counterparts to consider serious compromise on that crucial issue.

[SLJ Science and Creation 10 "The Sighting of New Horizons" 225-7]

A Very Relevant Gift

2011-11-09T11:02:00.002-05:00

Yes, I've been busy and not had time to resume our study of the Scientific Method, though my mental note-taking is proceeding. Meanwhile, a few weeks back I had lunch with a friend who is also a doctor, and we discussed some of our topics... as a result he gave me a most relevant gift. It seems funny to think of writing a discourse upon the epistemology of Science by starting from a blank lab notebook, but perhaps in the future I will have some time to make a few comments about it here.

I looked to see whether Father Jaki talked about such things, and found several strangely relevant references - likely there are others, but due to my time constraints, I will limit myself to these:

In his later years, Newton spent much precious time on erasing from his manuscripts and notebooks the name of Descartes, lest posterity learn a thing or two.
[SLJ "God and Man's Science: A View of Creation" in The Absolute Beneath the Relative and other essays, 62]

In the twelve years between 1904 and his sudden death in 1916 at the age of 56 he [Pierre Duhem] not only continued his prodigious series of publications in theoretical physics, but filled 120 large-size notebooks, each 200 pages long, with excerpts from medieval manuscripts which he had to beg from other French libraries. He had no microfilm, no xerox machines, no dictaphones, not even ball point pens at his disposal. Above all, he had no research assistants of any sort.
[SLJ "Science and Censorship: Hélene Duhem and the Publication of the Système du monde" Ibid, 178]

He [Darwin] might have been cured of his illusion about the evolution of his religious beliefs had he reread in his late years his early Notebooks. Available since the early 1970s in easily accessible edition, those Notebooks make it absolutely clear that the Darwin of the late 1830s was a crude and crusading materialist.
[SLJ "Monkeys and Machine-guns: Evolution, Darwinism, and Christianity" Ibid, 190]

To advance science therefore was to break with inherited ways of thought, a break with blatantly careless reasonings, "scientific" prejudices, and self-flattery, or, in short, to initiate a revolution. To this he [Lavoisier] referred as early as 1773 in his laboratory notebook, where he described his program as one that "seemed destined to bring about a revolution in physics and chemistry."
[SLJ The Relevance of Physics 151]

As my friend the doctor wrote, "Remember, it's for Posterity." Let us keep this principle in mind as we work.

P.S. There is an exciting episode about one of SLJ's own notebooks (and another about his exploration of the notebooks of Olbers!) both of which appear in A Mind's Matter, but I will leave these for another time.

If only you had been more careful in your work, you might have discovered a planet!

2011-10-20T13:57:00.004-04:00

Last time we heard from Father Jaki about probing into an apparent discrepancy in the third place to the right of the decimal, and how it related to ths discovery of argon.

Today, let's hear from another writer - one of the most wonderful and relevant (and brief) chapters I have ever read in any science text - one on which I hope one day to preach a lecture or three. It deserves to be studied, and ought to be copied and read at the start of every academic year, and proclaimed annually in every laboratory! Yes, really.

Here is just one of its dramatic paragraphs:

In the history of astronomy can be found numerous cautionary tales which illustrate the fatal consequences of messy and muddled observational records, as well as of preconceived ideas regarding what is likely or possible, and of emotional bias - expectation, disappointment, surprise, hope. No fewer than 19 pre-discovery observations of Uranus have been identified, from 1690 (by Flamsteed) onward. It is true that many of these in no way reflect upon the technique of the observers, since a single observation would quite possibly not reveal its planetary character. [*] But that none of theese observations should have led to the discovery of Uranus is incredible. The case that is most relevant to thematter of observational records concerns the French astronomer Lemonnier, who in January 1796 observed Uranus six times over a period of nine days, including observations on four consecutive nights. His records of observations were kept in a particularly untidy and unsystematic fashion (one of the Uranus observations was noted down on a paper bag that had contained hair powder), and this certainly contributed to his failure: in a well-kept record the anomalies between these nine observations cold not have failed to strike him - and he would have anticipated Herschel in the first planetary discovery of historical times by twelve years.

* On the other hand Herschel detected its non-stellar character before its motion had been established.

[J. B. Sidgwick, Amateur Astronomer's Handbook, Section 32: Observational Records]

Please read that again, and ponder this in particular:

...the fatal consequences of messy and muddled observational records, as well as of preconceived ideas regarding what is likely or possible, and of emotional bias - expectation, disappointment, surprise, hope.

Don't be thinking of getting your name into the books. Think of the fact that you may have abandoned your humility - your childlike attitude towards Reality, and substituted Superstition - or belief in Phlogiston, which is the same thing. (If you don't know what that is, I suggest you look it up.) Remember, even the great Maxwell was caught:

For it is one thing to propose an inference as being very plausible and another to assert its reality and in the least uncertain terms at that. In this respect even a Maxwell could not avoid the pitfalls set by an unquestioning faith in mechanism. ... "There can be no doubt," he asserted categorically, that the ether "is certainly the largest body of which we have any knowledge."
[SLJ The Relevance of Physics 80-81 quoting JCM's "Ether" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica]

And, no, he was not talking about an organic chemical with an oxygen between two other groups, like (C₂H₅)₂O. (Ahem, a little chemical humor there, hee hee.)

Let us use caution and DILIGENCE! Yes, diligo = "I love"... it is our choice, our selection... and we ought to be fervent in our work. Let us LOVE Reality, our cosmos, our work... and our God Who made it, and our fellow humans for whom we do such work: "Whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you did it for Me" - and that will include even our research as long as we have done it well, and for the sake of our common humanity, rather than out of pride or selfishness.

Yes, to the shock of many professors, and even more administrators, there's a deep truth lurking in "publish or perish" and it is not associated with tenure or professional status. Another day we'll explore where St. Paul spoke on this topic - it's stunning...

Argon - or, are you certain about that error?

2011-10-16T10:30:00.003-04:00

This is just a brief posting in aid of our on-going study of "the Scientific Method", about which we are slowly collecting ideas and relations of those ideas in order to more fully grasp the mystery of Science Writ Large. Whether it will aid us in doing better work in our labs, or in our lab write-ups, or just make us feel a greater measure of delight - well, I cannot say. It is useful to collect these items, and eventually we will knit them together into an orderly unity. It may not become a CRC Handbook or even a Dover reprint - indeed, it may be that they will never leave this blogg and the E-cosmos - but at least we will have seen some new things, or (even better) re-seen some old things.

Today, I do not mean to suggest some sort of appeal to Heisenberg. I am speaking several orders of magnitude larger than that. I could take a chapter - or another book in the series - to talk about error, whether it be the formal sort of measurement, or the more formal sort of mis-shapen logic, or the idiosyncratic kind that comes from round-off in calculators and computers - or just plain human sloppiness, which we are all prone to. It is a fascinating study - as fascinating as disease is to a physician, who has in mind his own frailty.

The strange thing about error is that it too deserves to be considered - no, not in the sense that we invert our purpose - I do not mean taking on a heretical view for the sake of achieving a novel viewpoint! I mean error in the more common scientific sense, those little "plus-or-minus" sorts of things we see all the time in the tables and charts of lab reports or journal articles. We have to keep those odd little gaps in mind, lest truth be hiding there.

Note!!! This is where our language gets in the way. "Error" is often (especially in philosophy and theology) understood as "the negation of truth". In science, the sort of error I am speaking of may be more often expressed as the "imprecision in a measurement."

I have selected a most interesting little excerpt for your consideration today - a tale that suggests how important it is that we consider those "imprecisions" as places which deserve fuller exploration:

The instances taken from nineteenth-century physics could be multiplied at some length to illustrate the fundamental importance that increased precision in experiments plays in establishing new laws or theories. Ohm's law, the laws of radiation, the gas laws, to mention only a few, were but triumphs in precision. The establishment of well-equipped physical laboratories, first in German and French and later in British universities, clearly evidenced the general recognition of the extraordinary importance precision has in physics. The rewards were at times spectacular, particularly when unknown entities, such as new elements, were discovered. The case of argon was perhaps the most characteristic, resting as it did on the worries of Ramsay and Rayleigh as to why some samples of nitrogen had a weight of 1.257 grams per liter instead of only 1.256. As it turned out, an unknown element, after its discovery called argon, caused this discrepancy. The identification of other inert gases followed in quick succession.
[SLJ The Relevance of Physics 254-5]

P.S. If any of our chemist readers can give a fuller reference to this interesting work, I would appreciate it.

The Rosary - our Experimental Lab for the Gospels

2011-10-07T10:36:00.003-04:00

Yes, this posting is relevant to our on-going (if slow and sporadic) series on the Scientific Method, and to that grand Jaki phrase "Science writ large". Even if it seems to be a rather Catholic thing, or a rather "prayer" thing, and not science at all.

That's because people have begun to have a very narrow view of science, and do not see the lab for the test tubes - or the web pages. They forget WHY there are such things as experiments, and what it is we are doing, and why we are doing it. That's also why there is such a thing as the rosary, as strange as it must sound. As Chesterton liked to point out, it's about vision:

...the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.
[GKC Tremendous Trifles]

There is a fascinating connection between the words "experience" and "experiment" - and the Latin word "periculum" from which we get the English word "peril" - that is, danger.

This is why I have said the first virtue of a Scientist is humility. He must be willing to submit to dangers - the first and worst is that WE MIGHT HAVE GUESSED WRONG ABOUT REALITY. Hence, we devise a scheme, submitting ourselves (No, emphatically not the things in the lab!) - that is, our mental image of reality - to danger by risking another look at Reality. We do this for many reasons, perhaps most would say it's out of curiousity, but it may be better for our moral health to say that we do it out of humility. We are not building a story. (As fun as that can be, and I can tell you it's REALLY fun! And cheaper than buying toy trains and all that.) We are hoping to know more - to get some clue about Reality, just as a sculptor carefully chisels out the marble, we carefully chisel out our mental constructions and models - but just as the scupltor continually corrects his work by shifting his gaze, his lights, his angles - perhaps on occasion even touching the relevant region - so too we require a continual feedback of data. We must spur ourselves to that single activity of seeing.

The same is true for the Rosary. This convenient hand-held tool - imagine a hand-held lab! - provides us with all the machinery necesary to make ever deeper explorations of the Mystery of the God-Made-Man, Jesus Christ. You may say, why should a religious activity - an activity of prayer - a rather specifically Catholic activity, and perhaps a quarrelsome and argumentative one - why should THAT be an exemplar for Scientists?

Because it reveals the nature of experiment. It is "experiencing" something - yes, the same thing, but my God, how many experiments have been repeated over the course of centuries! In fact, that is one of the signal trademarks (the Signs, if you will) of a good experiment: its repeatability. It begins to answer the question: why do an experiment?

To find out more - even if it's something we've already done before.

We are not "mindlessly repeating" something - no, just the opposite. It is a most mindful repetition: we proceed with care, with diligence, with attention - we check our equipment, we check our references, we see what others (both authorities and other workers on the topic) have to say about the matter... and, as the famous "Sir Henry Merrivale" (the detective in the mystery stories by Carter Dickson, pseudonym of John Dickson Carr) liked to say we do some "sittin' and thinkin'".

That is, we MEDITATE. No, this is not the "eastern" form of meditation, which is a sort of emptying of the mind. This is as opposite as one can be: it is the extreme presence of mind, bringing our complete mental personality to bear upon the matter, hoping, perhaps almost desperately, to find (like that sculptor) that perfect vantage point... and thereby gain a better view of Reality.

So do you mean I pray while I experiment? Or experiment while I pray?

For me, they are interconvertible. I have enough doubts about my abilities to keep reasonably to the task at hand, but there is a sense of Awe about this... that by learning more about That Which Is, I learn more about He Who Made That Which Is.

And which of you, if he ask his father bread, will he give him a stone? Or a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he reach him a scorpion? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father from heaven give the good Spirit to them that ask him? ... But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his justice: and all these things shall be added unto you.
[Luke 11:11-13, 12:31]

Yes, even to the most technical and dull gear and data and equations of the laboratory... All of those things also proclaim the glory of God, creator of heaven and earth:

And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard all saying: To him that sitteth on the throne and to the Lamb, benediction and honour and glory and power, for ever and ever.
[Apo/Rev 5:13]

==========

P.S. I should add that the reason for calling the rosary the handheld lab of the Gospels is simply that by stepping through the various major episodes of the Life of Our Lord and concentrating on them slowly in a ritual (one might say "according to standard lab protocols) we advance into a greater knowledge and understanding of His life - a real life, in our real world, of which there is always more to See...

P.P.S. Above you will find the word "diligence". This is most often understood as meaning "careful" or something similar. I think it might be good to point out its original meaning is "to love, esteem"... we ought to pray and experiment from Love. This will sound goofy, if not downright silly - but that's because there is very little meaning left in "Love" in our day. What a shame. But don't you love to learn more about Reality? You should...

Let's not forget we have a Foe!

2011-09-29T07:18:00.003-04:00

It's the feast day of St. Michael - the day we ought to recall that we have a dangerous Foe working against us...

Speaking of Lucifer, one thinks of Michael, a name which means “who is like God.” It is also a hallowed shorthand, telling perhaps less of God than of Lucifer's daring and downfall. Lucifer wanted to play God. How an angel can do that is a question for which answers, very speculative to be sure, may be found in the writings of an Aquinas or a Maritain. All such answers rest on considering angelic nature, pure intellects, whose cognition has three main features. The mode of that cognition is intuitive, its origin is innate, and its operation is independent of things. The Cartesian theory of errorless human knowledge is expressed in exactly the same terms. It should not be surprising that a man, believing himself to be capable of knowing in such a way, should try to play God. Descartes tried to do this in the only sense in which a poor mortal can do it, namely, to dictate to God how to go about the business of creation.
[Jaki, Angels, Apes, and Men 15-16]

Let the scientific enquirer continue to cultivate the patience of science. Let him linger - at any rate let me linger - in the place of popular entertainment whatever it may be, and take very careful note (if necessary in a note-book) of the way in which ordinary human beings do really talk about each other. As he is a scientific enquirer with a note-book, it is very likely that he never saw any ordinary human beings before. But if he will listen carefully, he will observe a certain tone taken towards friends, foes and acquaintances; a tone which is, on the whole, creditably genial and considerate, though not, without strong likes and dislikes. He will hear abundant if sometimes bewildering allusion to the well-known weaknesses of Old George; but many excuses also, and a certain generous pride in conceding that Old George is quite the gentleman when drunk, or that he told the policeman off proper. Some celebrated idiot, who is always spotting winners that never, win, will be treated with almost tender derision; and, especially among the poorest, there will be a true Christian pathos in the reference to those who have been "in trouble" for habits like burglary and petty larceny. And as all these queer types are called up like ghosts by the incantation of gossip, the enquirer will gradually form the impression that there is one kind of man, probably only one kind of man, perhaps, only one man, who is really disliked. The voices take on quite a different tone in speaking of him; there is a hardening and solidification of disapproval and a new coldness in the air. And this will be all the more curious because, by the current modern theories of social or anti-social action, it will not be at all easy to say why he should be such a monster; or what exactly is the matter with him. It will be hinted at only in singular figures of speech, about a gentleman who is mistakenly convinced that he owns the street; or sometimes that he owns the earth. Then one of the social critics will say, "'E comes in 'ere and 'e thinks 'e's Gawd Almighty." Then the scientific enquirer will shut his note-book with a snap and retire from the scene, possibly after paying for any drinks he may have consumed in the cause of social science. He has got what he wanted. He has been intellectually justified. The man in the pub has precisely repeated, word for word, the theological formula about Satan.
[GKC "If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach" in The Common Man]

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle! Protect us, our families, our countries, and help us do our work well, to the glory of God. Do not let us walk into our labs or classrooms thinking we are God Almighty...

GKC on the Mystery of Observation

2011-09-10T09:20:00.003-04:00

I had no time to arrange a posting this week on our topic, so I will just give you this important excerpt from a Chesterton essay.
--Dr. Thursday

I have seen with my own eyes in print all the above explanations of the Sea-Serpent as seen by sailors. They are all perfectly plausible and typically modern; they all only forget one thing: that it would be just as easy to apply this distributive and disruptive process to any other object that had only been momentarily seen on some score of occasions. When first the giraffe was described by travellers it was treated as a lie. Now it is in the Zoological Gardens; but it still looks like a lie. If few save stray travellers had seen the thing, and if the scientists (for some muddle-headed reason of theirs) had decided to doubt it, it would have been quite easy for them to explain every alleged appearance in the same way. There might be a tall python with a stretched neck just behind a horse with a hidden and sunken head: this might give the impression of a quadruped with a dreadfully long neck. There might be an animal with a long nose and pointed ears peering from the top of a lonely and leafless tree: this might give the impression, in certain lights and shades, of a tall vertebral column terminating in an ovine face. There are no limits to these coincidences of illusion on land or at sea; but we have the right to ask two questions of those who actually use them as an argument against the possible existence of giraffes. We have a right to ask, first, why all these coincidences tend to create the image of a giraffe? And we have a right to ask, secondly, why the dickens there should not be such a thing as a giraffe?
[GKC ILN October 21 1911 CW29:176-7]

Yeah - interesting, even if humorous, isn't it?

Now, to help you out - kindly print these out in a nice, fairly large font, and post it somewhere for you and others to read and think about:

When first the giraffe was described by travellers it was treated as a lie.

Now it is in the Zoological Gardens; but it still looks like a lie.

--G. K. Chesterton, 1911

One of the severest tests
of a scientific mind
is to discern the limits
of the legitimate application
of scientific methods.

--J. C. Maxwell, 1878

In order to consider the Scientific Method, we must first consider what Science is

2011-09-02T10:15:00.002-04:00

I wrote a lot yesterday, in the tactile sense (pen and paper) and have only just begun to transcribe it... it will come in fragments, just as it is fragmentary in its character. But it helps move us along. And so, let us begin...

In order to examine this topic of the "Scientific Method", we first need to consider what "Science" is. As big as our chosen topic is, as argumentative as it may be, the matter of "science" is even larger and more argumentative.
This is neither a New Thig, nor one which has arisen from the usual issues blamed for "new" things, such as:
1. The Renaissance
2. The Protestant Reformation
3. The "Enlightenment" (which some of us call the Endarkenment)
4. The "rise of science"
5. The Industrial Revolution
6. Quantum Mechanics
7. Modern - that is, 20th and 21st century life.
and so on...

Why? Simply because the question as to What Is Science dates as far back as the 1200s, or even further.

For over 800 years, people have been debating on "science" - its definitions, its divisions and order, its methods... and even more amazing, these were people who
1. were friends
2. were quite orthodox in their belief and behavior, and not in any sense "protestant" (Though I think they were Reformers in the best sense, that is, in the sense of John the Baptist: they not only wished but worked to reform their lives, which we are all called to do.)
3. were authentic believers but at the same time they were "scientists" (if I may be permitted to use the term before we've defined it - we computer scientists do this, and I will talk about that another time.)

That is, these people wished to consider seriously the reality of things and apply their intellects - and indeed their whole energy - to understanding at least a little of that reality.

(to be continued)

note: three references on this topic I have here with me are:

1. The Division and Method of the Sciences - St. Thomas Aquinas' commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius, tr. Armand Maurer
2. Science and Creation inthe Middle Ages by Nicholas Steneck (this considers the work of Henry of Langenstein (d. 1397) on Genesis.
3. The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor tr. with notes by Jerome Taylor

An Important Comment

2011-08-31T15:20:00.002-04:00

Alan Aversa posted the following comment which is worth its own entry in our records:

This site has a whole collection of his online works. There is also a very nice OCRed and formatted PDF version of his La théorie physique, son objet, sa structure (1906).

Paul Needham has just produced the first full-length translation of one of Pierre Duhem's scientific works: Commentary on the Principles of Thermodynamics by Pierre Duhem. From its preface:
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (1861–1916) held the chair of physics (changed to chair of theoretical physics in 1895) at Bordeaux from 1894 to his death. He established a reputation in both the history and philosophy of science as well as in science (physics and physical chemistry). His pioneering work in medieval science opened up the area as a new discipline in the history of science, and his La théorie physique (Duhem 1906) is a classic in the philosophy of science which is still read and discussed today. Although his work in these two fields is now well represented in English with a number of translations that have appeared in recent decades (Duhem 1892b, 1903, 1902, 1905–1906, 1906, 1908, 1915, 1985, 1996), there is little of his scientific work available in English. The original manuscript of Duhem (1898) was translated by J. E. Trevor, one of the editors of The Journal of Physical Chemistry, for its first issue. But his work almost invariably appeared in French. The present volume contains translations of some of his important early work in thermodynamics, which I hope will contribute to a more balanced picture in English of the breadth of Duhem’s publications and provide a further source of insight into his thought.

Thanks, Alan! I've not had time to check any of this out, perhaps later. I would like to learn French also, but I have no time. Besides, PD's work is too important for it to remain in French.

About what we have seen... or haven't seen

2011-08-26T14:32:00.004-04:00

So, Doctor (you are thinking to yourself) with all this odd meditation about reason and faith (or trust) and principles, have you not lost your way? Aren't you trying to understand a little more about the scientific method? Or have you decided to write about something else?

Thank you, my dear reader. you are helping me stay on track. but I do wish to point out, that for me, like Chesterton, "My trouble is that I never can really feel that there is such a thing as a different subject. There is no such thing as an irrelevant thing in the universe; for all things in the universe are at least relevant to the universe." [GKC ILN Feb 17 1906 CW27:125-6] Which is another one of those priceless gems we ought to keep as a lovely posting on the walls of our labs and classrooms, whether they be philosophy or physics, theology or automata theory...

But really I rather expected you to quote Chesterton's famous groan from his readers: "But why does Mr. Chesterton drag in his Roman Catholicism?" [See GKC's The Thing CW3:227]

Yeah - why does Dr. Thursday always drag in HIS Roman Catholicism? Well... today, I will annoy you even more, and drag in, not a papal encyclical, but two other curious source books. Even if you are not annoyed you will be surprised.

The first is to be found among the very remarkable collection of texts classed as "Children's Fantasy" or "Fairy Tale". We know that this is wise, since no less an authority than GKC relies on these for building his argumentation about science and other matters - an argument which is well worth your study. It is found in the chapter called "The Ethics of Elfland" in his 1908 masterwork called Orthodoxy. Note that a sizeable chunk of that chapter was quoted in the 1957 work called Great Essays in Science, edited by the very famous Martin Gardner. The anomaly of this is discussed at length in Jaki's Chesterton: A Seer of Science, a book that every scientist and philosopher ought to have, and ought to read periodically, as a sanity check. If someday (please God) our Duhem Society becomes a tangible reality, I hope we might have an entire conference on this book. It ought to be germinating, and fructifying into new and useful things...

But, as I said, I wish to examine a line from one particular text, and no, it is not Chesterton, nor Jaki, nor Gardner. It is from the work of another famous children's writer, E. Nesbit, and it is incredibly relevant to our topic - in some ways, it is the entirety of our topic, even though it is nothing more than a question. Believe me, I was stunned when I read it. Here it is:

"Do you think there's nothing in the world but what you've seen?"
[E. Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle, 16-7]

Well... we might just write Q.E.D., dust off our hands, and proceed to the next topic. But we won't, since there's more to say, and another item from another book to consider.

So let's take it again, slowly: Do we think there's nothing in the world but what we've seen? Well... let's be honest, which is the First Virtue of a scientist. The obvious answer is No - we are certain - more certain perhaps of this truth than of any other - that there is more, indeed, far more, in the world than what we have seen. And my God, we ought to be happy, grateful, joyful beyond words. The old maps were wrong: ne plus ultra = "nothing more beyond" was just a bit of tongue-in-cheek hubris on the part of the map-maker. We may not have travelled to the last shores, the "final frontier" - but we've already seen such sights as to beckon onwards to ever-new vistas. Science writ large... it is that glorious line from Newman:

There is but one thought greater than that of the universe, and that is the Thought of its Maker.
[Newman, The Idea of a University Part II Chapter VIII Christianity and Scientific Investigation, 3]

(Yes, if time permits, we shall examine that chapter - indeed, that book in detail, but not today. Let us proceed.)

If we are honest, we scientists will admit to being very childlike. Consider this very insightful comment about children's literature, and see what it reveals about scientific literature:

A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales - because they find them romantic.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:257]

Scientists like realistic tales - yes, because we find them romantic. Did I not quote for you that other famous line from the same book about "The greatest of poems is an inventory." [Ibid CW1:267] Is there not some mystic magic in the Periodic Table, or in the vast splendors of biological taxonomy? Of course... and they reveal to us things that we have not yet seen. How many chemists believe in praseodymium - or in californium? Have you seen them? Or biologists - even marine biologists - who have seen the glories of the orders of cubomedusae and stauromedusae and antipatharia?

Perhaps Jesus also referred to us scientists when He told Thomas that "blessed are they that have not seen and have believed." [John 20:29]

We have more - much more - to say on this, since as we have pointed out, this is our topic. But we need to clarify the topic before we can hope to proceed.

Now, alas - I must muddy the waters, for I will turn from the sound and simple lore of children's books to a thoroughly technical reference dictionary on archaeology, edited by Ruth Whitehouse. No, I am not going to be critical - or at least not of that text; I am not in any position to critique it. Rather, I want to quote a wonderful line I found in it, a line which bears directly upon our topic, and is in some way the corollary to the Nesbit question mentioned above. (It also is very Chestertonian, and I may try to give a short excursus on that in a future post, it deserves it.) The line appeas in the entry for model, and is definitely an editorial augmentation, but its truth is inarguable, and it deserves to be highlighted, considered, remembered:

...all archaeological processes are strictly untestable, because they have already happened...
[Whitehouse, ed. The Facts On File Dictionary of Archaeology, 332]

That statement reveals so much - as I said, the counterpoint to the Nesbit dictum. There are certain things which are going to be forever out of our reach.

But blessed are we who have not seen, and yet believe... Such is Science. Clearly we have much to disentangle, but we need to keep these ideas very clearly in front of us, lest we fall by pride into thinking we have seen everything, or can test everything. Thank God for Maxwell, who told us to seek out the limits of the scientific method - and if we are to do that, we need to understand just what it is we are doing.

We'll stop here; there's a lot to think about. I hope you will ponder these matters, and find yourself stimulated to a greater enthusiasm in our work.

"Take my word for it"

2011-08-19T09:38:00.000-04:00

Yes, we are continuing our discussion of the "Scientific Method" - and I understand that so far I have only given what might be a disjoint collection of notes that might get worked up into something more coherent someday. I ought to reassure you: I do have some ideas on getting to the topic in a more "scientific" fashion, but I prefer to give you some jottings now, lest I get busy again, and lose the opportunity.

Indeed, I am quite aware of the central lacuna: the fact that I have not yet even stated what this "Scientific Method" is! Though you may have some ideas, and are of course enough of a scholar to understand the absic sense of these two words joined together: A "method" is something "a way (metHOD comes from Greek hodos = "way") or technique or approach to getting something done - and "scientific" obviously means that whatever is getting done is getting done in one of the branches of Science - physics, chemistry,and so on. But no, we are still not ready to define it yet.

Rather, I want to examine a different word today - that pesky word "faith" which always comes up, either directly or indirectly - and is present, either obviously or latently, in everything. As we well know, the problem that arises in treating of the matter of "faith" comes from it being a stand-in pronoun or assumed euphemism for "religion" or "worship" - something abstract and personal, and hence not useful for "getting something done" - which is what Science (and a fortiori Engineering) is all about.

But really, we need to begin to see "faith" as having a solidity like a foundation - something providing a greater agreement, not a greater quarrel - and it may help if we take one of its synonyms and consider using a word like "trust" or "confidence".

You might not like that last, since it is a sneaky way of hiding faith in a Latin disguise (fide). That's all right - then stick with "trust". Now, let us proceed.

Very much of our lives - and very much of Science and Engineering - depends upon Trust. That is, accepting the truth of a statement - whether from a person (verbally) or from a publication (in print, be it tactile or electronic) - for no other reason than we trust that source as being reliable. I have already pointed out that every one of us begins our work by relying upon a very large foundation of unquestioned truths, namely the complex system we call "language". Coupled with language is another, rather vague system - which I feel must be compared rather like the vagus nerve compares with the spinal cord - it handles some very critical matters which are not exactly language, but are not entirely separated from it either. The usual term for this system is "common sense", though I may be abusing the term. Chesterton often refers to it under that name, though sometimes he calls it "logic". It is somehow allied with the nature of "semantics" - with the basic meanings of words, not so much inthe pure grammatical sense, but in the reasoning sense. It is why we know there's something wrong (or funny) about the phrase "eating a lavender adverb" and so forth. To frame this point another way: we receive from our parents and elementary teachers our own native speaking and writing tongue. (There's a curious juxtaposition, isn't it? a "writing tongue".) But we also receive a treasury of information - some of it received perhaps from chance interactions as children, some from our own experiences (and more on that another time, since it leads to our major topic!) But it is received, and we take it as given.

Why?

It is enshrined in a famous phrase. "Take my word for it." This is what we do, simply because we are in need. Now, it would be delightful to go into how this ties into Subsidiarity - since it is precisely here that even as children we invoke that great principle, appealing to another to supply us in our needs - but that will take us too far afield. Let us remain in the idea of taking someone's word - and consider that a little more regarding our topic, that of Trust.

Now, that trust may be just as reliable in an unbeliever as in a believer - and that trust may point in either direction, never relying upon or being defeated by any particular issue of religious belief or form of worship:

I am an atheist; I have no god to call on for those who will not take my word. But I tell you in the name of every root of honour that may be left to a soldier and a man...
[GKC "The Resurrection Of Father Brown" in The Incredulity of Father Brown]

What, then, is required? As we examine the matter, it seems to me to require three attributes:

1. The words of the statement must actually communicate something meaningful, that is, by the suporting foundation of the already-accepted system of language.

