FATHER STANLEY L. JAKI: EVOLUTIONIST by Paula Haigh
personal letter dated April 23, 2000
Paula P. Haigh is a literary theorist by education, an avid student of St. Thomas of Aquin and a brilliant essayist. Her insight is keen and her no-nonsense literary style erudite. She plays no favorites and pulls no punches. It is an honor to be granted the privilege of gracing this website with her essays. Bill Crofut
I. First Principles and Paley's Stone
George Sim Johnston in his fine but totally uncritical review (Catholic World Report, Nov. 1991, pp. 69-70) says:
If this is really the crux of Fr. Jaki's message, then no one could disagree with him on any rational grounds.
A fatal flaw of our culture is its commitment to a world view which rejects any knowledge other than the "scientific." That science itself in no way warrants this savage reductionism is the crux of Fr. Jaki's message.
However, it is my contention that what Fr. Jaki means by science and the progress of science is not entirely clear. That he accepts the scientific method of empiricism seems evident from all his works, and it is also my contention that this method, by rigorously and on principle, ruling out God is a self-inflicted reductionism, not only savage but diabolical in origin. That Fr. Jaki's emphasis is primarily upon technology and applied science rather than intellectual disciplines seeking truth and from which certain practical advantages may or may not proceed, seems confirmed by the opening chapter ofPurpose which gives an account of scientific progress starting from the Voyager-2 space probe and working back to the steam engine.
Fr. Jaki seems to disavow the forms of progress that the 19th century delighted to see as manifestations of humanity's forward march: Condorcet's "progress of reason and the defence of liberty ... with man restored to his natural rights and dignity..." (p. 5); the steam engine, the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace in England in l85l, the proliferation of the railroads, and finally the "Social Gospel" and "economic theory of progress and purpose" put forth by Marx end Engels. (p. 14) Fr. Jaki does not identify himself with any of these.
Perhaps Fr. Jaki comes closest to telling us exactly what his idea of progress is when he quotes Newman (p. 16) as to the contrast
between the essentially non-progressive character of the humanities, above all of theology, natural and supernatural, and the progress, mostly a process of accumulation, of the science.
Newman is, of course, a highly esteemed Catholic author and historical theologian, an authority for some kind of progress. He lived and breathed the air of the rationalist's dogma of progress and his Development of Christian Doctrine (l845) was certainly one of his century's prize productions.
Also, Newman was most astute when he recognized the cumulative character of the physical sciences as opposed to the unchanging, non-progressive nature of literature and the arts and of theology. That insight is echoed in clearer and more certain accents by Dr. Jerome Lejeune in his book, The Concentration Camp (Ignatius, 1990, p. 132):
The cleverest discussions can change nothing. The ethical committees will solemnly proclaim their contradictory oracles and the anxiety will remain: technology is cumulative, wisdom is not.What is needed for the salvation not only of the sciences but of the entire world is the wise control of all things by a true and living theology, the science of Wisdom par excellence.
Then what remains for us?
Wisdom remains for us.
If the technicians fail to recognize this, we have everything to fear from a denatured biology, but if the physicians remember it, the most sophisticated technology will remain at the service of the family of man.
An unforgettable wisdom that summarizes in a single phrase, the standard by which all will be judged:
"What you have done to the least of my brothers, you have done to me."(Matt. 25-40)
Dr. Lejeune tells us in a few simple words, unmistakably clear and emphatic, what we will never find straightforwardly expressed in all the pages of Fr. Jaki's scintillating prose.
Fr. Jaki concludes the first chapter of Purpose, which is titled "Progress with scant purpose", with one of his usual pirouettes:
In view of this obvious debacle of secularism, nothing would be more tempting than to turn to the sacred as the true foundation and safeguard, historically as well as conceptually, of belief in progress .Why tempting? Perhaps if Fr. Jaki told us why, he would find himself caught in his own contradictions.
(p. 30-31)
But he rejects as a temptation that supernatural wisdom that Dr. Lejeune so keenly knows to be our only salvation.
In his book about Fr. Jaki, Creation and Scientific Creativity (Christendom, 1991) Fr. Paul Haffner quotes Fr. Jaki as saying that "Faith in the possibility of science is a most conscious derivative from the tenets of medieval theology on the Maker of Heaven and Earth." (p. 33)
Again, I am not clear as to Fr. Jaki's meaning. Aristotle in the 4th century B.C., opens his major work, the Metaphysics, with the observation that "All men by nature desire to know." If that is not the very basis for all science, what else could be?
All of Aristotle's works, far exceeding in scientific value those of his predecessors, on such subjects as the heavens, the history and parts and generation of animals, physics and the soul -- all indicate in a most incontrovertible manner, that science in all its aspects was not only seen to be possible but was actually begun with Aristotle himself. It seems totally unreasonable to require an explicit belief in God as Creator in the Christian sense for men to believe in the very possibility of the natural sciences.
I may seem to be contradicting myself, as it has just been shown that science needs theological wisdom to be saved from itself. The way I see it is this: before the Incarnation, pagan peoples had lost the original revelation given to Adam, especially after the Flood at the Tower of Babel from whence all the nations dispersed, taking with them only remnants of the true religion; and these remnants quickly became corrupted. By the time of Aristotle, the polytheistic mythology of the Greeks no longer made sense to thinking men like Plato and Aristotle, and so they began from reason alone, discarding the childish and irrational myths. But they knew from reason alone that a Supreme Being must of necessity exist and that He is, in some way, the Cause of all things. What Aristotle did, building on that tenet alone, is a really astounding witness to the power of unaided intellect when it is submissive to reality.
The science of our times is not nearly so rational. Indeed, it is perverse in the extreme because it denies the existence of God Who makes Himself known to our reason in countless ways through His creation. Besides that, science today could have the benefit of a fully developed philosophy awl theology, had it not been willfully rejected at the Renaissance, particularly in the persons of the new empiricists like Galileo, Descartes, and Bacon.
And so there is, if you will, a kind of rise and fall in the movement of history: Aristotle was preparing the way for the great synthesis of the 13th century, and everything, from Roman times was on the way up to the apex of Christian achievement in that marvelous civilization we call Christendom, wherein Christ Our Lord was truly King of Heaven and of Earth, by right of Creation on the one hand and by right of conquest in Redemption on the other.
But since the 13th century, for many reasons, things have been going downhill. Christendom has fallen apart, Christ the King is rejected by the nations and states who must acknowledge Him and His Sovereignty if they are to be blessed by God. And perhaps most insidious of all, we have come to be dominated by a God-denying scientism, built on the three great errors of the primordial atheism of empiricism, a pagan heliocentrism, and a great new myth of evolution. All three of these errors are based in principle on a denial of the Christian Scriptures on which our Catholic Faith is based. Now science, free of all restraints from either Church or State, continues to attack not only the minds of men but their very bodies by such unnatural and barbaric practices as abortion, the implantation of organs from other species, and the euphemistically termed "fetal research" wherein the brain tissue of an unborn child is suctioned out with a plastic tube while the child is still alive in the uterus of its mother and its other organs are "harvested" in the same inhuman manner. People of ancient times constructed idols of iron to which they sacrificed their babies, as in the furnaces of the god Molloch. The Aztecs, as late as the l520's, were sacrificing their young people to demonic gods and tearing out their hearts while they still lived. Today, we are our own idols as men and women collaborate in the holocaust of the unborn on the altars of unimaginable selfishness. Our Lady came to save the Aztecs from their evil ways. Perhaps She will also come soon to change the hearts of modern people.
Fr. Haffner probably has the true explanation of Fr. Jaki's idea of progress when he tells us that he, Fr. Haffner, proposes to show us the "manner in which Jaki forges the link between Christian faith and modern science. ..." (p. 33)
That link, of course, is John Buridan's profession of faith in the creative act of God which imparted an impetus to the heavenly bodies in the beginning and which enables them to continue in motion as true secondary causes under divine supervision. This subject has been discussed at length in Fr. Stanley L. Jaki: Revisionist and it has been argued there that any link between Buridan, Galileo, Newton and Einstein is tenuous at best and can only be "forged" by a distortion of historical facts.
The main reasons for the absence of a true origin of modern science in Buridan or in the medieval and especially Thomistic syntheses are
1) the fact that the epistemology of modern empiricism, seen already in Galileo and going back to William of Ockham (fl. 1350) is radically separatist, pulling apart the knower arid the known in a quantitative exclusion and separating also all the natural sciences from their proper place in the hierarchy of sciences, a hierarchy that reflects the created order;
2) a commitment to the heliocentric and/or a-centric theory of the cosmos, which theory is based in a radical un-realism, a denial of the very basis for science -- the evidence of the senses processed by the intellect but unable to contradict each other;
3) an embracing of evolutionism which begins early, even with Descartes and Newton as they explain the temporal formation of the heavenly bodies. Fr. Jaki's evolutionism shows in his "progress of science" which is a positivist progressivist view of history strongly reminiscent of that of Auguste Comte (l798-l857). This theory of history's movement is radically opposed to the Catholic view which can be found in classical authors from Saint Augustine's City of God to the Thomistic works of Fr. Denis Fahey (d. l955). According to this Catholic view, history is not perfectionist by any natural means and exhibits a linear movement that is filled with the swirls and eddies of falls and restorations, beginning with Creation and ending with the Day of Judgment. The kind of linear perfectionist movement seen in the accumulation of technological inventions and cultural improvements that Fr. Jaki seems to envisage for science is seen in our times to be a Frankenstein monster without any soul. The reason for this is the rejection of God in the higher wisdom of nstura1 Philosophy, especially metaphysics, and a radical rejection of the supernatural wisdom coming from divine revelation.
These three great deformities of modern science: empiricism, heliocentrism, and evolutionism, were present from the beginning and have grown apace in such a manner as to make this child of Fr. Jaki a monster that he should either disown or labor to reform, because, unlike a human child, this offspring of the adulterous Renaissance has freely chosen from the beginning to follow the disastrously wayward path it has taken.
In other words modern science could only achieve what Fr. Jaki claims to be its essential "self-propelling" dynamic "on-going" process of accumulating ever better instruments of pollution and destruction unhindered by any directives from above by having broken away from and continuing to reject the good order of the medieval hierarchy of sciences. Buridan, then, by his submission to higher authority and wisdom, marks an end rather than a beginning.
