sljaki.com
"The Rev. Stanley Ladislas Jaki, OSB, one of the most significant scientific minds in modern times, died in Madrid on April 7, 2009. On August 17 he would have celebrated his 85th birthday. A Benedictine priest, monk, and physicist, he was a seminal thinker and contributor in cosmology, theology, and the philosophy of science, and his legacy will be felt for years to come. His work could not be more relevant than it is now, what with the rise of the “new atheism” and such figures as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, etc. This article is both a tribute to the considerable genius of Stanley L. Jaki, and a reexamination of the importance of his prodigious work as a refutation of those who advance dubious or invalid notions about the universe and its origins. It also examines the rôle of Christian thought as a progenitor, rather than an inhibitor, of scientific discoveries and advances.
Stanley L. Jaki was born in Gyor, Hungary, in 1924. From 1932 to 1942 he attended a school there, run by the Benedictines. He was so impressed by them that he entered their order in 1942, and was ordained a priest in 1948. During World War II he lived at the famed Hungarian Archabbey of Pannonhalma, established in the 10th century and, after Monte Cassino, the second largest territorial abbey in the world. This was a trying time in his life, and he had several close calls with Soviet soldiers, among other events.1 His intelligence, brilliance and wide learning were recognized at an early age, and he went on to receive a doctorate in theology from the noted Pontifical Institute of Sant’Anselmo in Rome in 1950. He then came to the United States, where he taught at a seminary in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, complications from a tonsillectomy deprived him of his voice for several years. He then gave up teaching, and enrolled in a doctoral programme in Physics at Fordham University, where he studied with the Nobel laureate Victor F. Hess, the discoverer of cosmic rays. He received his doctorate in physics in 1957.2 He now had two doctorates (in theology and physics), with undergraduate studies in philosophy, theology, mathematics and other subject areas. Thus, he was provided with a wide, expansive educational background that enabled him not only to traverse the boundaries of several disciplines, but to see a larger, broader picture of things than most people are capable of seeing. A reviewer has noted that both of Jaki’s doctoral theses were acclaimed by prominent people in the fields he studied.3 As if this were not enough, he did post-doctoral research in the philosophy of science at several universities, including California at Berkeley, Stanford, and Princeton, as well as the Institute for Advanced Study, also in Princeton, New Jersey. He was the Fremantle lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1977, Hoyt Fellow at Yale in1980, Farmington Institute Lecturer at Oxford (1988-89), and twice Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh (1974-75 and 1975-76). In 1987 he was awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize for his work in furthering science and religion.
A prodigious writer and indefatigable scholar, Jaki wrote more than forty books, on subjects ranging from G.K. Chesterton,4 to the contributions of the French physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem,5 to the life of John Henry Cardinal Newman,6 and other topics. He may be best known for works like The Relevance of Physics (1966) and Science and Creation (1974).7
The cosmology of Stanley L. Jaki could be summed up in the comment he made in one of his works, that one must say “Creator” in order to say “Cosmos”. Indeed, this summarizes well the long intellectual journey that is to be seen in his numerous articles and books on the subject.8 That journey was well-chronicled by Fr. Paul Haffner in his pioneering book on Fr. Jaki.9 Indeed, to be a serious cosmologist is to be involved in a long, extensive, sometimes bewildering intellectual and spiritual voyage. In his book The Road of Science and the Ways to God (1978), Jaki stated that the metaphysical realism that is embodied in the classical proofs for the existence of God is the only epistemology compatible with creative science.10 For Jaki, influenced as he was by Gilson, and others, the evidence for God’s presence, or purpose, is overwhelmingly apparent everywhere in nature.11 (Indeed, it is so evident that it eventually moved the noted British philosopher Antony Flew away from atheism to theism.) Jaki found Gödel’s mathematical theorems to be a special confirmation of his metaphysical and cosmological thinking and beliefs.12..." |