The first truth involved is a truism, but a truism often as little understood as any mystery. It is that the artist is a person who communicates something. He may communicate it more or less easily and quickly; he may communicate it to a larger or smaller number of people. But it is a question of communication and not merely of what some people call expression. Or rather, strictly speaking, unless it is communication it is not expression. A signalman cannot be said to express the fact that the Scotch Express is coming from York, if he communicates the fact that it has broken down at Newcastle. A messenger cannot be said to express his sorrow at a king having been shot, if he only succeeds in communicating the news that he has been crowned. The word "expression" implies that something appears as what it really is; and that the thing that is recognised outside is the same that has been realised inside.
[GKC ILN Nov 27 1926 CW34:206-7]

2. The concept must form a unity with our understanding of Reality according to "common sense".

...the line between legitimate and illegitimate expansion of a word is so difficult to draw, that there is little to be gained by questioning it except that mere quarrel about a word that is called logomachy. There always are some confusions about a definition or exceptions to a rule. The great principle that Pigs is Pigs does not dispose entirely of the existence of pig-iron, or of cannibals calling a man a long pig. We all know the plain practical man, the sceptic in the crowd, the atheist on the soap-box, who boasts that he calls a spade a spade, and generally calls it a spyde. But even he may have to deal with the learned and sophisticated man, who will prove to him, that even in the case of the ace of spades which he planks down in playing poker, the spade is not really a spade; being derived from the Spanish espada, a sword. If once we begin to quibble and quarrel about what words ought to mean, or can be made to mean, we shall find ourselves in a mere world of words, most wearisome to those who are concerned with thoughts.
[GKC "The Hound of Heaven" in The Common Man]

3. The person giving this statement must be trustworthy. Typically there must be some reason for us to grant, at least provisionally, the dignity of listening to what the man has to say. Often, that's because we have already had experience with that speaker, and have found him reliable in the past - and as we find our trust validated, we gain an increasing respect for his accuracy. (Even when on rare instances we find he has made a mistake in his statement, we are more willing to let it pass - but that is also another topic.)

When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truths that flowers smell." No: you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father, it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine...
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:360]

Yes, I know I quoted that before, but it's well worth pondering. We do find our reliance growing as the statements of an authority are verified, again and again, by experience... and this is something we will consider more later.

Now, it is well worth pausing here and considering something - again, something unusual, which is all to easy to overlook - that is, the idea of trusting ourselves. It would be quite as dangerous to Science (and to many other things) if we somehow factor ourselves INTO the equations or experiments...

Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test. It is not pride to wish to do well, or even to look well, according to a real test. It is pride to think that a thing looks ill, because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself. Now in the general clouding of clear and abstract standards, there is a real tendency today for a young man (and even possibly a young woman) to fall back on that personal test, simply for lack of any trustworthy impersonal test. No standard being sufficiently secure for the self to be moulded to suit it, all standards may be moulded to suit the self. But the self as a self is a very small thing and something very like an accident. Hence arises a new kind of narrowness; which exists especially in those who boast of breadth. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all.
[GKC "If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach" in The Common Man]

Also, in our delight with machines - oh, how silly we are, using these machines to communicate, and yet we can also find reliance in them, just as we do not stop at every bridge to check its stability - and what tools might we use? How would we check those tools? Well, we need to consider another of Chesterton's warnings, from his famous detective story about the "lie detector":

"...Isn't that better evidence than a lot of gabble from witnesses: the evidence of a reliable machine? "

"You always forget," observed his companion, "that the reliable machine always has to be worked by an unreliable machine."

"Why, what do you mean?" asked the detective.

"I mean Man," said Father Brown, "the most unreliable machine I know of."
[GKC "The Mistake of the Machine" in The Wisdom of Father Brown]

Let us conclude with this brilliant observation:

Science can analyse a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but science cannot analyse any man's wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful. The man's desire for the pork-chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven. All attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science of history, a science of folk-lore, a science of sociology, are by their nature not merely hopeless, but crazy. You can no more be certain in economic history that a man's desire for money was merely a desire for money than you can be certain in hagiology that a saint's desire for God was merely a desire for God. And this kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything in the nature of a science. Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.
[GKC Heretics CW1:117]

Our First Contest

2011-08-18T13:58:00.006-04:00

(I ought to have done this yesterday, for Fr. Jaki's birthday; I apologise.)

Announcing the first contest of the Duhem Society!

The Genesis One Contest

As we all know, the first chapter of Genesis is the summary or "Great Creation" story - as compared to that in Genesis 2 which talks mostly about Adam and Eve and the garden. We also know that this is one of the major bones of contention when it comes to any sort of discussion about science (writ either large or small) and faith (also writ either large or small). It's sad, since (as GKC might say) it's stingless for the most orthodox. Ah well. Perhaps you already have a copy of SLJ's Genesis One Through the Ages, which gives a great deal of interesting information about the topic; as with most such topics, it comes up in many of SLJ's books. You also ought to have read (or at least seen our posting) about the very critical comments by St. Augustine from his own work on the topic - see here for the reference.

Anyway, the contest is a rather tongue-in-cheek affair, though one which ought to be attempted by every serious Historian of Science, just as a corrective against assuming too much - or too little. It is a writing exercise, and yet it should be fun, and very interesting and instructive.

Here it is:

The Genesis One Contest

Write a comprehensive statement of Creation which includes all things, and indicates not only the entire system of physical things, but also stresses their origin. (Who, and How - you decide how to proportion it all, as long as What is "everything" = "all things visible and invisible".)

You may use whatever style you wish, but you are restricted to under 759 words - which is (at least by one estimate) the number of words in Genesis One. You need not work out a division into verses, unless of course you use a poetic form.

In order to enter, you may submit it to me by e-mail (see my "profile" for the e-address), or you may post it on your own blogg, then send me a link to it. If you use e-mail, let me know whether you will permit your entry to be posted on our Society blogg.

Note that this exercise is not to prove anything (except perhaps to you, the entrant). We will not impose historico-critical analysis, or doctrinal verity, or any of those formalisms to your submission; you must be the final arbiter: when you are done you will have to find yourself satisfied - and be able to say as God did, that it is indeed VERY good. (If you're not, wait a year, revise it, and try again!)

Due by September 23 - that is, Before the Fall. (hee hee)

An aside: if you think that this seems to suggest that there might be more to Genesis One than a rather liturgical "emphasis on the seven-day week and the holiness of the Sabbath" - well, I think that's plain, especially once one reads the relevant chapter. But then SLJ does say a lot more than that; it's always a matter of emphasis. And let's not forget what St. Augustine says about it!) Maybe it's because I'm an architect of systems, and that last line about how God saw the System of All Things as very good... well, you write enough fiction (or software), and you'll begin to understand that such writing is a lot different than purely academic commentary. I am sure it will be a shock to some, but there is such a thing as Reality. Ahem. But that's just an aside.

I hope this will be an annual activity. Please enter early and often. I make no guarantees about any sort of prizes, but I am sure the fun you have writing it, and the fun we'll have reading it will be worth more. Perhaps someday when we have our journal, we'll also be able to have real (tangible) prizes.

How dare you!

2011-08-12T09:48:00.004-04:00

What! A computer scientist is trying to write about the Scientific Method - and examine it with respect to history and to both theory and practice? Is he crazy?

Oh, yes, I can hear the whines - they're not loud, but they're there:

"You're not a philosopher - and you're certainly not a historian of science, even if you read Jaki and Duhem. You're barely a scientist at all, even if you do have a doctorate in computer science. You're just a programmer."

Ahem. That's sad, but it won't work. You see, I am a Catholic, with all that implies: specifically, that I am interested in everything. Chesterton puts it quite boldly:

You cannot evade the issue of God; whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him. Now if Christianity be a fragment of metaphysical nonsense invented by a few people, then, of course, defending it will simply mean talking that metaphysical nonsense over and over again. But if Christianity should happen to be true - that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe - then defending it may mean talking about anything or everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true. Zulus, gardening, butchers’ shops, lunatics asylums, housemaids and the French Revolution - all these things not only may have something to do with the Christian God, but must have something to do with Him if He really lives and reigns.
[GKC Daily News Dec. 12, 1903 quoted in Maycock, The Man Who Was Orthodox]

This splendid idea ought to be posted in every lab and office and classroom. Of course it is expressed in what some call GKC's "verbal fireworks" - but it is really an idea nearly two millennia older, since St. Paul said the same thing to the Colossians:

That their hearts may be comforted, being instructed in charity and unto all riches of fulness of understanding, unto the knowledge of the mystery of God the Father and of Christ Jesus: in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
[Col 2:2-3, emphasis added]

Moreover: there was a movie some years back which seemed to portray a certain supposedly well-rounded person - a man of widely (and wildly) diverse interests - as a "Renaissance Man". That's interesting - but after some thought, and some recent reading, I prefer the term Medieval Man. That's why I told my friends at work,when they wanted to know how I managed to solve such curious computing problems like spot transport for a cable TV company by using encyclicals by Leo XIII and John Paul II. Oh yes - I quoted Chesterton to them:

I revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting something done.
[GKC Heretics CW1:46]

Note: this says doctrinal methods - not the merely the physical aspects of that era. So that does not mean writing my computer programs on parchment from my own goats, using a quill I plucked from my geese and ink I made from the soot in my chimney! (hee hee)

It means finding out WHAT IS GOING ON, and WHY - it is answering the ancient question Dic cur hic = "tell why you are here" - as Father Jaki liked to say, inquiring as to the Purpose of It All. Otherwise, I am not even a programmer: I am wandering blind in a forest at night, looking for a haystack to probe for lost needles, and I might not even be on the same planet as the desired haystack!

Now. (Ahem!) If all this means trying to learn more about this "scientific method" by examining all its various detailed antecedents when it is applied, so be it. Some of those details are not easy to see, you know, and it is no insult to other great students of these matters to hint that they may have missed something. We all miss something; we are not the mythical thousand-eyed Argus.

Or are we?

Well... that's part of the mystery that is being overlooked. (no pun intended!)

In fact, that's at the root of the point I made last week about Tradition and Appeal To Authority - but we must not rush up that steep slope. We have more to say before we get to it. But at least I've dropped the hint.

Now, about this term "Catholic". Remember that it is from the Greek, and means "universal". People love to talk about "multicultural" and "being tolerant" - such terms do make me chuckle, for of course despite their narrow bias they give a glaringly brilliant bow to Ancient Rome and the power of her Latin. The Catholic vision is far larger. It envisions ALL things: it is universal, all-inclusive, but not simply as a multitude of varieties, nor in the semi-pagan "Vulcan" philosophical views. Truth is one, but since there is One Truth, there is also error, and it is not a matter of tolerance or universality to suggest including errors as part of Truth.

That does not mean we ignore error - but at the same time we do not confound error with truth, just as a physician does not confound illness with health. There are entire branches of the various disciplines devoted to the study - not of error-as-such, but in the sense of How Things Go Wrong. Theology makes lists of heresies, Medicine has pathology and teratology and such related studies; Engineering tracks famous and infamous disasters - and so forth. Obviously, when something goes wrong, one needs to first identify what is wrong, in order to know what remedy to apply, etc...

But let us not drift too far. Yes, this begins to smack of epistemology, that is, the study of Knowledge. Of course: you see, to a Medieval Man, the great Edifice of Knowledge is one building, and each of its halls come into contact with many others.

Perhaps I ought to suggest another image - we shall use both as we proceed - the image of the Diamond. Its brilliance comes from the multitude of its many facets, and in our Diamond, every facet is one of the disciplines, and it touches or receives light from many others. This is a wonderful thing, and while it may be exceedingly hard (10 on the Moh scale of hardness) - indeed, unconquerable (the meaning of the Greek word) - it is lovely, and desirable, and rare, and stands for indeed mystical things.

There is one other analogy to offer - that is the analogy called "The Tree of Virtues". This is an organizational method going right back into the Middle Ages: an intellectual device (we computer scientists call it a "data structure") for managing the huge variety of virtues, that is, or the good and positive powers of the human person. You can find it in books like The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor from the 1120s, or in the commentaries on Boethius of St. Thomas Aquinas (mid 1200s) or the writing of Henry of Langenstein (died 1397). You can also find it in something called Cursus Theologicus from Salamanca, one edition of which has an immense diagram that looks much like a modern-day "org chart" or perhaps a system diagram - or like the "Chart of the Metabolic Processes":

(Image courtesy of A. Poole at Loome Books.)

Another time we'll talk more about this tree - for today I merely want to point out that this "Tree of Virtues", like the diamond, or the Edifice of Knowledge, is a tool - like the org chart - to help us see the Complete Picture of the system. Science does not only have branches: it also has supporting trunks and roots. It is well that we do not miss the forest, or even the tree, while we stand in fascination at our one single favourite chloroplast...

* * * * *

Postscript. I must say one more thing, even if it is personal, and even if it means revealing one of my professional secrets. Yes, I am a programmer - but in order to be a programmer, I must also be all the things for all the disciplines which request my services. I do not lose my identity; I take on the tasks and abilities of the user who needs my help, and then unite that need to the incredibly severe limits of this odd little machine, and then produce the series of instructions, just as a cook writes a recipe. Yes, it can be written at a desk, but it demands the existence of a kitchen... This is another topic for another time, oh yes indeed. But do not think that a programmer doesn't have to be aware of the other fields! Indeed, since computer science is really just a branch of mathematics, the queen and handmaid of Science, it must deal with many other matters. These are truly catholic (note the lower-case) fields, but then as a Medieval Man, I agree with Chesterton:

I never can really feel that there is such a thing as a different subject. There is no such thing as an irrelevant thing in the universe; for all things in the universe are at least relevant to the universe.
[GKC ILN Feb 17 1906 CW27:126]

No matter what your own discipline, you will find more to enjoy, and more to think about, and more assistance for your own topics, once you begin to be catholic in that way - when you revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century.

(In case you are wondering: yes, that cable TV system got something done by taking advantage of Subsidiarity. In the 5.5 years it ran, about 200,000 commercials were sent out (when needed) to over 170 inserters, going to six of these on the average. Further details when my book comes out.)

Another note. Upon re-reading this, I am not sure that I've used the right capitalizations each time the word "Catholic" appears. However, that's part of the point. To what extent the two are coupled is a topic for another series of postings, but let no reader fear. There must be professional respect, and courtesy - and even more, there must be love of neighbor. The related issues - forms of worship, dogmatic teachings, organizational structures - are topics to be discussed, but ought not impede us from our work. (Yes, I am well aware of their treatment in Fr. Jaki's writing; that is also another topic for a future date.) For me, they provide a unity which enables a vaster view and a more enthusiastic labor...

Just a quick example. The very common concept of "hierarchy" - which may suggest the elegant system of layman-priest-bishop-Pope - is quite demonstrably Jewish in origin. It is a powerful and elegant and effective scheme of organization, and it was suggested to Moses by Jethro his father-in-law! See Exodus 18:21-22; this is indeed the basis of Subsidiarity and of all such related organizational methods.

About the Scientific Method

2011-08-05T10:21:00.003-04:00

This year we note the 45th anniversary of the publication of Jaki's first book, The Relevance of Physics. In it he quotes a fundamental epigram from one of the greatest physicists, a statement which we ought to learn by heart, and post in our labs and offices and classrooms:

One of the severest tests of a scientific mind is to discern the limits of the legitimate application of scientific methods.
[SLJ TROP 382 quoting J. C. Maxwell, "Paradoxical Philosophy" (1878), reprinted in The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, edited by W. D. Niven, II (Cambridge, 1890), p. 759.]

And, we might add, one of the severest tests of a member of the Duhem Society is to explain just what these "scientific methods" are, as well as those limitations. Otherwise, we are either (1) doing magic, since there is no causal relation underlying our work, or (2) working mechanically, and all our work is just as natural as a ticking clock.

I think the problem arises from the very popular but quite mistaken notion that there is something "scientific" - that is, akin to a mathematical proof-system - underlying the idea of "scientific method", and that this formal hidden substructure gives an unarguable truth to all matters resulting from or derived from these methods.

Wow, and people talk about believing things without any reason?

The simple fact is that science is just as much a matter of faith as every other thing we do - our Master, G. K. Chesterton, put it in one of his great epigrams which belongs up there with Maxwell's:

It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:236]

Now, this is very irritating to some, but then they are making what the philosophers call "a fallacy of equivocation". They think that because I and GKC and SLJ and PD and a large number of others state that "reason is itself a matter of faith", this means reason (and hence science) is therefore chained or enslaved to a particular religious system, probably Roman Catholicism.

Oh my. We could talk THAT - I mean, about the connections between Science (writ large) and Roman Catholicism for quite a while, considering that is a good deal of what Duhem and Jaki (and Chesterton) wrote about. But that is an interesting sidetrack we'll reserve for some future conference. For today, I will just say NO THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEAN AT ALL! [See note at end]

I will use the argumentational device the medievals called distinguo = "I distinguish". I distinguish "faith" as here meaning "an assertion of the intellect about the truth of something without either (1) direct sensory experience or (2) proof by mathematical rules". (As opposed to "faith" standing as a sort of pronoun or variable or place-holder for "a particular system of worship or religious practices".)

It is obvious on the face of it that we cannot "experience" reason even as we do it - it's there, like time, and we accept it as binding matters together from our experience or from our memory - but we neither "experience" it as a sense-impression, nor do we "prove" it by theorems and axioms.

This issue is tied to the idea of "tradition" especially as it touches faith in the other sense, meaning a system of religious practices, or even to topics like politics. It touches - or rather, rests firmly upon a very strong foundation, which some will find even more objectionable - the idea of the Appeal To Authority - since again they will leap to the conclusion that I am talking about the Pope. Not just now! Very simply, we take Authority as a given just as much as we take "Proof" or even "Sense-Experience".

Why? Because we have to. We always have to.

For very good reasons, too. Without Tradition and Authority, we would be completely mute. Language itself is neither sensory nor proveable. We do not "sense" language, nor do we "prove" language. We take it Upon Authority. We were taught it by authorities, and its usefulness is borne out in countless ways as we proceed with our lives - it is not a debatable matter.

We could go on and on about this, but I have no time today. Indeed, this is a clue to the next step in our discussion. You might want to think about that, but I'll give you a hint.

Just consider this very interesting bit of Chesterton, and we'll see whether I can continue this discussion at some future time...

When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truths that flowers smell." No: you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father, it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine...
Exactly because when my mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did come in winter (as she said); therefore the whole world was to me a fairyland of wonderful fulfilments, and it was like living in some Hebraic age, when prophecy after prophecy came true. I went out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me, precisely because I had a clue to it: if I had held no clue it would not have been terrible, but tame. A mere unmeaning wilderness is not even impressive. But the garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found out in its turn.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:360-1]

And in the same way, we take ideas like "the scientific method" and "reason" upon Authority. This is excellent; we therefore have powerful tools, indeed tools of almost unimaginable capability to use in our work, and we are thereby enabled to advance in knowledge. And recall that knowledge in Latin is scientia. Our Science (writ large) is nothing more than knowledge about Reality, and since we cannot expect to live long enough to do Every Conceivable Experiment - nor even to invent our own language (like Tolkien) so as to truly express ourselves in our own way - it is quite fitting that we base our work upon Tradition (as in language) and Authority (as in texts and reference works).

Let me suggest a fun piece of homework to consider. If one was to deny all this, what could be suggested as a replacement? (Be careful; it's a trick question.)

* * *

Note at End: One does not "stop" doing mathematics when one does physics or chemistry, as if these things were kept in two different rooms. One might not be working directly on a theorem (call it "performing active mathematics") when one is in the lab with equipment - but one is still aware of the theorem, acting in some way as a strong support in one's mind... it is in some sense the same for the Scientist who is a practicing Believer. One might not be praying (call it "performing active religion") in the lab with equipment, but... well, think about this. The idea is that we may have a reminder of why we work with us, and this serves to strengthen us as we work. One cannot stop being human in order to be a scientist. (You WILL get hungry, and tired.) There's more to this topic, and perhaps we shall consider it another time.

The Plans of His Heart...

2011-07-01T13:30:00.005-04:00

I wish I had the time to write the posting - well, the book - that deserves to be written about today's feast, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It would give many reference to Father Jaki, but would also contain material from books which it appears he (like so many priests and bishops) never examined - books on developmental anatomy. These texts ought to be sources for truly deep and powerful meditations upon the mystery of the God-Man, Jesus - and, naturally, upon the mystery of Man the species, to which we belong.

Jesus was still an embryo of perhaps a month old - probably Mary had been with Elizabeth for three weeks by now - when His Heart began to beat. This needs to be considered at length... Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into it at any length today, so if you have a library at hand, please go hunt for a book on developmental anatomy (the one I have is by Arey) and check it out.

But perhaps you are wondering about that title. Well, that's from the Psalms, rather from the Divine Office, also called the Liturgy of the Hours. That version (whatever translation it may be) gives it as Psalm 33:

He frustrates the designs of the nations,
He defeats the plans of the peoples.
His own designs shall stand for ever,
The plans of His heart from age to age.
[from Ps 33 Morning Prayer, Tuesday of Week I]

Why is that relevant to us, to scientists? Because those plans include matters of science, not only theology or philosophy. This is not a mere truism about the formation of the cardiac structures and hemopoiesis (that is the Making of Blood). It was told us by St. Paul:

That their hearts may be comforted, being instructed in charity and unto all riches of fulness of understanding, unto the knowledge of the mystery of God the Father and of Christ Jesus: In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. [Col 2:2-3]

In Jaki's wonderful little volume on the LItany of the Sacred heart, you will find a good starting point - no, it won't have lots of footnotes to medieval or modern scientific works, but it has something even more important. It reveals some very interesting matters about the devotion to the Sacred Heart, matters which deserve a fuller treatment by our Society, since they concern thinking men of faith and reason, for anyone who is interested in the foundations of Science Writ Large - and also who may be concerned with the state of our sad and fallen world. This devotion to the Incarnate Love of God offers much hope, which we need very badly, and gives us many seeds for growing new gardens, no, new orchards of fruitful produce, not only in the direction of spirituality, but also in more confident science and more robust and effective engineering...

Hardly more than a hundred years old as approved for public use, the Litany of the Sacred Heart has, of course, a much older history. In the Introduction that history is traced out as it developed from a Litany of seventeen invocations to one with twenty-seven, and finally to our Litany with thirty-three invocations. While this development is not without importance of its own, attention is best focused on the spiritual factors and efforts that lie behind it. Especially noteworthy should seem the connection of the approval of the Litany for public use with events that prompted Pope Leo XIII to decide on the consecration of the entire world to the Sacred Heart, which took place on June 10,1899. This act Leo XIII called "the greatest act of his pontificate."
[SLJ The Litany of the Sacred Heart introduction]

Indeed. the greatest of more than 25 years of serious, difficult work! (Another day we shall examine the parallels between Leo XIII and John Paul II - they are striking.)

God will not be frustrated. He is worth our trust, or we could not reason about anything, be it ontology or automata, stars or quarks or turtles or halogens...

Let us remember, and add this line to our Great Epigrams:

the Plans of His Heart shall stand forever...

My Atrocious Neglect

2011-06-29T16:36:00.004-04:00

I apologise - I have neglected to post on the 150th anniversary of the birth of Pierre Duhem. All I can do is post something on this great solemnity, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, which was one of his very own feast days.

Hence, in partial reparation, I will quote one of Jaki's less-well-known encomiums of our great Master. (Remember, "encomium" means a formal or literary sort of compliment; it's one of SLJ's favourite words.) The excerpt is significant, and makes me long to meet an enthusiastic scholar who is willing to translate the Duhem works into English. (I would also like to meet someone who will finance the re-publication, both a French and an English edition... someday perhaps, God willing.)

Modern culture seems to be in the throes of an unbridled quantification, in which individuals are on the road to becoming mere numbers, if not mere holes in punch cards.[note 1] As in any crisis, the extremist remedies are here very much in evidence. Side by side with those who decry science as a perversion of "naturalness" are those who want everybody and everything to be ruled by science. To strike a middle course, as sanity demands, between the extremes of romantic primitiveness (if not illusory anarchism) and of dehumanizing scientism, one must be fully aware of the limitations of scientific method.[note 2] This is not an easy task. To cope with it there are several avenues, of which one, that of historical studies, should have special appeal. History is a great equalizer. Sooner or later it cuts all things and all men down to their true size. Science looms up as a savior only for those whose familiarity with it is restricted to what Duhem so aptly called "the gossip of the moment." Those who are brave enough to look past the popular but ephemeral truths of the day will find in history a most instructive teacher. The history of physical science can indeed forcefully show its student that myths are present in science no less than in other areas that owe so much to science for the reduction of their myths.

Recognition of this may be a humbling experience in a scientific age such as ours; yet it is indispensable if science is to become man's servant rather than his tyrant. Those who pondered much on the proper range of scientific theory and enriched their analysis of it with a wealth of historical illustration have rendered a most valuable service to the cause of culture. Indeed, if the liberating message about the limitations of scientific method is gaining a firm foothold today, a large share of the credit should go to Duhem. His philosophical analysis of the aim and structure of physical theory and (especially) his pioneering studies in the history of science display an increasing timeliness, or rather an enduring humanistic freshness. No wonder. Duhem for all his devotion to scholarly and scientific investigations was visibly animated by a dedication to his fellow men, whom he wanted to assist in their groping toward a more robust, more balanced, and more satisfying formulation of truth.
[SLJ Introduction to Duhem's To Save the Phenomena7 translated by Edmund Doland and Chaninah Maschler, xxv-xxvi]

Note 1: this was written for the 1969 edition, when computers were still primarily worked by "punch-cards." Today's reader can substitute something like:

"...a collection of redundant entries misfiled in an overly designed relational database..."

"...a collection of mostly unrelated and probably inaccurate files distributed among the INTERNET 'cloud'..."

Note 2: One of the Major Quotes, given to us by no less than Maxwell, found in several of SLJ's books, and which we ought to memorize:

The most difficult test for a scientific mind is to recognize the limitations of the scientific method.
[from JCM's review, in Nature (1879), of Paradoxical Philosophy, reprinted in his Scientific Papers, vol. 1, p. 759]

Science and the Ascension

2011-06-02T19:42:00.000-04:00

I had a debate as to whether to post this on my own blogg or here. It is cases like this when we can thank God for George Boole, and so we can say "YES" to such "or" types of questions. Hee hee. (That's the famous trick we computer scientist use when asked if we want ice cream or cake. We reply, "Yes".)

Anyway, this is just a short excerpt but it is intense as usual. So read it and think about it, and get busy.

Now the whole of the rationalistic doubt about the Palestinian legends, from its rise in the early eighteenth century out of the last movements of the Renascence, was founded on the fixity of facts. Miracles were monstrosities because they were against natural law, which was necessarily immutable law. The prodigies of the Old Testament or the mighty works of the New were extravagances because they were exceptions; and they were exceptions because there was a rule, and that an immutable rule. In short, there was no rose-tree growing out of the carpet of a trim and tidy bedroom; because rose-trees do not grow out of carpets in trim and tidy bedrooms. So far it seemed reasonable enough. But it left out one possibility; that a man can dream about a room as well as a rose; and that a man can doubt about a rule as well as an exception.

As soon as the men of science began to doubt the rules of the game, the game was up. They could no longer rule out all the old marvels as impossible, in face of the new marvels which they had to admit as possible. They were themselves dealing now with a number of unknown quantities; what is the power of mind over matter; when is matter an illusion of mind; what is identity, what is individuality, is there a limit to logic in the last extremes of mathematics? They knew by a hundred hints that their non-miraculous world was no longer water-tight; that floods were coming in from somewhere in which they were already out of their depth, and down among very fantastical deep-sea fishes. They could hardly feel certain even about the fish that swallowed Jonah, when they had no test except the very true one that there are more fish in the sea than ever came out of it. Logically they would find it quite as hard to draw the line at the miraculous draught of fishes. I do not mean that they, or even I, need here depend on those particular stories; I mean that the difficulty now is to draw a line, and a new line, after the obliteration of an old and much more obvious line. Any one can draw it for himself, as a matter of mere taste in probability; but we have not made a philosophy until we can draw it for others. And the modern men of science cannot draw it for others. Men could easily mark the contrast between the force of gravity and the fable of the Ascension. They cannot all be made to see any such contrast between the levitation that is now discussed as a possibility and the ascension which is still derided as a miracle. I do not even say that there is not a great difference between them; I say that science is now plunged too deep in new doubts and possibilities to have authority to define the difference. I say the more it knows of what seems to have happened, or what is said to have happened, in many modern drawing-rooms, the less it knows what did or did not happen on that lofty and legendary hill, where a spire rises over Jerusalem and can be seen beyond Jordan.
[GKC The New Jerusalem CW20:315-6]

AND please remember: tomorrow begins the Great Novena, the one made at the express direction of Jesus Himself... please join us in prayer, as there are many problems and difficulties which so desperately need the aid which only the Holy Spirit can give!

About Benson's The Dawn of All

2011-05-29T10:11:00.002-04:00

Today the Duhem Society celebrates the 137th birthday of one of our Masters, the paradoxical Gilbert Keith Chesterton. He was not a scientist, not a philosopher, not a historian. he called himself a journalist, and in some ways he was more of an artist than anything else - though his most fertile medium was words, not paint or marble.

You know I have a certain bias about GKC - though it is not an unreasonable one. Indeed, it seems fitting that GKC be one of our Masters, not only because of Father Jaki's work which demonstrates GKC's power in grasping the truths of Science-Writ-Large - but also because of his humility and reverence for Reality - that is, the truthful way of seeing God, and His Creation. This is the fundamental power required for every scientist, every philosopher, every historian - everyone who applies pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.

Now, one of the frustrations I find when studying Jaki - I am here speaking as a Chestertonian - is that he wrote no fiction. Nor did Duhem, as far as I am able to discern from SLJ's texts about him. This is sad - and as you may know, I am attempting to remedy that lack by writing my own Saga. But I have recently finished an amazing book which I heartily wish Father Jaki had commented on. The book is called The Dawn of All by Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, an English writer of roughly the same era as Chesterton. Benson wrote several interesting volumes of Catholic fiction - that is stories where the persons really exhibit their faith, often in quite challenging situations - see (for example) Come Rack! Come Rope!. This volume, The Dawn of All, came out 100 years ago, and is his second "end of the world" story - the first is The Lord of the World. I prefer not to speak about these in detail, except to highly recommend them, in particular because they contain certain interesting sorts of predictions regarding science and technology and so belong to the very rare category of "Catholic Science Fiction" - though that is not all they predict.