Again, Fr. Jaki seems to be saying that true and certain science can only come from Catholics. In a sense this is true, but in another sense it is not entirely so. We have seen that Aristotle and other pagans working in the strength and light of natural reason alone, without benefit of divine revelation, have left a marvelous deposit of natural human wisdom. But it is undoubtedly incomplete and often distorted; in the ancient mythologies and practices, the original revelation is even horribly corrupted. It is only in the full light of divine Faith in God's complete revelation in Our Lord Jesus Christ that science can achieve its true and full potential. A great fund of scientific knowledge was given to Adam in the beginning. He knew more of the secrets of nature than scientists know today, and this knowledge formed the basis of the high civilization and developed technology of the pre-Flood peoples. But all had to begin anew after the Flood, while much of the original revelation, both of nature and of the supernatural life, was corrupted and lost as tribes and nations migrated away from the centers of civilization in the Middle East. Even those centers, such as Ur, Babylon, and Nineveh, lost the true religion and degenerated, due mainly to evil rulers. The power for good as well as for evil that has been given to rulers, especially to kings, can be seen in the example of the king of Nineveh (Jonas 3:6). But the worship of Baal became widespread in the Holy Lands. Only a promised line of Semites guarded the faith and hope in the Messiah to come; and when He came, only a remnant of Israel received Him.
But we know from the wisdom of the Magi that a vast fund of natural knowledge mixed with supernatural prophecy must have been preserved amongst the peoples of the ancient East. The treasures of knowledge left by Plato and Aristotle came into the West by way of the Arabs in the 12th and 13th centuries.
This is the crucial juncture. The works of Aristotle, all are agreed, provided the basis for the development of western science. It is possible, even highly probable, that technology would have developed in a slow and very limited manner, always under the control of the higher wisdoms of metaphysics and theology. But given the fallen nature of man bearing the consequences of original sin, and because of other convenient opportunities brought about by Satan and evil men, such as the longing for the luxuries of the East cultivated by the returning Crusaders, there came about that Age of Expansion and resurgence of classical culture we call the Renaissance, accompanied by a neo-pagan way of life in the capitals of both East and West, with a consequent decline of religious life.
During this crucial time, some men rebelled against a Church they saw as corrupt and produced a Luther, a Calvin, a Zwingli, and others; and so Christendom, due to the religious wars provoked by the ideas of these so-called reformers, disintegrated. Other men, as excited by intellectual independence as the Protestants were by religious freedom, rebelled against the authority and higher wisdom of theology that presided over the arts and sciences in the schools, and they produced a Galileo, a Campanella, a Bruno, a Foscarini. Modern science took its rise in this rebellion against the "Aristotelians" and the Thomistic theologians of the universities.
Just as the Masons of some years later met secretly in taverns and private homes to plot revolutions, these philosophers of science, as they were then called, abandoned the universities and began to form semi-secret societies, such as the Lincean Academy to which Galileo belonged. In England, they culminated in the Royal Society founded in 1662 under Charles II but from which Sir Isaac Newton carried on his most vicious campaign to destroy the last Catholic King of England, James II.
Such is the true beginning of modern science, as it is also the beginning of anti-Christian political systems and heretical sects that continue to plague both Church and State with their divisions.
The God-intended fulfillment of all the sciences in the hands of Catholic saints and scholars resembling Augustine, Bonaventure, and Thomas is yet to be realized. Fr. Jaki's view of progress and his strategy of compromise with error do not and can never lead to that desired goal.
In the Introduction to The Purpose of It All (pp. ix-x) Fr. Jaki states:
..design is not the same as purpose. In fact, designs have been registered before anything specific could be ascertained about their function, let alone the purpose of their functioning. The purpose remains in fact often in the dark, while more and more scientific light is shed on the specifics of the function.Fr. Jaki's books are exceedingly sparing of concrete examples, especially from the life sciences, and so I am hard pressed to know exactly what is being referred to here. But it reminds me of what the evolutionists call "vestigial organs." Such parts of the human body as the appendix, the coccyx or tail-bone, the tonsils and adenoids, were all believed at one time to have been left over from a previous more animal-like existence, especially the tail-bone. However, all of them have been found to have very specific and specifically human purposes. (See "Vestigial Organs" are Fully Functional, by Jerry Bergman and George Howe. (CRS Books Monograph No. 4, 1990.) Recent research shows that even so minor a disorder as the taken-for-granted morning sickness of pregnant women may actually be the. body's way of protecting the developing infant from the mild toxins that adult bodies easily throw off but which the embryo is not yet able to neutralize. (BSN, 30:5, p. 10) Fr. Jaki continues:
Apart from the closeness of the design argument to the cosmological argument and at times plain identity with it, forms of the design argument can be very defective in coming to grips with the notion of purpose. One cannot read . purpose into mere biological processes in which there is no evidence of a conscious aim at work. Seeing purpose at work in the purely biological domain demands therefore a careful philosophical consideration, which, so it is argued in this book, comes only from the doctrine of the analogy of being.While the Thomistic doctrine of the analogy of being is always relevant, I question that it is the crux of the difference between purpose and design or that it would be of much help to the biologist examining processes of nature in which he can descry "no conscious aim at work."
Rather, I suggest that what is needed is a return to first principles and a consideration of Aristotle's four causes, because the difference between design and purpose resides precisely in the difference between formal-material causes (design) and finality or teleology (final cause). I must confess that Fr. Jaki's discussion of design and pattern in the present book leaves me more confused than otherwise. For the sake, then, of those of us who are called, in one way or another, to deal with the activities of modern science, I offer the following consideration of first principles.
The first act of the mind is to apprehend reality in its intelligibility which is twofold:
1) the fact of its existence and
2) the fact of its essence or nature.
This primary object of the mind, twofold in its being, is not God, nor self, but the being that exists in the world outside the mind. We can only know this real being through our senses, but what is grasped as intelligible in the sense-object is grasped immediately in and from the sense-object by the intellect, first as it recognizes an existing thing as existing, i.e., as real, and secondly, as it recognizes the existing thing as some kind of being.
Thus all our knowledge comes to us through our senses and such knowledge is based in a self-evident, undemonstrable and irrefutable, incontrovertible manner on the given fact that things exist outside of us.
If this first given of all knowledge is not recognized, granted and submitted to as given, with a basic humility of the intellect, then all consequent acts of the mind are vitiated at their source. Such deviants are the philosophy of Plato, of William of Ockham, of Descartes, Kant, and all their fellow-travelers.
This realism of sense knowledge received, abstracted from and possessed in the unity of knower and known, is the realism of Thomism and the only realism that will serve as a true and fruitful basis for all the sciences.
Secondly, as a consequence of abstraction whereby the intellect grasps the very formal nature of a being, there is consummated a real union of form between the concept in the mind and the nature of the individual being known through the senses, for the individual being or substance is knownsimultaneously as unique individual concrete substance and as an individual possessing and exhibiting a universal nature or essence that it shares with the other individuals of its class or kind. It is this actual form which constitutes its conceptual intelligibility and which the mind grasps and makes its own intra-mentally without in any way diminishing the concrete individual in itself.
Here is the basis for all scientific classification.
In this way does Thomistic realism solve the dilemma set up by Platonic idealism on the one hand and positivistic, radical empiricism on the other. We must deal especially with the latter because radical empiricism, stemming from Ockham's nominalism in the 14th century, reduces reality to sequences of phenomena, thus stripping the real world of those first principles of being that alone render it as fully intelligible to us as God intended it to be.
Once the real world is seen and acknowledged and esteemed as the given that it is, certain other principles follow directly, principles equally self-evident, undemonstrable and irrefutable except by a denial of reason itself. These principles are the necessary and objective laws of reality, of all that is or that can be.
Rising directly from the first apprehension of being is the principle of contradiction. Some call it the principle of non-contradiction, for it simply means that the mind recognizes as a self-evident fact that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time. Being, therefore, is absolutely opposed to non-being, to nothingness. A positive correlative to this principle but in the realm of essence rather than existence, is the principle of identity, which states the self-evident fact that a thing is what it is and not something else. As Gertrude Stein, in the face of some idealistic nonsense, put it: a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
One would imagine that it would be very difficult indeed to get away with denying these self-evident first principles. Yet it is being done all the time by the evolutionary scientists. Here is an example given by Phillip E. Johnson in his book Darwin on Trial (Regnery Gateway, 1991, pp. 74-75):
Paleontology ... has taken Darwinian descent as a deductive certainty and has sought to flesh it out in detail rather than to test it. Success for fossil experts who study evolution has meant success in identifying ancestors, which provides an incentive for establishing criteria that will permit ancestors to be identified. Gareth Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History has expressed in plain language what this has meant in practice:"We've got to have some ancestor. We'll pick those.Besides being a blatant example of circular reasoning, this practice manifests a far more serious sin against reality itself. Circular reasoning is a sin against logic, but to assume that there was a being present in the past which had a certain nature "ancestral" to some being with an identified nature in the present, and then to claim that the past being is certainly a true being with such and such a nature simply by labeling it so, is an unconscionable manipulation of facts. It is a combination of purest nominalism with a denial of the principle of identity which states that a thing is what it is because we have known it to be such by science, i.e., by certain knowledge.
Why? Because we know they have to be there, and these are the best candidates." That's by and large the way it has worked. I am not exaggerating.
Obviously, "ancestors" cannot confirm the theory if they were labeled as such only because the theory told the researchers that ancestors had to be there.
Flowing directly from these first principles of knowledge as from the fountainhead of affirmations of the real comes the principle of sufficient reason, not to be confused with what Leibnitz (1646-1716) claimed to be such. Leibnitz only muddied the clear waters of Thomism. The principle of sufficient reason in its true form states another self-evident fact: every real being has the reason for its existence, its raison d'etre, either in itself or in another. This does not mean reason in the sense of cause, but reason in the sense of knowing. As Brother Benignus puts it:
Everyone, in all his thinking and acting, takes the principle of sufficient reason for granted. ... Obviously it cannot be demonstrated, because every demonstration presupposes it. ... Its truth is what makes us reason. Reasoning is impossible without this principle -- not merely in the sense that without it we would not know what to conclude from premises, but in the much more fundamental sense that without an intuitive knowledge of it we simply would not reason at all, we would never ask a question or try to answer one, we would never give or seek a reason for anything. To reason is to apply the principle of sufficient reason to objects of knowledge; to be rational is to be able to grasp this principle.This principle is that which causes the mind to know, self-evidently, that things "make sense", that the order of nature, the cosmos, is not an absurdity.
[Nature, Knowledge and God. Bruce, 1947, p. 400]
Brother Benignus, in this same work, also makes a very important point about this principle in regard to science. If the principle of sufficient reason did not specify an irrefutable aspect of reality, then the following events could be real possibilities in the physical sphere:
1) something could begin to exist from nothing and with no antecedents whatsoever;2) something could cease to exist at any time and for no reasonsIf any one of these propositions expressed a real possibility, science would be impossible.(page 399)
3) something could have or acquire any properties at any time, no matter how incongruent, unfitting, or unnecessary for its being;
4) a being could perform any operations whatsoever, needing no particular nature to determine its operations nor any particular circumstances to call them forth.
