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New Science, Old Apologetic
By George S. Hendry

LORD GIFFORD, for whom the famous Gifford Lectures are named, laid it down that the subject of the lectures should be the knowledge of God and that the lecturers should treat it as "a strictly natural science." It was natural for him (in another sense of that poly-semantic word) to put it this way at the time he wrote his will (1885); for the immediate effect of the Darwinian revolution had been to challenge the authority of the Bible in matters of a scientific nature, and the issue had come to be seen as one between science and religion. But it became plain as soon as the lectures began that there can be no dialogue between science and religion except through the mediation of philosophy.

I

The subject of most of the lectures has been philosophy and religion, rather than science and religion, and most of the lecturers have been professional philosophers; only a minority have been scientists.

The Gifford Lectures for 1975 and 1976, delivered at the University of Edinburgh, deserve critical examination because of the range of themes, the professed thesis of the discussion, and the person of the lecturer.* Stanley L. Jaki, who was born in Hungary, is both a priest of the Benedictine order and an expert in the history of science which he teaches at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He is the sixth American to hold the Gifford lectureship since it was established almost a century ago.

Professor Jaki, unlike most of his predecessors, takes science for his base, and he seeks to show how "the road of science" links up with "the ways to God." There is, however, no direct linkage. Here, as elsewhere, philosophy is the intermediary, and Jaki's concern, in retracing the road of science is not so much to review the scientific findings of the scientists as rather to bring out the philosophical presuppositions and postulates and, in some cases, the prejudices, with which they have worked. It is a main part of his thesis that all scientists have worked on the basis of a philosophy (methaphysics and epistemology), and at times, he suggests, their scientific conclusions have been dictated by their philosophical premises.

It was also stipulated by Lord Gifford that the lectures should be popular. This can never have been easy, and some of the lecturers seem

George S. Hendry is Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology, Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary.
*The Road of Science and the Ways to God, by Stanley L. Jaki; Chicago, the University of Chicago Press, 1978. 478 pp. $21.00.

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not to have attempted it (Whitehead!) It seems well nigh impossible for one who discourses on developments in twentieth-century science, relativity, and quantum mechanics. Jaki attempts to meet the challenge by his manner of presentation, which is basically historical. His intention is, as he says, "to stress essentials and to paint the intellectual landscape in crisp and bold strokes." As regards the painting, he may be said to have succeeded, for he possesses a vivid and lively style and a gift of phrase-making. But as regards the essentials-what are the essentials, and how are they selected? It is here that readers may begin to grow uneasy, particularly as they note Jaki's way of telling the story. The story, as he tells it, has the air of a court-room trial, in which the author assumes the role of prosecuting attorney, bent not so much on establishing his own case as in refuting that of his opponent, and resorting at times to some of the less reputable practices of the court-room. The freedom with which the author dispenses epithets like atheistic, agnostic, pantheistic, positivistic, etc is bound to raise some question as to his objectivity. It is unfortunate that the author, who evidently possesses an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of science, should have chosen to present it in this manner.

There is a third stipulation which Lord Gifford made, viz., that the subject be treated "without reference to, or reliance upon any supposed special, exceptional, or so-called miraculous revelation." It is not clear whether the implied contrast in his mind was general revelation, as his language suggests, or natural theology, or whether he drew a distinction between them, but it has generally been recognized in modern theology that they must be distinguished. General revelation, in the sense of a revelation of God in the works of creation, apart from special revelation in the events of saving history, is a different thing from natural theology in the sense of a construction of "ways to God" with materials drawn from nature alone Jaki ignores the distinction, he speaks mostly of natural theology, but it is a natural theology "steeped in Christian faith," which is a dubious concoction, and it is identified as "Christian theism." He claims to find it in the Bible, and he cites texts from the Psalms and from Paul, but he fails to recognize that his concept of natural theology, which he describes as inference from nature to God, becomes explicit for the first time in the Wisdom books of the Apocrypha and can hardly be read back into the Psalms and the Pauline writings which offer what might be more aptly described as inference from God to nature. The Wisdom books are products of Hellenistic Judaism, and clearly more Hellenistic than Judaic. The eloquent statement of the cosmological argument in Wisdom 13 has no parallel in the canonical Scriptures, and the God, whose existence is proved, is the "craftsman" of Plato ( 13:11), who "created the world out of formless matter" (11:17), and who "arranged all things by measure, number and weight" (11: 20). It is a far cry from this God, "the God of the philosophers," to "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. "

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II

Jaki's confusion of natural theology with general revelation is reflected in his curious comment on the five "ways" of Aquinas. He excuses the extreme brevity of these proofs of the existence of God with the explanation that elaboration was unnecessary at a time when "the biblical inference from nature to God" was believed by almost everybody to be simplicity itself. No doubt there is some truth in this, but he overlooks the fact that Aquinas assigned these proofs to that part of theology which belongs to philosophy. Moreover, Jaki's whole interest in the God of natural theology is centered on the function God performs as the ultimate ground of intelligibility, on which the possibility of a viable science rests. As Whitehead and others have remarked, rationality does not hold a high place among the attributes of God which are celebrated in the Old and New Testaments.

The universe created by the God of natural theology possesses the two qualities of rationality and contingency, and the science which seeks to comprehend it involves a combination of rational theory and empirical observation Jaki portrays the course of science as a struggle to overcome the recurring tendency to exalt one of these factors and suppress the other. When the element of rationality is isolated from that of contingency, the result is apriorism, and when contingency is isolated from rationality, the result is positivism.