I cannot say they feel like Duhem; clearly they do not feel like Jaki - but they certainly feel Chestertonian, and Newmanian to an extreme. I must not speak too much here about the Newman dimension, lest I give too much away about this particular story, but it is impressive. Since Benson was an Anglican convert, perhaps this is quite understandable, and I am merely showing my ignorance. I do not mind confessing how little I know. Sometimes I feel I know very little, but then I find myself enjoying my reading more - and even my re-reading. Why shouldn't I enjoy Jaki or Duhem or Newman as I enjoy the mystery stories of Chesterton or Sayers? All these reveal truth, as does the Bible, which contains the ultimate mystery story of all time in which the Detective solves His own murder. (See Luke 24:13 et seq especially 25-27, where Christ sounds like Holmes addressing Watson.)

As far as I am able to tell with AMBER, Jaki never mentioned Benson, and Chesterton only twice. (See GKC's The Thing CW3:327 and The Resurrection of Rome CW21:378) If our Society were set up in the usual manner of a scholarly system, we would perhaps commission a monograph - or perhaps provide a grant to subsidize a graduate student - to study these two Benson volumes and give some insights into their place in our intellectual library. I cannot do this, not having the resources; nor do I have the time to do the work. All I can do is offer the idea.

But I can do something more. I can recommend them, and especially this one, as it seems to be in such concord with our purposes. I shall give you a short excerpt, in the hope that you will want to find a copy and read it for yourself.

[Our hero] had seen here for himself a relation between Science and Faith - a co-operation between them, with the exigencies of each duly weighed and observed by them both - which set Nature and Supernature before him in a completely new light. ... the two seemed to have met at last, each working from different quarters, on a platform on which they could work side by side. The facts were no longer denied by either party. Science allowed for the mysteries of Faith; Faith recognized the achievements of Science. Each granted that the other possessed a perfectly legitimate sphere of action in which the methods proper to that sphere were imperative and final. The scientist accepted the fact that Religion had a right to speak in matters that lay beyond scientific data; the theologian no longer denounced as fraudulent or disingenuous the claims of the scientist to exercise powers that were at last found to be natural. Neither needed to establish his own position by attacking that of his partner, and the two accordingly, without prejudice or passion, worked together to define yet further that ever-narrowing range of ground between the two worlds which up to the present remained unmapped. Suggestion, for example, acting upon the mutual relations of body and mind, was recognized by the theologian as a force sufficient to produce phenomena which in earlier days he had claimed as evidently supernatural. And, on the other side, the scientist no longer made wild acts of faith in nature, in attributing to her achievements which he could not for an instant parallel by any deliberate experiment. In a word, the scientist repeated, "I believe in God "; and the theologian, "I recognize Nature."
[Robert Hugh Benson, The Dawn of All Part I Chapter 8]

Postscript. Why do I seem so hesitant in writing details about a book? Is it not contrary to Science? Not really. It is not so much a matter of Science as it is a matter of pedagogy. There are certain demonstrations - indeed, even in physics and other "hard" sciences which good teacher will not describe in detail, preferring that the student make his own observation. The idea is FORMALLY an experiment - that is, for the student to EXPERIENCE the truth directly, not to hear it stated. It is so in certain aspects of "book-learning". Father Jaki often told people to "read my books". (He told me many times!) And clearly, if we want to study writing (as itself) we need to be able to discuss the book (in itself). But it is a larger matter - a matter of human nature - that there are certain things which are better taken directly, and one of the chief of these is mystery stories. Chesterton said it this way:

[The book] is at least great in this sense - that it contains an important intellectual principle. Nothing would induce me to tell the reader anything about the solution of the riddle. The man who tells the truth about a detective story is simply a wicked man, as wicked as the man who deliberately breaks a child's soap-bubble - and he is
more wicked than Nero. To give away a secret when it should be kept is the worst of human crimes; and Dante was never more right than when he made the lowest circle in Hell the Circle of the Traitors. It is to destroy one human pleasure so that it can never be recovered...
[GKC ILN Nov 7 1908 CW28:210]

I am not saying that we must therefore treat every book as if it were mystery fiction, and refuse to discuss it until all have read it. But there is something true - something very Christmas-like - in the idea that a gift ought to be kept wrapped until the time when it is to be unveiled:

There are three broad classes of the special things in which human wisdom does permit privacy. The first is the case I have mentioned - that of hide-and-seek, or the police novel, in which it permits privacy only in order to explode and smash privacy. The author makes first a fastidious secret of how the Bishop was murdered, only in order that he may at last declare, as from a high tower, to the whole democracy the great glad news that he was murdered by the governess. In that case, ignorance is only valued because being ignorant is the best and purest preparation for receiving the horrible revelations of high life. Somewhat in the same way being an agnostic is the best and purest preparation for receiving the happy revelations of St. John. ... its whole ultimate object is not to keep the secret, but to tell it.
[GKC ILN Aug 10 1907 CW27:524]

And if you have read it, and wish to discuss it, or (even better) have the wherewithal to write such a study or analysis - or even just to write up your own comments - please proceed.

And if you doubt the relevance to our Society, consider:

(1) Jaki considered Chesterton's fiction; also the fiction of Sigrid Undset and also of Dickens. Did you know that Dickens reviewed Darwin's famous book? I learned that from SLJ.
(2) Duhem liked Dickens and gave his own daughter a nickname from one of his novels. SLJ states this but (surprisingly enough) does not cite a reference, though he does indicate that Duhem "used to read [Dickens] aloud at home in evenings when Hélène was a child." [SLJ Reluctant Heroine 58]

Very curious, Dr. Thursday (one might say): do you mean that, if one wants to be a Scientist, one must be agnostic?

Not quite! I am not speaking of one's spirtual commitment; you must already have faith, for "Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all." [GKC Orthodoxy CW1:236]

No; I mean one must preserve a certain sort of agnosticism about natural truths - until they are revealed. For example, if you confess to a belief in phlogiston, you cannot discover the truth of oxygen, for you will ignore the evidence! The earth looks flat and unmoving, but then a television image looks solid and moving, and we know by its construction it is discrete points which do not move at all!

We must approach nature as a child approaches the wrapped gift, or as the voracious mystery-reader approaches the as-yet unread volume. For Nature is the greatest of Unread Volumes - because of Gödel (as SLJ indicates in several places) we know there will always be more to learn: there will always be another sequel, and yet another adventure - until the Author's work is completed.

And then will come that "happy Revelation of St. John"... and the good wine in the Inn at the End of the World, where we shall meet Duhem and Jaki and Chesterton and Newman - and Benson. It will indeed be the Dawn of All.

SLJ's Lectures in the Vatican Gardens is released

2011-04-25T13:53:00.003-04:00

As you will find at this link, Father Jaki's next book has been released from Real View Books. It is called Lectures in the Vatican Gardens.

For reference, the complete SLJ bibliography can be found here, thanks to Antonio Columbo.

Announcement from the Jaki Foundation

2011-04-25T13:47:00.002-04:00

The Jaki Foundation has released its statutes. As yet I do not have any data on the membership fee, etc.

Easter Reunion

2011-04-23T18:28:00.005-04:00

It has been a busy time for me these past months. Between work and study commitments I have been unable to contribute to our society blog and I am most grateful to Dr. Thursday for keeping us up to date on the wonderful developments regarding Fr. Jaki's books and society.

However, through God's grace, my Lenten season has been spent in the company of Pope Benedict's learned second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth series. A small paragraph towards the end his book reminded me of all the scrupulous scholarship Fr. Jaki laboured over, most especially his landmark work 'Science and Creation'. As we reflected on Genesis at our Easter Vigil Ceremonies this evening, I was reminded once more of the importance of those three words "In the beginning...", God's plan for his creation and the triumph of the Cross in reuniting God and man. Following from this theme of reunion, I propose for the consideration of our Society, two extracts from the works of Pope Benedict and Fr. Jaki, two streams of thought, considering two tributaries of the theme of creation, but yet exploring in unison.

A Happy Easter to all!
~JT.

Let us say plainly: the unredeemed state of the world consists precisely in the failure to understand the meaning of creation, in the failure to recognise truth; as a result, the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world.

At this point, modern man is tempted to say: Creation has become intelligible to us through science. Indeed, Francis S. Collins, for example, who led the Human Genome Project, says with joyful astonishment: "The language of God was revealed" (The Language of God, p. 122). Indeed, in the magnificent mathematics of creation, which today we can read in the human genetic code, we recognise the language of God. But unfortunately not the whole language. The functional truth about man has been discovered. But the truth about man himself - who he is, where he comes from, what he should do, what is right, what is wrong - this unfortunately cannot be read in the same way. Hand in hand with growing knowledge of functional truth there seems to be an increasing blindness towards "truth" itself - toward the question of our real identity and purpose....

(Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth Vol II, p. 193)

...The atmosphere is that of glib agnosticism in which only condescending smiles would greet anyone courageous enough to recall, in the name of reason, a most hallowed tenet of Western tradition which John Henry Newman formulated with devastating simplicity: "There is but one thought greater than that of the universe, and that is the thought of its Maker."

The secularisation of Western tradition seems to have run its full logic when the discrediting of belief in the Creator leads to the sublimation of the universe itself into mere nothingness. A part of that tragic intellectual process is the naturalness with which teachers and students of cosmology defend Nothing as actually Something. In witnessing such a facile game with the intellect one is tempted to despair of the purpose of any rational discourse, including the discourse about evolution, cosmic and other. If, however, evolution becomes a necessity a purposeless proposition, the rise of a purposeful being, man, will remain an insoluble puzzle. And so will remain, in that case, the purpose of man's science, a most palpable evidence of his purposeful activity. Today, more than ever in its history, science includes the making of cosmological models that truly encompass the totality of material beings, the universe, in witness of the age-old truth that all science is cosmology. Their cyclic types, unless utterly arbitrary, illustrate that the linear model is indispensable in however subtle a way. And so is faith in Creation, which enables man to commit himself to cosmic linearity, and, as this book tried to show, made possible the only viable birth of science".

(Jaki, S.L. Science and Creation, p. 366)

Important News on SLJ Books!

2011-04-12T10:46:00.002-04:00

For some time now, I have been aware, by various e-mails and comments, that some members and interested scholars are concerned that Jaki's Science and Creation is out of print and copies are all but unavailable, with almost absurd prices in the used-book market.

Well...

Last Thursday, the second anniversary of SLJ's death, I received information from Real View Books that once they have completed work on the "new" books of Father Jaki (that is, those which were awaiting publication when he died), they will resume work on the reprinting work. Science and Creation is high on that list.

This is great news - we must therefore be patient, and show our support for the work of Duhem and Jaki by supporting Real View Books.

Postscript: In the near future, I hope to report on SLJ's new book "Lectures in the Vatican Gardens" which is about to be available.

Jaki on the Annunciation and the Defence of Life

2011-03-25T09:00:00.001-04:00

Today, upon Mary's assent, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity was incarnate as a single-cell male human being - Jesus Christ, True God and True Man - and the angels adored Him dwelling among us in that virginal tabernacle.

The Incarnation is, of course, the will of the Most High conveyed by the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin and her consent to that will. The very moment she pronounced the words, "Let it be done to me according to thy word," the Incarnation was a fact. At that point she could only believe it, she had no other evidence and was not to have any physical evidence for the next twenty-eight days. Even then it was still a matter of faith on her part as to what was really taking place in her physically. Embryology, genetics, and even gynecology were still almost two thousand years away.

But in her case too, and above all in her case, faith had to have its unexpected rewards. She rushed to Elizabeth, her aged aunt, unbelievably in her sixth month. Rush she did, the Greek text of Luke says so, and did so immediately, again according to the Greek text, the only record to go by. It was not out of curiosity that she did so. She did not rush because on verifying that some unbelievable thing happened to Elizabeth, she herself could believe the even more unbelievable about herself. A woman with Mary's faith was at safe remove of such scheming. She rushed because she wanted to help. And help she did by staying with Elizabeth for three months, the remainder of her pregnancy.

Mary certainly must have been surprised that before she could say a word about herself to Elizabeth, Elizabeth got the word. She got it from inside, from her own womb, as the baby leapt there out of joy and reverence for the arrival of his Lord. A six-month-old fetus bowed in worship to the Lord of all, not yet two-weeks-old, in Mary's womb. What greater witness should one expect from on High in defense of life? Strange as it may seem, this supreme witness on behalf of life has remained curiously unexploited. No encouragement has been given by leading exegetes. Of course, exegetes like anyone else are limited in their perception. They draw out of a text, this is what exegesis is, not necessarily everything that is there. It often takes a shock to have one's eyes opened and such a shock has been available ever since abortion entered a runaway course.

Thus I find little excuse for recent leading exegetes of Luke's Gospel who invariably fail to point out the bearing which Mary's visit to Elizabeth has on the Christian view of unborn babies.

[SLJ "Life's Defence: Natural and Supernatural" in The Gist of Catholicism and Other Essays 155-6]

Perhaps one day, once that concrete teaching of the fetus-Jesus has shaped popular consciousness, there may develop a greater consciousness of the Feast of the Visitation. By advancing that Feast from July 2 to May 31, the Church wanted to achieve two objectives. One, a more obvious, was the upgrading of the Feast by turning it into the crowning of the month devoted to Mary. The other objective, less obvious, was the bringing closer in the Liturgical Year the Visitation to the Annunciation. If it were not for the usual closeness of March 25 to the Holy Week, it might not be impracticable to make the Visitation the octave of Annunciation. This would provide another stunning seal of the Church's respect for any and all foetus as a truly human being. But even as it stands, the Feast of the Visitation powerfully translates the principle of legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi and should thereby serve as a strong guidance in an agonizing confrontation. Of course, what happened at the Annunciation is a far greater fact than the visit made in virtue of the fact. But the actual human recognition of that fact came only with the visitation of Christ to John the Baptist, the visit of the Creator become-a-mere-fetus to the greatest of mere human fetuses ever alive in a woman's womb.
[SLJ "Christ, Catholics, and Abortion" in Catholic Essays 73]

Indeed! Perhaps one day the bishops will grasp that they have a tool to deal with this matter in a most effective manner. It is simply to make today's feast day a holy day of Obligation in the same fashion as Christmas. They should also insist that all homilies for this feast provide a thorough exposition of the Incarnation of the Word as Man, including the scientific perspective that true humanity resides in the living single cell as well as all subsequent stages of development.

Jaki and Newman on the Feast of St. Joseph

2011-03-19T09:48:00.002-04:00

It shows Newman's profound Catholic sense and of the very Catholic character of his ideas on doctrinal development, that he was never tempted to show any uneasiness about that phenomenon. On the contrary, he offered in that Letter of his to Pusey a profoundly supernatural perspective in which one was to see the late rise of devotion toward Saint Joseph. To explain this to Pusey, who set great store by the known practices of the Ancient Church though not so much on the deeper considerations underlying them, Newman began with the principle that the intercessory power of a given individual with the ruler of an empire was proportional to his closeness, through friendship or association, to that ruler. Yet, neither the apostles nor the martyrs were the closest persons to Christ, the Incarnate God, the true Ruler of all. These persons were Mary and Joseph, but at first, so Newman argued, those two were "immersed and lost in the effulgence of His [Christ's] glory, and because they did not manifest themselves, when in the body, in external works separate from him, it happened that for a long while they [Mary and Joseph] were less dwelt upon." ... Such was Newman's justification not only of the relative novelty of signal devotions to Mary, but also to Saint Joseph. "Those names, I say, which at first sight might have been expected to enter soon in the devotions of the faithful, with better reasons might have been looked for at a later date, and actually were late in their coming." For Newman the signal example of this was what he called the recent vigor of devotion to Saint Joseph: "Saint Joseph furnishes the most striking instance of this remark; here is the clearest of instances of the distinction between doctrine and devotion." The latter often runs ahead, often far ahead, if one is to amplify on Newman's train of thought, of doctrinal specifications.
[SLJ The Litany of St. Joseph, introduction]

St. Joseph, patron of scientists, pray for us.
St. Joseph, patron of engineers, pray for us.
St. Joseph, patron of workers, pray for us.

St. Joseph, who taught the Incarnate Son to walk, pray for us.
St. Joseph, who taught the Incarnate Son to talk, pray for us.
St. Joseph, who taught the Incarnate Son to work, pray for us.

St. Joseph, who taught Jesus to be honest, pray for us.
St. Joseph, who taught Jesus to be generous, pray for us.
St. Joseph, who taught Jesus to be patient, pray for us.

St. Joseph, who defended Mary his most chaste spouse, pray for us.
St. Joseph, who defended his foster son the Incarnate Word of God, pray for us.
St. Joseph, who defended the Holy Family, defend our families.

Imaculate Mary, pray for us; St. Joseph, pray for us; and do so together.

[Note: That last is not mine; Fr. Jaki mentions this in his book on Mary's litany, which I cannot get at just now to give the precise citation for.]

Thinking about why our Society exists

2011-03-16T10:04:00.004-04:00

Yes, I've been busy... I wish I could give you a full report, but it's boring, and not useful for us.

On the other hand, I continue to struggle with the idea of an introduction, or at least a suggestion of which SLJ book to start with. Sooner or later I will have to try to get something together, even if it is just a series of blogg-postings - but that will depend on time and other complexities. As time may permit, I will try to sift and collect and organize; should you have suggestions regarding this, do let me know.

For today, please consider this brief excerpt:

Socrates argued that the motion of matter was expressive of purpose, namely, that all bits of matter tried to achieve what was best for them. Therefore, so Socrates thought, if one looked in such a way on matter, one could not object to assuming that man also sought what was best for him in that fullest sense which is an eternal reward (or punishment) for man's actions.

This train of thought of Socrates was first developed into a systematic explanation of the physical world in Plato's Timaeus, where the world is described in terms of an organism in which every part acts for a purpose. An even more systematic treatment of the same organismic (animistic) notion of the universe was given in Aristotle's Meteorologica, which deals with the sublunary world, and in his De coelo or his account of the nature and motion of the heavenly bodies. In both works the notion of an organism, of a living body, is the framework of explanation. In De coelo Aristotle explicitly states about the cosmos that it is a living being or animal that has the perfect shape, the shape of a sphere. Quite crudely organismic or animistic are, however, the analogies which Aristotle uses in the Meteorologica. Thus he presents earthquakes as the results of a digestive process that goes on in the bowels of the earth.

This organismic perception of the physical world invited man to view nature, as he does his own nature, introspectively and volitionally. This could but discourage the genuinely scientific, that is, quantitative approach to matter and motion among the Greeks. It did the same, as was noted above, in all ancient cultures in all of which science suffered a stillbirth. In other words, in spite of some promising insights and technological achievements, science failed to emerge as a self-sustaining enterprise. Only one culture, the premodern Christian West avoided that failure through a process that began with Buridan and Oresme, continued with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and culminated in Newton.

[SLJ "Giordano Bruno's Place in Science" in Numbers Decide and Other Essays 214-5]

Here, we need to grasp not so much the animistic error of the ancient Greeks, but the error of proposing an "impassable divide" between Science and Philosophy. This sort of error is all too common in current institutes of higher learning, nearly all of which have forgotten (or vetoed) Newman's warning about the matter:

...if you drop any science out of the circle of knowledge, you cannot keep its place vacant for it; that science is forgotten; the other sciences close up, or, in other words, they exceed their proper bounds, and intrude where they have no right.
[JHN "Discourse IV. Bearing of Other Knowledge on Theology" in The Idea of a University]

Newman uses the word "science" to stand for any ordered field or discipline of study. Note, of course, that by symmetry what applies to Theology applies to Science and each of its divisions as well - but we'll examine that interesting topic some other day. (And yes there is lots more to say.)

For Science and Philosophy what matters is the Real World. (Otherwise, we have only fantasy, and one might enjoy that, but cannot do reasoning about it: that way leads solipsism and then Nothing.) We live in the Real World, the world of water, rocks and iron, of sun and moon, of trees and wheat and grapes, of lambs and scorpions, fish and turtledoves; the world in which "Jesus Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate" - and this Truth is the culmination of both Science and Philosophy, for as St. Paul tells us, in Him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. [see Col 2:3] Some people use the world "anthropocentric" about the universe; in reality it ought to be Christocentric, which is not a new idea: we attest it every Sunday the Nicean creed when we say Per quem omnia facta sunt = "Through Him all things were made."

Only when Christianity gave us that key - the right relation of Man to the Universe, revealed in Christ - could we cease making those absurd mistakes of the ancients: uranocentrically treating the "heavens" (the "superlunary regions" as they used to be called) as divine and hence beyond our study, or the egocentric mistakes of the moderns, applying philosophy or science to matters out of their rightful arenas. And this key principle was not revealed by Newton or by Galileo, who derived his work from Stevin and Cardanus, who built on Jordanus Nemorarius (fl. 1320) and who is linked to Buridan and Oresme, by whom that key WAS revealed. (All this is explained at length in several places in SLJ's writing, e.g. Science and Creation.)

And this revelation was itself revealed to us by Duhem's work of a century ago, as Jaki's work now reveals it by revealing Duhem's.

Remember: "...for a Catholic [such as Duhem] the Middle Ages could not be the Dark Ages. He [Duhem] knew that there was more genuine light in a single page of Thomas Aquinas than in entire volumes written by the champions of the Enlightenment." [SLJ "Christ and the History of Science" in A Late Awakening and Other Essays]

Let us then do as Chesterton stated, and "revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting something done." [GKC Heretics CW1:46]

For "all depends on what is the philosophy of Light." [ibid]

==============

Postscript. As I re-read this before posting, I realized that some of it may be considered "fighting words". That may be the case - but I have no "opponent" to whom I am addressing them, neither real nor imaginary. If I failed to state things in a positive sense, that is because I am limited, and perhaps all too rushed in trying to get SOMETHING written during a brief pause in other business. But let me say this: if they are fighting words, perhaps we can speak about them at a Duhem Society Conference - which, please God, we shall have one day. These bloggs and comment-boxes can only do so much, alas. But maybe after all I have written poorly - and so I suggest you read more Jaki, rather than my own fumblings.

Roads and Ways to a Starting Point

2011-02-11T09:38:00.003-05:00

Recently I was asked about SLJ's The Road of Science and the Ways to God, his published edition of his Gifford Lectures. This is one of his earlier works, a hefty book, though at 331 pages not quite so large as his The Relevance of Physics with 532 pages. He says in his introduction that these lectures are supposed to be aimed at audiences in which scholars are "at most a perceptible minority". Be that as it may, Road is an important work in the Jaki collection, though - when I was asked about it - I said I am not sure that it ought to be "first" on one's reading list. Just consider this very important glimpse from his introduction:

Science found its only viable birth within a cultural matrix permeated by a firm conviction about the mind's ability to find in the realm of things and persons a pointer to their Creator. All great creative advances of science have been made in terms of an epistemology germane to that conviction, and whenever that epistemology was resisted with vigorous consistency, the pursuit of science invariably appears to have been deprived of its solid foundation.
[SLJ The Road of Science and the Ways to God, vii]

Really, that's very important, though there is more to Jaki's work than this encomium of Duhem's work. (As you ought to know, "encomium" is one of SLJ's pet words, it means praise. That quote is a succinct summary of Duhem's master-work, but also permeates and is permeated with Jaki's own work.)

I may have said that "Road is not a good start" in private, but I wish to retract in public, or at least qualify my remark. As I think about Jaki's writing, there is one great difficulty. It is hard to suggest a "starting book" to begin the introduction to his work - very hard indeed. Since I like Chesterton, I usually suggest SLJ's Chesterton a Seer of Science since it is comparatively small (116 pages); it forms a complete unity, and it provides a good starting point for these two very important writers. It also covers four major points of synthesis: a correct view of science, a opposition of scientism, a criticism of evolutionism (NOTE the ending) and a triumphant championing of the universe - these points not only describe Chesterton, but also Jaki.

Yet others are not going to want to only read about Chesterton; they want to know more - they want to know about Wöhler and his synthesis of urea, or about the Olbers paradox, or about why the moon matters, or about how Galileo got the theology right and the Church got the science right, or how St. Augustine answered all the Galileo conundrums about a millennium in advance... oh my there are so many things to mention! (I could cause all sorts of havoc by mentioning his studies of Kant or of Bruno.) But mostly people want to know more about Pierre Duhem and his work - and especially they want to know more about Jaki's explorations of the history of science. Which is, after all, the reason we have this Duhem Society: to continue the work of our masters in the study of the Way of Science - "Science writ large", as SLJ loved to put it.

One is also confronted with the eight collections of SLJ essays - these are good reading, and give a healthy seasoning of humour and insight along with their information - but they are collections and do not form a comprehensive scheme.

So I pondered this matter last night, and so I think this morning - and I wondered... Finally I decided to ask you, oh patient and kind reader, who may be less beset by conundrums at the present moment than I am:

What do you think? What book ought one start with, especially if one is NOT a historian of science, or even a scientist? Or is it time for the Duhem Society to write an introductory text? And please say why you think that, if you can.

Please comment here, or, if you prefer, send me an e-mail about this. (Click on "Dr. Thursday" under the "Contributors" on the right panel for contact info.)

Why We Bother...

2011-02-07T11:35:00.002-05:00

I have been - well, I cannot use the word "swamped" since it is a matter of snow. I wonder how the Greeks would have said it? AH, well, anyway, all I can offer you today is two small but very deep chunks for your meditation:

Having treated the scientific ideas of earlier centuries as myths, the men of the Enlightenment had to fall victim to the inner logic of such a stance, and as a result, they treated their own ideas on science as dogmas. Thus, while they painted in black and white the relative merits of the pre-Galilean and post-Galilean phases of science, they failed to notice the often gross imperfections of the early phase of classical physics. Complaisance, however, is not the key for unlocking the meaning of history. Nor is the task of achieving a scientifically enlightened and truly human culture so simple a proposition as the Age of Enlightenment would have had us believe. In our own times the expectation of an age of greater awareness, the hope for a unification of the two cultures will remain just a dream as long as those speaking of physics do not acknowledge at least in principle what R. Dugas wrote as a final remark in his History of Mechanics: Nothing is futile in scientific matters, not even the contemplation of the past. For this embodies the lesson of our vagaries, our scruples, our illusions, and our errors. Science did not progress by that harmonious path, the illusion of which is easily created after the event. The direct knowledge of the old works, however they may be outstripped today, can only enrich the perspective of the future which opens before us.

That a historian of physics should reach such a conclusion is natural, but there is no lack, either, of prominent physicists who have voiced similar appraisals of historical studies in physics. The reconstitution of the knowledge and theoretical concepts of the past was in De Broglie's view the means that makes us "privy to the very basis of science and enables us to see it in perspective."

[SLJ The Relevance of Physics 512]

The second, perhaps one of the most pungent lines I have have read in the last month, is not quoted in SLJ to my knowledge. I would not even have recalled reading it before, but I happened to find one of my old business cards with the bibliographic reference jotted on the back. I had NO IDEA what it referred to, and went to look it up, and found this. I offer it for your careful consideration, and delight:

All science is derived from self-evident and therefore "seen" principles; wherefore all objects of science must needs be, in a fashion, seen. ... it may happen that what is an object of vision or scientific knowledge for one man, even in the state of a wayfarer, is, for another man, an object of faith, because he does not know it by demonstration.
[St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica II-II Q1 A5]

I know, Aquinas meant "Science Writ Larger" (not "large" as SLJ always said) since it means any true (formal) work of human knowledge.... and yet it IS true (a fortiori) about Science, in the sense of Physics and so forth. It is the mystic sense of true and penetrating vision that Chesterton refers to here:

the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.
[GKC Tremendous Trifles 6]

Oh yes! If you want a starting book on Jaki, start with his Chesterton a Seer of Science And for some profound insights of Chesterton on science, see his book on Aquinas.

Solvitur ambulando: Scientist, Catholic – and Hiker?

2011-01-19T11:10:00.001-05:00

In speaking about Pierre Duhem as a man of science and man of faith, it is impossible not to think first of what may be his most memorable statement:

Of course, I believe with all my soul in the truths that God has revealed to us and that He has taught us through His Church, I have never concealed my faith, and that He in whom I hold it will keep me from ever being ashamed of it, I hope from the bottom of my heart.

Such were the words Duhem put almost at the very start of his long and famous essay, "Physics of a Believer." At its end Duhem registered the place, Peyreleau, where he wrote it, and the date, 9 September 1905, when he completed it. A year later, almost to the day, he was back in that quaint village and made a magnificent drawing of it as it is overshadowed by the almost vertical mountainside at the confluence of the Tarn and of the Jonte.

The famous gorges of those two rivers he chose repeatedly for his September hikes, his only form of recreation. Hiking kept him only from his writing desk, not from his constant reflections - scientific and philosophical. Duhem, who composed his writings in his head, found in walking a most effective help for his mind to find answers to many a problem.
[SLJ Scientist and Catholic: Pierre Duhem 11]

Why Duhem?

2011-01-11T12:13:00.002-05:00

Duhem was unique among modern scientists with his penetrating insights into the method of the exact sciences, and in particular of physics, both on the conceptual level and along the vast and broad front of its use in history. In fact he did, what historians and historians of science were supposed to have done long ago: He discovered the true origins of Newtonian physics. That those origins are steeped in a culture, the Middle Ages, which for many is still the classic embodiment of obscurantism, could have but served as lèse majesté. But as if insult were to be added to injury, Duhem also spelled out the fact, with a vast and most original historical research that those origins are intimately connected with Catholic dogmas, such as the creation out of nothing and creation in time.
[SLJ Scientist and Catholic: Pierre Duhem 9]

(Yes, I hope to continue with our study of SLJ's The Relevance of Physics, but not today. Soon, I hope. Dr. T.)

Not appropriate to hold a conference on Duhem?

2011-01-04T09:44:00.005-05:00

As you read that title, you may have wondered what is going on. Do you detect a certain sort of doubt, or perhaps a tone of sarcasm here?

I hope you did. It is hard to imagine what will happen in the next five years, though of course much depends on what you and I are able to accomplish in that time. I certainly hope there will be a conference - perhaps two, one on each side of the Atlantic. Certainly there needs to be some serious study of Duhem - I still wish to see an English translation of Le Système du monde and his study of Leonardo - indeed, a complete edition of his collected works, in both French and English - and there are several other lesser projects too. But without fail there must be some sort of meeting which must include a proper celebration.