And yet we see every day examples of evolutionary scientists -- so-called -- violating every one of these propositions with impunity. Such is the price we have paid for neglecting our inheritance of sound metaphysics and theology.
Closely related to both the principle of identity and that of sufficient reason is the recognition that every being exists in one of two ways: as substanceor as accident. Substantial being is that which first and directly receives the act of being or existence, whereas accidental forms receive their being from the substantial form. Thus, Jim Jones is a man whose substantial form or substance is an individual determination of human nature, and his human nature remains the same beneath all the accidental changes that happen to him from conception until death. If it is true that all the cells in our body change entirely every seven years, then we must say that the basis of the change is accidental because we know that the human person remains the same beneath all the changes, not so as to obviate growth and accidental changes but in such a way that the human person remains human. The principles ofsubstance and accident play an enormous part in such sciences as biology and psychology. The false philosophies of mechanism and evolutionism are both due to a failure on the part of philosophers of nature to deal with the sciences in terms of their first and necessary principles.
Enter now Aristotle's Four Causes which St. Thomas made an essential part of his own philosophy. The four causes are included within the principle of sufficient reason because no being ultimately "makes sense" unless all four of its causes are recognized. St. Thomas put it this way:
When I ask the reason why, I must answer by one of the four causes:1) Why has a circle these properties that it has, i.e., its boundary line equidistant at all points from its center? Because of its intrinsic nature. This is the nature of a circle. A circle is not a square but a circle. This we call its formal cause. It is what causes a circle to be what it is. Also worth noting about this cause is that quiddity, the formal cause, does not require actual existence in the extra-mental world for its validity. This is why it is so easy for mathematicians to construct worlds out of geometric figures and mathematical formulae. It is also a good reason why all four causes should always be considered together when studying any being. Otherwise, one may construct a "science" of the mind alone, and that's not real science, but imaginary science.Brother Benignus quotes St. Thomas again on these four causes by way of summation and showing their relationship. Furthermore, St. Thomas shows that the four kinds of causes can be analytically deduced from the nature of any production of being, without recourse to illustrations taken from human art. Thus:
2) Why is this iron red hot? Because it has been heated by fire or some agency imparting heat. This agent is the efficient cause of the heat in the iron. It must be noted here that the agent-efficient cause must always be an act with respect to the effect to be caused, i.e., ice cannot cause heat in another being.
3) Why did you come here? For such and such a purpose. Final Cause.
4) Why is man mortal? Because he is a material composite, hence corruptible. This is the material cause of man's mortality.
There must of necessity be four causes: because when a cause exists, upon which the being of another thing follows, the being of that which has the cause may be considered in two ways. First, absolutely; and in this way the cause of being is a form by which something is a being-in-act. Second, insofar as an actual being comes to be from a potential being; and because whatever is in potency is reduced to act by something thatIt is when considering the four causes, especially the efficient and the final causes, that we necessarily infer the existence of a Supreme Agent and a Supreme Destiny or Finality for all things. But more of that later.
is a being-in-act, it follows of necessity that there are two other causes, namely the matter and the agent that reduces the matter from potency to act. But the action of an agent tends to something determinate, just as it proceeds from some determinate principle, for every agent does what is in conformity with its nature. That to which the action of the agent tends is called the final cause. Thus there are necessarily four causes.(p. 71)
There is one more set of principles that must be laid out clearly before we have, though only in barest outline, the basis for all the sciences, the only basis which will keep them from going astray into error.
"The doctrine on act and potency is the soul of Aristotelian philosophy, deepened and developed by St. Thomas." (Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.Reality. B. Herder, 1950, p. 37):
. all corporeal beings, even all finite beings [i.e., the angels included] are composed of potency and act, at least of essence and existence, of an essence which can exist, which limits existence, and of an existence which actualizes this essence. God alone is pure act because His essence is identified with His existence. He alone is Being itself, eternally subsistent.This conceptual difference [and this real distinction] in the primordial division of created being into potency and act has far-reaching consequences.Brother Benignus says further:
The concept of being as essence and existence is sufficient by itself for the attainment of that of possibility; but the experience of change is necessary for the formation of the idea of potentiality. Change in the concrete is known by direct experience; our sensio-intellective mind is given change as directly as it is given being, although the understanding of change presupposes the understanding of being. The intellectual grasp of change implies the notions of potentiality and actuality, which become explicit upon analysis of the concepts of change.Please notice how every word of this explanation is directly relevant to the theory of evolution, shining, as it were, a bright light upon the evolutionists' sins against reality.
Beings are perceived to change: we see the leaves stirring in the wind; we see them appear, open out, and grow in spring; we see them change color and fall to the ground in autumn. Whatever we perceive we grasp under the aspect of being; the green leaf of May and the red leaf of October are both beings. We see the green leaf come into being out of the branch, and we see the red leaf come into being out of the green; and in the winter we do not see the leaf at all. Last winter, the leaf I see now in spring did not exist; it was not; it was not-being. But it was a certain kind of not-being -- a kind which, I see now, was to be a leaf. It was not not-being as the impossible is not- being; it was possible, at least. It was, in fact, something more than possible. Possible being is related, in the mind, only to thought, not to experience. The non-existent leaf of winter was, I see in spring, definitely related to experience. It had a relation to existence which is quite different from the relation which a mere possible has; it had a relation to a concrete future existence grounded in some concrete present existence. Even while it does not exist actually, it is rooted in the actual being of something which does exist and which is capable of becoming it. It possesses potential being.
That covers the most important necessary principles of all being which we need to use in our defense of creation against evolution.
Thus, by analyzing the changing being given to it by immediate experience, the intellect attains the concepts of actual being, or being which has present existence, and potential being, or being which has a real capacity for existence rooted in some actual being. From these concepts it forms the abstract notions of actuality and potentiality. Quite as important, by a simple comparison of actual and potential being with the principles of identity and contradiction, it arrives at an immediate judgment which is one formula of the principle of causality -- that something can come to be only from something which is, or, in other words, that every potentiality presupposes an actuality. And still another principle of importance in Thomistic metaphysics follows this one -- that every changeable being is a mixture of actuality and potentiality.(page 388)
Now back to the four causes which are most relevant to Fr. Jaki's present book. The efficient and final causes of being are extrinsic, whereas the material and formal causes are intrinsic
This is an important point because evolutionists, insofar as they recognize teleology or purpose at all, will insist that the only purpose of any design or pattern in nature is to function as a mechanism for evolutionary change. In other words, the mechanism itself becomes both the efficient and the final cause, whereas it is only the material-formal cause. The mechanism is intrinsic to the being, whereas the efficient and final causes are extrinsic. The mechanism cannot, therefore, be either efficient or final cause. As Fr. Jaki says: "The celebration by Darwinists ... of the saving of teleology by Darwin, could only mean a not at all sophisticated encomium of mechanism." Darwin wrote in 1870: "I cannot look at the universe as a result of blind chance. Yet I can see no evidence of beneficient design, or indeed any design of any kind, in the details." Remarkable blindness! Fr. Jaki comments:
Note well that Darwin did not need any supernatural help in making this inference. Quite the contrary. He needed only to use his natural reason. He was either too weak-minded to do this or he deliberately refused to recognize and submit to the evidences of his reasoning powers.
Darwin was much too shortsighted philosophically to realize that in order to see design one needed, in addition to physical eyes, mental eyes. They alone can make a philosophical inference equivalent to registering the presence of design. (Purpose, pp. 49-50)
The final cause asks and answers the question: Why does this mechanism function the way it does? Darwin answered that it did so in order to perpetuate the good of the being at some future time by evolving it into some other kind of being or by making modifications that would ultimately lead to major changes in the nature of a being. He thus made the mechanism itself both the efficient and the final cause of things, which is impossible because it would make the being itself to be the cause of its own being. Darwin stated in Origin of Species (l859) that "natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being and "all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection." He also described this "innate tendency towards progressive development" as something that "necessarily follows ... through the continued action of natural selection." (Quoted inPurpose, p. 50) Quite obviously, natural selection is perceived by Darwin to be the intrinsic material-formal cause as mechanism of change plus the efficient and the final cause as intelligent choice-maker, determiner-director of all change in the being, and the positor of the goal as "perfection". In this way Darwinian evolution shuts out God and deifies nature
We know that the truth is otherwise. We need to get into the habit of applying the first principles, especially the four causes, to all things. In doing so, we do speak analogically, that is, we do not speak of identical beings all the time but of different kinds of beings as having something basic in common --certain attributes of being that enable us to speak of all of them under some common aspect by analogy. These attributes are essential existential similarities that transcend the essential existential differences. Thus, man, monkey, mushroom, stone and snowflake all exhibit to our minds these first principles of being in their different modes but always intelligible existences. The modes are different; the intelligibilities they contain are the same.
Even God exhibits these laws of intelligibility, though we acknowledge we are speaking analogically. But it is this rule of analogy that enables us to say anything at all about God in a positive way. We see that all creatures reflect the perfections of God in an almost infinitely varied way, so apparently limitless is the hierarchy of beings that make up the cosmos, from sub-atomic particles to super-galaxies. But we know that God is the First Efficient Cause of all things because no being can cause itself. All things depend upon Him absolutely for their existence, but He is dependent upon nothing for He alone is all-sufficient and necessary. He is His own Formality which is His infinite Actuality. There is in Him no potency because change is the manifestation of some need, and God is all perfect. He needs no change and is immutable, having or rather being infinite perfection. The perfection of the purposeful designs we see everywhere in nature is a reflection of His infinite Wisdom. His infinity is hinted at in the fact that scientists never exhaust the riches of material creation, never come to definite limits in their examinations of matter. And finally, He is the goal and end of all His creatures because, as Aristotle said, "every agent acts for an end", and thus also must God. What is the end He had in creating all things? It can only be Himself. There is no other. Even natural reason tells us this.
In this way does natural reason also recognize the chasm that must necessarily exist between the infinite First Cause of all things and His creatures. God's transcendence is a reality that the mind is forced to acknowledge even while it must at the same time acknowledge His immanence, since no power on earth can exist and operate without His most intimate agency.
Reason acknowledges the infinity of God and the finitude of His creatures. As we look at the principles of causality operating in creatures, we understand that the creature is always limited specifically by its nature which is finite, corruptible, and ruled by the laws of its own specific potency and act. If there were no such limiting principles in every finite being, then evolution could well be true, and we would not be able to distinguish any definite kinds of beings nor would there be any end to the changes that could take place. The reality is otherwise.
