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The Savior of Science
By Stanley L. Jaki
Washington, Regnery Gateway, 1988. 260 pp. $10.95.

Stanley Jaki has been an outspoken critic of established dogmas in the history and philosophy of science. He is especially vehement in opposing the popular notion that the progress of modern science has been hindered by Christian faith, particularly in its medieval, Catholic form. Jaki has been a professor of physics at Seton Hall University and a member of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton. He was the 1987 recipient of the Templeton Award for Progress in Religion. Of his twenty-five books, Science and Creation (Edinburgh, 1974) and The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Chicago, 1978) have provided the most sustained arguments in favor of a more positive historical relationship between Christian faith and physical science. The present offering is more thematic than historical and provides a good introduction to Jaki's thought for the interested reader.

Jaki is known for his encyclopedic knowledge, his meticulous scholarship in primary sources, and his polemical stance against historians who see either a significant, discontinuity between medieval and modern science or a unique relationship between modern science and either late-medieval nominalism or Reformed theology. Within the Catholic

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Church, Jaki argues against those who would abandon the cosmological proof for the existence of God or interpret Aquinas along the lines of Immanuel Kant (transcendental Thomism).

What is distinctive and bold about this latest volume is Jaki's application of the traditional Augustinian theme of fall and redemption to the status of science itself. Familiar points about the importance of the doctrine of creation in the Hebrew Bible and Apocrypha are summarized as in Jaki's earlier Cosmos and Creation. But Jaki realizes that the ancient Jewish people were not themselves much interested in natural science as we know it. So, the distinctive contribution of the New Testament must also be taken into account. Accordingly, Jaki turns to the relevance of the redeeming work of Christ for the history of science.

According to Jaki, there are many indications of the fallen condition of science. One is the failure of earlier scientists to test ideas that we now take to be false (for example, Aristotle's claim that the speed of fall of a body depends on its weight) or their failure to follow empirical evidence to conclusions that we now regard as obvious (for instance, the darkness of the night sky which is widely cited as evidence against an infinite, homogeneous, static universe). Another indication of fallenness in physics is a tendency to treat nature as a mathematical abstraction (for example, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics). But the most pervasive corruption of science is the perennial temptation to become like God-a form of hubris demonstrated for Jaki by cosmologies that attribute the origin of the mass-energy of the universe to an initial random fluctuation (the "inflationary scenario") and by proposals that would give scientists a role in controlling human procreation.

The role Jaki attributes to the Savior of science depends on a highly orthodox interpretation of the person and work of Christ. The full deity of the Logos as the agent of creation, for example, is needed to guarantee the full rationality of the universe and hence to eliminate vestiges of irrationality, whether in the form of the antinomies of Kant or of the randomness allowed by quantum theory and cosmology. Belief in the hypostatic union and the true humanity of Christ, on the other hand, ensures respect for the reality of matter and avoids the pitfalls of occasionalism and idealism.

Jaki is an engaging controversialist-brilliant and never dull. Unfortunately, he indulges freely in the criticism of political and social programs like population control that bear only indirectly on his central topic. Even his central theme of God and Christ as the agents exclusively of order, stability, and rationality lend themselves to undue social conservatism and threaten the valid points Jaki wishes to make about history and theology. Nonetheless, the patient reader will be rewarded with some keen insights and heuristic arguments that may profitably be developed further.

Christopher B. Kaiser
Western Theological Seminary
Holland, Michigan