However. And I say this with some childish delight, because as I am presently examining Jaki's study of Duhem, I learned something curious about Duhem which makes me wonder just how appropriate it would be to hold such a conference at all! Here, let me show you:

The day of Duhem's anniversary [of his death] was duly marked by the loyalty of his friends. One of them was the Abbé Lethellieux, director of the Revue des Jeunes, a bimonthly aimed at university students, who secured two contributions on Duhem. The first, to appear in the August 10 issue, was written by François Mentré who, as a specialist on Cournot's philosophy, was, as will be seen, very familiar with Duhem's works pertaining to the philosophy of science. Almost an entire shelf in his library, Mentré noted at the outset, was filled with Duhem's publications. Mentré had hoped to meet Duhem in person at the Congrès de philosophie et d'histoire des sciences in Geneva in 1904, but Duhem, who at the urging of Paul Tannery sent a paper, informed Mentré in a letter of his horror of attending such 'Babylons.' Whereas Duhem's dislike of congresses was fairly well known, it is only through Mentré that a precious glimpse of Duhem's reflections on the history of experimental method became available to the public. Mentré quoted from a letter, which Duhem wrote on October 24, 1913, in response to Mentré's congratulations on Duhem's findings about Buridan, Oresme, and others: 'Your letter,' Duhem wrote, 'showed me that you have been greatly preoccupied by a thought which has been haunting me for a long time. The progress of experimental method has been conditioned by the progress of industrial technique and, in particular, by the [progess of] the glass industry. This was, I believe, the topic of my last conversation with my venerable friend Jules Tannery... I would gladly know of an alert investigator who would do on this topic a research which neither you nor I can undertake. I bet he would arrive at interesting results.'
[SLJ Uneasy Genius: the Life and Work of Pierre Duhem 231, emphasis added]

Ah, doctor - so you think because "Duhem's dislike of congresses was fairly well known" we ought not have a conference?

No; I wanted to get your attention. Read that first line again:

The day of Duhem's anniversary was duly marked by the loyalty of his friends.

So I think it ought to be clear we should have the great Duhem Conference to include Wednesday September 14, 2016, with a solemn Mass and great anniversary talks and a banquet. We, his friends and students from all over the world, must mark the century with our loyalty.

God willing, let us plan for this.

Duhem and the New Year

2011-01-01T11:18:00.002-05:00

Welcome to 2011, dear friends and scholars and members of our Duhem Society - and all interested and thinking men!

In just five years we shall see the centennial of Duhem's death and the semi-centennial of the appearance of Jaki's great The Relevance of Physics. With God's help I will try to get further into our projects and perhaps we shall see some more formal actions taken as we advance.

In a tiny attempt to assist my own work, I am re-reading Jaki's book on Duhem, which seems even more rich and fertile in ideas than it did the last time I read it. For today, just a tiny sample, but one which is joyful and revealing, as well as suited to the day:

Récamier pointedly recalled that Pierre found very amusing the Ecole's New Year parties and added that "he certainly collaborated in them." In fact he wrote the text for one of those parties, including the poems to be sung by the chorus.
[SLJ Uneasy Genius: the Life and Work of Pierre Duhem 59]

Here is my own challenge for our members, be you a physicist or philosopher or simple student: write a suitable poem - yes, one that might be sung, if possible.

If, come 2016, God will permit us to have an international conference, good. We ought to have scholarly lectures and seminars and symposia and publish formal proceedings. But if we are true to Duhem and Jaki we ought to have poems and songs as well. We must always recall that we are men, members of the human species, who eat and sleep - and yes, who rejoice at festive times. If we forget this, we could never be scientists:

Science finds its facts in Nature, but Science is not Nature; because Science has coordinated ideas, interpretations and analyses; and can say of Nature what Nature cannot say for itself.
[GKC The Resurrection of Rome CW21:358]

And sometimes it may be better said as a good old rousing chorus in a sort of drinking song... Let us wear lab coats, let us drink our beer from 750-ml beakers, let us rhyme elements and equations - let Science and Engineering join Art and Music and Literature in proclaiming the glory of God!

Duhem or Chesterton?

2010-12-28T11:40:00.002-05:00

I have found what seems to be a startling parallel - or perhaps I might say a convergence of ideas - between Duhem and Chesterton. Even more remarkable, it is a sort of derivative from Darwinian evolution - though it is what we might call a sane form of Darwinian reasoning. It suggests a great mystery, and yet a positive one, since it urges fruitfulness: to me this strongly suggests the great "Analogy of the Body" from St. Paul (1Cor12). See what you think.
-- Dr. Thursday

Here is Duhem:

What is true of all living beings, is also true of scientific doctrines: It is through struggle that selection is made among them; it is the conflict which fragments and sweeps away the false ideas; it is the struggle which forces the right ideas to make more precise and more valid the proofs which they claim to themselves; it is the struggle which forces the fruitful ideas to deliver all their products.

Now this struggle of ideas is impossible if science is entirely in one single locality; when this absolute centralisation is in effect one finds before long in each branch of knowledge only one teacher, and the disciples of that teacher. The teacher, no longer exposed to being contradicted, and long since accustomed to seeing his best ideas received as products of a genius, hardly has any concern to protect himself from an exaggerated confidence in his own judgment, confidence which delivers him defenseless against the habit of making errors. The disciples, receiving their master's teachings as oracles instead of improving them with free discussions through a contact with opposite doctrines, yield to the nonchalant habit of repeating a lesson already learned which ends in no longer being comprehended.

Precisely because we feel how dangerous it would be to let French science reach that point, we desire to see our universities vigorously armed for engaging in a contest with one another. We wish that a doctrine proclaimed in Lyon may see an opposite doctrine rise in Toulouse or Nancy, that a doctrine proclaimed in Paris might develop in Lille or in Bordeaux. We wish that in France each man of science may find at every moment these two essential conditions for scientific work: the freedom which permits him to put forward all his ideas, and the opposition which obliges him to produce only mature ideas.
[PD quoted in SLJ, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem 133; see my note at the end.]

And here is Chesterton:

Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire; just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon. If any one wants a modern proof of all this, let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity, Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the Pagan empire would have said, "You shall all be Roman citizens, and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and reverent; the Frenchmen less experimental and swift." But the instinct of Christian Europe says, "Let the German remain slow and reverent, that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental. We will make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity called Germany shall correct the insanity called France."
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:304]

I might add that Jaki has a caveat about the implications regarding "evolution", and I could add my own. But I think we can examine the ideas here without jumping to any unwarranted conclusions; Chesterton (and Jaki) have plenty to say about Darwin, as they remember to distinguish proper science from improper philosophy - but we shall defer that topic for the time being.

A note about the Duhem quote: There appears to be a typographical error in SLJ's text. In checking the footnote reference, there is a diswcrepancy of pagination, so it seems that the article by Duhem must be what SLJ would note as "1989(13)" and not "1898(12)", but I do not have access to the materials in question to verify. The footnote of the citation gives page 246 for "1898(12)" but the bibliography has "On the General Problem of Chemical Statics", JPhCh 2:1-42 and 91-115. Item 13, however, is "Une soutenance de thèse de doctorat à la Faculté des Sciences de Bordeaux", RPBSOu 244-50 (avril); which agrees with the context of the quotation.

A Link to Your Christmas Gift

2010-12-24T09:35:00.003-05:00

Courtesy of Dr. Kelly of the Catholic Association of Scientists and Engineers, I have the delight of presenting you with a link to a most startling website...

http://randoduhem.monsite-orange.fr/

It offers hiking tours to the sites visited and painted by Pierre Duhem!

Amazing. Delightful. Awesome. How I hope I may go there someday. At least both you and I can have a small glimpse of the natural beauty of Cabrespine...

* * *

My very best wishes for a happy and holy Christmas day and season to you and your family...

Duhem on the relation of the sciences to metaphysics

2010-12-19T10:42:00.004-05:00

[Early September 1894, the Third International Scientific Congress of Catholics held in Bruxelles...]

Duhem's hour came the following morning when he attended, in the philosophy section of the Congress, some lectures dealing with topics that touched on the relation of sciences to metaphysics. After the Pere Bulliot, future head of the philosophy department of the Institut Catholique in Paris, had read his paper on the concepts of matter and mass, Duhem asked, not without the promptings of some present, for permission to make a few remarks. Although his remarks were not reported in the Compte rendu of the Congress in the form of a verbatim quotation, the printed text can, partly because of its incisiveness and clarity, be taken for the most part for Duhem's actual words. Duhem, the report begins, 'is convinced that these researches [having for their object the confines of the positive sciences and metaphysics] will, if done wisely and prudently, lead to the reconciliation of Christian philosophy and modern science, but he insists on the extreme difficulty of such studies.' Duhem's reasons were as follows:

Only the principles of the different positive sciences are of interest to philosophers; but, in order to know these principles, it is not enough to read a book of popularization, not even the first chapters of a treatise written by a competent scientist. One does not comprehend the meaning and bearing of the principles on which a science rests except when one has studied that science for years, applied in a thousand ways those principles to particular cases, and mastered in depth the technique of what the Germans call the materials of science.

For example, the obvious sense of Euclid's [parallel] postulate is accessible to a child who studies the first book of geometry. But in order to understand the exact sense of that postulate, to grasp the reasons which give it a special place among the truths of geometry, to see clearly what would become of geometry if that postulate were to be abandoned, one must have a complete mathematical training which requires years of work.

If therefore we want to handle with competence and fruitfully the questions which are of the domain common to metaphysics and to positive science, let us begin with studying the latter for ten, for fifteen years; let us study it, first of all, in itself and for itself, without seeking to put it in harmony with such and such philosophical assertion; then, as we have mastered its principles, applied it in a thousand ways, we can search for its metaphysical meaning which will not fail to accord with true philosophy.

Anyone who would find exaggerated a similar labor must not forget that every hasty, scientifically incorrect solution of one of the problems relating to the common frontiers of science and philosophy, would result in the greatest prejudlce against our cause. The philosophers must imitate the patience of scientists. Once a problem is posed, scientists devote centuries, if necessary, to solving it. They accept only a precise and rigorous solution.

At any rate, the schools we are combatting give us example. The positivist school, the critical school, publish numerous works on the philosophy of science. These works carry the names of the greatest names of European science. We cannot triumph over these schools except by opposing them with researches done by people who, too, are masters of the positive sciences.

[quoted from Compte rendu du Troisième Congrès Scientifique International des Catholiques tenu à Bruxelles du 3 au 8 septembre 1894 (Bruxelles: Société Belge de Librairie, 1895) in Jaki, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem, 113-4, emphasis added]

Essential Jaki

2010-12-12T10:38:00.002-05:00

What can I possibly mean - "essential Jaki"? The Relevance? (He himself suggests as containing much of his later work, at least in embryonic form. See A Mind's Matter 27.) Or one (or more) of his essay collections? Or his amazing meditations on prayers? Or that tiny little thing on Chesterton? Or perhaps - Science and Creation?

Well, No.

I have no time to fairly and justly give you a recommended selection of his works - so if you are hoping for for an "introduction" to him I must diappoint you, at least for today. But then... perhaps (like some other great writers) almost any of his works are a suitable start. In this he is like the holograms of laser physics, a great analogy to certain even more mystical ideas: any fractional part of a hologram contains a representation of the whole image.

But actually, I was thinking about how one could easily have a "Jaki Advent Retreat" with his incomparable meditations on the Savior, and though there are barely two weeks left before Christmas, I suggest the following texts. (You can always work on obtaining them now, for future use.)

1. Advent and Science - a booklet of four essays
2. The Virgin Birth and the Birth of Science - a booklet with pictures by Blake
3. Catholic Essays - this is a collection but I mean specifically these two: "3. The Creator's Coming" and "4. A Most Holy Night"

You may also add, if you like, his little books on the Litany of Loreto and of St. Joseph, as well as the Magnificat...

I must also suggest his cosmological or Christocentric studies, though it would be to open not a retreat, but the bibliography for a grad-school seminar, and add items like his studies of the Psalms and The Savior of Science - but especially deserving of exploration is the important chapter on Science and the Jews, the seventh in Science and Creation which is called "The Beacon of the Covenant":

In the biblical view God is primarily and ultimately a person, whose most unique characteristic is to reveal His unspeakable transcendence in His most immediate concern for the children of Abraham.
The God of the Bible is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; that is, the God of the Covenant, or a God who freely binds Himself to the welfare of mankind through the mediation of Abraham’s progeny.
[SLJ SC 139]

What a grand statement of What Advent Is All About...

"...a God who freely binds Himself to the welfare of mankind through the mediation of Abraham’s progeny..."

Jaki and Advent

2010-12-04T10:29:00.002-05:00

Sorry I have fallen behind on our study of The Relevance of Physics; I hope to resume it shortly. Meanwhile, I suggest you get a copy of SLJ's Advent and Science and read it. Here is its beginning.
--Dr. Thursday

It may seem strange to seek a connection between Advent and science, and even stranger if Advent is mainly a matter of sentiments. Yet, undoubtedly, more than any other phase of the liturgical year Advent is the season of that gripping sentiment which is longing. Advent is also replete with the joy of anticipation which in some way surpasses even the joy of possession. Many have observed, and rightly so, that there is something special in the joy of expecting as compared with the joy one feels on coming into possession of what one has eagerly looked for.

What is true of religion, as experienced especially during Advent, is also true of science. The magic of science comes to a large extent from musing about its future marvels and about its promise that man's horizons would forever expand. The feats which science has already achieved along these lines greatly strengthen the confidence that the future has even greater feats in store.
[SLJ Advent and Science 1]

P.S. If you wish for some more seasonal reading material, I have just posted links to some of my past blogg-writings, which includes some unusual observations relating the 20 amino acids to the 20 mysteries of the Rosary.

Brief Thoughts for the Feast of Christ the King

2010-11-21T10:59:00.003-05:00

Duhem and a few other Catholic historians of science undoubtedly saw in medieval science a credit to Catholic faith. Duhem himself viewed science in the Middle Ages as a proof of Christ's promise that those who seek first the Kingdom of Heaven will reap benefits on earth as well.
[SLJ "Medieval Creativity in Science and Technology" in Patterns or Principles and Other Essays]

...Gilson's profound conviction [was] that all intellectual work should promote the Kingdom of God as a service under Christ the King...
[SLJ "Gilson and Science" in Patterns or Principles and Other Essays]

"For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King."
[GKC Charles Dickens CW15:44]

Let us always do as these great Masters have indicated: in lab, or office, in classroom or library, at home or at work: let us seek first Christ's kingdom, and all our work be in service of others thereby serving Christ the King.

The Sun is a Doggy: Observation, Similarity, Prediction

2010-11-16T10:44:00.002-05:00

We are considering Jaki's primal work of cliognosology, that is, of the history of science, The Relevance of Physics: part one of which is called "The Chief World Models of Physics" and chapter one which is "The World as an Organism".

It is, as we saw last week, a very Chestertonian title to a very Chestertonian work. A Scientist reading it may (unfortunately) be disappointed, and in fact dismayed; it does not seem to be about science, and (worse) it is not written in a very scientific style, though it has over 150 footnotes in its fifty pages, and even mentions Einstein and other modern scientists. Perhaps the title itself is misleading, for there's not very much in this chapter about the idea of "the world as organism" and hardly a scientific portrayal of it: a critique of what it described correctly and what it failed to describe. Still I urge you to deal with it, as it will be useful, and even surprisingly so.

Here is one reason why. This chapter gives us a wandering through the museum of Greek philosophers, most of whom did not do science in any sense, and who would probably laugh at the idea that they were "studying nature" - but whom some scholars deem as scientists, or at least scholars who laid a foundation for science. They spoke, wrote, ranted - just like us - except it wasn't on a talk show, or on a blogg. (This may seem to be an extreme view, but, thankfully, it's not mine. Granted, Jaki doesn't state that theme directly, but it gleams out by his almost chaotic approach to the pantheon of Greek writers.) Ah, now we can begin to understand: the Greeks were having a good time talking, embellishing or defending their views and adopting or opposing the views of others without regard for order, for reason, or (most importantly) for concern over whether any of their ideas related to something in the real world. (Just like we do these days.) Sure, some of their ideas sprang from the real world, but as these wise men retreated into their groves for debate, they left all reality behind. (Just like we do these days.) In other words, they do what we moderns do: in our academic journals, in our bloggs, in our talk shows (sometimes called "the news") - indeed, in all our media.

But this is a great advantage to us. Jaki provides a priceless insight into these historic and exalted figures, and brings them to us in a way which fits into our own world: as fallen humans, hoping to apply their intellects to the world around them, yet full of themselves and concerned with their own interests even while they purport to be doing "science". (Or others claim that purpose for them.) Yet - and this is the real surprise - they did make some advances, and important ones - if only in the sense that their works were collected and maintained for two millennia, and thus we can take advantage of their work, even with its errors and its absurd views.

It may seem crazy to us in the 21st century to "admire" these ancient Greeks - that we ought not do. Indeed, they leave very much to be desired when one recalls their soap-opera polytheism and their distorted views of government (the State is all) and Man (the individual is unimportant - so unimportant we can enslave other humans). We can ignore all this, since we are trying to see what they had to say about science. But even there... oh my, what can we say? It sounds like the sheerest nonsense to imagine the sun as an animal, going to its den in the evening, or the sea as an animal with its tides being its "breathing" or whatever. Yes, you might suggest that this had some relation to their paganism: these people believed that the sun was a god, didn't they? Excuse me, but unless you've never been outside your whole life, you must know that the sun (speaking strictly from its appearance) is as glorious as a god: brilliant, powerful, warming, and even (speaking as a Christian) subject to death and resurrection... Isn't it? That truth hasn't changed, even if it is merely a truth of appearance (even committed Copernicans speak of "sunset" without committing heresy). Moreover, Christianity did not take this truth away, but confirmed it in a startling manner: as great and holy a saint as Francis of Assisi could write a canticle which spoke this way of our local star:

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.
[St. Francis, "Canticle of the Creatures"]

No pagan could write such a thing, but I have a feeling that plenty of pagans would be willing to join with him in singing it. And if our science does not urge us to sing along, we ought to find another occupation, since we have failed. We ought to be adding verses; God knows we've learned so much more since the 12th century.

(Ah - another project for our society; we should have an annual contest: quarks and quasars and everything in between - they have no voice, but we do: "All praise be yours, my Lord, through ALL that you have made...")

No; we need to understand the work of the ancients, and also the correctives. By refusing to examine (and yes, to admire, if only remotely) the ancient Greek philosophers, you would miss the important second point to be learned from this chapter, and it is a complex one. These ancients had really begun to be scientific, and that in three ways, which I shall term Observation, Similarity, and Prediction.

(1) They truly observed. You cannot speak about an "animal" in a general sense unless you have at least started to pay attention to how a sheep is not a goat, is not a dog, is not an eagle, is not a fish. (You must have already understood how this sheep is not that sheep as you understand Plato is not Socrates, even though both are "Man"; this is of the same sort of idea, but advanced by a level.) This power of "observation" is the fundamental characteristic of a scientist, though it is (as Chesterton noted in a famous context) an idea which is "too big to be noticed". If you do not see, observe, pay attention to what IS, you can never do Science. Remember how Chesterton also said: "the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing." [GKC Tremendous Trifles 6] The Greeks revealed that they were seeing something extraordinary: they could even see the ordinary, which is the first mark of a Scientist. And that IS extraordinary.

(2) They could apply the idea of similarity; they could generalize.

In order to understand this, I must mention another something which may be "too big to be noticed": Similarity is not logic, nor is logic similarity, but there is a link between them, and it is that both require accurate raw material in order to proceed. Otherwise you may claim that a "snark" is like a "boojum" only more "rovantic" - which tells you nothing at all. (Besides being boring, and Science is never boring.) This truth is enshrined in Chesterton's great epigram, which is another one for the wall of your lab or office or classroom:

Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
[GKC Daily News Feb 25 1905 quoted in Maycock, The Man Who Was Orthodox]

In the same way, one cannot find truth from similarity unless one has first found truth without it.

The Greeks knew this, and so, once they had observed: animals retire to their dens at night; the sun also appears to retire. Hence, they said, "the sun is like an animal". You can laugh about this; it does sound funny, and there are far more goofy ideas to come - but you must not lose sight that this IS the beginning of real science. Yes, of course, we have learned so much more since then, but remember, one has to start somewhere! Also, you must recall the record of history: there are many others who never got that far. This is the point of Einstein's remark Jaki quoted near the start of the chapter: Einstein's famous remark: "In my opinion one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. [of the ancient Greeks] The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all." [SLJ TROP 4 quoting AE's letter of April 23, 1953, to Mr. T. E. Switzer of San Mateo, California; see D. J. de Solla Price, Science since Babylon (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 15.] For extensive details on this record, consider the first six chapters of Jaki's Science and Creation.

(3) Even more important, they were able to build upon these fundamental tools. They were able to extend, from observation and similarity, to prediction. That is: "We saw animals doing thus-and-so. The sun is like them. And so, we can expect that, since an animal also does so-and-thus, someday we may also observe the sun doing so-and-thus." Of course this leads to absurdities: they saw dogs having puppies and nursing at their mother's side... what they may have expected in terms of curious solar phenomenon can only be guessed at. Sure, in some cases these ideas lead nowhere. But prediction is a tool, and as one learns how the tool works, its uses and its abuses, one learns not to hit one's thumb with the hammer - and then one begins to build.

It is true that the ancients didn't always observe; made distorted similarities, contrived absurd predictions. But so do we. We need to learn about their mistakes so that we do not continue to make them. We also can begin to appreciate (in the richest sense) these men as men, as scholars, and thereby find our kinship with them, and be grateful for their work and the work of all those who have built on theirs.

The Feast of St. Albert the Great, patron of Science

2010-11-15T09:46:00.002-05:00

But in the same book Gilson also had to voice a conviction of his which could serve as a prime guideline in his program of keeping alive Thomism by constantly immersing it in the latest development of science. "Science is revolutionary," Gilson quoted Claude Bernard, and then in the same breath he added: "I am profoundly convinced that philosophy is not." Such a conviction must imply the recognition of two important consequences. One has to recognize that no study of science, not even of its very latest developments, can have for its fruit revolutionary implications for the perennial philosophy. The latter can gather from such study only new illustrations, however startling, of very old truths. And since each age, or rather generation, has its own preferred variations of phraseology, those new illustrations should seem of utmost pedagogical value. This is to be still learned by many Thomists who often speak as if they were brought up in the waning of the Middle Ages.

While this can be expected to change for the better, realism forces one to recognize a rather dispiriting feature of human behavior: Human nature is itching for novelties. Gilson himself once dejectedly registered the unwillingness even of Thomists to hold on to this or that well-established truth, even historical truth. Consequently, somewhat illusory should seem Gilson's dream of what he called "a religious order of scientists." He had in mind a close collaboration among a handful of theologians well trained in the sciences.
Collaboration of this kind may be a pleasing subject for conversation, but it would be a most difficult thing to bring about. Even the collaboration between Aquinas and Albertus Magnus was not what Gilson had in mind. Yet they were geniuses, and saints for good measure. Still, as Gilson the teacher demonstrated, it is possible to produce like-minded pupils who, even if their influence suffers a temporary eclipse, will serve as guideposts for a post-eclipse generation searching for beacons better than the ones who presented the twilight of eclipse as the dawn of a new day.
[SLJ "Gilson and Science" in Patterns or Principles and other Essays]

Postscript: We must here note another great project for the Duhem Society to pursue: Gilson's dream of "a religious order of scientists". Far from being illusory, it is surely a topic for us to consider and ponder - and someday propose.

The Problem with The Relevance

2010-11-09T11:01:00.001-05:00

The single biggest problem facing the reader of Jaki's The Relevance of Physics is not its size or even its scope. (An aside: I understand some readers of this bloog are having difficulty obtaining a copy; perhaps you might send an e-mail to Real View Books inquiring whether there are any remaining copies around, or asking about a reprint - perhaps if there is sufficient interest...) No; the difficulty arises in the complexity of dealing with the subject itself, the history and inner life of science. This study (which I called "cliognosology" in a previous column) is at least half philosophy, and requires tools of literature and history and allied fields - and yet, at the same time it requires knowledge of the matter of science itself: its subject matter, its organization, its method - along with its dramatis personae of science, their writings and methods. It is a huge project.

But then so is any field of our subject, and if we are scientists (in the widest sense) we do not shrink from mere size, or from complexity. We do not avoid the thought of Antares, though it may be larger than our entire solar system out to the orbit of Mars. We do not avoid the topic of metabolism, though the usual chart of Metabolic Processes looks more like some sort of vast computer network - even to the four-place enzyme codes which have the same format as IP addresses! Besides, this book contains important ideas - it is a sourcebook. We do not reject the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics because it is too large to go into our pocket - and TROP is a good deal smaller. It's also a good deal more readable. And where it is a bit obscure, I hope to assist, by means of this study.

Therefore, let us begin with chapter one, "The World as an Organism" (pp. 3-51)

In these first stage-setting paragraphs, we immediately find how rocky our road is - and yet how rich. (Apropos of my own introduction, I think of our Society's Master, Pierre Duhem: physicist, historian, and hiker. He did not avoid a difficult rocky trail for he knew the vistas to be attained by means of it!)

We find Plato mentioned in the unattributed quote of Whitehead; we find mention of a J. Burnet; we find the name Archimedes with that odd word "divus". A bit later we find a torrent of other names: Homer, Plutarch, Hesiod, Thales and so on, but among these we also find scattered Einstein and Schrödinger. We may wonder who these people are, how they relate, and what is the point of it all.

Clearly, Jaki's spotlight is on ancient Greece - as indeed you will find in the rest of this chapter. Now, if you happen to have read other of Jaki's books, in particular Science and Creation, you may be a bit surprised at some of the "encomiums" he gives to ancient Greece here. (That word "encomium" is a fancy synonym for "praise" and is one of SLJ's "pet" words, but surprisingly it does not appear in TROP.) In fact, this is one of the curious complications - almost an unsettling one - about this book. Is Jaki praising or condemning the Greeks, or what? No; he is trying to suggest a larger view.

This method, Jaki's style, or approach to handling such topics, may take a little getting used to. It's not the usual sort of exposition one finds in science, and (contrary to his own words to me about non-fiction writing) I think it suggests a certain hidden longing for the complex-web-weaving style of detective-fiction. (Oh, how I wish he had written a mystery story!) Let me say more about this. A writer like Chesterton (of whom, as you know, I am particularly fond of mentioning!) will allude to other writers, and give huge leaping analogies, thereby linking difficult ideas into something one can grasp. He will not refrain from even taking a famous Bible verse and extending it by a sort of trick of typesetting, almost as one makes a word "bold-face" in a word-processor. One famous instance is GKC's inversion of Mt 19:6 to give "Those whom God has sundered, shall no man join" - almost mystical insight into the truth of the sexes, and one which Jaki quotes (e.g. in "Purpose Redux" in SLJ, A Late Awakening and Other Essays, though he is not using it as GKC did.)

Jaki does not use Chesterton's approach, though on occasion we find his using something like it, as we have just seen. (It can happen to any serious student of Chesterton.) He has another, which (like Chesterton) takes some getting used to. He leaps, in a kind of weaving motion, bringing various link-points together across the millennia and across the entire gamut of "cliognosology" [my word for "the study of the history of science] which we should see here as its two halves, as Science, writ large, and as History. You will find its first instance in the second paragraph of our text, where we find Heisenberg and Aristotle and Schrödinger bumping into each other - and this is just the start.

You may claim: but this is only natural when one examines an idea!

Perhaps. This is why it is so difficult, especially to come into such a topic as a scientist, since it is not about the idea, but about those who held an idea, or a version of an idea - it is History writ large, not Science, though it may be an item drawn from Science or which one has come to term Science. It will be unsettling, but then so are some of the ideas in our own science or what we term science. This is the point, and this is the strategy of presentation, which does have a scientific style: bring the related matters together, no matter how twisted other parts may become - and then examine the adjacencies. (This is much like Mendeleev's method which gave us the Periodic Table - a matter which we shall hear about in chapter 4 of our text.) So if we need to bump something from quantum physics with something else from ancient Greece, just keep reading, and enjoy the view - it may get bumpy, but the vista will be excellent.

Fortunately, when we get to the fourth paragraph, we find this kaleidoscopic mosaic clarified for us. Jaki is setting up his structure for the first three chapters, the three views of Nature as (1) living, (2) mechanical, or (3) numerical.

November 1 and 2

2010-11-02T16:58:00.004-04:00

In the last few days the plenary session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences took place in Rome. The tradition provides that a commemoration of the deceased academicians take place before the talks. As I read on the leaflet, the commemoration of our dear Father Stanley Jaki has been given by prof Jean Michel Maldamé, OP.

Father Jaki has been in Rome many times this period of the year, and not only for the periodical gathering of the Academy...

... Personally, I would like to add that in late October and early November 1950 I was in Rome, preparing for the defense of my thesis in theology. The high point of those days was, of course, the definition of the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. I was present at the definition in St. Peter's Square, November 1.
[SLJ God and the Sun at Fatima]

... Prior to the gathering of over two thousand bishops for the opening of the Second Vatican Council the largest such event took place on November 1, 1950. On that day, under an unusually blue sky, almost a thousand bishops filed out to the Vatican Palace to Saint Peter's Square to join as the College of Bishops with their head, Pope Pius XII...
[SLJ The Litany of Loreto 213]

In some sense we have lived the last two days together as one, the Solemnity of All Saints and the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed. And together are the Assumption of Mary and her praying for us.

The words "pray for us sinners..." reveal their appropriateness in most unusual and unforeseen occasions. For the writer of this book one such occasion came as he was sitting in the front pew of the Chiesa dei Frari in Venice gazing at Titian's "Assumption". ... Pray for us in the hour of our death so that first our souls and then our bodies may be taken up to heaven where there will be no tears whatsoever.
[SLJ Twenty Mysteries 97-99 (see also this post)]

Cliognosology: Jaki's Very Chestertonian Approach to Physics

2010-11-02T11:29:00.002-04:00

Yes, I am getting into some incredibly hot water with this study of The Relevance of Physics, Father Jaki's first major work of cliognosology, but then you must remember that Chesterton said "I believe in getting into hot water. I think it keeps you clean." [GKC ILN March 10 1907 CW27:142] We also ought to keep a sense of humor, even as we deal with serious topics - this will help us recall our humanity, and make our work truly a culture - which springs from the Latin root meaning "to grow".

Eh... Cliognosology? What's that?