Mercifully, change itself is limited both by corporeal nature and the duration of the creature's existence. Science itself proclaims and operates on the presuppositions of regularity and predictability in nature's operations, and of the universally acknowledged laws of thermodynamics, of biogenesis, and that like comes from like. No scientist has any right or reason to say or even to suggest that the origin of all things came about by one unique exception to these laws. They do so for one reason only: to escape from God and His existence as their Creator. There is far more than the merely human at work in evolutionary ideology. It is the work of the Devil.
And there is nothing except the diabolical perversity of the "scientific method" to prevent the scientist from rising, in all his studies, to the First Cause and ultimate Goal which is God. For secondary causes under God's Providence and concurrence always act in a way that exhibits the principles of being and causality, pointing infallibly to their Maker as the goal of all their operations.
As a very clear illustration of the four causes in action as secondary causes in nature operating under God's Primary Causality, in a very immediate, i.e., immanent way, let's look at The Mystery of the Snowshoe Rabbit (American Tract Society, Oradell NJ 07649):
Contrary to what Fr. Jaki says elsewhere -- that scientists ask only the how of things and not the why -- we see here the scientists asking, very clearly,why the rabbit's fur turns from brown to white and back to brown again with the seasons.
Scientists were puzzled over the snowshoe rabbit for many years. Finally an experiment was conducted that solved the mystery. One of the big bunnies was captured and brought to a laboratory for tests. When Snowshoe came to the lab he had on his brown summer coat. He was put in a comfortable cage and fed his favorite meal of bark, twigs, and water. Each day the scientists turned off the lights a little earlier until the big bunny lived in the darkness about 18 hours a day. The rabbit's fur was turning white! Did the short daylight hours cause this change? The scientists couldn't be sure. More tests were needed.
So they gradually added more artificial light to Snowshoe's cage each day until he had 18 hours of sunlight and 6 hours of darkness. It wasn't long before the dark brown hairs appeared in the big bunny's white coat. It kept changing until most of the white hairs had been replaced with brown ones. The scientists had figured out the mystery of the snowshoe rabbit.
The rabbit has a gland in his body that is very sensitive to light. When the days are long and the nights are short the gland sends a signal to a brown pigment gland to produce brown hairs. When the nights are long and the days are short the pigment gland is told to produce white hairs. Perfect timing, isn't it? The big rabbit camouflages beautifully with the snow. It's very hard for his enemies to find him now. When spring comes to the wild woodlands and the days get longer, the snow melts and the brown earth shows. Isn't it amazing that when the days are longest, the snowshoe rabbit is the brownest and his fur matches his surroundings perfectly!
Did all of this happen by chance or do you think the snowshoe rabbit was designed by an intelligent Creator?
Protestant children will have no doubt as to the answer to that question. In fact, all children know by nature that God made all things. They must betaught the error of evolution.But what we want to notice here particularly is that the scientist is indeed seeking a cause of the color change. He finds it first of all by some intuition. Otherwise, why would he begin his experiment with the lighting? So he verifies his hypothesis by experiments. He discovers that the duration of the light is the efficient cause, the immediate proximate agency of the rabbit's color change.
The way the scientist phrases his description of the mechanism is interesting. He says that the gland "sends a signal" and the gland "is told" what to do. We know from recent DNA research that certain components of the cells do indeed "tell" other parts of the body what to do. I suppose the discoveries about the complicated "language" of the genetic code come about as close as anything in the physical sciences can come to being a real explanation rather than a mere description.
The descriptions of empirical science are most appealing because they describe effects that we can see, taste, touch, smell, and hear. They appeal to the senses. Metaphysics, on the other hand, is about principles that are invisible but no less real. We can see the light as a visible secondary efficient cause, and the gland in the rabbit's body is responding to this physical light. But only metaphysics can answer the question as to why light should cause the change in the rabbit's gland. Other things do not cause it to react. So there is only one answer that makes sense, and it is found in the Wisdom of God Who planned it this way at Creation. Fr. Jaki might call this a recourse to mystery, but he cannot deny it is the only explanation that makes sense.
So, too, the scientist can locate the glands in the rabbit's body and even view the cellular activity that goes on as the material-formal causes activate all the processes of transmitting messages and activating potencies in the rabbit's material forms. The ultimate explanation resides in the substantial form that is the specific nature of this rabbit -- its rabbitness. It is this form that causes the reactions in the gland that is sensitive to light. It is this form that activates the matter that was waiting to receive just these specifications and no others. The principles of causality themselves are invisible, but theeffects of these causes are stunningly manifest.
All these processes that take place within the rabbit's body when activated by the efficient agency of the light are the action of the material-formal causes. The formal cause is the rabbit's nature, that total substance which was brought into being from nothing in the beginning at Creation. The material cause is just that -- the materials that are directed by the formal cause, because matter itself is nothing but a principle of change, but a principle of change always geared to and determined by its specific form, in this case, the snowshoe rabbit. The changes that take place in any individual are always specified by the form and take place only within the limits defined by the formal cause of the species, which is its created nature.
Now the end result or purpose of the change from brown to white and brown again is camouflage. It is only intelligence that knows purpose as purpose. The rabbit does not know its purpose as a purpose. Rabbits and all other irrational creatures simply obey the laws inscribed in their natures. Therefore there is, for certain, the purpose of a higher Being at work here, a Being with intelligence and Will, and that Being, we know, is God. This is St. Thomas's 5th Way for proving God's existence.
Just a few more words on this principle of finality, since this principle is ostensibly the main burden of Fr. Jaki's book, The Purpose of It All.
Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O,P., in his book Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought
(Herder, 1950, p. 35) says:
The principle of finality is expressed by Aristotle and Aquinas in these terms: "Every agent acts for a purpose." The agent tends to its good. But that tendency differs on different levels of being. It may be, first, a tendency merely natural and unconscious, for example, the tendency of the stone toward the center of the earth, or the tendency of all bodies toward the center of the universe. Secondly, this tendency may be accompanied by sense knowledge, for example, in the animal seeking its nourishment. Thirdly, this tendency is guided by intelligence, which alone knows purpose as purpose, that is, knows purpose as the raison d'etre of the means to reach that purpose.It is only intelligence that knows purpose as purpose, and so, when we see the entire universe and all within it existing and moving according to an incomprehensibly grand design and order, perfect in every detail, and one that no creature can really destroy, we must necessarily infer, if our reason is healthy and normal, that there is both above and working within it, a supremely intelligent Being Whom we call God. Not to make such an inference for any reason whatsoever is to deny one's own power of reason. Such a denial is a profound act of self-deception, and it is an act of the ultimate perversion, because reason is our highest faculty.
Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange continues:
On this principle of finality depends the first principle of practical reason and of morality. It runs thus: "Do good and avoid evil." It is founded on the idea of good, as the principle of contradiction is on the idea of being. In other words: The rational being must will rational good, that good, namely, to which its powers are proportioned by the author of its nature.Natural reason seizes these self-evident principles from its grasp of intelligible reality. These principles of existence, of contradiction, of identity, of sufficient reason, of causality and of act and potency are all self-evident, undemonstrably given and open to reflection; they are incontrovertible and irrefutable certitudes. They form the basis of all science. They are the givens of our intellectual life. Not one of them or any aspect of them can be denied or doubted or excluded from a scientific method without consequences that will seriously retard or altogether hinder the attainment of truth.
All these principles are the principles of our natural intelligence. They are first manifested in that spontaneous form of intelligence which we call common sense, that is, the natural aptitude of intelligence, before all philosophic culture, to judge things sanely. ... natural reason seizes these self-evident principles from its notion of intelligible reality.
When Fr. Jaki speaks of the cosmological argument as being almost identical with the argument from design, one may reasonably assume he is referring to proofs for the existence of God. However, he is impossibly vague on the point. Of Saint Thomas' 5 Ways for proving God's existence from natural reason alone, not one of them is called the argument from design or the cosmological argument. They are, rather:
1) the argument from physical motion, which reduces to potency and act;I suppose it is to the 5th way that Fr. Jaki's cosmological argument refers.
2) the argument from efficient causality or active agency;
3) the argument from possibility and necessity, or the contingency of things;
4) the argument from the hierarchical gradation or degrees of being in things, which infers the necessity of a cause of the supreme degree in all things;
5) the argument from the governance of the world, or the final cause.
In his exposition of this 5th way, St. Thomas is proving that the very reason for which the Efficient Cause of the 2nd way moves and causes all things to act and endows them with secondary causality according to their specific natures--this reason is beyond the immediate activity of creatures. As Etienne Gilson explains it:
This fifth way arrives ... not only nor first of all at the reason for what order there is in the universe, but also and preeminently at the reason for nature itself. In brief, beyond the intelligible manner of existing, the final cause attains the supreme reason for which beings exist.( The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas. Random House, 1956, p. 75)St. Thomas himself says: "Hence it is plain that not fortuitously but designedly do things achieve their end." (ST, I, Q 2) To think that this marvelously ordered universe could arise and continue to function by chance -- fortuitously -- is patently absurd and does violence to the human mind.
And this is precisely what has so impressed Michael Denton when he exclaimed:
It is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and ingenuity of an absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of chance. ... a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, ... (Evolution: a Theory in Crisis. Adler, l985, p. 342)St. Thomas continues:
Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to the mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being is God. (ST, I, Q 2)The reason for being that we find in the arrow is ultimately in the archer as being both the efficient and the final cause of the arrow's motion. So it is with us and with all things. Our very reason for being is ultimately -- and immediately -- in God. He is our Creator, our Sustainer, our Redeemer, and our Destiny.
Another analogy that much appeals to me is that of the artist who, when he makes an object of art, be it poem, statue, painting, symphony, first conceives in his mind an idea or a plan and an image of the finished product. Toward this desired goal of his conception he works with the materials of his art. Because his will is intimately involved, he works with love--or, as in the case of blasphemous "art" with hate. The artist is the efficient-agentcause of his work as its maker, but his purpose, realized in the work itself, is also first and finally in himself. Material and formal causes constitute the product. This production of the artist remains as an analogue of the artist himself, long after the artist has departed.
Now here is a very important and specific difference between a human artist and God the Creator. God can never leave the least of His creatures, or it would fall into nothingness. This proves the extent to which all secondary causes in nature depend upon God for their agency and their finality, for the manner in which they operate at every level.
And so, God has created us out of nothing--this we know from divine revelation. And in bringing us into existence from our nothingness, God had an end in view which is ultimately Himself. Because He is infinitely good--St. Thomas's 5th way proves this--it is our happiness that He desires in Himself, as His gift. How wonderful to realize that all of creation is destined to be for His glory and our happiness! This final cause--our happiness and God's glory--are the same. The final cause is truly the primary cause of all--the cause of causes.