III

Jaki does not join in the concert of praise for the empirical method, which has often been hailed as the mainspring of modern scientific progress. His concern is to point out the limitations of the empirical method when it is practiced without the support of a metaphysical or natural-theology framework. Thus Bacon, who has received a large amount of credit for his part in the promotion of the empirical method, appears in Jaki's story of the road of science. not as the hero, but the villain-because he gave short shrift to natural theology.

Jaki's treatment of Bacon is characteristic of his method Bacon (who occasionally appears as Lord Verulam, but never as Viscount St Albans) is introduced as the unsavory character he undoubtedly was, and portrayed in the most unfavorable light. The reader is led to wonder how any good thing could have come from such a man, who, in addition, shared "Calvin's antagonism to natural theology," and whose genuine contributions to the advancement of science, which are grudgingly conceded, are all vitiated by his errors in metaphysics and natural theology. Contrast the gentle treatment accorded to Marin Mersenne, who is introduced as a reasonable geometrician and a devout monk, who was an enthusiast for natural theology, and who carried his enthusiasm to the point of constructing no less than thirty-six proofs of the existence of God, one derived from the anatomy of the human knee, which showed that it was designed for the purpose of genuflection.

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Jaki is no less severe on those who make the opposite mistake of attempting to base science on reason alone and dispense with empirical observation and verification. He does accord a certain priority to reason in the subtle interplay of reason and sense, on which the progress of science depends, for a theory is not derived from experience, it is a product of creative imagination-idealization, he calls it. It is surprising, therefore, that he should be so harsh on idealism, and particularly on Hegel, who advanced such a theory in his early essay on the orbits of the planets .The fact that his theory was disproved by facts that came to light is held up against him as if it discredited him once and for all. No account is taken of the work of his mature years, in which he undertook to do the very thing that Jaki's own thesis calls for, viz to offer an account of nature in which both the rational and the contingent are accorded their due place. Instead, Hegel is dismissed as a madman, a good Lutheran, but one with "nothing of traditional Christian faith" in him, and when the title of his principal work is given as Enzyklopadie der Naturuwissenschaften, readers may legitimately question the extent of the author's acquaintance with this work, as they may also question his equilibrium when they find Hegel smeared with the guilt of his political progeny, Lenin and Stalin, who slaughtered countless thousands of human beings, while the Spanish Inquisition averaged only ten deaths a month.

IV

The most disappointing feature of the book is that the promise of the title is not fulfilled. It is repeatedly asserted that there is a link between the road of science and the ways to God-that belief in a personal, rational God as Creator is the precondition of creative scientific advance, and that where the belief is absent science runs into the ground, but it is never demonstrated. The road of science is traced in the light of a thesis, but the thesis is not argued systematically Jaki excuses himself from this task in the final chapter with the plea that his specialty is the history of science, not the speculative study, of natural theology, and he coolly refers the reader to the exposition of the latter in an earlier course of Gifford Lectures given by E.L. Mascall. This is unfair to the reader, who has accompanied the author on the long road of science in the hope of reaching the promised link with the ways to God. We may question whether it is consistent of Jaki to excuse himself in this way, while he reprimands Darwin for advancing a theory with vast metaphysical implications and declining to explicate them on the ground that he was unaccustomed to metaphysics. And if readers do turn to Mascall's lectures, they will not find them helpful, for while Mascall plunges into natural theology (of which he has a strict concept), it is not from the road of science but from the path of philosophical reflection that he takes off.

In default of a systematic exposition of the inference from nature to God, we are left with what is, in effect, a pragmatic argument-though

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pragmatism is one of the items in Jaki's syllabus of errors-that science flourishes when it is planted in a soil which is fertilized by belief in a personal and rational God, who has created an ordered and coherent world. The argument relies heavily on a realist epistemology, according to which the mind is held capable of comprehending objective reality and not, as Kant would have it, its own constructs. The success of modern science is held to prove this position, that the order, which the mind comprehends, is an objective feature of the world, and not merely a regulative principle. The wonderment at the intelligibility of the world, expressed by Einstein and others, is seen as a tacit, and sometimes reluctant, acknowledgment of the dependence of science on natural theology. But, apart from the question of epistemology, the fact remains that the order of the world functions in science as a regulative principle, and no amount of success can elevate it to constitutive status. The author will not recognize that science, too, walks by faith, not by sight.

Jaki's specialty is the history of science, and this forms the main component of his book. It is plain, however, that the history is read from the perspective of the thesis it is designed to prove. The author admits as much when he quotes with approval the dictum of Bolingbroke that "history is philosophy teaching by examples. " If this is true, we are left wondering what, if anything, does history teach. Two things may be suggested. One is that while theological considerations played a part in the rise of modern science, science developed a momentum of its own, and its continued progress stems from the dedication of its practitioners to its intrinsic aims without regard to theological and philosophical implications. To call such people positivists as Jaki does, does not discredit their scientific accomplishments. The thesis advanced by Monod in Chance and Necessity may be questionable, and even self-refuting, but this in no way detracts from the importance and value of his work in biochemistry, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize.

A second historical qualification is necessary. If science became a viable enterprise only where it was nurtured by natural theology or Christian theism, natural theology, or Christian theism, has not everywhere proved to be "a major propellant of intellectual and scientific history." This happened only in Western Christendom; nothing comparable to it took place in Eastern Christendom, in spite of the fact that belief in a rational Creator has been firmly held there, and, indeed. the cosmic dimension of theism has been more consistently kept in view in the theology of the Eastern Church than in that of the Western Churches. It seems that something more was needed than a sound natural theology.