It's my new word for "the history of science", made from "Clio" the Muse of History, and Greek "gnoseo"= scientia. If you have another suggestion, or can help improve this one, please let me know.

I say this - that SLJ uses a Chestertonian approach - as a mark of esteem. Jaki has chosen a huge subject, which can easily get bogged down in details. But he, like Chesterton, uses the method of vignettes, rather than structures, since after all Jaki writes as a literary scholar, not as a scientist, despite his doctorate in physics. He gives us a thumbnail structure in the table of contents, but after that you need a guide, which I hope to provide, if only in a rambling fashion. (I am a scientist, you see, but have read Chesterton and Jaki at great length, and indicate my admiration for them by my own poor form of imitation.... but the science keeps on creeping in, which may help.)

Yes, the book is huge: over 530 pages, twelve chapters, with about 100 footnotes in each. It is a difficult subject: the history of science in general, the inner purpose and reason and meaning of physics in particular. It spans the time from the earliest musings on reality by the ancient Greeks up to the latest (1966) topics. But it is not a history, so much as it is an examination of certain intellectual aspects of physics - and at this point the best way I can help you to understand this is to give you the master outline of the book.

The Relevance of Physics
Table of Contents

Part One: The Chief World Models of Physics
Chapter One The World as an Organism
Chapter Two The World as a Mechanism
Chapter Three The World as a Pattern of Numbers
Part Two The Central Themes of Physical Research
Chapter Four The Layers of Matter
Chapter Five The Frontiers of the Cosmos
Chapter Six The Edge of Precision
Part Three Physics and Other Disciplines
Chapter Seven Physics and Biology
Chapter Eight Physics and Metaphysics
Chapter Nine Physics and Ethics
Chapter Ten Physics and Theology
Part Four Physics: Master or Servant?
Chapter Eleven The Fate of Physics in Scientism
Chapter Twelve The Place of Physics in Human Culture

This may seem overwhelming; the book is overwhelming, but in a good sense. Let me give you an example. Do you have a copy of the amazing CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics around? I mean a "tactile" version, not an electronic one. It's got to weigh over five pounds, maybe a couple of thousand pages, representing perhaps hundreds of thousands of man-years of meticulous lab work and record-keeping... what a gift it is. A huge and useful work. (If you are not a scientist, please consider your own master-reference, perhaps the Oxford English Dictionary, or perhaps the Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon.) I do not mean that Jaki's text reaches these levels, but it is rich in a similar way, and so it is overwhelming.

Here I will make a suggestion. I suggest you think of TROP as a "four-volume" set, bound as one. It will help lessen the impact. The sections (and to a certain extent, the chapters) are far more separable than in other texts of this type.

As I peer into the first chapter, near its very start I found this line:

It has been said in the twentieth century that the European philosophical tradition is but a series of footnotes to Plato...
[SLJ TROP 3]

SLJ quotes it also in Science and Creation, which gives us a name, though not a citation:

With his penchant for startling dicta, Whitehead once defined European
philosophical tradition as a series of footnotes to Plato.
[SLJ Introduction to Science and Creation]

But he gives something more in another place, not more in the sense of a citation, but "more" as a musician might develop a theme:

In comparison with a flame or a tidal wave, quite anemic is the figure of speech which Whitehead used in describing all Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato. Any scholar busy with footnotes knows how enervating can be the tracking down of references to reliable sources. Still Whitehead meant a beginning for philosophy which is a robust enterprise. Such an enterprise generates an ever more powerful continuation.
[SLJ "Purpose Redux" in A Late Awakening and Other Essays]

I quoted that because in some sense this is SLJ's own commentary on TROP. It might be said that all Jaki's other works (at least those which are cliognosological) are a series of footnotes to The Relevance of Physics.

Please note. This is not really my own idea. It is, in fact, Father Jaki's idea. See how he phrased it in his "Intellectual Autobiography":

Meanwhile I began to write short articles for a Hungarian language quarterly, published in Rome, on various scientific questions relating to religion. They contain in a nutshell more than one idea which I was later to develop in full in The Relevance. The extent to which this long book anticipates themes of many of my subsequent writings dawned on me only when I had to see through press the publication of its Hungarian translation in 1996. It was then that I read again each line of The Relevance and found out that it was truly the coming of age of my mind.
[SLJ A Mind's Matter 27, emphasis added]

Indeed, he has more to say about TROP in that book, and we shall explore it also.

For today, then, take some time and review your own personal storehouse of knowledge about history and physics. What ideas leap out at you? What order would you give to such a study if you were to write it? What ideas or events or individuals would you spotlight? There is a reason that the "table of contents" comes first: it gives you the map, the floor plan, the layout, the blueprints of the complex structure you are about to enter. Recall that Aristotle and Aquinas say that "it belongs to wisdom to put things in order". It is wisdom for you to grasp this order now, lest you become dazzled or confused once we begin our explorations.

Why the Relevance?

2010-10-26T11:45:00.002-04:00

We must answer this question - why is there a book, The Relevance of Physics - before we proceed to study it in detail.

Jaki gives the answer in a concise preface. As if it were a hologram, almost any sentence might (on its own) render a complete reason or justification for the remainder of this huge volume - or at least it gives a very strong enticement. One might not even be a physicist, or even a historian, to find a fascination with the subject.

In his original preface Jaki quotes two excellent - perhaps superlative - statements about his topic. Oddly, neither is annotated, but since he quotes them elsewhere, I can provide the attribution. They are important for us, and I shall offer them for your consideration:

...no less prominent a figure of present-day American science than Vannevar Bush voiced the desperate cultural need for a systematic illustration of the limitations of physical science. "Much is spoken," he noted, "today about the power of science, and rightly. It is awesome. But little is said about the inherent limitations of science, and both sides of the coin need equal scrutiny." To help redress the balance between those two sides is the aim of this book.
[SLJ, preface to TROP, quoting VB "Science Pauses," Fortune 71 (May 1965), p. 116.]

Then there is this grand epigram, an insight from one of the greatest scientists of history, which ought to be a poster upon every lab and in every work area of all scientists:

[This book's] purpose would be fully achieved if it increased in those who cultivate and love physics that component of the wisdom of science of which Maxwell once wrote,"One of the severest tests of a scientific mind is to discern the limits of the legitimate application of scientific methods."
[SLJ, preface to TROP, quoting JCM "Paradoxical Philosophy" (1878), in The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, edited by W. D. Niven, II (Cambridge, 1890), p. 759.]

What I meant about a new project

2010-10-23T10:38:00.002-04:00

I apologise for these lags in my postings... I am sure many of you have your own business to attend to. But I know you would like to have some sort of action, or at least know there are good things to come. I can't make promises, but I am trying to arrange for good things to come. Bear in mind I have no direct connection to a publisher or anything else, and my own time constraints often leave me with very little time, even to post here. (I hope you may have some small satisfaction with my postings on my own blogg where I am trying to maintain my Thursday writing.)

But 2011 is just two months away, and there are not many more years until 2016.

Why do I bring up 2016?

Well - there are two reasons, both of which must strongly act upon us of the Duhem Society, and which may possibly get us to accomplish something.

The first: 2016 marks the centennial of the death of Pierre Duhem. This year ought to be marked in a fitting manner. Since at this time the "Duhem Society" exists only as a loose collection (yet a world-wide collection) of friends and scholars, linked by common interests by means of this blogg, I don't yet know how we might take a suitable action towards this event. But we ought to consider it. In my dreams I might hope for a major conference, with papers and seminars and a dinner, and time to meet and to talk among ourselves, and a Mass of Thanksgiving - perhaps one in France, and one on the western side of the Atlantic. I also dream of a publication of "The Collected Works" of Pierre Duhem (annotated, as may be fitting) and also an English translation. But I have no means to enable any of this. At best I have an enthusiasm... and offer a sense of support to those who may be able to work at this.

The second: 2016 marks the 50th anniversary (the semi-centennial) of Stanley Jaki's first major work in his field: The Relevance of Physics. This also should demand a conference, and perhaps a republication - in this case I consider an annotated edition to be very important. I regret that there was never time for us (I mean the students and friends of SLJ) to produce a Festschrift to Jaki. But by 2016 we ought to have something... if only a study of this important text. There is plenty of meat to go around; one avenue I would like to see explored is a cross-link from TROP to his other works.

It is in this second case that I have hope for my own involvement. I would like to begin a blogg-study of this work - but I would like to know whether this is of any interest to my readers. I have done something similar to this for Chesterton's Orthodoxy (you can see here for the index) - though for TROP I will not post the complete text, since it is not out of copyright. I will work out a way of handling the disparate editions; that is not an insurmountable difficulty. But I think we need to begin. We may wish for a complete annotated "Collected Works" of Jaki as well as Duhem - these are huge projects and will take a long time - but we must start somewhere, and TROP and its 50th anniversary provides a suitable starting point.

So please add a comment about this. Note: I am not trying to give myself airs as a "scholar" - perhaps there are plenty of real scholars at work on PD and SLJ, and I am simply out of touch with the journals. But there is the INTERNET now, and we ought to be cross-pollinating - there are people who are interested, who are enthusiastic, and who are capable of thought - and of writing about their thoughts.

Besides: what a grand thing: to unite, here in this wonderful medium, in consideration of the works of these great scientist-historians. It reminds one of the work of Mersenne...

Finally, I must point out one other matter in regard to this topic. Perhaps you are interested, but for some reason find yourself in disagreement with me, or us, or the approach. There is no reason why you may not have your own blogg, and we might communicate. The Scholastics often used the debate-paradigm, since this is a tool for seeking the truth. It would be a great thing if there would be other Duhem Society bloggs, perhaps in other languages, or focussed on other aspects.

I write this now, Saturday October 23, 2010, since only God knows how much (or how little) time I may have. At least I have told you about my hopes. But I would like to hear from you. (Or you can e-mail me; see the link in my profile - please be sure to state "Duhem Society" in your subject-line.) And I hope that (God willing) I shall meet many of you at the conference in 2016, if not sooner.

On a Great Medieval Scientist

2010-10-07T09:58:00.002-04:00

On this, the feast of the Holy Rosary, let us consider something about a Dominican, from a book about another Dominican. It contains a very interesting line:

Albert the Swabian, rightly called the Great, was the founder of modern science. He did more than any other man to prepare that process, which has turned the alchemist into the chemist, and the astrologer into the astronomer. It is odd that, having been in his time, in this sense almost the first astronomer, he now lingers in legend almost as the last astrologer. Serious historians are abandoning the absurd notion that the medieval Church persecuted all scientists as wizards. It is very nearly the opposite of the truth. The world sometimes persecuted them as wizards, and sometimes ran after them as wizards; the sort of pursuing that is the reverse of persecuting. The Church alone regarded them really and solely as scientists. Many an enquiring cleric was charged with mere magic in making his lenses and mirrors; he was charged by his rude and rustic neighbours; and would probably have been charged in exactly the same way if they had been Pagan neighbours or Puritan neighbours or Seventh-Day Adventist neighbours. But even then he stood a better chance when judged by the Papacy, than if he had been merely lynched by the laity. The Catholic Pontiff did not denounce Albertus Magnus as a magician. It was the half-heathen tribes of the north who admired him as a magician. It is the half-heathen tribes of the industrial towns today, the readers of cheap dream-books, and quack pamphlets, and newspaper prophets, who still admire him as an astrologer. It is admitted that the range of his recorded knowledge, of strictly material and mechanical facts, was amazing in a man of his time. It is true that, in most other cases, there was a certain limitation to the data of medieval science; but this certainly had nothing to do with medieval religion. For the data of Aristotle, and the great Greek civilisation, were in many ways more limited still. But it is not really so much a question of access to the facts, as of attitude to the facts. Most of the Schoolmen, if informed by the only informants they had that a unicorn has one horn or a salamander lives in the fire, still used it more as an illustration of logic than an incident of life. What they really said was, "If a unicorn has one horn, two unicorns have as many horns as one cow." And that is not one inch the less a fact because the unicorn is a fable.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:455]

You may be wondering which line I wanted to single out. I mean this one:

Serious historians are abandoning the absurd notion that the medieval Church persecuted all scientists as wizards.

I wonder who GKC meant. Could this suggest that Chesterton did know something about Pierre Duhem? Or does he mean some other historians of science of the first third of the twentieth century? It would take some research to answer, and we may add this to our growing list of research topics.

P.S. I wil no longer be writing my weekly column for the American Chesterton Society, whose blogg is stopping. Whether I will have any additional free time remains to be seen, but I have an excellent project in mind, if that is God's will. All I will say for now is involves SLJ's first book (not counting his doctoral dissertations)... We have about six years until its 50th anniversary, and there's work to be done. Stay tuned.

On Catechism and Dignity

2010-10-02T11:16:00.002-04:00

Throughout many of his essays, father stressed the importance of reviving the 'Penny' (UK) and 'Baltimore' Catechisms. Based on his prompting, I purchased the Baltimore Catechism 'One' from Tan Classics, as basic as could be found. I turned to the first lesson and a question on the first page stood out:
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Q: Why did God make you?
A: God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven.
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Looking back on my catholic school-time catechesis, not too long ago, how I wish I had been taught such a simple, but direct and profound expression of our faith, instead of learning definitions of 'ecumenism', 'sectarianism' and 'the eightfold path'.
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Fr. Jaki reminds us that simple catechisms remain 'the best means of implementing the only metamorphosis that results in human dignity as acted out in the daily lives of individuals. Anything else is largely a waste of time'. Having read quite widely about the catholic faith at this stage, I find that the simple statements are genuinely the most profound and memorable ones.
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Human dignity is precious yet so easily and routinely violated. This is all the more tragic when it occurs in the fields of religious care, scientific advancement, and (of increasing concern) ecological conservation, where noble aims are corrupted because people forget the answer to yet another simple question on the first page of the simplest catechism:

Q: What is man?

A: Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.

Fr. Jaki diagonoses the historical precedents of the loss of that dignity and what is required to reignite a genuine respect for who man is.

~JT.

~-~-~-~-~-~

On the intellectual level nothing definite about human dignity is generally shared any longer in spite of profuse references to it. The Enlightenment spread the illusion that man was pure reason, thereby putting human dignity on a pedestal befitting angels. Once on that pedestal man looked out for perspectives suitable for beasts and obtained them through Darwinism. The physics of relativity and of quantum mechanics created the widespread belief that all is relative and mere happenstance. In both cases the individual is the measure of all things as he frantically measures everything. The September 2003 issue of Scientific American suggested to its readers that they were mere holograms because the universe itself may be just a hologram. Computers are used to celebrate the idea that man's mind is an artificial intelligence machine, hardly a dignified perspective, except for some rabid hackers. Environmentalism transfers the dignity which only humans deserve to have to meadows, rivers, lakes, and a clean atmosphere. Microbiology is used for justifying the view that human nature is an agglomerate of "selfish genes". The dictates of instant gratification set the tone of cultural discourse about human dignity while modern man is robbed of the last traces of traditional Christian views about that dignity.

The lessons of history turn against man unless he learns them thoroughly. One of these lessons is that ethics must be lived by a society's individuals, before society can discourse about ethics to any and all. No different will be the lesson about a bioethics which focuses on genes and genomes. In the absence of a society, where individuals steeped in genuine ethics set the tone of discourse, the focusing will resemble the amusement of children who let sunlight pass through their magnifying glasses, focus it on a piece of paper, and shout with joy when it catches fire, at times with devastating consequences. The question is whether society wants to risk being devoured in a conflagration or rather wants to secure proper warmth for its well being. Both are a process of metamorphosis. Only one of the two means life.

[S.L. Jaki, 'The Metamorphoses of Human Dignity' in 'A Late Awakening and Other Essays', pp. 147-148]

SLJ on St. Michael's feast

2010-09-29T09:45:00.002-04:00

Less than two months after the dreams, Descartes, not yet twenty-three, began writing his “Cogitationes privatae” which started with the following statement for the first days of January, 1619: “Just as actors, who are advised against appearing on the stage with a blush on their face, put on a mask, I too enter, with a mask on, the theater of the world in which I have so far lived as a spectator.” Cryptic as these words may appear at first, they can be understood if one assumes that Descartes wanted to hide his view of himself as a superior man, an angel in short. He knew - he did not jettison all common sense - that he would blush were he to present himself to his fellowmen as being far superior to them. While all this has to be conjecture, the reading of Descartes' works can leave no doubt that his claims about truth and knowledge required far greater powers than those of mere man. Those powers, as he described them, were, in fact, angelic. Unfortunately for Descartes, and for posterity as well, there are two kinds of angels. one kind, which had for leader the bearer of all light, Lucifer, rushed headlong into a disastrous fall.

Speaking of Lucifer, one thinks of Michael, a name which means “who is like God.” It is also a hallowed shorthand, telling perhaps less of God than of Lucifer's daring and downfall. Lucifer wanted to play God. How an angel can do that is a question for which answers, very speculative to be sure, may be found in the writings of an Aquinas or a Maritain. All such answers rest on considering angelic nature, pure intellects, whose cognition has three main features. The mode of that cognition is intuitive, its origin is innate, and its operation is independent of things. The Cartesian theory of errorless human knowledge is expressed in exactly the same terms. It should not be surprising that a man, believing himself to be capable of knowing in such a way, should try to play God. Descartes tried to do this in the only sense in which a poor mortal can do it, namely, to dictate to God how to go about the business of creation.

Descartes' apologies that he in no way prescribed to the Creator how to fashion a world out of the chaos, have convinced only some Cartesians. He was the first modern scientist who fell to the in which man is lured into deriving a priori the shape, structure, and laws of the universe. The core of an a priori derivation is not that it relieves one of laborious search and experimentation (although this may reveal a good deal about the merits of the enterprise). The core is rather the consequence that once such a derivation is achieved, the possibility that God could have created any other world is pre-empted. A God who is bound by inner necessity to create the very world which exists in a poor shadow of himself. The true creator of such a universe is the man sold on a priori reasoning, a very fallible way of playing God. As one could expect, the universe fashioned in such a way is a very fallible construct, and so is its science. The science and universe of Descartes provide a perfect example.
[SLJ Angels, Apes, and Men 15-16]

New Newman Book by Dr. Angelo Bottone

2010-09-23T18:11:00.005-04:00

In light of Newman's recent beatification, it gives me great pleasure to share with readers of the Duhem Society blog, the news of the publication of the first comprehensive treatise concerning Bl. Newman's works in relation to his quest to establish a Catholic University in Dublin. This book is written by none other than Dr. Angelo Bottone, one of this blog's contributors and a founding member of the Duhem Society. Our congratulations to you Angelo!

Further details and purchasing information is available from the publisher's website:

http://www.zetabooks.com/new-releases/angelo-bottone-the-philosophical-habit-of-mind.-rhetoric-and-person-in-john-henry-n.html

(H/T Magdalen)

This is the first comprehensive study of John Henry Newman's works related to his foundation of a university in Ireland. It considers his Dublin Writings (1851-1859) in their totality and full meaning, in an attempt to show that they share a unity that is not merely chronological but also conceptual. It analyses Newman's volumes, articles and sermons produced while he was in residence in Dublin and explains the historical background that led to the establishment of the Catholic University of Ireland. This work offers an original exploration of the influences of philosophers such as Aristotle, Cicero and Locke on Newman's own thought. Aristotle's inspiration is presented in a new light and compared with Ciceronian rhetoric and the Utilitarianism of Locke and his followers. Moreover, the intellectual, moral and artistic dimensions of the human person in Newman's Dublin Writings are discussed, in conjuction with his concepts of the unity of knowledge and of the philosophical habit of mind. The final chapter is the author's personal reflection on the issues that Newman raised, with reference to the development of university education and to contemporary thinkers such as Derrida and MacIntyre.

Testimonia

Angelo Bottone has covered some aspects of Newman from an original perspective, focusing particularly on the rhetorical elements of his writings. In this respect, his work is innovative, as Newman’s Dublin Writings have been always considered only for their contribution to a debate on education. Angelo Bottone covers new areas, like the influence of Cicero or the role of the study of foreign and ancient languages in the university founded by Newman. Angelo Bottone’s book and its timing for publication may generate new perspectives on this period of Newman’s life. He has given a philosophical flavour to this study, which is novel as other authors have written about Newman mostly from a theological or educational view point. (Domenico Iervolino, University of Naples)

Bottone's book is an historical and thematic treatment of Newman's Dublin writings, the best known of which is The Idea of a University. The merit of this work is that is makes available an account of many other writings of Newman that are not generally available, and presents an integrated interpretation of them. Reading The Idea of a University in the context of his other Dublin writings allows the reader to gain a more complete and nuanced understanding of this centrally important text. (Gerard Casey, University College Dublin)

Beacon from Birmingham

2010-09-18T18:31:00.006-04:00

Tonight is the eve of the joyous beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman in Birmingham, the highlight of what has been an historic and incredibly successful visit for Pope Benedict to the island of Britain. Newman was an inspirational figure to countless Christians, not least Fr. Jaki, who penned no less than five books and a collection of essays concerning Newman's books and letters.
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Newman also contributed greatly to the foundation of the Catholic University of Ireland (which became University College Dublin) and its University Church, pictured above, where I had the privilege of attending lunchtime Mass on Friday. The parish community has a series of events to celebrate his beatification, which can be viewed on its website here.

It is most fitting to quote from Fr. Jaki's conclusions on Cardinal Newman's life and conversion on this most special day. Let us remember them both in our prayers along with the individual Anglican converts and groups of Anglicans availing of Pope Benedict's Anglicanorum Coetibus.

~JT.

~-~-~-~-~-~

Since the purity of Newman's life had for some time been attested by many, he was not a modern Saint Augustine. There is however, a close parallel between Augustine's Confessions and Newman's Apologia. The Confessions contains many pages about Augustine's struggle to extricate himself from the many traps set by man's mind in his search for truth. In his Apologia Newman "apologizes" to his Anglican contemporaries for having waged an uncompromising struggle with himself, background, and circumstances to gain a grasp of the Catholic truth. Had he chosen for the Apologia's motto, "I have not sinned against light", he would not have exaggerated.

For Newman it was relatively easy to change from an Evangelical into a zealous member of the Church of England. It was somewhat difficult for him to notice there the Catholic features a divinely established Church had to possess. He took it for a noble task to turn intimations of those features into a vivid reality. He agonized over finding that he merely chased a dream because the Church of England was but a "mimic Catholicism". To part with it meant for him a parting not only with friends but humanly with all. He needed much research and soul searching to muster resolve to make the move and cash his lot with the true Church which, humanly speaking, was, in his parts, rather void of whatever that all represented.

But what gives to that existential transition, involving as it did all of Newman's human existence, its most decisive aspect was his perception that were he not to make that step he, whom all took for a paragon of saintly life, would remain in the state of sin, the sin of schism. It is that perception of Newman's that governs the last three of his Anglican years and all his years as a Catholic. Ignore or slight that perception of Newman's, and his life and thought will fall to the level of clichés, however pleasing. Ignore that perception of his and an opaque screen will be put in front of the volcanic force with which he kept preaching, especially to converts, that there was only One True Fold, that to belong to it was the key to one's eternal salvation whereas to postpone endlessly one's conversion might inure one into the treacherous habit of living in sin, the sin of schism...

In making the step from the Church of England to Rome, Newman was fully aware that he was proceeding from shadows and images of reality to reality itself (ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem). In these Latin words, harking back to a phrase of Saint Paul, he had perceived his life's destiny long before he had decided to have those words be the sole décor of his tombstone. He lived those words all his Catholic life...

[Extracts from S.L. Jaki, Newman to Converts: An Existential Ecclesiology, pp. 487-488; 502]

In Memoriam: Pierre Duhem, September 14, 1916

2010-09-14T09:29:00.002-04:00

Eternal rest grant unto thy servant Pierre, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.

On this day, 94 years ago, Pierre Duhem died. Today is also the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and there is a fitting harmony here, though some may find it mysterious: a harmony between the Instrument of Salvation and this heroic historian of science. Let us of the Duhem Society, and all scholars, ponder this mystery: the cross is Defeat; the cross is Christ; the cross is the path to Science Writ Large. And if you need a starting point to link them, start in the Nicene Creed with the clause per quem omnia facta sunt = "through Him all things were made". Also see the quote from St. Paul given below by Father Jaki - one might give a series of lectures on the great truth that Jesus is Lord of Science and of Engineering just as much as He is Lord of Philosophy and Theology...

Let us also begin now to consider our plans - in six years we MUST have an international conference on Duhem. That's not very long, my friends; we must begin to plan for it. Perhaps two, one in Europe and one in America. But there must be a meeting, and lectures, and a publication. There is work to be done - I think specifically of translations and reprints (with commentaries). God willing we shall find a way of getting it done. Let us ask Duhem and Jaki to intercede for us, that God's will be done, whether in the lab or in the classroom, wherever we may be.

For your meditation, here is a fitting excerpt from Jaki's second book on Duhem.

--Dr. Thursday

Obviously, Duhem did not long for a fashionable and easy Christian faith and life. His life had too many trials to let him entertain illusions, especially their spiritual kinds. At the center of his religious life stood the cross of Christ. A proof of this is his obvious identification with two crosses in the outskirts of Cabrespine, the subject of two exquisite drawings of his. Ultimately, they are the most genuine context for putting Duhem on the scene of his life and work.

One of the crosses, the Croix d'Estresse (the cross of distress), he drew on September 4, 1912. His drawing of it has its own value for students of the history of art, as the cross is a rare example of crosses with a Pietà carved on their reverse side. The cross, erected in 1632, has since attracted many pilgrims. They still keep going to the place where it stood until about six years ago when it mysteriously disappeared while a new road was constructed to the property acquired by some from abroad. (Perhaps through this reference the Department of Aude will take note and appropriate action). Let it be hoped that Duhem's drawing of that cross will not become its sole detailed evidence and a painful reminder of widespread illegal trafficking in art objects in the region. In any case, the drawing by Duhem remains a lasting evidence of his spontaneous recourse to the Virgin invoked as the mother of all afflicted. It should not be difficult to evoke Duhem's sentiments as he drew the figure which in a kneeling position under the Pietà raises his hands in supplicant prayer towards the One of whom it was never heard that anyone turning to Her would have had his prayers unanswered.

The other cross, erected in 1638, a plain one in the midst of the communal field, Duhem drew on August 21, 1916, less than a month before his death. He made that simple cross speak by emphasizing its size. He did so by letting it be seen from an angle whereby it appears equal in height to the mountain behind and thus dominates the field. A purely artistic technique, but hardly in the case of Duhem who never pretended to show what he was not convinced about. He let his whole life be dominated by the cross, the very act that alone makes a Christian for whom "every treasure of wisdom and knowledge is deposited in Christ" (Col.2:3). It was through identification with Christ that Duhem's vast knowledge of science, including its philosophical and historical dimensions, took on a prophetic character.

[S. L. Jaki, Scientist and Catholic: Pierre Duhem 109-10]

Evicting the Creator

2010-09-06T08:42:00.003-04:00

The title of this post may sound familiar to readers of this blog. It is, of course, the title of Fr. Jaki's review of Prof. Hawking's grand foray into popular science called 'A Brief History of Time'. Now some twenty-two years after the publication of that bestseller, Hawking is making waves in the news-sphere with his latest book 'The Grand Design' to be released shortly. The 'God' question and the search for the elusive Theory of Everything (ToE) feature heavily in the previews and if reviews of the proof editions are accurate, then the grand conclusion of this latest venture may not be too different from his prior writings:
"the authors made their point quite convincingly: philosophy is dead in the sense of answering the most mysterious of life's questions. It is up to science, and scientific theory, to provide clues to the true answers, as philosophy in its most ancient forms has taken a back seat, but modern philosophy, that of scientific philosophy, has taken root." From 'Memoiai's' Amazon Review.
Old wine in new skins? Here are some extracts from Fr. Jaki's review of the original ~ JT.

"What place then for a Creator?" This question of Professor Hawking received wide publicity in a two-page profile on him in Time just about a month before his book appeared in tall piles in countless stores. Professor Hawking makes no secret of his aim: it is to find the answer to the question of the why of the existence of all matter, mind, and will in terms of that science, physics, which presumably can answer questions only about the how of purely physical processes.

Professor Hawking philosophizes from the start and he does it badly. He does not notice the irony when at the end he complains about the comedown of philosophy from its Aristotelian heights to its Kantian shallows and to the wastelands where philosophers offer only talk about talk. [His] book is less about the history of time than about his own ideas on it. Worse, if in any prestigious post of physics, then certainly in the Lucasian Chair one should have at least been familiar with a famous twentieth-century remark that the reality -so fleeting and so fundamental - of the now is beyond the competence of physics. Coming as it does from Einstein, the remark should seem important for two reasons. One is the rather unfortunate predicament of our culture which takes note of a basic philosophical truth only when registered by a prominent scientist. The other is that Hawking has Einstein for his chief antagonist, though for a reason which was not altogether unknown to Einstein, but for which Hawking's insensitivity is almost complete.

Professor Hawking's chief purpose is to create the impression that a perfectly homogeneous beginning of the universe is a most plausible state of affairs and is therefore in no need of further explanation. His road there leads through a recount of the latest research on black holes to which he contributed greatly.

Not only hypothetical but philosophically wholly unjustified is the very earliest phase of the universe as imagined by Professor Hawking. He begins with a most unjust report about the address which Pope John Paul II gave to a conference on astrophysical cosmology at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Fall of 1981. According to Hawking, the Pope told the participants that "it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God" (p. 116).

As anyone can ascertain from pp. xxvii-xxxii in the thick volume of the proceedings of that conference, published in 1983 under the title, Astrophysical Cosmology, the Pope merely noted that it was not within the competence of the physical method to discuss the origin of the universe insofar as it is a creation out of nothing. The Pope's reminder was merely an echo of a remark by James Clerk Maxwell, after Newton the greatest physicist at Cambridge University: "One of the severest tests of a scientific mind is to discern the limits of the legitimate application of scientific methods." Only physicists who think that physics enables them to observe the nothing would ever have any problem with that wise and fully scientific reminder.

Professor Hawking makes it clear right then and there that he wants to be one of those physicists. Their number is fairly large, as most physicists have subscribed for over two generations now to the ontological fallacy of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics [i.e. an interaction that cannot be measured exactly (in the operational sense), cannot take place exactly (in the ontological sense)], though relatively few of them are so flippant with reality as are Professor Hawking and some of his colleagues.