It is also a great motive to wish to be saved so as not to rob God of any of the glory due to Him from us, His creatures.
I have gone into philosophical considerations at such length simply because Fr. Jaki, having raised philosophical questions, fails to answer them as clearly and as completely as both science and philosophy demand. And yet, what I have written here does not begin to do justice to the principles and concepts of Thomistic metaphysics, not to mention their application to today's world. Let the reader but consult the authors quoted. Most of all, we need to open up the empirical evidences to the higher sciences so that the full meaning and significance of the creatures studied by the physical sciences may be revealed, we may be better instructed by nature, and God may be truly glorified by those who thereby come to know and love Him better.
Before beginning a study of Fr. Jaki's evolutionism, I must in justice and with some gratitude discuss briefly his exposure of Paley's failure to recapture the metaphysical insights of his Catholic ancestors in the 13th century.
William Paley (d. 1805) was an English Protestant minister who published several books on theological subjects, his most famous being Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature. 1802. Of this book Fr. Jaki says (in Purpose, pp. 59-60):
Hardly a book written in the 19th century on the proofs of the existence of God fails to contain a reference to that book's opening paragraph centered on that hallowed timekeeping device, the watch:In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, -- that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not admissible in the second case, as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz., that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose; e.g., that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none would have answered the use that is now served by it.Fr. Jaki's analysis of Paley's argument is excellent, but he does seem to fail to appreciate the analogy of being which does not escape the insights of Michael Denton:
Paley was not only right in asserting the existence of an analogy between life and machines, but was also remarkably prophetic in guessing that the technological ingenuity realized in living systems is vastly in excess of anything yet accomplished by man." (Evolution, p. 34l)However, Fr. Jaki does notice that Paley missed the significance of the stones:
... the case of a watch, evidently the outcome of design, involves, according to Paley, no metaphysics. It should now be clear that the very starting point of Paley's book, or his insistence on the difference between coming upon a stone or a watch in a meadow, may hide an ulterior and very important aim on his part. He seems to be intent on constructing a design argument that works independently of an ontological or metaphysical foundation. (Purpose, p. 67)Exactly. And yet, there is no way of knowing what Paley's interior motives were, but it is true that Protestants generally are averse to metaphysics. It's part of their tradition inherited from men like Luther who were followers of Ockham, Ockham the great separator of religion from faith, of physics from metaphysics.
However, Paley just might have been reading St. Thomas. In the article entitled "Whether it is an Article of Faith that the World Began?" St. Thomas says:
By faith alone do we hold and by no demonstration can it be proved, that the world did not always exist, ... The reason of this is that the newness of the world cannot be demonstrated on the part of the world itself. For the principle of demonstration is the essence of a thing. Now everything according to its species is abstracted from the here and now whence it is said that universals are everywhere and always. Hence it cannot be demonstrated that man, or heaven, or a stone were not always. (ST, I, Q 46, a 2)These principles show us why it is that God's existence can only be demonstrated, i.e. irrefutably, conclusively, and necessarily proven by the existence of things and not from their natures, or essences. This is also why arguments from finitude and corruptibility cannot conclusively prove a beginning and an end. It's enough to reflect upon the apparent infinitude or endlessness of the physicist's investigations into matter to realize this fact. So, we only know by Faith in divine revelation that the world had a beginning with time or that time began with the first motions of matter.
If it is temporal, then it is quantitative, i.e., measurable, and there is no way of irrefutably demonstrating that anything had a beginning or will have an end because quantity is potentially, infinite. This was Aristotle's conclusion and St. Thomas accepted it as true. We need divine revelation to inform us otherwise.
What, then, can be conclusively proven by natural reason alone? The mere presence of the stone should have prompted Paley to ask (as `Leibnitz did some 100 years earlier) "Why something, why any thing rather than nothing?" The sheer existence of the stone, apart from any characteristic of its nature, is as much of a marvel as the existence of the watch. In fact, even more so, since the watch was evidently man-made; but who made the stone?
As Fr. Jaki points out, Paley equated design with complexity, something the Darwinists after him came to do also, considering the greater the complexity, the more advanced in evolutionary progression. For this reason, too, Paley saw the celestial bodies, which the astronomy of his day presented as simple rather than complex, as being inadequate objects for proof of God's existences Strange thinking, indeed! I imagine that in 1802,after two centuries of Copernican controversy bludgeoning common sense into submission to mathematical constructs as reality, his intellect was hardly capable of seeing "the unimaginable wonder" of the cosmological design revealed by the heavens just above us.
It seems that Paley never got beyond the merest hint of St. Thomas's 2nd Way, that of Efficient Causality -- God as First Cause and, by revelation, Creator of all things. Rather, he got bogged down in admiration of the formal-material causes of things, what Fr. Jaki rightly calls pattern as opposed to design -- the intricacy of structural configurations and interrelatedness. These provide great occasions, indeed, for such paeons of praise as Paley poured forth about the happiness of bees, aphids, and fish, etc. (See Purpose, p. 70) Such romantic notions of natural felicity seem never to have brought him to the Final Cause of all this wonderful activity, whereas the entire point of what nature was working hard to tell him most specifically was the existence of the Maker of all and the purpose of all is God's glory.
Here I must make an important admission. I have not studied Paley's Natural Theology and am going entirely on what Fr. Jaki says about him. Admittedly, I should know by now that Fr. Jaki is not always entirely reliable when he attributes views to other people. Some day I hope to make a thorough study of Paley's book just to see for myself exactly what his views were on so many of the subjects that fascinated the men of his time.
But I do venture, the following:
The wonders of the natural world, not to mention the supernatural wonders of divine grace, are finite in themselves but seem infinite to us as they reflect the infinite perfections and goodness of God. Recognition of creation's ultimately unfathomable mystery -- a reflection of God's transcendence, a grasp by natural reason of a Reality as the Source of what we see, an intuition far exceeding in its degree of truth that of Paley, is Kurt G”del'sIncompleteness Theorem, referred to by Jaki in The Savior of Science (pp. 108-109) as a corrective for the modern scientist's hubris. George Zebrowski, writing about G”del in Omni (April 1992, p. 54) says:
But about G”del's proof, the common comment is, "Didn't he prove that we can't know everything? Well, we all know that.Natural reason without benefit of divine revelation, comes back to Aristotle's eternal world.
This is just not good enough. If it were otherwise, he might have shown that we live in a universe in which we could solve all problems and learn everything. So the proof is far from trivial if it tells us that we can't do this, ever, and also implies that we can't know everything because the universe is infinite; we could exhaust a finite universe, but not an infinite one that has always existed in some form and, like our idea of God, requires no creation.
We know by Faith that the world is finite and corruptible, beginning with Creation and destined to end in Judgment; but also to be renewed and resurrected as the proper environment for our own glorified bodies.
But God has so created the universe that it seems infinite so that scientists are not able to exhaust its material forms. We should not miss, therefore, the providential corrective that this apparent infinitude offers, as Fr. Jaki points out, to the pride of a technology that threatens to destroy us all in the lawlessness of its tyranny.
But there is a very deep and real sense in which we can know everything, for unlike the sciences of nature, the highest natural science of being which is metaphysics provides us with principles that en1ighten all possib1e events and facts. Add. to this the pinnacle-science of theology that gives us the truths of Faith and of the Blessed in Heaven, insofar as we are able to understand and contemplate them here below, and we have all we could possibly desire to know, even though this desire in itself is without limit.
Because our ultimate Final Cause and Destiny is God Himself Who alone is infinite and infinitely good, our desire for things and for persons in this life, if not ordered to God, becomes agonizingly frustrated and can destroy us. But if our lives are rooted in the truths of Faith and if our minds are enlightened by a reason bathed in the higher light of Faith, then we do not experience any frustration in our quest for more and deeper knowledge, understanding and wisdom. Rather, as the Holy Spirit says of Wisdom: "They that eat me, shall yet hunger; and they that drink me, shall yet thirst." (Eccl 24:29) A correspondence with grace always calls forth from the infinite bounty of God new graces. So it is with Divine Wisdom: the more we taste of its sweetness, the more we desire and the more it increases in us.
Wisdom is the highest of the natural intellectual virtues and the best of the Gifts of the Holy Ghost. This highest and supernatural wisdom transforms all lesser wisdoms. Our Lord made a sharp distinction between natural and supernatural wisdom when He compared the water of Jacob's Well to the living Water of His Life (John 4:13; 6:15) indicating not only the superabundant satisfaction of His Light and Life but the transformation of the natural: "The Water that I will give him, shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting."
But, it is necessary, according to Fr. Jaki, "for the Christian to distinguish the 'gold' from the 'straw' in the evolutionary theory."
Before going further, we must realize that Fr. Jakl's rejection of Darwinism is quite thorough. In The Savior of Science (pp. 137-8) he says:
Contrary to first expectations, Darwinism was not effectively shored up either by genetics or by those vast studies in biochemistry that followed the announcement in 1953 that the structure of chromosomes was a double helix made of specific sequences of amino acids. The exactness of biochenical research did not exactly turn into a bonus for those Darwinists who expected to turn with its help the evolutionary theory into an exact science. It is now known with exactness that missing links are no less conspicuous by their absence along with the perameter of molecular relatedness than they are between man and his still hypothetical anthropoid ancestors.With the fossil record gone as evidence for evolution, and not only the fossil record but also the sciences of genetics and biochemistry, we are surely entitled to ask what "gold" is left when all this "straw" has been swept away by empirical proofs. Fr. Jaki rejects "a rigid ideology that accepts evolution only in a form which, as Darwin wanted, excludes God and soul and leaves one with blind matter." (Savior, p. 139)
In fact, links, that is, forms of minutely graduated transitions--a central requirement for the truth of Darwinism--are missing everywhere in the evolutionary record.
