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God’s faithful Word means the reliability of science’s laws

Cont’d from Post 1, May 9, 2017.  Excerpts from The Savior of Science:

“Jeremiah’s argument (rather similar to the one in Ps 88) is clearly a reductio ad absurdum, the absurdity of any conjecture that the order of nature would ever show any instability. Almost in the same breath the same reductio ad absurdum is in sight as Jeremiah describes the stability of the physical world (the sequence of day and night) as a covenant betweenYahweh and nature that would sooner be broken than would His faithfulness in keeping His covenant with the people of Israel (Jer 33:25-26).”

Stanley L. Jaki. The Savior of Science (Kindle Locations 613-616). Kindle Edition.

“In falling back on that argument Jeremiah echoes an already established prophetic tradition. The firmness of judgments that Isaiah and Deutero-Isaiah utter over Israel and other nations is predicated on the unfailing submission of nature to God’s word, whereby it was produced in the first place (Is 40:12-26). That Cyrus would be an unfailing tool in carrying out a crucial turn in salvation history is made credible with reference to God’s unchallenged power over the universe (Is 44:24), which nothing else can challenge and change, for that matter. The same power of absolute certainty is invoked to make credible the rebuilding of Jerusalem (Is 45:12).  The latter is to be believed as firmly as the firmness with which the earth has been established (Is 45:18). The prophet is not reluctant to generalize, and he does so with a cosmic sweep. None of God’s utterances relating to salvation history should be looked upon as made in vain because nothing in nature happens in vain (Is 55:10)!”

Stanley L. Jaki. The Savior of Science (Kindle Locations 618-623). Kindle Edition.

“Psalm 88 is nothing less than a thematic development and resolution of the question, whether the God of salvation history can be trusted in spite of the upheavals that seemed to wreck the House of David.The resolution is given in terms of the cosmic truth of the heavens’ endurance and in terms of the absolute hold which only the Creator can have over the visible world. The move in that Psalm from the “heavens’ witness” to “the assembly of the holy ones,” and not in the reverse direction, tion, is not a happenstance. The same move is the backbone of Psalm 18, which first recounts the order evidenced by the physical realm before expounding on the moral order provided by the Law. This sequence sets also the framework for Psalm 135.There the phrase of God’s “love without end” is interposed between phrases in which first the steps of creation and then those of Exodus are recounted. In view of this, the sequence of the two great Psalms, 103 and 104, the first celebrating the physical realm as evidence of the Creator, and the second doing the same about the wonders of Exodus, should not seem accidental dental at all. Similar is the sequence in Psalm 31 and in Psalm 96.”

Stanley L. Jaki. The Savior of Science (Kindle Locations 625-632). Kindle Edition.

After citing verses from Psalms 73 & 118, Jaki exclaims:

“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).

“Particularly telling in these passages is the naturalness of the reference to the order and stability of 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 being “faithful witnesses in the sky” (Ps 88:37-38), the stars as being fixed there, and as having a fixed number (Ps 146:4-6). Thinking about the sky as a stretched-out tent is no obstacle to seeing it as something standing firm forever (Ps 103:2, 5).To illustrate God’s unlimited endurance the Psalmist finds 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 101:27-28). Some changes, some wearing out!-a biblical Churchill would aptly add, lest a tyro misread a slighting of cosmic stability done with tongue in cheek.

“It is indeed the endurance and stability of the physical realm which in the Bible is the most suitable backdrop for declaring the eternal validity of God’s actions and plans and of the eternity of His own very endurance. Cosmic ages are meant when the Psalmist declares the endurance of the plans of His heart (mind) from “age to age” (Ps 32:11). This is why the complete dominion ion over the world ascribed to God (Ps 49:12) does not imply as much as a hint of the capriciousness customary with absolute rulers. God’s rule over the world as being consistent is also conveyed by the references to the conviction that the same world attests it”from age to age” (Ps 144:4, 13).”

Stanley L. Jaki. The Savior of Science (Kindle Locations 638-650). Kindle Edition.

“At any rate, no martyrdom with a hope of bodily resurrection tion was ever inspired by a Demiourgos whose “creative” power consisted in the ability to manipulate the already existing “formless” matter into actual shapes. Nor was the Demiourgos ever credited with raising the dead to life. This alone should caution against seeing less than a strict creation out of nothing in St. Paul’s praise of God as one “who restores the dead to life and calls into being those things which had not been” (Rom 4:17). Once that kind of creation is seen in this passage, quite natural will appear a favorite argument of the first Christian apologists: the raising of the dead cannot be beyond the powers of a God who created all out of nothing in the first place .16 No less importantly, only such a God or Creator-who is implied everywhere in the Old Testament by the absence there of a rival power (as, for example, “formless” matter) to Yahweh-could be seen as so superior to nature that the coherence and permanence nence He granted to that nature could not appear as a threat to His absolute sovereignty over it.”