Scientifically the saddest aspect of Professor Hawking's book is his failure to refer to Gödel even once. I cannot imagine that Professor Hawking would be as ignorant about Gödel's incompleteness theorems as was a world-famous Nobel-laureate expert on quarks, gluons, and charms as late as 1976. The luminary in question, a fellow panellist with me at a conference attended in that year by more than 2,000, was rather miffed when I told him that he would certainly fail in his attempt to come up within three months or even three years with a necessarily true theory of fundamental particles. Such a theory, he believed, would tell us why the universe is what it is and cannot be anything else, and that therefore it need not have been created.

Professor Hawking seems to be unaware of a point I have been making since 1966 in the pages of books published by leading university presses, including my Gifford Lectures given at the University of Edinburgh in 1975 and 1976. The point is that Gödel's theorems exclude the possibility of necessarily true theories about the universe. Physical or cosmic infinity can have no abstract or purely geometrical proof. The geometry of a cosmology may of course be so satisfactory, so simple, and so symmetrical as to suggest that it is the necessary form of physical existence. The philosophical fallacy latent in that suggestion should be clear. Here the scientific fallacy should be recalled briefly. According to Gödel's theorems, no non-trivial set of mathematical propositions can derive its proof of consistency from the set itself. Consequently, the cosmological theory in question, that obviously implies many non-trivial mathematical propositions, has to obtain its proof of consistency from a proposition lying outside the set of those propositions.

Those familiar with the fallacy of regress to infinity would now be fully entitled to say, sapienti sat. Those not so wise should perhaps turn to Professor Hawking for an answer to the question why he as a cosmologist chose to ignore Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Had he considered them, his book would not have become a futile move to evict the Creator from the business of creating nothing less than the universe itself.

[Extracts from 'Evicting the Creator', Chapter 10, The Only Chaos and Other Essays (1990) pp. 152-161]

An Important Link: PL of St. Augustine

2010-08-25T11:35:00.002-04:00

I have a wonderful thing to tell you, something I just learned.

The following link, http://www.sant-agostino.it/latino/index.htm will take you to the complete Latin text of the Patrologica Latina of the Opera Omnia (complete works) of St. Augustine. My hearty thanks to those who worked on it - let us remember them in our prayers.

This is of great importance to us who study SLJ (and therefore PD also) as by means of this link you have access to St. Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram - his commentary on Genesis which SLJ quotes in several places regarding the supposed "conflict" between Science and the Faith. It provides the complete answer to all the whining nonsense we are still hearing today, some 1400 years after the book came out.

I know it's in Latin; I don't yet know of an English source for it. But it is far better than nothing, and perhaps someone who knows of an English text or web page for it will tell us.

To save you time in looking up the reference, here is how SLJ tells it:

...he [St. Augustine] wanted no part of a study of the Bible which purposely ignored the well-established results of scientific studies. He put the matter bluntly: “It is often the case that a non-Christian happens to know something with absolute certainty and through experimental evidence about the earth, sky, and other elements of this world, about the motion, rotation, and even about the size and distances of stars, about certain defects [eclipses] of the sun and moon, about the cycles of years and epochs, about the nature of animals, fruits, stones, and the like. It is, therefore, very deplorable and harmful, and to be avoided at any cost that he should hear a Christian to give, so to speak, a ‘Christian account’ of these topics in such a way that he could hardly hold his laughter on seeing, as the saying goes, the error rise sky-high.” Such a performance, Augustine remarked, would undercut the credibility of the Christian message by creating in the minds of infidels the impression that the Bible was wrong on points “which can be verified experimentally, or to be established by unquestionable proofs.” While ignorance on the part of Christians was reprehensible, not every detail of knowledge about nature possessed, as Augustine was quick to note, the same measure of certainty. Beside incontrovertible facts there were probable hypotheses and simple conjectures. When some statements of the Bible collided with the latter, Augustine urged caution. A case in point was the question whether celestial bodies, stars in particular, were animated or not. As reason and observation provided no decisive evidence, nor did the Scriptures seem to be explicit, the matter was open to further inquiry. When, however, a question appeared to be settled in a convincing manner by scientific reasoning, Scriptures had to be reinterpreted. Clearly, the biblical phrase about God stretching out the firmament as a tent (skin) clashed with the sphericity of the earth. This naturally demanded a spherical covering, which was also suggested by the motion of the planets and stars. Augustine was not reluctant to give reason its due: “The Bible contradicts those who affirm something which is false; for that is true which is asserted by divine authority and not that which is conjectured by human frailty. However if perchance, they [the heathen] should prove it [the sphericity of the heavens] with evidences that cannot be doubted, it remains to be shown that what is spoken of as a tent, does not contradict those true demonstrations.”
[SLJ "The Leaven of Confidence" in Science and Creation 182 quoting Sancti Aureli Augustini De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim,edited by J. Zycha, in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. XXVIII, Sec. III, Pars 1 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1894), pp. 28-29 (Book 1, chap. 19); p. 62 (Book II, chap. 18); p. 46 (Book II, chap. 9)]

The Mystery of the University

2010-08-24T11:11:00.002-04:00

A reader recently commented here, asking about Jaki and Duhem on "geocentrism". Of course this term comes up frequently in Jaki's studies on the history of astronomy, and in other settings such as his Bible and Science. Trying to go through all the citations would be the work of a little monograph, and I have no grad students to assist. (Not yet, anyway; if you are looking for a topic, or an advisor, do let me know, though it will have to be a remote kind of advice.)

Anyhow, I was going over the citations, at least the fifty-odd I could readily get from AMBER. The commenter wondered what that is, and you may also. AMBER is my term for my electronic collection of texts, mostly Chesterton and Jaki, and a few related authors - books I own, which I have taken the ridiculous amount of time necessary to scan and proof and arrange for my own use. Since most of GKC is already on the net in some state or other, and SLJ's is still under copyright, there is no expectation that it will become a public tool, alas. And yes, Father Jaki knew and approved of my work; in fact he came to rely on it very heavily for his own work. (Does this mean I was in the role of "grad student" to SLJ? History will have to decide.) Of course being a computer scientist makes all the difference, especially considering that my doctoral work was on searching biological sequences... but never mind that now.

As I was saying, I was going over the citations for "geocentrism" and found one which I thought was quite apropos, especially considering a link to another book I am presently reading in my work towards this mysterious "university" I mentioned previously. It is an instance of the remarkable Chestertonian character one may see in SLJ's writing, relating widely divergent matters to illuminate an idea. Here it is:

Nothing is more difficult than to speak of the brain-mind or mind-body relationship. It is a mysterious coin with two luminous sides. The only way to handle it is to follow the advice once given about a tax coin and render both mind and body their respective dues. In a sense the Thomistic doctrine of the soul as the form of the body states precisely this. It is a doctrine respecting facts, refractory though they may be to the impatience of reductionism. Lacking intellectual patience, Descartes from the start read his own mind into Scholastic terms. Had Descartes appreciated Thomas's doctrine of soul, he would have kept equal respect both for Thomas's emphasis on the priority of the sensory (thoroughly misunderstood by Locke and other empiricists) and for his simultaneous emphasis on the active role of the intellect (intellectus agens), mistakenly viewed by many nowadays as a vote by Thomas for idealism. Both emphases could but degenerate into shibboleths of empiricism and idealism once they were no longer considered as two sides of one and the same coin. Had Descartes pondered this, he would have retained a healthy respect for the sensory and experimental. He might even have perceived that the experimental, being inexhaustible in new data, casts a pallor on purportedly definitive systems. At the same time he might even have spotted for the intellect a healthier role than an intuition of all basic truths in one fell swoop which puts an end to any further creativity. The reward for acknowledging the mysteriousness of the mind-body relationship would have been a notion of science as an open-ended enterprise with ever new challenges and exploits.
Behind the debacle which is Descartes' performance in physical science lies a disastrous bargain. He wanted the coin of truth at the price of eliminating all mystery. The transaction secured for him only his own perception of extension, or space in a broader sense, which he took for an utterly luminous, ultimate, and exhaustive verity. In more technical parlance, he bargained for Euclidean geometry, which certainly fitted man's experience of his immediate surroundings, as a universally valid expression of reality. Thus Descartes performed, long before Kant though to have done it first, that turn which became called Copernican, although it was the very opposite of what Copernicus performed. What Copernicus did was to transform geocentrism into heliocentrism, and let heliocentrism rest on theocentrism, the best, even the only safeguard against anthropocentrism of any kind. Copernicus never tried to refashion Christian anthropology, let alone to dictate to the Creator.
[SLJ Angels, Apes, and Men 19-20]

As you see, this excerpt contains some wonderful cross-links. Of especial interest to me in one of my present tasks is the mention of "Thomas's emphasis on the priority of the sensory" - this is emphasized and brought to a new drama in Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas which I will forgo quoting just now.

But the other cross-link is to an interesting little volume I am reading at the moment, and I will give you just a sample. The link wil lbe obvious:

If there were no Catholic Universities, the academic world would be the poorer for it.
The reason Academe would be poorer is that it would lack an advocate of mystery.
[Francis C. Wade, S. J. The Aquinas Lecture 1978: The Catholic University and the Faith]

The author goes on to explain this remarkable thesis, but I have not finished the entire text (though it is short).... perhaps I ought not have quoted it without grasping the conclusion, but this point is far too important to allow to slip by. The right sense of this "mystery" - and both Wade and I see several wrong senses - does indeed give us hope - and even more, a thrill. It is, as Chesterton would put it, the sense of wonder, the sense of Surprise.

We of the Duhem Society ought to be in wonder, ought to continually seek for the Surprise - which is the Reality God gave us.

Jaki on the University

2010-08-20T16:18:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I posted this on the blogg of the American Chesterton Society which alludes to a possible new University. (See the PS at the very end of the post.) In my consideration of Newman and Jaki as well as Chesterton, I found two very important quotes which I think you will appreciate.
--Dr. Thursday

I think that the tripartite division of functions at a college or university should be carefully respected: students should learn, instead of trying to teach; the faculty should teach instead of trying to run the place; the administration should do its job unfettered, though not to the point of aggravating the teachers by over-administering them.
[SLJ A Mind's Matter 29]

If anything bears witness to the modernity of the Middle Ages, universities do. Modern life is inconceivable without universities, but this was no less true of medieval life which saw their rise in the first place.
[SLJ The Only Chaos 36]

Happy Birthday, Father!

2010-08-17T10:31:00.002-04:00

Today, August 17, 2010, marks the 86th anniversary of the birth of Stanley L. Jaki, OSB. In memory of this day, here is a curious excerpt from Father's first book on science and history. It is curious because it mentions his birthday, but also because it gives a striking image of the importance of engineering to science, of having a wider view, of the critical need to be attentive to precision, and many other things. It is well worth your careful attention.

And do not forget to toast SLJ today at dinnertime!

--Dr. Thursday

The appeal of the Copernican system did not lie in the precision it permitted for calculating the position of the planets. In this respect it was at best equal to, but did not surpass that of Ptolemy, in spite of the claims of Rheticus to the contrary. Rheticus of course was duty bound to praise both his master's observations "made with the utmost care" and the results that coincided "to the utmost degree of exactness with the observations of all scholars." The fact, however, was that Copernicus' instruments were almost crude, and that no more than twenty-seven of his observations entered into his epoch-making work. The rest of his data were borrowed from the ancients. Being shut in himself, far removed from the main thoroughfares of the world, Copernicus could hardly realize that ocean navigation and the progress of technology were just beginning to force on science a new and hard look at the exactness and reliability of measurements.

Such needs often remain long submerged until suddenly, owing to some unexpected incident, they break to the surface. The impulse that brought the streams of precision and of science forever together was touched off by a partial eclipse of the sun witnessed by fourteen-year-old Tycho Brahe, who was studying rhetoric and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. That such phenomena as eclipses occurred as predicted had a simply overpowering effect on Tycho's mind. Tycho threw in his lot irrevocably with astronomy. Three years later, already in possession of all available astronomical tables, he found on the night of August 17, 1565, that Jupiter and Saturn were so close as to be hardly distinguishable. To his great shock both the Alphonsine and the Copernican tables were wide of the mark in fixing the date for this event. The former erred by one month, the latter by several days.

For Tycho this represented an intolerable state of affairs. As he had correctly diagnosed matters, the situation could be remedied only if astronomy developed an absolute dedication to the construction of better instruments. In pursuing this end, Tycho had no equal in his day. Before long his rewards came in ample measure. His huge sextant, equipped with a table of figures indicating the errors involved in his observations, played the decisive role in showing the superlunary position of the nova of 1572 and of the comet of 1577. His long list of carefully taken data delivered a mortal blow to Aristotelian cosmology and established Tycho as the foremost astronomer of his time.

[SLJ The Relevance of Physics 240]

Jaki on today's feast of the Assumption of Mary

2010-08-15T16:50:00.002-04:00

The words "pray for us sinners..." reveal their appropriateness in most unusual and unforeseen occasions. For the writer of this book one such occasion came as he was sitting in the front pew of the Chiesa de' Fratti in Venice gazing at Titian's "Assumption," a masterpiece also by its monumental size. He did as a teacher of his had done in the early thirties in traveling by train from Hungary to Berlin through Dresden. He stopped there, took a cab to the Zwinger, went straight to Raphael's Sistine Madonna, sat before it for two hours, and then rushed back to the train station to continue his journey. I had only half an hour to spend in that Chiesa and wanted to spend all that time in gazing at Titian's masterpiece.
[SLJ Twenty Mysteries]

A personal note from Dr. Thursday: If I am ever in Europe, I hope I will remember to do this. There are many things on my list - none of them the usual "tourist" things, but all of them thrilling in a Catholic or scientific or musical - that is to say, in a Human fashion... And I have so many friends on the eastern side of the Atlantic, too... Ah, well - someday, perhaps, God willing.

Litany of the Most Precious Blood

2010-08-14T15:59:00.002-04:00

It is wonderful to be back after my lengthy absence and to also have good news to share with the readers of the Duhem Society Blog! Over the past few months I've had grueling exams and research papers to contend with and at last they are complete! My thanks to those to kept my travails in their thoughts and prayers. So much has happened since I last posted, not least the establishment of the Fr. Jaki Foundation which is a very exciting development! Today, let me share with you news of the publication of father's final litany commentary, the Litany of the Most Precious Blood, which is presently available from the realviewbooks.com website. Reprinted below is father's explanation of the impetus for this book.

~ Jakian Thomist

In early January 2009, the manager of Real View Books forwarded to me an e-mail from a priest in Canada. He wanted to know whether the author of The Litany of Saint Joseph: A Commentary would consider writing a similar book on the Litany of the Precious Blood. This was the first time I heard that there was such a Litany, although I knew full well of the Feast, indeed a Solemnity, of the Most Precious Blood celebrated on the first day of each July. First I thought that this was one of the dozens of litanies which popped up during post-Tridentine times. Actually its origins go back to the thirteenth century and has since taken on many forms, of which one, thoroughly revised in 1960, became the latest addition to litanies approved by the Holy See for public use in the Church. The priest in Canada received within a day or two my assurance that I would give a serious thought to his suggestion.

The writing of a commentary on each of the Litany's twenty-four invocations presented little problem and indeed offered most welcome opportunities as it immersed my mind in topics most spiritual. More problematic was to find sufficient material about the history of the Litany to be dealt with in the introduction.

Fortunately I had to be in Rome in March 2009 for delivering a series of lectures (more on them later), I could plan on getting proper information from the central offices of the Missionaries of the Most Precious Blood. In that expectation of mine I was not disappointed. They provided me with the best published material on the history of the Litany and also on the life and work of their founder, Saint Caspar del Bufalo, a most zealous promoter of the devotion to the Most Precious Blood. He was also a chief missionary in the Pontifical States during the 1820s and 1830s, a mission land in those years.

In short, the typescript of the commentary on the Litany was essentially ready by the end of March 2009 and joined the list of minor works of mine that had been completed and in part published by then.

(Extract from 'Three more years' additional chapter to Fr. Jaki's autobiography)

Homer Nods....

2010-07-31T09:46:00.003-04:00

This post is in the form of an "erratum" I happened to note when searching for something about Chesterton in Jaki's works, and I could have easily missed it - except that just two days ago (Thursday July 29) I had posted on the ACS blogg about Chesterton's 88th anniversary of hic conversion - which was July 30, 1922.

Now, the erratum is this, from SLJ's collection of essays:

A past master of paradoxes, Chesterton defined their purpose as a means to awaken the mind. His own personal life provided at least one big paradox which keeps haunting the minds enthralled by his ever-alive massive literary output. The paradox in question is the long delay - almost ten, perhaps as long as twenty years - which it took for him to match his crusade for Catholic orthodoxy of dogma and morals with his becoming a convert to the Catholic Church. He did so on June 30, 1922, the Feast of Corpus Christi. His death, on June 14, 1936, fell on Sunday within the Octave of that most Roman Catholic Feast.
[SLJ, "GKC as RC" in Catholic Essays 93]

So if you have this book you may wish to insert a slip of paper at that page regarding this information. To make this curious slip on SLJ's part even more curious, it turns out that in 1922 the feast of Corpus Christi was Thursday June 15, not June 30, which was a Friday. The other detail about the date of GKC's death is correct, and part of a famous joke about GKC's size, because the Introit of that date speaks of God leading the writer into a "LARGE place". [see Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 651, quoting Psalm 17, the Introit for the Sunday within the Octave of Corpus Christi]

Am I, perhaps, being too hard on a very minor detail? No; Father Jaki's own academic efforts were always attuned to precision in details. For example, I can simply cite his own brilliant observation on a most ridiculous slip on the part of a Chesterton biographer, who in describing GKC's conversion, at which both Father O'Connor and Father Rice were present, wrote that "Frances waited outside while they heard Chesterton's confession." [SLJ "GKC as RC" in Catholic Essays 107 (emphasis added) quoting A. S. Dale The Outline of Sanity 234. Note, however, that SLJ's footnote on this contains another slip, calling Maisie Ward "Mr. Ward"!] To set the matter clear, Maisie Ward reports what happened:

While G.K. was making his confession to Father O'Connor, Frances and Father Rice went out of the chapel and sat on the yokels' bench in the bar of the inn. She was weeping.
[Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 465]

So - am I being too hard? Well... given my own experience in working with him on a new edition of Science and Creation, I am sure that Father would have readily made the correction in a future edition. Given the huge amount of text from Father Jaki's pen, it seems all too likely there are occasional lapses like this - and most of them trivial. He, like me is human, and liable to err - in this SLJ and GKC always sung in unison the Church's continual warning: to avoid sin we must watch and pray. Moreover, we know that in proofreading another pair of eyes can see far better than our own...

But there is a certain additional richness for us to note here - and it is fittingly noted by Chesterton himself:

To explain this peculiar kind of public value one must understand one of the deepest differences, and perhaps diseases, of our time. It was the mark of the art of the past, especially the art of the Renaissance, that the great man was a man. He was an extraordinary man, but only in the sense of being an ordinary man with something extra. Shakespeare or Rubens went with the plain man as far as the plain man went; they ate and drank, and desired and died as he did. That is what people mean when they say that these gods had feet of clay; their giant boots were heavy with the mire of the earth. That is what people mean when they say that Shakespeare was often coarse; that is what people mean when they say that he was often dull. They mean that a great poet of the elder kind had spaces which were idle and absent-minded; that his sub-consciousness often guided him; that he sprawled; that he was not 'artistic'. It is not only true that Homer sometimes nodded; but nodding was part of the very greatness of Homer. His sleepy nod shakes the stars like the nod of his own Jupiter.
[GKC "They Tell a Story" in The Apostle and the Wild Ducks 49]

Note: this famous phrase "Homer nods" is derived from Horace's Ars Poetica 402.

an important comment

2010-07-20T16:17:00.003-04:00

This comment was recently posted, but it is too important to leave there.
At some point we should consider a joint conference - that is, if we ever get around to having conferences.

--Dr. Thursday

Dear Duhem Society,

Fr. Stanley Jaki addressed a number of our Catholic Association of Scientists and Engineers meetings between 1992 and his death. We have a web site at www.cas-e.org that announced some of his lectures. There is also a poem "A Tribute to Pierre Duhem" that I wrote to make Duhem's life more known and easily remembered. Perhaps you would like to read it.

I also make an public access interview of Professor Ariew about Duhem and his contributions and placed it on youtube.

Best Regards,
Dr. Francis J. Kelly
President
The Catholic Association of Scientists and Engineers

News: Angelo speaks at Chesterton Day

2010-07-07T10:28:00.002-04:00

Ah - you read that title and wonder: Why is Dr. Thursday talking about Chesterton on the Duhem Society blogg?

For two - or three - reasons. First, Chesterton deserves to be included among our Great Teachers, with Duhem and Jaki. His humour and steadfast pursuit of truth and love of God are axiomatic for us. He gives us the necessary balance, the warm heart which - no, I should write the BURNING HEART - which keeps our brains tempered and accurate.

Second, because Jaki was a great student of Chesterton. If you wish an excellent introduction to Jaki's writing, start with his little volume, Chesterton a Seer of Science. It is just as true the other way: if you know Jaki and want an excellent introduction to Chesterton, you should start with that same book. We can speculate whether Duhem had known of Chesterton: there is this interesting bit in SLJ's book on Hélène:

Hélène, who by then had many opportunities watch her father draw impressive landscapes, must have seen him refer to the enormous difference between a good drawing and a snapshot of the same scenery. Undoubtedly it was this graphic vividness and richness of detail that drew Duhem toward Dickens whom he used to read aloud at home in I evenings when Hélène was a child. Duhem's attachment to Dickens around the turn of the century was not a vote for novelty. Dickens' works had been in eclipse even in his own land for several decades before Chesterton threw a powerful light on his perennial value in 1908.
[SLJ "Reluctant Heroine: the Life and Word of Hélène Duhem" 59]

And there is also a curious suggestion that Chesterton may have known of Duhem's work - a suggestion which I do not think Father Jaki observed. This excerpt is from the dialog between MacIan, a Catholic, and Turnbull, an atheist:

[MacIan said:] "...there are only two things that really progress; and they both accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill or down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse; but they have steadily increased in certain definable matters; they have steadily advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things, it seems, that ever can progress. The first is strictly physical science. The second is the Catholic Church."

"Physical science and the Catholic Church!" said Turnbull sarcastically; "and no doubt the first owes a great deal to the second."

"If you pressed that point I might reply that it was very probable," answered MacIan calmly. "I often fancy that your historical generalizations rest frequently on random instances; I should not be surprised if your vague notions of the Church as the persecutor of science was a generalization from Galileo. I should not be at all surprised if, when you counted the scientific investigations and discoveries since the fall of Rome, you found that a great mass of them had been made by monks.
[GKC The Ball and the Cross]

Another time we can explore this more fully - it certainly seems to be a strong suggestion - indeed a handy synopsis - of Duhem's Systeme du Monde and Jaki's Science and Creation (see especially chapter 8, "The Leaven of Confidence" and chapter 10 "The Sighting of New Horizons". But let us defer it for today.

For there is a third reason I have for mentioning Chesterton here. Simply because Angelo, one of our members, recently spoke at the Chesterton Day activities in Italy - and he is also involved in the foundation of the
Irish Chesterton Society.

We should all look forward to hearing more about this. Chesterton and Jaki are irrevocably interlinked; Jaki and Duhem are irrevocably interlinked. We who seek truth should take advantage of their light - which is a reflection of the One Light.

Change and Endurance

2010-06-21T09:47:00.002-04:00

Yes, it has been a while since I've posted - things have been busy for me. Time has been speeding by - but as today marks the solstice, it is good for us to remember what changes - and what endures.

Instances are numerous in the Psalms when resolution of the sinful individual's unstable predicament is given with a reference to the confidence which the stability of nature as a work of the Creator should inspire (Ps35, 80, 120). In Psalm 73 the lamentation over the destruction of Jerusalem has its denouement in the look at God's firm hold over the created realm:
Yours is the day and yours is the night.
It was you who appointed the light and the sun:
it was you who fixed the bounds of the earth:
you who made both summer and winter. (Ps 73:16-17)
That God's creative action, which is a function of his mere word, is stable is an idea so natural that it represents a backdrop in Psalm 117 to continued reference to the permanent validity of moral laws:
Your word, O Lord, for ever
stands firm in the heavens:
your truth lasts from age to age
like the earth you created. (Ps 118:89-90)
No wonder then that the unfailing processes of nature can serve as a supreme token of the certainty of the enduring rule of the Messiah in his kingdom:
He shall endure like the sun and the moon
from age to age . . .
In his days justice shall flourish
and peace till the moon fails...
May his name be blessed for ever
and endure like the sun. (Ps 71:5-7, 17)

What is particularly telling in all these passages is the naturalness of the reference in them to the order and stability exuding from creation (Ps 92, 95, 148). Hesitation in that respect is declared to be the sad privilege of fools (Ps 13 and 52). Evidences of stability are the sun and the moon as "faithful witnesses in the sky" (Ps 88:37-38) and the stars by being fixed there and by their fixed number (Ps 146:4-6). Thinking about the sky as a tent stretched out is no obstacle to seeing it as something to stand firm forever (Ps 103:2, 5). To illustrate God's unlimited endurance the Psalmist can find no better means than a reference to the endurance of the heavens and the earth (founded in the beginning by God) as a mere transition, no more lasting than clothes that are changed and wear out (Ps 101:27-8).
[SLJ The Savior of Science 59-60]

Martin Gardner, R.I.P.

2010-05-28T09:33:00.002-04:00

Of your charity, please pray for the soul of Martin Gardner, who died recently. His name and works appear occasionally in Father Jaki's writing - see below for a famous and important example.
--Dr. Thursday

...about one-third of chapter 4 of [G. K. Chesterton's] Orthodoxy, "The Ethics of Elfland," reprinted in 1957 in, of all places, Great Essays in Science, a title in the Pocket Library. A typical first printing of titles in that series was in the tens of thousands, and copies were available not only in all bookshops but also at many newsstands in the 1950s and 1960s. There was Chesterton in the company of Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Henri Fabre, J.R. Oppenheimer, Arthur Stanley Eddington, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell, so many giants in mathematics, physics, and natural history. Chesterton was also in the company of such prominent interpreters of science as John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, and even T. H. and Julian Huxley. In such a company Chesterton needed a special introduction if not plain justification. Martin Gardner, who as associate editor of American Scientist put together that volume, did indeed apologize: "It may come as a shock to many readers," he began his introduction of Chesterton, "to find a selection by Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) included here. The rotund British writer was not noted for his knowledge of things scientific.... Yet there are times, as in the following selection, when he startles you with unexpected scientific insights." Worse, Gardner noted in way of final forewarning, the selection came "from, of all places, Orthodoxy, Chesterton's most famous work of Christian apologetics," a work published, Gardner added, perhaps to take some of the sting out of the whole business, "fourteen years before Chesterton became a Catholic." There was, of course, one unquestionable compensation for being exposed to Christian apologetics at its best. It was Chesterton's style "for which the author is justly famous - brilliant, witty, alliterative, dazzling in its metaphors and verbal swordplay, and a joy to read even when you disagree with him."

The re-christening by Gardner of the selection as "The Logic of Elfland" might have prompted Chesterton to some pointed remarks going far beyond a lecture on editorial ethics. In the whole section quoted, and in fact in the entire chapter, the word logic is hardly to be found. Not that there is no logic in it, but it contains much more. Hence Chesterton's choice of the title, "The Ethics of Elfland"...

[SLJ Chesterton a Seer of Science]

Founding science

2010-05-03T16:43:00.002-04:00

Where Honest Scientists Trace Their Roots

By Edward Pentin
ROME, APRIL 29, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Without the Christian faith, there would be no modern science as we know it today.
That was the groundbreaking assertion made by Benedictine Father Stanley Jaki, a Hungarian-born physicist and theologian, who died last year aged 84.
A man of deep faith, lucid intelligence and great creativity according to those who knew him, Father Jaki’s expertise in science and theology led him to become one of the Church’s greatest thinkers, especially regarding the relationship between science and religion.
According to Father Paul Haffner, a professor of theology at the Pontifical Regina Apostolorum university in Rome, Father Jaki’s biggest contribution to modern science was the discovery that it “arose under the influence of a medieval Christian culture.” Before then, such a claim was strongly opposed by those who thought science was born out of the Enlightenment.
“They thought the Middle Ages were a dark ages, but in fact we know historically that’s not true,” explained Father Haffner, himself a prolific author who has written "Creation and Scientific Creativity," a theological study of Jaki’s thought. He cited great scientists of the medieval Church, in particular Jean Buridan, the 14th century French priest who sowed the seeds of the Copernican revolution (Copernicus was also a priest, a fact often overlooked in the Galileo controversy).

More here.

Photos and News from the Jaki Memorial Conference

2010-04-15T16:16:00.002-04:00

Our good friend Magdalen has returned from Roma and has posted some photos from the Conference here. She also informs us of the announcement of the forming of the Jaki Foundation, about which we await further details.

Fifty Years of Learning

2010-04-11T09:03:00.003-04:00

I was not yet through with my doctoral research in physics at Fordham University in 1956-57, when it dawned on me that the real problems between science and religion, or science and the humanities, lie not in the quantitative results of science, or of physics in particular but in the philosophical interpretation of those results given by prominent physicists. Many of them turn to writing high-level science popularizations in order to gain more fame and money. A case in point is Stephen Hawking, whose Brief History of Time sold five million copies within five years after it came off the press in 1988. He tried another business coup a few years ago with The Universe in a Nutshell, which only proved that prowess in mathematical physics is no antidote against churning out sheer nonsense by using words other than numbers. In that book the universe is turned into a joke.

We have come a long way since John Henry Newman, the greatest convert of the nineteenth century, wrote in his The Idea of a University that only the idea of God is greater than the idea of the universe. Now it has become a fad with prominent scientists to swallow up the universe as if it were a pill and then regurgitate universes in umpteen numbers.

Numbers are the soul of science, that is, of exact science, of which physics is the chief form, which is closely following by chemistry, astronomy, and molecular biology. Other so called sciences, such as psychology, political science, sociology, and theology can be and should be forms of reasoned discourse but they should not be called science. For the last three hundred years, since Newton to be specific the word "science" has become increasingly associated with the word "physics," the only science that can predict the future position or states of small and largest bits of matter in a quantitative way, that is exactly. Political science cannot do anything similar. When it tries, things can go spectacularly wrong. An instance of this was Henry Kissinger's prediction, in 1988, or two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the Soviets would remain the other superpower.