It is quite evident at this point that Fr Jaki is a theistic evolutionist. But one is still curious to know on just what basis he rests his case for any kind of evolution. And we might as well recognize at the outset that Fr. Jaki's hatred for the creationists, Catholic as well as Protestant, is an enduring one. Fr. Haffner says:
Jaki points out that there is no opposition between creation and evolution, but he takes care lest his words be taken for an endorsement, however indirect, of creatlonism. He insists, however, that the clashWell, it could not be any more clear: Darwinism is out but evolution is OK; Darwinism is bad because it is materialistic; evolution with God and soul retained is OK. That's theistic evolution.
of Christians with Darwinism (as not co-terminus with evolutionary perspective) arises because the latter is a materialist position incompatible with creation. ... (page 72)
But does this theistic evolution rest on any kind of scientific basis? It is not easy to find out because Fr. Jaki is a master of evasive and obfuscoatory techniques. The section in Savior entitled "Unrepentent Darwinists and non-Darwinian evolutionists" is a good example. But by ignoring all the red-herrings he strews in our path as we attempt to get clear statements of commitment from him, we can ascertain his scientific faith in the long ages of evolutionary history punctuated by catastrophic events that caused what he claims are periodic extinctions of vast numbers of species. That such catastrophies might have contributed in any way to the rise of new species, is too much like the "punctuated equilibrium" theory of S. J. Gould to please Fr. Jaki. He rejects Gould's thesis. What he has to put in its place is anyone's guess. Here is what he says:
... since ideology has no control over scientific findings, it should not be surprising that the problems of Darwinists have been further aggravated by setbacks they have recently suffered through the work ofFr. Jaki Is a physicist and it is with evident pleasure that he gives the credit to the physicists for "proving" the evidences needed for evolution. But the new and unwanted development that puts the Darwinists again in opposition to the physicists is the fact of a discerned catastrophism that upsets Darwin's Lyellian uniformitarian gradualism:
some physicists. A new chapter was added thereby to an old story. Physicists were at first an ominous specter for Darwinists as they did not grant billions of years for the earth as postulated by Darwin. Peace
reigned between physicists and Darwinists following the first radioactive estimates, around the turn of the century, of the earth's age in billions of years.
Those long ages no longer look like the quiet affair Darwin and Darwinists hoped for. The finding in the 1960's of iridlum in high concentrations in widely separated spots close to the earth's surface prompted a renewed look at some major though not sufficiently appreciated features of the paleontological record. One of them is the sudden disappearance of trilobites from the sen during the Cambrian period, about 500 million years ago. Another occurred on a far more devastating scale about 250 million years ago during the Permian period when almost all marine life became extinguished. Most dramatized is the wholesale death of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, toward the end of the Cretacean period. A new look, strengthened by radiometry, at the entire fossil record suggests that notable extinctions have for the past half a billion years occurred on the earth every 23 million years.Fr. Jaki then demolishes the Eldridge-Gould theory of "punctuated equilibrium" by showing that it is un-Darwinlan in postulating a suddenness of development following catastrophic events; it thereby does away with the competitive struggle for existence that is supposed to stimulate natural selection into making favorable mutations. What Fr. Jaki succeeds in doing is to becloud our minds with his brilliant refutation of both Darwinian and
The triggering device for these regularly occurring devastations of life is the periodic encounter of the sun with large showers of comets and meteors. Their impact with the earth results in a dust cloud that produces a lethal greenhouse effect over thousands of years.
non-Darwinian evolutionists without ever giving us a clear and distinct idea of what he himself terms the "gold" of evolution theory as opposed to its "straw." However, it can be ascertained, especially in his crowing over the achievements of physicists.
Fr. Jaki's evolutionism is based in part on the fallacious reasoning of radiometric dating methods and on the purely speculative assumption that comets and meteors have collided with the earth at periodic intervals of 23
million years. Fr. Jaki states these assumptions dogmatically yet he is not able to offer us any irrefutable evidence.
There is one more supposedly evidential basis for his evolutionism. The subsection entitled "The true ground for the truth of evolution" (in Savior, pp. l77ff) will provide us with this information:
... Now that astronauts have seen the entire globe from outer space, it may not be a sheer flight of fancy to conjure up in a single composite image what has always been the most compelling evidence on behalf of evolution.Let the reader note well that what Fr. Jaki is about to present as the most compelling evidence for evolution is pure Darwinism; it is what Darwin found in the Galapagos Islands. So for all his rejection of Darwinism, what are we to think? This Is what he says:
The screen, gigantic of course, would show the flora and fauna of islands, such as St. Helena, Galapagos, Celebes, and of continent-islands such as Madagascar and New Zealand. About each of them the gigantic screen would show strange peculiarities. To mention only one specific example; 130 of species of beetles on St. Helena [exactly like Darwin's finches!] most of which belong to genera that are not found on the nearest mainland. This is not the place to retell in any detail the argument from geographic distribution [emphasis added] in which the mental view goes infinitely [sic] beyond the physical view and conjures up what only the eyes of the rnind shall ever see: the emergence of new species of beetles....Fr. Jaki [does not seem to realize]...[ t]hese are new varieties of...a beetle! If [he]...cannot define species for us, then at least [he should]...spare us [his]...embarrassing sophistries. He continues:
Nor shall the physical eye ever see the impact which the isolation of those beetles from their main-land relatives had, in imperceptible steps to be sure [how Darwinian] on their special development. Nor will a supercamera show the actual and infinitesimally small steps in which that development took place. Only the eyes of the mind will see all this and see it confidently.If this is not Darwinian gradualism, I don't know what could be!
Now Fr. Jaki launches into an exposition of what amounts to a metaphysic of evolution, or what attempts to be. And this must be examined most carefully, because it is a rival to the only metaphysics which the Church has made her own, and that is the metaphysics of St. Thomas.
But before doing that, a word must be said about how Fr. Jaki is able to get away with his evolutionism, that is, how he is able to put forth such a monstrous error supported by a philosophical-faith, or "confidence" as he
calls it, without the Holy Office, now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the pope and all the bishops censoring him. The story is a long one, stretching all the way back to Galileo, at least, and the gradual
acceptance of the Copernican theory after 1638. But in more recent times, it may be traced to the work done in the philosophy of science by Jacques Maritain.
In 1879, Pope Leo XIII wrote an encyclical entitled Aeterni Patris: On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy according to the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor." In this letter, the pope exhorted all the bishops of the world "to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thonas ... for the safety and glory of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the increase of all the sciences. ... Let this doctrine be the light of all places of learning... Let it be used for the refutation of errors that are gaining ground." Of St. Thomas' predecessors, the Fathers of the Church, the pope says that St. Thomas "gathered together their doctrines like the scattered limbs of a body, and moulded them into a whole. He arranged them in so wonderful an order, and increased them with such great additions, that rightly and deservedly he is reckoned a singular safeguard and glory of the Catholic Church." And for this reason primarily, heresiarchs have openly said, "that, if the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas could be gotten rid of, they could easily give battle to other Catholic Doctors, and overcome
them, and so scatter the Church."
This encyclical did indeed give rise to a grand resurgence of Thomism. Here is a description of it in the words of one of Its best-loved figures, Brother Benignus, F.S.C., in his very popular text-book, Nature, Knowledge and God (Bruce, 1947):
The present revival of Thomistic thought is very largely due to, besides purely philosophical reasons, the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII and to the great work, both organizational and philosophical, of Cardinal MercierThese last two sentences are what concern us most -- and also, that which concerned Bro. Benignus most. His book is a landmark on the road to a definitive reconciliation between Thomism and modern science. Unfortunately, his book, and others like it, were, somehow, not enough. I respectfully suggest that the main reason for the failure of the 20th century Thomists to staunch the flow of error from the major wounds given to Truth during the last four centuries is their failure to effectively combat or even to combat at all the major errors of Copernicanism and evolutionism. Heliocentrism has been accepted since the early 19th century, and evolution, I venture to say, with many a Catholic philsopher to document the statement, has never really been fought at all.
of the University of Louvain. The rebirth of wide Interest in St. Thomas led also to a reawakening of interest in the other great ancient Scholastics, so that during the past three or four decades, research into the witings and significance of St. Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and other medieval thinkers has increased immeasurably over all that was done for centuries preceding.
Hardly a field of human Interest has been left untouched by the Scholastic revival. Metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, were perhaps the first fields where this new-old force made Itself felt; but from these
it spread out to the criticism of the arts, the philosophy of law, and to all areas where philosophy is pertinent. At present, the politico-social-economic sphere is perhaps receiving the fullest impact of Thomistic thought, with the
problem of the nature of knowledge in the natural sciences and its relation to philosophy coming next. This latter problem offers to Thomists and to philosophers generally their greatest challenge today; it would appear that
the progress of philosophy depends upon its solution. A satisfactory solution would be itself a major step forward in human thought, and would open the way to many other roads that seem to be impassable as long as the problem is not solved. (pp. 56-57)
However, it is a fact that all the principles for silencing forever these major errors of the physical sciences are there in the metaphysics of St. Thomas. But here is what happened, again in the words of Bro. Benignus:
Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas explicitly distinguished between the natural sciences and the philosophy of nature, although the former was a great natural scientist as well as a great philosopher of nature, and the latter, while not a scientist at all as we would apply the term today, yet shows, by certain remarks that the distinction in question must have more than once occurred to him. Both of them theoretically located the pursuits which are today distinguished as science and philosophy of nature under physica, without marking them as distinct pursuits. (p. 411)That is the key to our present troubles, because, if the natural sciences had been allowed to remain in direct contact with the philosophy of nature and this latter in turn under the direct supervision of metaphysics and theology, both heliocentrism and evolution would never have been able to grow and gain ground. Empiricism would have been exposed as the great danger that it is to minds as well as souls. However, we have witnessed and continue to witness the apostasy of the theologians in all these matters. It would not be difficult to show, from their writings, beginning with Jesuit scholars on the continent and with Fr. John Zahm in America, how the error of evolution has been accepted by the theologians who proceeded to compromise Catholic doctrine in order to accommodate it in the book just quoted. Brother Benignus himself could provide us with a prime example.
And so it is that:
Most modern Scholastic philosophers, however, niaintain that the distinction must be made...that, indeed, it is of prime importance to both science and philosophy. Foremost among contemporary Thomistic philosophers in expounding this view is Jacques Maritain.That was in the 1940's. By granting to the physical sciences an autonomy they did not possess by nature, the way was wide open for the usurpation of the throne of truth, a throne which belongs by right only to theology.
I say that the physical sciences do not have an autonomy of their own by nature because in the very nature of things, which is seen reflected in the hierarchy of the sciences, the physical sciences are the lowest, especially as they tend more and more to the useful and the practical, i.e., to technology. Practical activities must always be ordered and supervised by the higher rule of intellect and will. In the order of nature, we do not allow our pets to rule over us (perhaps some do today!) because the fish in the bowl and the pond, the horses, cattle, dogs and cats are inferior to us in nature and require to be ruled by us as by higher beings, if, that is, we are to make use of them.
The same is true of the lower physical sciences; they require by their very nature to be ruled by the higher sciences of metaphysics and theology.
And so, despite his great reputation both for learning and for holiness, Jacques Maritain, as the times have proven, did not do the world a service when he recommended and encouraged the autonomy of the physical sciences.