Stanley L. Jaki. The Savior of Science (Kindle Locations 702-709). Kindle Edition.

“Another of those pitfalls is the mystical urge to see God so much everywhere and in everything as to make a coherent nature practically imperceptible. Such was the case when Ockham insisted on the radical disconnectedness between stars and starlight. Today it appears in some theologians’ misguided recourse to quantum mechanics, or rather to its Copenhagen interpretation, where God is turned into a “fill-in” to connect events that are denied causal tie because the physical interaction between them cannot be measured exactly. But this is to anticipate.”

Stanley L. Jaki. The Savior of Science (Kindle Locations 722-725). Kindle Edition.

“The placing of all matter on the same level was a direct corollary to the belief in the createdness of the universe. This connection could be seen only when createdness meant strictly, emphatically, and unequivocally a creation out of nothing. In the absence of a firm espousal of such a notion of creation, the “leveling” of all matter, so important for the future of science, did not follow emphatically and at times not even clearly The lengthy works of Philo ofAlexandria, about whose monotheism there can be no doubt, are particularly instructive in this connection. They contain no explicit endorsement of creation out of nothing and only one statement that strongly suggests it. A radical break with the Aristotelian distinction between celestial and terrestrial matter is equally absent in the works of Maimonides, des, the next towering Jewish intellectual with a memorable literary output.  His critique of Aristotle is just as spotty as the one penned by Crescas32 two centuries later when Aristotle was as heatedly criticized in Latin Christendom as he was revered.The clarity of creation out of nothing is not, of course, to be looked for in the murky flood of cabalistic Jewish lore produced from late Antiquity on through the medieval centuries and beyond.

“A brief look at modern Jewish thinking about creation has no less instructiveness. Its non-orthodox branch shows a growing tendency toward pantheism or a dilution of monotheism in the measure i which it does not include the assertion of creation out of nothing.The shying away from creation out of nothing in some modern orthodox Jewish works on creation is justified there on the ground that it is not explicit in Genesis 1, a reasoning which contains more than meets the eye. The real justification may he in the perpetuation of the radically negative stance which Palestinian Judaism took a generation after Philo against Alexandrian Judaism. The stance carried with it a suspicion about details in sacred books written in Greek within Alexandrian Judaism. The Palestinia rabbinate, which adopted a most conservative stance following the destruction of Jerusalem, could hardly be sympathetic to “innovations” in those books, although they merely made explicit that which had already been implicit in the Hebrew scriptures. More importantly, the sympathy shown by Christian Jews for those books could but generate dislike for them in opposite quarters.

“Undoubtedly, secular scholarship will by and large frown on this religious explanation of the failure of Hellenistic and medieval Jewish intellectual tradition to issue in a breakthrough similar to the one achieved by Buridan. The preference of that scholarship for purely sociological explanations will appear rather self-defeating when one turns to the Muslim ambiance. Unlike the Jewish world-scattered, fragmented, uprooted for over many centuries following the destruction of Jerusalem by the legions of Titus in 70 A.D.-the Muslim ambiance quickly turned into a vast politico-social entity: as a huge crescent it stretched from India to France along the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Whatever the status of Muhammad as a prophet (on who usually foretells events, an art on which the Prophet was not keen at all), he was certainly a crusader from the very start. He never for a moment considered retiring peacefully with his views to any safe corner in the Arabian peninsula. Nor did his followers, and for an undoubtedly religious motivation. It consisted in a burning zeal to spread “pure” monotheism. The vista of opulent booty along the holy-warpath did not, of course, dampen that zeal.

“The “pure” monotheism promoted by that zeal was purism incarnate, in that the Creator-God (Allah) of the Koran was to remain free of any consistency which a world created freely by Him might “impose” on Him. Orthodox Muslim scholars did their utmost to undermine the notion of a universe operating along consistent laws, calling it a taint on Allah’s absolute freedom to do whatever He wanted.The Mutakallimum, or the orthodox Muslim party, were willing to recognize in the laws of nature only some habits similar to the customary riding of the king of a city through its streets. Just as the king could break his riding habit any day, so could Allah change at any moment the pattern of any or all parts of the universe. This graphic characterization by Maimonides, physician of the Kaliph in Cairo,34 of the world view generated by the Koran’s notion of the Creator told more about that notion than could be told in long treatises. No less telling was Maimonides’ failure to note the utterly detrimental impact of that notion for the scientific enterprise.