I have just mentioned theology and said that it should not be called science in spite of Thomas Aquinas and other great theologians. The reason for this is that as the superstructure of revelation, theology is about purpose, about the ultimate purpose of human life. Purpose, or rather the sense of purpose, is not something that can be measured, whereas exact science stands or falls with measurements at times so exact as to called for the seventh, and even for the ninth decimal point.

In addition to purpose, or the sense of purpose, which is the determining factor of healthy or sane human life equally decisive is free will, and also equally unmeasurable. Free will cannot be measured, nor can the words is or are or were or would be or should be or will be - words that carry the burden of all human communications. Communication in turn has to be free or else everything turns into a machinery,leaving not a shred of the so-called human dignity, which again cannot be measured. It would be nonsensical to look for two pounds or two gallons of human dignity.

I found that from the start I was groping after something which became crystallized in my mind only around 1984 and in reference to my work on the relation of science and religion, which earned me the Templeton Prize, three years later. What crystallized can be stated briefly. Whenever religion, be it the one in the Bible, contains something which can in principle be measured, the Truth of that proposition stands with measurement, that is, with science. And whatever cannot be measured, such as purpose or free will, is no business of science.

[S.L. Jaki, Fifty Years of Learning, extracts from pp.4-7]

The picture of Father was taken in June 2004 provided courtesy of Antonio!

A Meditation For Our First Anniversary

2010-04-07T10:06:00.002-04:00

My dear fellow members, readers of this blogg, students and scholars and all who seek the Truth:

Today marks one year since the passing into eternity of Father Stanley L. Jaki, O.S.B. It also marks the founding of this "Duhem Society" - at least in the sense of one simple yet visible activity, the posting of periodic thoughts and excerpts and other articles about or by our Great Teachers, Pierre Duhem and S. L. Jaki. Our Society may not be very formal as yet - there are no dues and no scholarly works, no articles of incorporation or membership badges or ballots for officers. But there are interested people who come here and read - and hopefully think and pray as well - from all over the terrestrial globe, and this is a very gratifying thing. At the very least, we have begun some simple rapport of interested minds, of curious persons, of hopeful scholars - and perhaps this is better (I mean healthier) for scholarship in general, especially at this time of tension and concern which worries so many all over the earth.

It is no easy task to find a unifying passage to underscore our Society's purpose, or the solemnity of this day - but perhaps the excerpt quoted below, of Father Jaki speaking about Duhem, will be sufficient. We who claim to follow such great teachers must strive, in our work in laboratory or field, in classroom or library or office, to be "a witness to a faith whose hallmark is trust in the ultimate victory of virtue and truth."

Let us keep today in solemn memory, recalling our Great Teachers, pondering their writing if we can find some time to do this, praying for the repose of their souls and for the well-being of our fellow members. Let us especially pray for wisdom for teachers and students, for scholars of every type, for scientists and engineers, for theologians and philosophers, for priests and for laity. And let us work to do more in our second year, to the extent we can.

I join with my assistants across the Atlantic, Jakian Thomist and Angelo, in wishing you a grand Paschaltide, and best wishes on our solemn anniversary.

May the souls of Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.

Paradoxically yours,
Dr. Thursday.

For all his acquaintance with many Thomists, Duhem never grew fond of Thomistic terms. Had he done so, he might have perceived the misconception of the term "faith" as a label put by Rey on his ideas about what a good physical theory ought to be. Instead, Duhem took Rey's use of "faith" in a theological sense and replied in kind. As one walks in an argumentative mood, one can easily miss the immediate countryside and even walk well beyond one's chosen target. Duhem certainly missed the point Rey wanted to make. It is to that misunderstanding on Duhem's part that we owe his magnificent profession of Catholic faith in a scientific context. He lived that faith from childhood to sudden death in his mid-fifties with heroic fidelity and with a profoundly reasoned conviction.

Yet that misunderstanding of his contains in a nutshell a most instructive aspect of his being a believer as well as a scientist. The misunderstanding was that of a philosopher of physics, but it was his overriding interest in a perfect form of physics, a heavily philosophical objective, that prompted him to unfold with great originality previously unsuspected harmonies between faith and science. The science was physics, which even more than in his time stands, because of its exactness, for the ideal to be emulated by all other sciences. Though a theoretical physicist, he deeply appreciated the role which industrial applications played in the progress of his field. The depth of his views about the abuses of physics for destructive purposes can be gauged from his remark that the ravages of World War I constituted that gravest of all sins which is the sin against the Holy Spirit.

Here too he was led by a faith that had for its object the teachings of the Catholic Church which Duhem followed and practiced with no mental reservations. Even in most difficult situations, which State as well as Church created on more than one occasion around the turn of the century, he did not let his personal preferences override his sense of loyalty to Church authorities. Nor did he grow resentful when in vain he tried to call the attention of those in charge at the Institut Catholique in Paris to the decisive role which studies in the philosophy and history of physics were to play in the shaping of twentieth-century cultural consciousness.

Catholic institutions of learning still have to do justice to that role. They might put themselves into a commanding position if they recognized Duhem as one of the greatest and most reliable geniuses of this century of science. Those teaching in Catholic universities can always derive inspiration from his fearless courage whereby he kept disregarding the interests of his own academic career. The one who trusted so much in Divine Providence offered no hollow rhetoric when he portrayed, in his Les Origines de la statique, unquestionably the most revolutionary work in the historiography of science, even the evolution of science as something directed from above. Apart from his devotion to science, his life too was, from start to end, a witness to a faith whose hallmark is trust in the ultimate victory of virtue and truth.
[SLJ Pierre Duhem: Scientist and Catholic 24-5]

Easter Sunday Surprise

2010-04-04T17:37:00.003-04:00

Father Jaki in Rome

It is timely that on this day, the most important and joyful of the Christian calendar, we reflect on the passing of father Jaki during holy week last year. I remember my sadness upon hearing of his sudden illness and then knowing that he would not be able to reply to the letter I had sent to him. I was reading his Genesis 1 through the ages at the time and his words were echoing through my mind as I listened to the first reading from Genesis during the Easter Vigil that following Saturday.

It amazes me that almost a whole year has past since the foundation of the Duhem Society in father's memory. It was thanks to a link from The Blue Boar that I first discovered this page on the day after father died and I was struck by the wonderful initiative of Dr. Thursday to ensure a continuity of father's thought from then onwards. To think that a few months later I would be contributing myself!

A special day of lectures and no doubt lively discussion (Father would expect no less!) has been organised for the 13th April in Rome (details here) as a fitting tribute. That the programme is to be divided into four sections - biographic, scientific, philosophical and theological, points as evidence that father's talents knew no boundaries and could not be contained within one mere discipline! How I would love to be there, but a combination of work and study prevents me from travelling. (Some guest bloggers may be required to keep everyone informed of the events!)

But here is a surprise for us all to enjoy right now! It was with great amazement that I heard Fr. Jaki being discussed on EWTN's The Journey Home programme last week. Ms. Becky Mayhew, a former Southern Baptist had encountered father through philosopher friends of her deceased husband. I recommend watching the video replay through the JH Website, (the link to the current show is at the bottom of the page) or it can also be heard as mp3 in the past programs section No. 577. Fr. Jaki features 44 minutes into the show. "If you know one thing about Fr. Jaki" she says, you'll know that "he did not suffer fools gladly!"

As father's anniversary approaches on Wednesday, I would ask that all readers of the blog remember him especially in their prayers. Jaki's commitment to Christ and his tireless, unceasing work for the Kingdom is truly an example for us all to follow. May he enjoy the splendor of eternal life with Our Lord and all the saints!

Embracing the Cross

2010-04-01T19:20:00.003-04:00

And bearing his own cross,

he went forth to a place called the Place of Skull,

in the Hebrew, Golgotha where they crucified him.

~-~-~-~-~

Jesus was not only sentenced to death, but to perhaps the most cruel from of death imaginable. The Romans were not the inventors of crucifixion, but they meted it out very generously. So often did they use it that the vertical pole of the cross was left in fair numbers in the ground as a gruesome decor of the outskirts of cities and towns of the vast Roman Empire.

From the tribunal the victim had to carry the horizontal bar on which he was to hang, with arms nailed or tied to it. Such a bar was put on the shoulders of Jesus. The one who spoke of his yoke as easy to bear, took up a yoke of indescribable pains.

Jesus showed no reluctance which is a resistance. Even in the Garden of Gethsemane he did not resist to say that his Father's will be done, no matter what. No trace in him of rejecting even the mere thought of suffering, not even the thought of the torture of crucifixion. Already scourged, his head bore the imprints of a crown of thorns that might have ripped one of the arteries in his temples. A bloodstained wretch he looked every inch, who already had spent a whole night on his feet and was subjected to trumped-up charges, buffeting, taunting and vilification by the vile. He must have now been at the point of exhaustion. Far more exhausting tortures lay just ahead of him.

As he grabbed that beam, his hands and fingers must have acted with a heroic desire which is inconceivable to us humans. We even fail to see that when we hold on to something delightful, we are held in its grip. A fateful grip indeed, when it is the desire of our eyes, or the urging of our body, or our pride of life.

May we be released from such bondage by letting Jesus gain hold of us! All we have to do is take up our crosses with an eye on him as he embraces his infinitely heavier cross.

[S.L. Jaki, Fourteen Stations, pp. 6-7]

(The mosaic of our Lord comes from the webpages of the Capuchin Franciscans of SS Peter and Paul Church, Cumberland, Maryland. I encourage you to visit their site at www.ss-peterandpaul.net.)

Einstein and the Anglican ABC

2010-03-28T12:02:00.001-04:00

A friend, discouraged by the general scarcity of ethical conduct in all walks of life, suggested to me the need for a scientifically grounded ethics. As if it had not been tried before, I thought to myself! Today, I share with you an interesting story Fr. Jaki describes about the dinner-table discussion between Einstein and the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, arranged by Evangelical British MP and gentleman philosopher, Viscount Haldane.

Does relativity have an impact on morality? Well, the marketeers of '79 at Time magazine certainly thought so! But let us listen to Fr. Jaki to discover the answer.

~ Jakian Thomist

Now the Archbishop wanted to learn the truth from Einstein himself. During the dinner with Haldane sitting close to the two, the Archbishop turned to Einstein: "Lord Haldane tells us that your theory ought to make a great difference to our morals." Einstein replied: "Do not believe a word of it. It makes no difference. It is purely abstract - science." So it is reported in the Archbishop's standard biography. According to another version, which is in Philipp Frank's Einstein. His life and times, the Archbishop asked "What effect would relativity have on religion?" Einstein tersely replied, "None. Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to do with religion".

Contrary to a once famous book, Relativity a Richer Truth, relativity as science can enrich only exact science. It is will impoverish any and all who expect from science more than it can ever deliver as long as it wants to remain exact and therefore rest its own truth with quantities, the only "exact" concepts, though they are such only in their abstractness. Hence, the truth of Einstein's remark to the Archbishop of Canterbury, that the science of relativity has nothing to do with moral betterment, which, let it be recalled, forms the gist of genuine religion. Einstein certainly offered something most momentous when he said in another context that he could not distill a drop of morality from his science. Pascal, no mean scientist, would now say, I told you so.

[S.L. Jaki, A Late Awakening and Other Essays, pp. 19 & 116]

Jaki on the Annunciation

2010-03-25T10:10:00.002-04:00

Today we celebrate the singular turning point of history: the moment about 2000 years ago, when Mary of Nazareth performed the greatest act of communication in all time, saying "Be it done unto me according to thy word". And so, having received this communication, God the Son, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, took to Himself the human form of a single living human cell, in the state of the fertilized egg - and so the Word was made flesh, and began to dwell among us.

Someday perhaps there will be others to collect Father Jaki's words about this topic, which is the critical substrate of his The Savior of Science among others. But it may be well for us to consider Father's words this topic, as difficult as it may be for some - because it is a matter of science, not faith, which establishes the humanity of the Fruit of the Womb. (It is true that some scholars use the term "embryo" at this stage, but the point is that entity in question is an unborn living human being, and so true Man as well as true God.)

--Dr. Thursday.

All scholars are in a sense glasshouse-men, though not always wary of throwing stones. Quite possibly they will remain stone-deaf on hearing, very likely not for the first time, that the very first journey of Christ was a monumental demonstration of the fully human stature of the human fetus, be it but ten days old and not larger than a pinhead.

That journey of Christ began once the Angel's visit to Mary was over. "Thereupon," states St. Luke, "Mary rose and proceeded with haste to a town in the hill country of Juda," generally identified as Ain Karim near Jerusalem. Where the New American Bible has "thereupon," which, it should be noted, means according to the best English dictionaries, forthwith and right away, that is, not any sequence but a practically immediate sequence, the venerable King James gives a literal rendering, "in those days," of the Greek. But since King James it has been learned that "in those days" is a Lukean idiom demanding an idiomatic rendering. As for Mary's "proceeding in haste," the Greek spoudazein leaves no room for any slowness or tarrying. What St. Luke says implies therefore that at most a few days after the Angel's visit to her, Mary was on the road. Since quite possibly she traveled on a donkey, the less than a hundred miles from Nazareth to Ain Karim could not have taken her more than ten days.

Needless to say, Mary could not notify Elizabeth in advance. Nor was she in a state of mind to do so. Possibly she spoke to Joseph, but this is not likely. The latter seemed to have learned of Mary's being pregnant only after her return to Nazareth three months later. Why did Mary proceed in haste? Some rationalist commentators, always emphasizing run-of-the-mill psychology, insisted that Mary wanted to know for sure whether she was pregnant. She could only be sure through observing herself for another two months at least, the amount of time needed for the absence of two successive menstruations. But she could easily verify whether the aged Elizabeth, barren until then, was truly in her sixth month and gain thereby assurance that the Angel's words to her could also be trusted.

Of course Mary was anything but a doubter like Zacharias. The latter was reproved by the angel and lost his speech for disbelief. Quite different was Mary's visit by the angel who, though very authoritative in regard to Zacharias, was most respectful toward one who was "highly favored." The angel knew that since belief and grace went hand in hand, full belief was inseparable from the fulness of grace. At any rate, Mary rose forthwith, proceeded in haste, and was to experience on arrival another visitation from on High. For before she had said a word to Elizabeth, the latter, inspired by the Holy Spirit, greeted her as "the Mother of my Lord," or "the Mother of my Messiah," as most modern commentators would add.

In that greeting by Elizabeth the attention of commentators has almost invariably focused on "my Lord." No commensurate attention has been given to the fact that Elizabeth, through divine inspiration, recognized Mary as a mother, that is, one with child. That the child was the Messiah is, of course, an important. But no less important should seem the fact that the Messiah was at that time but a fetus of at most two weeks old, not much bigger than a pinhead. That fetus, which is but a cinch for modern medical techniques to wash out from the womb, that is, to abort, was the Messiah because in addition to being the Son of God, it was also a full human being. So it was recognized by the six-month-old fetus, the still-to-be-born John the Baptist, jumping with joy in Elizabeth's womb. A lucky John, whom our Supreme Court (though not the widespread medical practice) might have protected. As for the Messiah, only a two-week-old fetus, he would not have been granted any protection by that august Court of ours, or by any such Court in any country in a world that proudly considers itself civilized.

Perhaps one day, once that concrete teaching of the fetus-Jesus has shaped popular consciousness, there may develop a greater consciousness of the Feast of the Visitation. By advancing that Feast from July 2 to May 31, the Church wanted to achieve two objectives. One, a more obvious, was the upgrading of the Feast by turning it into the crowning of the month devoted to Mary. The other objective, less obvious, was the bringing closer in the Liturgical Year the Visitation to the Annunciation. If it were not for the usual closeness of March 25 to the Holy Week, it might not be impracticable to make the Visitation the octave of Annunciation. This would provide another stunning seal of the Church's respect for any and all foetus as a truly human being. But even as it stands, the Feast of the Visitation powerfully translates the principle of legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi and should thereby serve as a strong guidance in an agonizing confrontation. Of course, what happened at the Annunciation is a far greater fact than the visit made in virtue of the fact. But the actual human recognition of that fact came only with the visitation of Christ to John the Baptist, the visit of the Creator become-a-mere-fetus to the greatest of mere human fetuses ever alive in a woman's womb.

Medical science provides more and more gripping details about the fertilized ovum's quick attachment to the mother's body in a most extraordinary symbiosis of two living beings. Yet its evidences shall never become as plain and as succinct as the word "thereupon" which occurs in a most crucial point of biblical salvation history. There that word found a far more exalted purpose than to serve masters of language, however noble, such as Alexander Pope and far lesser figures in whose hands language is rapidly deteriorating to the art of how to evade issues. On being called in, so the story goes, by George II, the famed poet was threatened with the alternative: "Mr. Pope, either you produce a pun right here and now, or you shall lose your head." "Thereupon" (forthwith, right away) the poet replied with feigned apprehension: "Your Majesty? A pun? What a pun [upon]?" Needless to say, Pope did not lose his head. But Pro-Lifers may lose their heart. The state of mind of Americans being what it is, a new law on abortion (much less a constitutional amendment) is hardly a likelihood. On seeing themselves foiled in their activist strategy, however praiseworthy, Pro-Lifers may soon begin to shake their heads in despair. They will be spared if their eyes be riveted on Elizabeth's words to Mary.

[SLJ "Christ, Catholics and Abortion" in Catholic Essays]

The Inescapable God and the Perennial Philosophy

2010-03-18T14:17:00.005-04:00

As part of our liturgy to celebrate the feast of St. Patrick, we listened to the beautiful psalm number 139, titled 'The Inescapable God' in my RSV-SCE bible. This psalm is one of my favourites and one of the most philosophical. Today, I wish to share some extracts with you and Fr. Jaki's commentary in his Praying the Psalms.
.
~Jakian Thomist

Psalm 139

O LORD, you have searched me and known me!

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

you discern my thoughts from afar.

You search out my path and my lying down,

and are acquainted with all my ways,

Even before a word is on my tongue,

behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.

For you formed my inward parts,

you knitted me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you, for you are awesome and wonderful.

Wonderful are your works!

Your eyes beheld my unformed substance;

in your book were written, every one of them,

the days that were formed for me,

when as yet there was none of them.

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!

How vast is the sum of them!

If I could count them, they are more than the sand.

Ps 139, 1-4, 13-18. RSV-SCE

Those who sensed keenly, and almost all saints are an instance of this, the futility of escaping God's pursuit of the soul, must have found in this psalm a mirror for their experience. A memorable expression of this is Francis Thomson's poem, "The Hound of Heaven."

This psalm contains for modern man more valuable material for reflection than a psychological, introspective plumbing of one's motivations. The material, once properly grasped, exposes one to that mental sanity which is sound philosophy of which there is aplenty in this psalm. This is indeed the most philosophical of all psalms. Its main theme is God's omnipresence and omniscience. Most of the times the point is put across in distinctly poetic terms, such as the fastness of the wings of the dawn and the brightness of even the darkest night. But at other times the diction is worthy of the finest metaphysical poets. Only those would be taken aback by this who let themselves be blinded by the cliché that there is a radical difference between Greek metaphysical rationality and biblical existentialism. Once one admits that good philosophy begins with wonderment and keeps exuding it, it will be easy to see metaphysics blare forth from this psalm, which in fact contains utterances about infinity that no mathematician can improve upon.

And if one sees that the difference between wonderment and assent is not an opposition but a complement, one's conversion to metaphysics, as recommended by this very "biblical" psalm, may be complete. It is a metaphysics vibrant with vitality, including its spiritual kind. True enough, the Bible stands or assent, but never for a blind one. Faith, as Paul insisted (Rom 12:1), ought to be a logike latreia, a truly reasonable and well-reasoned service, a point that cannot be recalled often enough.

Those desirous of a truly perennial philosophy may find it articulated in a capsule form in this psalm. By praying this psalm devoutly we may go a long way toward obtaining the grace which is the true love of wisdom. The word "philosophy" means precisely this insofar as it aims at truth and not merely at opinions about it.

[S.L. Jaki, Praying the Psalms pp. 226-7]

Is there a universe?

2010-03-14T15:51:00.003-04:00

I remember first reading Fr. Jaki's list of publications on the inside of one of his books and this title in particular struck my interest. Is there a universe? I had never asked myself that question before! After reading a copy in 2 days, it quickly became one of my favourite books - grounded in Thomism and a classic example of father's scientific creativity.

Today, we will join in at the point where father brings the final of his six lectures to a close (imagine tiptoeing into the back row of the auditorium to listen!) and where he provides an answer to a most novel question.

~ Jakian Thomist

When it comes to the universe, Burtt's remark becomes especially true that "the only way to avoid becoming a metaphysician is to say nothing." Much less can one, even if he is a scientific cosmologist, say "everything" or universe if he refuses to be a metaphysician. It does more harm than good if the metaphysics in question is the one that begins with the mind, instead of with the objectively material. Those who started with the mind, never reached matter, a point still to be learned by scientific cosmologists through a careful study of the history of Western philosophy. But if there is no physical realm, one tries in vain to go beyond physics in that sense which is metaphysical. So much in a way of comment about Burtt's other remark, appropriate both to philosophers and scientific cosmologists, that "an adequate cosmology will only begin to be written when an adequate philosophy of mind has appeared."

What is really needed is a recovery of the sense of the real from the clutches of rank idealism and blissful endorsements of Platonism as if equations and co-ordinate systems were the foundation of reality and therefore the creators of the universe itself. Until that happens, a prominent cosmologist may but momentarily awaken from the slumber of his philosophical idealism and register his astonishment over material reality by exclaiming: "The Universe flies!" That slumber must be totally dissipated if a step is to be taken from wondering about reality to the reality of the Universe itself.

The universe itself is raised to the highest conceivable pedestal - and a very safe one at that where no intellectual vertigo threatens the cosmologist - if one says, with John Henry Newman, that the idea of the Universe is so great that only the idea of its Maker is greater. Had Newman been an idealist, he would have thereby invited a mental vertigo. What he really meant echoes a long-standing conviction, voiced among others by Aquinas, that even the Creator could not have created anything greater than the Universe. Such has to be the case if the Universe, or the converging of all, is a reflection of the coherence which God has to be. The science of cosmology is unfolding magnificent vistas about the coherence of everything under its purview, while it has to take it for granted that there is such a totality of things which deserves to be called the Universe. This ultimate physical entity will loom convincingly at the end of one's mental journey as long as one holds fast to the right starting point.

[Extracts from S.L. Jaki, Is there a universe?, 1993, pp. 124-126 ]

Linguistics and Philosophy ~ Etienne Gilson

2010-03-06T10:23:00.004-05:00

Father Jaki's interest in the writings of Etienne Gilson prompted him to ensure that some of his best works were translated into English. I have regularly referred to the rare book Methodical Realism and From Aristotle to Darwin has been recently republished by Ignatius Press. However, the final book of the trio, Linguistics and Philosophy should not escape our notice.

While father did not write an introduction to this book, he is suitably acknowledged by the translator, John Lyon:

"To Father Stanley L. Jaki, O.S.B., I owe the suggestion that this work be translated. His influence and inspiration are deeply felt and appreciated." [L&P p. vii]

Indeed I am grateful that father continues to influence our studies to this very day!

So, why is Linguistique et philosophie of particular interest? According to father, "even in its philosophical purism, that book remains a mine of arguments against those who think that language, and with it the human intellect, is a mere binary counter with feedback mechanisms." [P&P p.196]

Here below is a long extract from the preface for us to enjoy!
~ Jakian Thomist

My book has taken shape and been provoked into being by the liberty which numerous linguists grant themselves of philosophizing as linguists and presenting their philosophy as if it were a matter of the science. This same attitude is not unknown to physicists or biologists either. It does not bother them if the philosophy thus bandied about under the name of science often consists in a denial of the validity of philosophical positions accepted by those whose metier is philosophy. A scientist who, with good right, would become indignant upon seeing a philosopher with a casual acquaintance with science uttering supposedly scientific opinions, will not himself thereupon refrain from philosophizing. Holding reasonably that it is necessary to have learned a science in order to be authorized to speak about it, he does not for an instant doubt that it is a matter of indifference who may be authorized to speak of philosophy, provided only that he knows some other discipline.

For the philosopher nature is what the physicist and the biologist tell him it is. Language is for him what the linguist tells him it is. In these two cases he comes across two kinds of scientists. All of them agree to hold all philosophical speculation in the background, and as scientists, they are reasonable to refuse to go beyond the realm of reasoned observation and experience. But all of them do not observe the same attitude toward reality. Some of them, for whom the fear of philosophizing is the beginning of science, methodically ignore or deny on principle the aspects of language use which provide reflection for the philosopher. Whether or not this attitude is of use to linguistics is for linguists to decide among themselves. Others - a short time ago Edward Sapir, today Emile Benveniste and Noam Chomsky for example - are equally solicitous to prevent their science for losing its way in the indistinct landscape of philosophy, and in particular metaphysics. These, however, have great concern in their descriptions to maintain the mysterious aspects of language for him who observes it merely as a scientist. These are precisely the aspects which retain the attention of the philosopher, for whom the philosophical constraints of language are but a particular case of metaphysical constraints.

[E. Gilson, Linguistics and Philosophy, pp. xvii-xviii]

A Joyous Anniversary

2010-02-25T13:38:00.002-05:00

Friends,

Today is a very important personal anniversary since it was this night, one year ago, that I encountered the work of Fr. Stanley Jaki for the very first time! His writings have propelled me into disciplines far removed from my day job and for that insight I am eternally grateful. What a delight for me it is to share with you those words I first read from Science and Creation which have inspired me to build a Jaki library and truly engage with my faith in the wider world.

~ Jakian Thomist

With his penchant for startling dicta, Whitehead once defined European philosophical tradition as a series of footnotes to Plato. Whether this was the safest generalization to make on the topic is another matter, but it cannot be denied that the major themes of philosophy are as old as philosophy itself. Much the same holds true of scientific speculation. The word "atomic", which our age uses as its hallmark, has an ancestry leading back to the times of Pericles. Then and there it was clearly perceived that matter had to be either discrete or continuous. Decision on this represented the touchstone of truth for Democritus as well as for Aristotle. In the latter's words the verification of a strictly smallest quantity could be of such portent as to shake the very foundations of philosophy.

Ancient Greek philosophers showed equally keen interest in questions having to do with the very large. There again, a fundamental pair of alternatives was formulated with all possible clarity: the world could only be finite or infinite in extent. The counterpart of this along the parameter of time also received a most explicit attention. the classical Greeks' firm advocacy of an eternal world became a distinctive feature of their world view and science. Their concept of the eternity of a finite world, repeating itself in every Great Year, also anticipated to a surprising degree the idea of an oscillating universe, the favorite choice of many cosmologists of our day.

Reaching full maturity always prompts a look backward. Young people do not care about genealogies. Family records begin to be of consuming interest only to those who have already arrived. The interest is particularly pressing when the beginning of the journey amounts to a miracle. The miracle is the emergence of a self-sustained type of the scientific endeavour. In a world history that had witnessed at least half a dozen great cultures, science had as many stillbirths. Only once, in the period of 1250-1650, did man's scientific quest muster enough zest to grow into an enterprise with built-in vitality.

Great cultures, where the scientific enterprise came to a standstill, invariably failed to formulate the notion of physical law, or the law of nature. Theirs was a theology with no belief in a personal, rational, absolutely transcendent Lawgiver, or Creator. Their cosmology reflected a pantheistic and animistic view of nature caught in the treadmill of perennial, inexorable returns. The scientific quest found fertile soil only when this faith in a personal, rational Creator had truly permeated a whole culture, beginning with the centuries of the High Middle Ages. It as that faith which provided, in sufficient measure, confidence in the rational of the universe, trust in progress, and appreciation of the quantitative method, all indispensable ingredients of the scientific quest.

The future of man rests with that judgment which holds the universe to be the handiwork of a Creator and Lawgiver. To this belief, science owes its very birth and life. Its future and mankind's future rest with the same faith.

[S.L. Jaki, Science and Creation, 1974, p. vii-viii]

Jaki: Defender of the Chair of Peter

2010-02-22T10:17:00.002-05:00

When you examine the massive collection of the books of S. L. Jaki, you will find that most of them deal with the history of science and its philosophical underpinnings. They are the work of a holy and literary man examining the many-tongued records of centuries, as Man has struggled to understand the kosmos, the world in which we live. You will also find a collection of little booklets which are more meditative, but still contain much history - his works on various prayers and practices of Roman Catholicism. There are important translations of historically important documents in science: works of Olbers, Kant, Lambert, and Bruno, chock full of notes, addenda, corrections, rebuttals and elucidations.

You will also find two rather small books on the nature of Papacy: And On This Rock and The Keys of the Kingdom.

I have no time nor inclination to summarise them - they are both splendid studies - the first of the geographical character of Caesarea Philippi and the use of the term "sur" and "kepha" (rock) in Hebrew Scripture; the second of the nature of the tool called a "key" and its place in technology and symbol.

It may make some people uncomfortable to speak of the papacy, regardless of their place in or out of the Roman Catholic Church - but I wonder. Do these find the same degree of discomfort from the Olympics? Or from the United Nations? Or from the ISO? Perhaps one of the other large international scientific organizations, such as the IUPAC or IUBMB are a source of worry?

I urge you to find these two books and read them and consider them as the work of a scholar on a difficult topic. And ponder, if you will, what another scholar once wrote about the same topic:

There is a famous saying which to some has seemed lacking in reverence, though in fact it is a support of one important part of religion: "if God had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent Him." It is not at all unlike some of the daring questions with which St. Thomas Aquinas begins his great defence of the faith. Some of the modern critics of his faith, especially the Protestant critics of it, have fallen into an amusing error, chiefly through ignorance of Latin and of the old use of the word divus, and have accused Catholics of describing the Pope as God. Catholics, I need not say, are about as likely to call the Pope God as to call a grasshopper the Pope. But there is a sense in which they do recognize an eternal correspondence between the position of the King of Kings in the universe and of his Viceroy in the world, like the correspondence between a real thing and its shadow; a similarity something like the damaged and defective similarity between God and the image of God. And among the coincidences of this comparison may be classed the case of this epigram. The world will more and more find itself in a position in which even politicians and practical men will find themselves saying, "If the Pope had not existed, it would be necessary to invent him."
[G. K. Chesterton, The Thing CW3:325]

Frankly, I think the scientific community has already done so, hence I am unable to understand the whine sometimes heard about the topic. Perhaps we scientists ought to try being poetical once a year at the very least, and exercise our intellects on ideas such as Rock and Key-Keeper - perhaps then we shall find ourselves refreshed and ready to return to our day-to-day (and far smaller) topics again. For us in the Duhem Society, I recommend this day, February 22, as the most fitting day for such an excursion.