Now, returning to Fr. Jaki, we find him trying to set up a philosophy or metaphysics of evolutionism, one that is in direct opposition to the philosophy of nature that is part of St. Thomas' metaphysics. Fr. Jaki will often, throughout all his books, pay a token lip-service to St. Thomas, to ontology arid to metaphysics generally. And the essential emptiness of this stated allegiance could provide the subject for another paper on Fr. Jaki.
Speaking of the infinitesimally small steps in the evolutionary process, those steps that can be seen only with the eyes of the mind, Fr. Jaki goes on:
The reason for this is that the mind's nature is to understand. That verb which is so "physical" in the immediate connotation of its components (to stand under something) can also denote an action stunninglyNow Fr. Jaki is throwing holy dust in our eyes, a dust he hopes will prevent us from seeing the absurdity of his position. However, despite its correct derivation, Fr. Jaki's definition of understanding is home-made and a good Catholic, I would think, should prefer the definition of theology. St Thomas defines understanding as both a natural virtue of the intellect and a supernatural gift of the Holy Ghost. It is called the habit of principles and consists intimate knowledge that penetrates to the nature and inmost essence of things. "Sensitivie knowledge is concerned with external sensible qualities, whereas intellective knowledge penetrates into the very essence of a thing, because the object of the intellect is what a thing is." (ST, II-II, Q 8) The intellectual virtue of knowledge is that which grasps and makes its own the very form of an existing thing; and the intellectual virtue of wisdom is that which orders all things to their highest cause which is God. Fr. Jaki's understanding is that by which the mind perceives the unifying principle of world view or synthesis.
non-physical and by a mere reversal of its components, is in itself a marvelous pointer toward that marvel which is understanding. For the mental act which is understanding is indeed a single grasp of the complexity and multiplicity of any visual image so that a unifying principle may be seen beneath it, and to be seen with that confidence which is implied in the act of any firm stand, its only kind worthy of the name. It should not therefore be a surprise that in all areas of learning the increase in understanding has always meant a growth in reducing (and with confidence) the multiplicity to unity. What has been said about the space-parameter (geological distribution), can equally be said about the time-parameter (the chronological sequence of sediments and the fossils In them). (Savior of Science, p. l48)
There are only two such unifying principles comprehensive enough to include in their syntheses both the origin and the destiny of all things: evolution and creation.
The Catholic world view is based on creation as presented in the first chapters of Genesis and destiny as presented in the Apocalypse. The Catholic synthesis recognizes creatures as composed of both essence and existence, of potency and act, of matter and form, i.e., as changing beings with unchanging natures. There is an unchanging vertical order of created nature as well as a changing order of generation that constitutes history and is based ultimately on man's free will. The presence of moral evil in the world is due only to the Original Sin of Adam and its consequences for his descendants.
As opposed to this Catholic world view, there is the evolutionary synthesis which bases all things on process , on potentialities,and on matter, ever-changing and directed by who-knows-what mechanism, but in Fr. Jaki's case, by God.
The evidence that Fr. Jaki gives us for his world view of evolutionary change throughout very long ages of time is a certain geographical distributionof flora and fauna viewed on a global map.
The evidence for the Catholic world view is based entirely on the Holy Scriptures as interpreted by the Church for almost 2000 years.
The evolutionary world view is a human construct; the Catholic world view is divinely given by Revelation.
The kind of evidence given us by Fr. Jaki is of the very same kind as the fossil record which Fr. Jaki has discarded as any kind of evidence for evolution. Fr. Jaki's work is full of contradictions.
However, geographical distribution, exactly like the fossil record is subject to another and far more compelling "interpretation" than that of evolution. In fact, it may not even be properly termed an "Interpretation" for Catholics because there is something more than an alternative explanation involved here. It is divinely revealed fact that God sent a Flood in Noah's time, a Flood that covered the entire earth for the period of a year. Such a Deluge was bound to have direct consequences for the topography of the earth world-wide, and this is exactly what is found to be the case in the land's layers ofstratified sediment and in the global distribution of fossils.
It is simply a great pity not to say an intense personal tragedy that Fr. Jaki has never considered the evidences in the earth of what the global Flood of Noah accomplished. There were not many catastrophies striking the earth at intervals of 23 million years. There was one huge catastrophy that accounts for all the geographic and geologic phenomena.
The main trouble with Fr. Jakl's world view is that it is not Catholic. It deviates radically from the constant teaching of the Church on Genesis. But then it has, too, the added disadvantages of being purely speculative, conjectural, imaginary, and if the Catholic Faith is anything, it is reasonable. But evolutionism is, after all is said and done, irrational, unreasonable, in the nature of a myth, a fairy-tale with no moral but despair.
But let's allow Fr. Jaki to continue his defense of what is really an anti-metaphysical vision of creation:
...[T]his is...[lamentable]! Fr. Jaki is telling us that by refusing to accept the evolutionary world view, we may by implication be denying the need for mental vision (his evolutionary mental vision) and so, the reality of the soul! IncredIble! Clearly, Fr. Jaki has absolutely no idea of the Cathollc-Christlan-Bibllcal world view which is based on the vertical unchanging order of creation, the foundation of all moral order, and the horizontal-temporal changing vicissitudes of unchanging natures through time: Creation, Temptation, Fall, long preparation with many falls and restorations, including the largest, the Flood, and finally, with Our lady, the Incarnation, then Redemption, Resurrection, with promise of our own, after Judgment, and finally. Heaven or Hell. It is Inpossible for Fr Jaki to fit these historical facts into his evolutionary pracess; and even if he tried, it could not work, because error never does, except by sophistry.
Anti-evolutionists so keen on saving the mind from the clutches of evolutionary materialism still have to realize the enormity of the risk they are taking. By insisting on proofs about every detail of the evolutionary process they may by implication deny the need for mental vision and with it the reality of the mind (soul), the very citadel of anti-Darwinism.
Perhaps before all else, these last-quoted words of Fr Jaki are a primary example of his special pleading, for his aim is not to defend truth but to "save" modern science which is evolutionary in essence.
Well, he must be allowed to continue his "saving action"
The chief objection to Darwinists should never be a charge that they claim to see vastly more than what actually can be seen.
What actually can be seen, according to Fr. Jaki, is geographical distribution, and from this visual image he rises, by the "mental vision" of infinitesimal changes over time, to an evolutionary world view that somehow includes God and the human soul. Fr. Jaki never explains how these things harmonize. But in the last analysis, as we have seen in our consideration of first principles, evolution is contrary to reason in its claims that things can cause themselves and that there are no unchanging natures.And evolution is contrary to Faith because it contradicts the historical facts of Genesis and departs from the infallible-traditional teaching of the Church on such matters as the State of Innocence and Original Sin.
Fr. Jaki's special pleading is for the atheistic assumptions of modern science, as becomes clearer the more we read him:
It's [would seem to be more of]...a mystery...about whom Fr. Jaki is [referring]...because the creationists [whom]...I read are not at all intent upon reducing the physical universe to mystery. Quite the contrary. It may be, however, that Fr. Jaki has in mind some non-Darwinian scientists who are Catholic but, by education and temperment, are much more in the Platonic tradition than the Thomistic. Such a scholar is Wolfgang Smith. Perhaps Fr. Jaki refers to him. But there is no way of knowing, since Fr. Jaki does not name him.
Nor should one bank too heavily on their being divided into querulous factions even when the problems on hand may seem so simple as the evolution of hair. For even their hapless division on a far more important matter, the origin of flying, may one day yield to their being united in a reasonably good explanation of it. Anti-Darwinists should not be mystery-mongers about a physical universe conerning which nothing is so misleading (and anti-Christian) [as]...the claim that it is "mysterious." .
In any case, it must be pointed out once again that in the Catholic view of things, the creation of everything by God in the beginning with time is not, properly speaking, either a mystery or a miracle. It is simply a gigantic historical FACT, divinely revealed in the first chapters of Genesis.
Fr. Jaki continues with what must be seen as his main thesis, though it is often veiled:
Against Darwinists there is only one argument, which is perennially valid
and goes to the heart of the matter. Their vulnerability to it would be far greater if T.H Huxley had admitted on more than one occasion that the
view connecting data and circumstances very distant in space and time
is a metaphysical vision, a philosophical act of faith. (Savior, p. l49)
There it is, out in the open. Fr. Jaki admits that evolutlon is a "metaphysical vision", by which he means, a philosophy in the service of a religion. Keep in mind that this argument referred to in these passages, is Fr. Jaki's own argument for evolution but against the Darwinist's materialism:
The argument's chief target is the Darwinist's inability or refusal to see the true metaphysical nature of his evolutionary vision. The argunsnt is that there is a metaphysical vision upon which scientists as well as non-scientists fall back each time they utter a phrase however trivial, let alone when they offer daring generalizations. (Savior, p. 1119)Fr. Jaki continues in this chapter to try to convince atheistic-materialist Darwinists to subscribe to his theistic evolutionism, an evolutionism which he tries, by sometimes paying lip-aervice to Thomistic metaphysies and an ontological order, to convince us, his Catholic readers, is a true philosophy of nature. That he wants nothing to do with a creation science based on the divinely revealed facts of Holy Scripture is clearly seen In the following:
Christians will only chase un-Christlan illusions if they hope forThe sad fact is that very many Catholics are following Fr. Jakl's advice and abandoning all belief in the inerrancy of Holy Scripture as always taught by the Church. It's modernism seeped down deep into the grass-roots.
a wholesale intellectual victory. Worse, they can only discredit their
Christ-inspired sense of purpose if they tie it to a geological timetable measured in thousands of years, or to the specific creation of plants and animals "according to their kinds," or to a sequence of creation in which
light and dry land cone before sun and noon. (Savior, pp. l56-7)
As to Jaki's separation of Darwinism from a non-Darwinian or Christian type of evolutionism, it is most instructive to note that two prominent and eminently qualified men who are not creationists and certainly not fundamentalists, both claim that Darwinian evolution is the same as evolution per se):
Undoubtedly, one of the major factors which contribute to the imnense appeal of the Darwinian framework is that, with all its deficiencies, the Darwinian model is still the only model of evolution ever proposed which invokes well-understood physical and natural processes as the causal agencies of evolutionary change. Creationist theories invoke frankly supernatural causes, the Larmarckian model is incompatible with the modern understanding of heredity, and no case has ever been observed of the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and saltational models of evolution can never be subject to any sort of empirical confirmation. Darwinism remains, therefore, the only truly scientific alternative which was one of its great attractions in the nineteenth century and has remained one of its enduring strengths ever since 1859. Reject Darwinism and there is, in effect, no scientific theory of evolution.And the only difference between atheistic evolution and Jakian theistic evolution is that theistic evolution makes God the mechanism or the primary agent in the evolutionary process. Pretty shoddy! Not to say blasphemous, especially in view of the fact that evolutionary processes are against the principles of right reason and contrary to all three channels of divine revelation: Holy Scripture, Tradition (the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church) and the Magisterium. Obviously, the present Magisterium cannot contradict the Magisterium of the past, for the Deposit of Faith is one. Present papal teaching cannot contradict past papal teaching without one of them being in error. The choice is clear.