“Beneath Maimonides’ graphic simile for capriciousness in nature, there lay the worship of a capricious Creator whose image lurks between the lines of the Koran. Its over-emphasis on the will of Allah as against His rationality set the uncompromising mising tone of the “pure” monotheism claimed on its basis. For that “purism” the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was a cryptic form of polytheism to be exterminated from the face of the earth.35 The classic Christian answer (which insists on the One God in three Persons while denying a separate personal or “psychological” consciousness to Persons defined as relationes subsistentes and begs the Muslims to correct their misconceptions) is too well known to be developed here. In this age of science, a more telling answer may be on hand in terms of the immortal dictum “by their fruits you shall know them,” provided that such scientific fruit or fruitfulness in science is looked for.

Universe and Christology

“The Trinitarian dogma is anchored in perceiving a concrete flesh and blood being, Jesus of Nazareth, as the Son of a God whom Jews as well as Muslims are fond of calling Father. For Christians, Jesus is an only Son in a sense that prompted on their part a revolutionary break with Greek semantics. That break was expressive of the manner in which the life, words and actions of Jesus suggested a radical break with all known human patterns. With the Greeks and Romans the expression “only begotten” (monogenes or unigenitus) had the universe for its supreme reference point. Such was the use of the expression by Plato, Plutarch, and Cicero, to mention only some major Greek and Roman spokesmen of Antiquity.” They took the universe for the only begotten entity because they all saw in it the par excellence emanation from the First Principle or Supreme Good, or Prime Mover, or whatever philosophical label was compatible with the pantheism on hand. Hence the strict divinity of the heavens and also the non-divinity or partial irrationality of the regions below the moon within the Greco-Roman perspective. It should be obvious that that universe had to lose its status as only begotten in the eyes of those who called a flesh and blood being the only begotten Son of a Divine Father and did so in the most exalted sense that could be formed by human minds. Admire as they did the universe as the chief evidence of the Creator (the first chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans is a most memorable instance), their admiration for it was also an act whereby the universe was put in its place, a place above which no mere creation could aspire. With Christians, inspired not by an abstract theologoumenon, but by a most vivid vision of a most tangible only begotten Son of God, the universe could not retain its hallowed status as a “begetting” from the “divine,” that is, its status befitting an entity sharing the divine nature. With Christians the universe had to remain a mere creature. This had to be so in spite of the comprehensiveness of all created perfection tion that made for Christians the notion of the universe the most exalted notion conceivable apart from that of God Almighty. John Henry Newman merely added the touch of his charmingly simple diction to that age-long Christian view when he declared in The Idea of a University:”There is but one thought greater than that of the universe, and that is the thought of its Maker.” Thus in the Christian perspective the exaltedness of the universe remained intact as it was lowered through that infinite distance which is between Creator and creature. The alertness within a genuine Christian milieu to the danger of toying with pantheism served the proper understanding of the universe in a measure still not sufficiently esteemed by historians of science. It was, historically speaking, the first manifestation of the saving grace which the Christian doctrine of salvation in and through Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of the Living God, provided for science.The other was unfolded two centuries or so later in the crucible of the first series of Trinitarian debates brought to a head by Arius and his allies.

“. . . Already with St Paul the attribution of the work of creation to Christ is the chief device to ward off the appearance of a duality between the Father and the Son. His most thematic passage (Col 1:15-20) should seem noteworthy also for the sequence in it. He first sets forth Christ’s creative work and only afterwards his redeeming function. By his transferring to Christ and the Church the Stoic portrayal of the cosmos as body and fullness (soma and pleroma) Paul helped the Colossians and all subsequent Christian communities to be on the alert against pantheism. No less formative of the Christian perspective on the cosmos was his conviction, expressed in his letter to the Ephesians (3:18), that through Christ they would comprehend what is “the breadth, length, height, and depth.” Paul clearly meant to lift Christian views on the cosmos above the splendid morass of Stoic cosmology in which the same expression was a borrowing from astronomical lore .

***

“In a sense far deeper and wider than one may suspect, there is a need for a theological salvation of the intellect in this age of science and with a reference to science. That salvation may help rescue theology from the edges of a precipice to which it has steadily edged for some time, mainly because many theologians have tried to be “scientific” without knowing hard science.They have overlooked the elementary fact that intricate patterns, the business of science, must, in order to exist, inhere in beings or things that exist. This is why they have grown insensitive to the totality of beings, the universe, although it remains, insofar as it exists, the only safe road for the theologically tuned intellect to the Being that gives existence to any and all.”

Stanley L. Jaki. The Savior of Science (Kindle Locations 745-864). Kindle Edition.