Postscript: I am also aware that SLJ wrote his theology doctorate on questions about Ecclesiology, but I cannot read French, so I am unable to comment on it at present.

Starting Lent with Father Jaki

2010-02-17T12:40:00.002-05:00

For your contemplation today. My suggestion for the members of the Duhem Society this Lent is to read (or re-read) SLJ's The Savior of Science, as we must become better acquainted with the Unigenitus, the Monogenes, the One Whom Pierre Duhem and Fr. Stanley Jaki followed, with heart and mind. What use is it for us to solve every equation under the sun, or annotate every reference with precision - yet lose sight of our Leader?
--Dr. Thursday

...there came those eighteen hours, beginning at about nine in the evening. During all those hours Jesus could not sit down as he was dragged from one court to another. For three hours, roughly from nine to twelve, that preceded his crucifixion, he was mocked and tortured. It was a miracle that he did not die while he was flayed from his shoulders down to his legs and felt pieces of flesh torn out of his body. The fixing of a crown of thorns on his head could have easily made him lose consciousness. Then he was sent to Herod Agrippa who added the crown of insult to his injuries. He became exhausted after the beam on which he was to be crucified had been put on his shoulders covered with wounds. A passerby had to be pressed to help him carry it for the last steps to the spot, ominously called the place of skulls.

As for the pains he suffered while he was nailed on the cross and let hang on it, physiological analysis of what went on in his body defied all imagination. Dr. Barbet, author of A Doctor at Calvary, became so identified with what Jesus suffered on the cross as to become unable to look at a crucifix again. So much about some of the trials Jesus suffered for our sake and suffered them so that we may remain strong in our trials. The Church knows why it insists on crosses with a corpus on it. Those who want crosses without corpus also know, as long as they are honest with themselves, that they obey the dictates of their naturalist theology.

Painkillers have become our most welcome associates. A large assortment of means for reducing excess body weight fills long shelves in our supermarkets. Medical insurance covers the unsightly effects of overeating. Ours is a society where two-thirds are overweight, beginning from childhood. Our Lents include no proper fasting. No place any more for hair shirts, nor for discipline, a word which also means a whip. At any rate, the rod has been banished from schools where students can enter only by passing through electronic gates, lest they carry handguns into the classroom. We Catholics think that for the last four decades ours has become a much deepened and very positive spirituality. We delve into classics on mysticism, though heedless of the greatest mystics' invariable nsistence on the need to mortify the flesh. The mental acrobatics accompanying such self-delusions are breeding mechanisms of trials with which one is not equipped to cope. Truly, it may not be sacrilegious to suggest that instead of praying, "Lead us not into temptation," we should rather pray: "Save us from leading ourselves down the rose path toward an imaginary bliss free of trials, though full of temptations to which we have already given our full assent." The petitions of the Lord's Prayer are a sequential mirror in which we can see, if we are courageous enough, the thick layers of pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-spiritual make up on our faces. May God's mercy save us from taking vice for virtue in the manner of hypocrites. Let us be saved from conforming with a world in which hypocrisy rules!
[SLJ Ours a Dearest Father (commentary on the Lord's Prayer)]

Jaki Day: Roma, April 13

2010-02-16T14:30:00.002-05:00

I have just received word that there will be a "Jaki Day" in Roma on Tuesday April 13. For more information, see here.

Methodical Realism ~ Etienne Gilson

2010-02-07T17:44:00.003-05:00

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have had a particular interest in Gilson's Le Réalisme Methodique , one of his cornerstones in realism and a book which Fr. Jaki quoted regularly from and indeed had translated by Philip Trower. Today, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its publication by Christiandom Press, here especially are some long excerpts from Fr. Jaki's introduction to this exceedingly rare book for us to enjoy!

~Jakian Thomist

Methodical Realism ~ Etienne Gilson

Introduction ~ Fr. Stanley L. Jaki

This book takes its title from its first chapter, the first of five articles written between 1931 and 1935 by Etienne Gilson. A giant among historians of philosophy, Gilson was hailed on his 65th birthday in 1949 as "le philosophe de la chrétienté" on the title page of a collection of essays written in his honour by prominent Catholic philosophers led by Jacques Maritain himself. Years later he turned eighty, Gilson was saddened though not surprised on finding that his work, which widely echoed even in secular academic circles from the late 1920s till the early 1960s in Europe as well as in the United States, suffered an eclipse out of which it only begins to emerge. As a historian of philosophy he saw more than enough of the instability of philosophical convictions and of the ever renewed contestation of long established truths by long refuted errors. He had a particular fondness for a phrase, "the wild living intellect of man," of John Henry Newman, who, as Gilson fully knew, did not offer it as an anecdote of the human mind. That Newman's thought found in Gilson a prominent defender against insinuations of subjectivism and phenomenologism was part of Gilson's life-long campaign on behalf of objective truth and of things utterly and unconditionally objective.

An aspect of that campaign, and a most incisive aspect is on hand in these articles which were published together in book form at the urging of Gilson's good friend, Yves Simon, a "fellow fighter" in Gilson's own words. What was very clear to Yves Simon, himself a Thomist philosopher of note, received ample confirmation a generation later. "Did not the article 'Le réalisme methodique', have a little of the attractiveness of a manifesto?" asked Georges Van Riet in his still standard survey, Thomistic Epistemology, or "Studies concerning the Problem of Cognition in the Contemporary Thomistic School."

By saying "little" Van Riet, professor at the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie of Louvain, admitted a great deal. Never before or after had the neoscholastic tradition as cultivated in Louvain received so challenging a jolt as in that article and the ones that followed it. In the 1930s, and even in the 1950s, when Van Riet wrote his great monograph, the issue could seem but a largely academic debate on some esoteric minutiae among neoscholastics, apparent heirs to that fondness for hair-splitting of which their scholastic forebears have often been accused. Those were the times, the reign of Pius XI and Pius XII, when pastoral policy (never a matter of infallibility) did not include a curious assumption about Catholic intellectuals - philosophers and theologians, let alone all Catholic college graduates. It was not assumed that as a rule they would think, speak, and write (to say nothing of organising and demonstrating) in a manner carefully attentive to all the consequences of one's dicta, actions and standpoints. Today, when Rome is desperately trying to clean up vast fields covered with dubious and at times plainly rotten fruits of a "mature" liberalism, the five essays here translated should reveal a prophetic instructiveness.

[Introduction to Methodical Realism, 1990, by Fr. Stanley L. Jaki pp. 7-9]

Ralph McInerny (1929-2010) requiéscat in pace

2010-01-30T13:48:00.002-05:00

I have just heard of the passing of that wonderful Thomist, Dr. Ralph McInerny of Notre Dame. Just recently I was browsing through one of his books (his A First Glance at St. Thomas Aquinas, the Thomistic equivalent to Adler's Aristotle for Everyone) and to my delight -undoubtedly to be shared by viewers of this blog! - there was an abundance of recommendations of Fr. Jaki's works! Please remember Ralph in your prayers and may he enjoy his eternal reward.

~Jakian Thomist

BYOJL #4: New Booklet by Father Jaki

2010-01-23T14:02:00.007-05:00

Real View Books has recently published a new booklet written by Fr. Jaki before his passing, on a most wonderful and beautiful topic - the Holy Eucharist. It is available from RVB for $3 and I hope that readers of the Duhem Society blog will benefit spiritually from it.

~ Jakian Thomist

What is the Mass? - by Fr. Stanley L. Jaki
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The authorization by Pope Benedict XVI of the Latin Mass as codified by Pope Saint Pius V should be enough of an indication of the perplexity of many of the faithful. They had many reasons to complain about the fact that the celebration of the Mass in the vernacular has failed to promote a vivid grasp of the awesome mystery of the Mass. This booklet was written at the request of a friend deeply beset by that perplexity. In answer, this booklet points out that the agonies felt over the improper celebration of the Mass and over the often odd participation of the faithful in it, should be seen in the light of the essence of the Mass. Enduring those agonies with faith in God is a sharing in the essence of the Mass, which is the rendering present, in a sacramental way, on the altar of Christ's self-sacrifice on the cross. Since he chose to be crucified for our sake, it behooves us to share in his crucifixion by enduring those agonies. The Mass is a breaking of the bread but only inasmuch as on Calvary Christ's body was tortured, and therefore our participation should be a modest sharing in that painful process. This participation in the Mass was brought into focus in our days by the little-known account of Cecil Raymond Humphery-Smith, a convert, about his privilege of sharing daily in the excruciating agonies that marked Padre Pio's Eucharistic celebration day after day.

Revolution or Revolutions?

2010-01-19T13:41:00.004-05:00

Fr. Jaki showed great fondness for a book by David Stove, an Australian philosopher, critiquing the famous four irrationalist philosophers of science - Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend. The book - Scientific Irrationalism - Origins of a Postmodern Cult. - is relatively unknown but doesn't fail to provoke a polarised reaction, as can be gathered by the Amazon reviews. It has been reprinted several times under different titles, my own copy is called 'Popper and After'. Part one discusses how the irrationalist philosophy is made credible through language, while part two asks how irrationalism about science began. I will be taking excerpts from this book along with comments by Fr. Jaki as we introduce these writers who have shaped the discourse on philosophy of science these past few decades. For today however as an introduction, I provide an excerpt from Fr. Jaki, as he sets their writings set in the context of Duhem and Koyre.

~ Jakian Thomist

Undoubtedly, it would pay to look into the impact that Koyre's pantheism had on his historical researches into the origin and chief characteristics of Galileo's science. Here, let me note only the price one has to pay if one accepts Koyre's contention that Duhem was wrong in claiming a continuity from Buridan through Oresme and Leonardo to Galileo and beyond. The price is that if Koyre is right, science must be taken with him for a succession of disconnected periods, a mere sequence of revolutions. Such a sequence is not a continuity and therefore cannot represent a progress.

In other words, if Koyre's critique of Duhem is accepted - and many modern philosophers and historians have accepted it - one cannot give a logical account of a fact, the fact of scientific progress which it would be absurd to deny. A telling point of that logical conundrum is that neither Koyre not his disciples - such as Thomas Kuhn of MIT, Paul Feyerabend of Berkeley, Bernard Cohen of Harvard, to mention some principal ones - give a clear definition of what they mean by revolution, while they profusely use that word. If they mean a complete break with the past, that is, with former ideas, they invite incomprehensibility of the pre-revolutionary phase as seen from the vantage point set up by the revolutionary change. To ward off the specter of incomprehensibility, they usually resort to some scientific expression, such as incommensurability, mutation, and paradigms.

The last of these is best left to Latin grammarians. They never expected their students to undergo a mental mutation or a revolutionary reorientation as they proceeded from a paradigm noun of the first declension to a paradigm noun of the second declension. As to genetic mutation, it consists in an extremely minute rearrangement of the chromosomatic material and not in its complete replacement. This is why one species can be instrumental in the rise of another species.

As to incommensurability, it occurs in a right-angled triangle with unit sides. The measure of the hypotenuse is an irrational number. Yet, no rationality was displayed by that Pythagorean of old who, on discovering the strange nature of that measure, drowned himself on the high sea. As to those moderns who cavort in the idea of incommensurability and do so in the name of their philosophies of science, they should rather take note of the Bulgarian proverb: Those who want to drown should not torture themselves in shallow waters. At any rate, they seem to ignore a principal lesson about revolutions, the point best conveyed in the French saying: Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme chose.

[S.L. Jaki, Patterns or Principles and Other Essays, p. 174-175]

Newman on Knowledge - Part 1

2010-01-16T14:01:00.002-05:00

I hope to discuss more of father's writings on Cardinal Newman in the next few months and their relevance to the philosophy of science. Following from my previous excerpts on Gilson's writings on epistemology, here today are two quotations on Newman's realism from Jaki's The Church of England as Viewed by Newman and Newman to Converts.

~ Jakian Thomist

Newman's work in philosophy was mainly about the illative sense, which is not about the basics of epistemology, where everything is decided in any philosophy worthy of the name. No philosophy can begin with a discussion of the problems of induction, which is the problem implied in the use of the mind's illative powers. Newman's occasional but emphatic statements even in the Grammar of Assent about the primacy of registering external objects would alone belie efforts that put him in the company of Kant as this was done already by W. Ward, Newman's first major biographer. As one with full access to all of Newman's manuscripts, Ward cannot be excused for not reporting Newman's remark in what eventually became published as his Philosophical Notebook, namely, that philosophers like Kant, who "have come to no conclusion", are not worth reading. Newman in fact left uncut the second half of his copy of Meiklejohn's translation of the Critique of Pure Reason. Things would have turned out much better in the post-Conciliar Church if Fr. Marechal had done the same with his own copy of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft.

Champions of the "new thinking" in theology, including its biblical branch, would not even pay heed to a telling admission of Fr. Raymond Brown that even biblical hermeneutics cannot do without epistemology. The Tractarians were innocent to all such problems, while some of them, and certainly Newman, toed the line of common sense realism in philosophy.

[S.L. Jaki, The Church of England as Viewed by Newman, p. 332-333]

~-~-~-~-~-~-~

Loss and Gain, the first book Newman wrote and published as a Catholic, is even much more than the fictional story of a conversion where Charles Reding, the hero of the story, often evokes Newman himself. This evocation derives in part from descriptions of Reding such as that he "was naturally timid and retiring, over-sensitive, and, though lively and cheerful, yet not without a tinge of melancholy, which sometimes degenerated into mawkishness." Nor did the evocation mainly rest on some graphic scenes - some amusing, some gripping, some plainly sarcastic - as from the fact that the story contains a chain of vivid argumentations between Reding and various types of Oxonians, ranging from agnostics to High Church devotees.

The chief strength of evocation lay in distinctly intellectual reflections, all markedly Newmanian also in their order. The first of them was about "the connection of fact with fact, truth with truth, the bearing of fact upon truth, and truth upon fact, what leads to what, what points are primary and what secondary". All this the young Oxonians still had to learn. Newman might have added that many Oxonians were not to learn all that even in old age. Surely, what follows in the next page in Loss and Gain foreshadows that Oxford which fell for the mirage of logical positivism which took distinction for facts and ignored almost almost all facts. The proof of this is Ayer's famous answer, "Almost all", to the question: "What was wrong with logical positivism?" Here is a part of that page from Loss and Gain:

"They hear of men, and things, and projects, and struggles, and principles; but everything comes and goes like the wind, nothing makes an impression, nothing penetrates, nothing has its place in their minds. They hear and forget; or they recollect that what they have once heard, they can't tell where. Thus they have no consistency in their arguments; that is, they argue one way to-day, and not exactly the other way, at random. Their lines of argument diverge, nothing comes to a point; there is no one centre in which their mind sits, on which their judgment of men and things proceeds."

[ S.L. Jaki, Newman to Converts: An Existential Ecclesiology, p. 50]

Blessed Niels Steensen (1638-1686)

2010-01-11T13:35:00.004-05:00

We often hear about the Catholic fathers of astronomy, but yet the Danish Catholic father of geology, Blessed Niels Steensen (or Nicholas Steno), is rarely mentioned outside of the academic arena. Described by Fr. Jaki as "the trailblazing geologist, a convert (former Lutheran), and eventually a Bishop", he was beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 23, 1988. However, today January 11, is his birthday! A celebration is in order and perhaps the best present of all would be to learn more about Blessed Niels and remember him in our prayers.

Some sources to start with are his Wikipedia page and the popular science book about him by Alan Cutler, "'The Seashell and the Mountaintop" available from Amazon. Fr. Jaki has also written on Blessed Niels and Dr. Thursday provides some long excerpts about him here.

Here are Fr. Jaki's concluding comments:

[Steno's] caution stood him in good stead. It earned him three centuries later the praise of another great Danish man of science, Niels Bohr, who commended his forebear's openmindedness in recognizing the great inadequacies in man's knowledge of his brain. Happily for science, Steno's openmindedness is still alive in many leaders of science and causes them to reach conclusions hardly different from his.
[S.L. Jaki, Brain, Mind and Computers, pp. 120-121]

~Jakian Thomist

The Realist Beginner's Handbook - Part 2

2010-01-08T17:41:00.002-05:00

Continuing from where we left off in Part One, Etienne Gilson describes the bedrock of Thomist realism in his Le Réalisme Methodique, as reproduced by E.L. Mascall in his The Openness of Being. Included are comments by Mascall in italics.

~Jakian Thomist

Knowledge presupposes the presence of the thing itself to the intellect, and we do not have to postulate, behind the thing that is in the thought, a mysterious and unknowable duplicate, which would be the thing of the thing as it is in thought but, in thought, apprehending the thing as it is.

Taine performed a great service for good sense when he defined a sensation as a true hallucination, for he showed where logic necessarily lands idealism. Sensation is what a hallucination becomes when this hallucination isn't one. We must not let ourselves be impressed by the famous 'errors of the senses' or be surprised by the enormous hoo-ha that the idealists make of them; idealists are people for whom the normal can only be a particular case of the pathological.

E.M: Gilson refuses to admit the accusation that realists are committed by their doctrine to posing as infallible; quite to the contrary:

We are simply philosophers for whom truth is normal and error is abnormal; this does not mean that truth is any earier for us to achieve that is, for example, perfect health. The realist does not differ from the idealist in being unable to make mistakes, but primarily in the fact that, when he does make mistakes, it is not because thought has erred through being unfaithful to itself but because knowledge has erred through being unfaithful to its object. But, above all, the realist makes mistakes only when he is unfaithful to his principles, while the idealist avoids them only in the degree in which he is unfaithful to his.

E.M: And finally, it is the idealist, not the realist, who takes the mystery out of existence and claims to know everything that there is to know:

To say that all knowledge consists in grasping the thing as it is does not in any way mean that knowledge exhausts the content of its object in one single act. What knowledge grasps of an object is real, but the real is inexhaustible, and even if the intellect had discerned all its details it would still be up against the mystery of its very existence. It was the idealist Descartes who believed that he could grasp the reality infallibly and at one fell swoop; Pascal, the realist, knew how naive this pretence of the philosopher was... The virtue proper of the realist is modesty concerning his knowledge, and even if he does not always practise it, he is committed to it by his profession.

[E.Gilson, Le Réalisme Methodique, pp. 87ff cited in E.L. Mascall, The Openness of Being, pp. 94-95]

EWTN: The Journey Home

2010-01-04T12:27:00.004-05:00

Those familar with EWTN probably have heard of the program 'The Journey Home', hosted by Marcus Grodi, a Lutheran convert, who interviews other converts about their entry into the Catholic Church. To my delight I have found the archive of previous shows on the EWTN site here (or through www.ewtn.com/journeyhome). There are at least 500 interviews from Dale Ahlquist to Fr. Z. Interviews which particularly caught my interest include those with Avery Cardinal Dulles, Dr. Scott Hahn, Dr. Francis Beckwith, Fr. Graham Leonard (former Anglican Bishop of London), Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and Alice von Hildebrand about the conversion of her husband Dietrich.

There are interviews also with perhaps some lesser known faces whose books may be of interest to readers of the Duhem Society blog.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker - Former Anglican and author of More Christianity, Adventures in Orthodoxy and other books on St. Benedict and the Rosary. Fr. Longenecker will also feature on tonight's show discussing the new Anglican Ordinariate.

Dr. Paul Vitz - Former Nominal Protestant and atheist and author of some very thought-provoking reads, Psychology as Religion, The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis, Faith of the Fatherless and Sigmund Freud's Christian Unconscious, which can be read online here.

Dr. Thomas Howard - Former Evangelical and author of On Being Catholic, Evangelical is Not Enough and guide books to C.S. Lewis amongst others.

Joseph Pearce - Former Anglican and author of The Quest for Shakespeare, Literary Converts and other books on Tolkien, Chesterton and C.S. Lewis

Fr. Ray Ryland - Former Episcopal priest and editor of extracts from V. Soloviev printed in The Russian Church and the Papacy

Dr. Anthony Rizzi - Physicist and author of The Science before Science: A Guide to 21st century thinking [I haven't read this book but it appears to rely heavily on Gilson and Duhem, no doubt father jaki features also!]

Fr. George Rulter - Former Episcopal priest and author of A Crisis of Saints, Coincidentialy and a book on the Cure D'Ars.

~ Jakian Thomist

Cathedra Sempiterna

2009-12-31T14:59:00.004-05:00

As we bid farewell to 2009, what greater comfort can we have than knowing that as we look upon this new year and decade, that Our Lord and His Rock are by our side. It seems to me a fitting time that I have just completed Jaki's second longest book - Newman to Converts - a work among father's best, which truly lives up to its billing as a "theological blockbuster" and serves as an excellent introduction to Newman and father's works on him.
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In a recent conversation with friends I asked, Who is Peter? And why should we listen to what he has to say? Well, gather around and listen to John Henry Newman provide the answer:
~ Jakian Thomist

Deeply do I feel, ever will I protest, for I can appeal to the ample testimony of history to bear me out, that, in questions of right and wrong, there is nothing really strong in the whole world, nothing decisive and operative, but the voice of him, to whom have been committed the keys of the kingdom and the oversight of Christ's flock. The voice of Peter is now, as it ever has been, a real authority, infallible when it teaches, prosperous when it commands, ever taking the lead wisely and distinctly in its own province, adding certainty to what is probable, and persuasion to what is certain. Before it speaks, the most saintly may mistake; and after it has spoken, the most gifted must obey.

Peter is no recluse, no abstracted student, no dreamer about the past, no doter upon the dead and gone, no projector of the visionary. Peter for eighteen hundred years has lived in the world; he has seen all fortunes, he has encountered all adversaries, he has shaped himself for all emergencies. If there ever was a power on earth who had an eye for the times, who confined himself to the practicable, and has been happy in his anticipations, such is he in the history of ages who sits from generation to generation in the Chair of the Apostles, as the Vicar of Christ and Doctor of His Church.

It was said by an old philosopher, who declined to reply to an emperor's arguments, "It is not safe controverting with the master of twenty legions." What Augustus had in the temporal order, that, and much more, has Peter in the spiritual. When was he ever unequal to the occasion? When has he not risen with the crisis? What dangers have ever daunted him? What sophistry foiled him? What uncertainties misled him? When did ever any power go to war with Peter, material or moral, civilised or savage, and got the better? When did the whole world ever band together against him solitary, and not find him too many for it?

All who take part with Peter are on the winning side. The Apostle of Christ says not in order to unsay; for he has inherited that word which is with power.

Excerpt from J.H. Newman Cathedra Sempiterna (1853)
Reprinted in full p.509-511 Appendix to Newman to Converts: An Existential Ecclesiology.

Christmas with Jaki and Duhem

2009-12-26T10:59:00.003-05:00

My very best wishes for a happy and holy Christmastide to all members of the Duhem Society, and readers of our blogg! As a kind of gift, here are two excerpts for your consideration.

(Yes, I am posting this on the second day of Christmas - we are also Chestertonian and so have a larger view of such things.)

--Dr. Thursday

On the level of nature death begins with birth. Only the supernatural given most concretely in Christ has ever provided hope that birth would not be the start of a process leading to irrevocable death. Science is no exception to this rule. As long as great creative minds in pursuit of science rested on the level of nature, science ended in stillbirths. Only when supernatural light led those minds was science given the chance for the kind of viable birth which is followed by uninterrupted growth. The latter can go on with no reliance on supernatural light which, however, remains indispensable to keep it beneficial, a blessing and not a threat. The light in question, the Christian dogma of the creation of the universe out of nothing and in time is not in itself a supernatural mystery. Unlike the mysteries of Incarnation and Trinity, the idea of creation out of nothing and in time can be glimpsed by natural man. But natural man - the Chinese and Hindu sages as well as the great Greek philosophers are the proof - could not gain a firm hold on the natural truth of creation out of nothing and in time until he was seized by the vision of a birth that came in the fullness, the completeness of time. It was the moment when Joseph reached David's town "to register with Mary, his espoused wife, who was with child. While they were there, the days of her confinement were completed."

So states Luke who in recent years has been dragged over "scholarly" hot coals for his alleged readiness to accept old wives' tales about the Nativity. Had this been the case, he would have produced another of those apocryphal gospels which have one thing in common: their prolixity characteristic of hollow chatter. Instead, Luke offers the utmost of reserve befitting one conscious of his full responsibility. About the most stupendous birth ever he states with maximum conciseness: "She gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger."

Those of Luke's readers who expected details typical of a natural birth had to be naturally disappointed. But Jerome, already quoted, saw into the essence of Luke's conciseness: Mary did what no woman weakened by regular childbirth would do. This is not the only case in Luke's nativity narrative where a miracle is hinted at by a diction which, as if by intent, avoids miraculous details. For that birth, miraculous as it could be, was never to deprive man of his tragic ability to ignore the always gentle light of divine evidence.

When seen in that light, the coming into light of the Babe becomes part of the vision about the woman clothed in the sun. Here too Blake was most original. In his rendering of it the Devil in the form of a huge dragon fails to note the woman though she, wrapped in the rays of the sun, lies under his very feet. Indeed, Blake's paintings of Mary give the same impression as Augustine's encomium of her, delivered on Christmas day, in which sublimity and realism are woven into a breathtaking texture:

A virgin conceiving, a virgin bearing a child, a virgin pregnant, a virgin fruitful, a virgin forever. Why should you marvel at this? For God had so to be born if He condescended to become a man.

The same alternative of not seeing and seeing the obvious holds true also about the birth of science. Theories about the birth of science are a dime a dozen and even more numerous are the efforts to ignore the problem posed by that birth and the stillbirths that preceded it. Historically, Buridan and Oresme may seem to be a far cry from Copernicus, from Galileo, let alone from Newton. It is not likely that Whitehead's imagination would have caught fire had he known about the third volume of Duhem's Leonardo studies published in 1913. It contained an advance glimpse of what became available in print when in 1954 the sixth volume of Duhem's Système du monde saw print after almost forty years of delay and after as many years following Duhem's death in 1916.
[SLJ The Virgin Birth and the Birth of Science 25-28]

Earlier references in this book to the lay vocation which Duhem saw in his pursuit of the perfection of physics may now appear in their strongest light which is the light of Duhem's very Christian soul. In the spectrum of that light, a spiritual light that is, a chief trait was the simplicity and the childlike character of his faith. One aspect of that character, a most Gospel-like trait, was his fondness for traditional, well proven forms of piety. At Christmas night in 1910, after he had spent almost three hours in church, attending two masses, he was unable to fall asleep, half-frozen as he was. He decided to write to his daughter about the liturgy in the nearby church of the Franciscan nuns: "They parted with their mass where Kyrie, gloria, credo were a potpourri of popular, nay vulgar tunes; instead, they chanted a mass to tunes just as bad but less ridiculous. During the second mass we had [the old tune] of 'sweet star, oboe, bagpipe' and other old memories." His letter was finished in the evening after he returned from solemn vespers in the Cathedral.
[SLJ, Scientist and Catholic: Pierre Duhem, 108]

A Celebration of Heroic Virtue

2009-12-19T14:13:00.003-05:00

On this special day as we witness the advancement of 21 heroes towards the Communion of Saints, I would like to make special mention of the two pontiffs among them Eugenio Pacelli and Karol Wojtyla.

No doubt the declaration of the heroic virtue of Pope Pius XII will be controversial, but this is in spite of impeccable scholarship by Jewish historians such as Martin Gilbert, Pinchas Lapide and Rabbi Dalin and Catholic historians Pierre Blet S.J. and unforgettably Sister Margherita Marchoine - several of her books on Pius XII are widely available. Sister Margherita is nicknamed the fighting nun and a powerful example of Father Jaki's paraphrase of the Book of Sirach "Fight for the truth and the God of truth will fight for you".

Pope John Paul II nominated Father Jaki to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1990. Here is an excerpt from father on the election of Karol to the Petrine ministry:

Cardinal Wotjyla's rising to the chair of Peter was indeed a most unexpected event, not just because John Paul I died most unexpectedly. It is said that in the morning of his entering the second conclave of 1978, Cardinal Wojtyla was making a pilgrimage to a remote Marian shrine in the lower Abruzzi and his car broke down. A stranger came along from nowhere with a car and deposited him at the door of the conclave just before he would have been barred from entering. My prediction was that either
Cardinal Wojtyla or Cardinal Hume would come out as pope from the conclave. There was no prophecy in that. A non-Italian pope had to come almost of necessity, especially in view of the fact that the sudden death of John Paul I prevented Italian cardinals from forming a solid voting block.
I was at a priestly gathering when the TV brought word of Cardinal Wojtyla's election and showed him appearing on the balcony of St. Peter's to give his first blessing urbi et orbi. I was the only priest who knelt down to receive it. Just an indication of the high tide of ecclesiological "liberalism".
[A Mind's Matter, p. 134]

Indeed, Cardinal Wojtyla was not the pope of "liberals". Father mentioned frequently John Paul II's Apostolic letter on the ordination of women shortly after such ordinations in CoE and indeed Jaki persuasively argued that this authoritative declaration was an infallible exercise of the Petrine ministry.

I will conclude with a small excerpt from Pope John Paul's address on leaving Gemelli hospital after his almost fatal shooting in 1981, a most memorable incidence of his heroic virtue. Father Jaki quotes his address as witness to the role of suffering and endurance in the Christian faith.

In giving thanks for His gifts of preserved life and restored health, I wish at this time to express thanks for yet another thing: in fact, it has been granted to me in the course of these three months, dear brothers and sisters, to belong to your community: to the holy community of the sick who are suffering in this hospital - and, as matter of fact, who constitute in a certain sense a special organism in the Church, in the Mystical Body of Christ... In the course of these months, it was granted to be to belong to this special organism...I now know better than ever that suffering is a certain dimension of life in which more than ever the grace of redemption is deeply engrafted in the human heart. And if I wish each one of you to be able to leave this hospital restored to health, I no less intensely wish that you will be able to take from here also that deep grafting of that divine life which the grace of suffering brings with it.
[And On This Rock, p. 99]

~Jakian Thomist