[Michael Denton. Evolution; A Theory In Crisia. Adler, 1985, p. 355]The central Darwinian concept that later came to be called the "fact of evolution"--descent with modification was thus from the start protected from empirical testing. Darwin did leave some important questions open, including the relative importance of natural selection as a mechanism of change. The resulting arguments about the process, which continue to this day, distracted attention from the fact that the
all-important central concept had becone a dogma.
The central concept is all-important because there is no real distinction between the "fact" of evolution and Darwin's theory.
[Phillip E. Johnson. Darwin on Trial. Regnery Gateway, 1991, p. 149]
Before leaving the study of Fr Jaki's evolutionism, which is simply his biased attempt to "save" modern science, and certainly not that of Christ or of His Church, I would like to examine his treatment of the bombardier beetle, bringing to bear one last time the principles discussed in this paper.
In The Purpose of It All, pp. 79-80, Fr Jaki says:
...in addition to patterns one has under one's very eyes a design at work. To say as most Darwinists do that there ought to have been an infinite number of transitional patterns is but throwing a red-herring in the way of philosophical reflection. That in no case can those countless transitions be verified should reveal something of the strange fragrance of that unphilosophical herring.In other passages, we have seen Fr. Jaki most clearly accepting the gradualism of the Darwinists, but here he seems to reject it. He is as slippery as the snake in Eden. However that may be, let him continue:
... this is not the real issue at hand. The real issue is not even a choice between natural selection and special creation, although all too often one is bombarded with this misguided missile.Wherever he falls, or on whichever side of the fence he lands, Fr. Jaki is always at pains to point out that he is NOT in the camp of the creatlonists:
Fr. Jaki is wrong on both counts. What he means by "special revelation" is anybody's guess. In Catholic discourse, a "special revelation" usually refers to a "private" revelation as opposed to the public revelation of Holy Scripture and Tradition as interpreted by the Magisterium of the Church. If he means public revelation in the case of the bombardier beetle, it's nonsense, since the nature of the beetle including his defense mechanism is not an object of divine revelation but is most clearly open to natural reason and the investigations of the physical sciences.
The dispute about the bombardier beetle is a case in point. Its undoubtedly most skillful defense mechanism can no more be taken for anempirical proof of special creation than the whole universe can be taken for such a proof of an initial creation of all. In the former case the proof, if any, has to be a special revelation, while in the latter case the proof has to rely on metaphysics. It is that metaphysics, or at least sensitivity to it, that should evoke the presence of a design at work when one's eyes are fixed on the bombardier beetle's defense mechanism:...
On the second point, of "an initial creation", it is not to metaphysics we must go for proof but to divine revelation. As we have already quoted St. Thomas, (see p.16) the creation of all things out of nothing in the beginning with time is not demonstrable by reason alone but is a truth of divine Faith revealed in the first chapter of Genesis.
But metaphysics does have much to teach us about the existence and the purpose of the bombardier beetle as well as about the nature of his defense mechanism:
The defense mechanism must of necessity be triggered by some active agency, some secondary efficient cause in the beetle himself and corresponding, in an analogical manner, to the human will which causes us, efficiently, to move in one way or another, or as with the passions, escaping the control of the will, trigger mechanisms in the human body that cause adrenalin to flow and blood pressure to rise. The external danger itself, sensed by the beetle, may also be considered a more remote efficient cause. It is the fitness of cause to effect that reminds us of God. The beetle's defense mechanism is not triggered by any cause but only by one that is sensed by him as dangerous. This kind of relation of cause to effect is of necessity a planned one, and plans are only made and carried out by intellect and will. In this case, of the beetle, there is no intelligent and willing cause except the Supreme Cause Who is God.
When the beetle senses danger, it internally mixes enzymes contained in one body chamber with concentrations of some rather harmless compounds, hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinons, confined to a second chamber. This generates a noxious spray of caustic benzoquinons, which explodes from its body at a boiling 212F. What is more, the fluid is pumped through twin rear nozzles, which can be rotated, like a B-17's gun turret, to hit a hungry ant or frog, with bull's eye accuracy. (Purpose, p. 80)
The pattern or design of the mechanism itself is the material-formal cause of the entire operation. The causality of the form, of the nature of the beetle, is neither action nor passion but is specification, determination. The formal cause is, as Aristotle calls it, a formula. It is precisely at this point thatspecies should be defined. The form is the unchanging actuality of the beetle's very being, of its nature, its essence, and that by which and in union with the material cause, all its effects are produced. (Cf. Bro. Benignus, p. 73)
The material principle is always in potency to the actuality specified and determined by the form. This is why the cause must be proportionate to the effect and vice versa, why, as in the case of the snowshoe rabbit, the change of color cannot be brought about by temperature or by diet, but only by the duration of the light. And this is also why the evolution of one species into another is a metaphysical impossibility. If it is a metaphysical impossibility, it is a fortiori a physical impossibility.
No power in nature can efficiently bring into being the entire nature of the bombardier beetle, including its defense mechanism, because 1) no being can act as its own cause of existence, and 2) no power of a non-rational nature can bring into existence a being with a rational nature. The cause must always be proportionate to the effect, and this especially in nature itself, otherwise things do not "make sense" and nature itself is absurd. But this is patently not the case. We see natural things always obeying laws that make eminent sense, that are most remarkable in their wisdom and providence. We know by reason that such operations of intelligence do not belong to irrational creatures like spiders and monkeys. They must, therefore, of necessity, be directed by a supremely Intelligent and Provident Being Who is God.
The Primary Cause is always, of necessity, present in the operation of secondary causes simply because the secondary causes do not have this active agency and purpose in themselves. It must be received, even as existence itself must be received from God Who alone is Existence and Who alone can give it, for He alone is its Source. And everything else, especially the intelligence and free will of human beings, depends first of all upon existence. And the actuality of concrete existence is imparted only by the form, because without the substantial form, there is no human being. This is why Godmust infuse the soul at conception: the material forms present then, in the union of sperm and egg, are the material for the human being and no other kind of being. They demand the substantial form of the human soul for their continued development. If God refused to infuse the human soul into the conceptus, it would die immediately, rot away, and there would be no human being. But if the zygote lives, we may be certain it is a human being informed by an intellective soul and destined to live forever.
Unless the Primary Agency of God is given its necessary place in the activity of all secondary causes, scientists may describe things ad infinitum but they fall far short of explaining them. The infinite power and wisdom of God are alone sufficient to account for the wonders of our universe.
Natural selection, or any other natural process, could never, no matter how much time be allowed, achieve the production of the beetle's nature, defense mechanism and all, unless natural selection were endowed with creative power and intelligence. But such belongs to God alone, and St. Thomas tells us that God does not communicate or delegate His creative power, even to the Angels. It is proper to Him alone. He could not delegate it, either, for if any creature had this creative power and wisdom of God, that creature would also be God. And so, natural selection is an impossible idea.
Nor could natural selection ever achieve the purposiveness of the defense mechanism itself, because such a mechanism demands, by its very nature, the presence of intelligence and plan. William Paley saw this. To attribute such intelligence and planning power to natural selection is to deify that natural process, and this is plainly pantheism.
Jaki tells us how the Darwinist tries to answer the creationists by referring to "those extremely numerous and finely graduated transitions":
Fr. Jaki is correct when he says that mere mechanism (material-formal cause) cannot by itself account for purpose (final cause). He ought, however, in all fairness, admit that the creationists, despite their lack of a developed metaphysics, come far closer to the Designer Who is God than do the evolutionists who persist in denying His Existence in the face of all the created evidences of His Presence.
Both sides are actually one in having no use for a philosophy that alone can cope with patterns that are also designs expressive of a purpose that mere mechanism cannot account for and of a purpose that does not supplement mechanical steps. (Purpose, p. 80)
Furthermore, in the existential order of real things, it is really impossible to separate the four causes.
Agency and purpose are reflected in every detail of the universe and its operations. These extrinsic causes are most evident in the creatures studied by the life sciences, but they are clearly seen even at the level of the elements and even sub-atomic particles where there are affinities and rejections, attractions and repulsions analogous to the agency and purpose of higher beings.
Such reflections of God's Being speak loudly and clearly of their Creator. The universe in all its particulars is a symphonic witness of God's Wisdom and Providence; His Wisdom in its design and His Providential power in its maintenance; His creative power in its very existence and the necessity of His existence in its continuance; His Necessity in its contingency, and His necessary concurrence in its every operation.
Secondary causality is indeed marvelous in all its aspects: in its agency, its evident purposes, its wonderfully beautiful material-formality. But none of this could even exist at all were it not for the sustaining power of the Primary Cause Who is God.
In writing an entire book on The Purpose of It All, Fr. Jaki must be given credit for recognizing in some way the primacy of the Final Cause.
Among the four causes, the final cause has the primacy -- it is the cause of causes. It becomes a cause by influencing the efficient cause and thus initiating the action of the latter; and ... it is the action of the efficient cause that makes the material and formal causes actual causes.
Then Fr. Jaki quotes Bro. Benignus as follows:
The efficient cause and the end are reciprocal because the agent is the beginning of the movement and the end of its termination. So, too, are the matter and the form; for the form gives being and the matter receives it. Therefore, the agent is the cause of the end, but the end is also the cause of the agency. The agent is the cause of the end (i.e., purpose) in regard to being, for the agent by moving brings it about that the end exists. But the end is the cause of the agent not in regard to being but in regard to the reason of causality. For the efficient cause is a cause insofar as it acts; but it does not act except thanks to an end. ... It should be understood that although the end is last among things in being, it is always prior in causality; whence it is called the cause of causes, because it is the cause of causality in all the causes. For it is the cause of the causality of the agent, as shown above; and the agent is the cause of the causality of the matter and the form. (St. Thomas in V Mets.)Having given Fr. Jaki credit for thus acknowledging some of the work by St. Thomas and Bro. Benignus, it should be obvious that this hardly offsetshis clearly revealed prestigious opinion that God created via process (i.e., evolution), contrary to Church teaching and tradition.
[Nature, Knowledge and God. Bruce. l947. p. 76]
Paula Haigh
Nazareth Village I #102
POB 1000
Nazareth KY 40048-1000
