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Science and Religion
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Questions on Science and Religion
Endless questions have arisen about the relation of science
and religion. Disputes still rage and misunderstandings rule. On occasion some
claimed that harmony developed at long last between those two most disparate
subjects. In this book an internationally recognized authority on that relation
offers a key to fourteen important questions, concisely listed in the table of
contents. The key is derived from the author’s now more than four-decade-long
work, available in almost fifty books and five hundred articles. The key is the
unique status of quantities in the conceptual domain. The truth of any
proposition in science rests with quantitative procedures. And since quantities
are everywhere where there is matter, science has a universal competence. Yet
this competence appears very narrow when compared with the non-quantitative
conceptual domain, usually summed up as the domain of qualities or values.
Religion relates to this latter domain whose grasp gives, however, no competence
about the domain of quantities. Hence the mutual irreducibility of religion and
science. It assures respective autonomy to both. All misunderstandings about the
relation of science and religion arise from an oversight of their respective
conceptual competence. The two are equally needed, but in two very different
senses. This difference may disturb the scientistic reductionist as well as the
uninformed religionist. Anyone else will have to live in peace with the
difference which is between knowing how the heavens go, and how to go to heaven.
By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki
ISBN 1-892548-41-0 •
202
pages • soft cover •
$16.00
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Numbers Decide
and Other Essays
This book, a collection of fifteen essays, takes its title
from a remark, “numbers decide”, of Max Planck, one of the greatest physicists
of the twentieth century. Among competing physical theories that theory proves
indeed victorious whose predictions agree best with the numerical values of
experiments. Planck’s phrase would have become even more memorable had he added
that outside physical or experimental science numbers decide very little. In
fact in the vast field of humanities they decide nothing substantial, a point
well to ponder in this age of science. This view sets the tone of the fifteen
essays that cover topics widely differing, yet equally relevant to some burning
questions of modern culture. Among these are the perplexities posed by
speculations about extraterrestrials, by cloning, by education, by the rude
awakening of an increasingly de-Christianized West to the reality of a crusading
Muslim world, and by anxious thoughts as to what the next thousand years may
have in store for mankind.
By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki
ISBN 1-892548-32-1 •
267
pages • soft cover •
$18.00
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Impassable Divide
Given the popularity of books on the relation of science
and religion, a close look on the subject may be in order. Much of that
literature provides no clear idea either about science or about religion under
discussion. It is argued in this book that the vagueness on the subject is due
to leaving both science and religion inentionally undefined. The way out of this
confusion is sought in a strict definition of science which is based on its
exact form, physics, in which quantities form the touchstone of truth. Such a
definition of science puts it on one side of an impassable divide on the other
side of which lies a religion whose sole business is to assure an eternally
valid purpose for human existence, a strictly qualitative proposition. Since
conceptually there is no passage from quantities to qualities, the relation of
science and religion cannot be that of an integration or of an opposition. While
the human mind can grasp both domains, it cannot reduce one to the other. It
must, however, use to the full its ability to hover, so to speak, over the two
domains. The Introduction gives a general idea of the historical confusions and
complexities of that relation as well as of the only sound approach, which as
such eschews expectations of popularity.
By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki
ISBN 978-1-892539-02-1 •
108
pages • soft cover •
$12.00
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A Late Awakening
and Other Essays
This book is the eighth collection of essays by the
author that in a good part deal with science. The first essay deals with a
strange and very late awakening to the bearing of Gödel’s theorem to physics.
The second is concerned with a similar though much earlier fact, namely,
Galileo’s oversight of a wholly mistaken statement of Aristotle on the laws of
motion. The next five essays have for their topic, in part with an eye on
Duhem’s work, the role which Christ, or rather belief in him played and still
plays in a proper grasp of the history of science and even of brave utterances
about extraterrestrials. In chapter 8 attention is focused on the relation of
relativity theory to religion, with special reference to Einstein’s own
statements, whereas the qestion of purpose as a problem in biology is discussed
in chapter 9. The next three chapters deal with the broader societal questions
of bioethics. Chapter 13 offers an analysis of the conversion to Catholicism of
Karl Stern, a noted Jewish psychiatrist. Chapters 14-15 deal with Chesterton,
whereas the thought of Thomas Aquinas constitutes the topic of the concluding
two chapters.
By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki
ISBN 0-9774826-4-2 •
261
pages • soft cover •
$18.00
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Sigrid Undset's Quest for Truth
Sigrid Undset is often spoken of as the
greatest novelist of the twentieth century. She, the winner of the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1928, may also be one of the greatest converts during
the same century.
Contrary to the cliché, Sigrid Undset did not convert because of her fondness
for the Middle Ages. In this age of one-parent families and “partner”
relationships, it may be most instructive to recall that she converted because
her disastrous marriage opened her eyes to what it means for a woman to be a
mother and to what children really are, beings created by God for an eternal
destiny. That meaning Sigrid Undset found to be anchored in the reality of the
Catholic Church insofar as its Founder, Jesus Christ, was truly the Son of God.
She then became a staunch defender of the Catholic faith through many essays
that have been neglected by her literary critics, most of whom judged her on
the basis of her novels, while largely ignoring their true gist.
Those essays convey with particular force Sigrid Undset’s quest for Truth and
her holding fast to it, once she had embraced it with great joy.
The book contains the text of Sigrid Undset’s two pivotal essays,
not previously available in English, Efterskrift (Postscript),
translated by Marianne Aga, and My reasons to convert, translated by
Fr. John H. Halborg.
A booklet that contains another text of Sigrid Undset, Reply to a Parish Priest, can be found
here.
By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki
ISBN 978-0-9790577-6-2 •
299
pages • soft cover •
$19
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A MIND'S MATTER:
An Intellectual Autobiography
In writing A Mind's
Matter one of his generation's finest
philosophers looks back at his own scholarship and the
intellectual framework that produced it - not least his
staunch belief in the crucial role of religious
convictions in academic thought. Stanley Jaki's
explosive productivity canvasses a wide range of
relevant topics, most notably the history of science,
and has earned him such signal honors as the Gifford
lectureship and the Templeton Prize. A Hungarian by
birth, Jaki has since 1950 lived in the United States,
where one's religion is supposed to be a strictly
private affair. Yet as a Catholic priest of the
Benedictine Order, Jaki has never made secret his
dislike of the "rule" that expects to eliminate
religious factors from the so-called academic equation.
To his mind those factors matter very much
indeed. In this powerful intellectual autobiography, Jaki reflects on the course of his thinking, asking in what sense the religious factors he holds dear can also promote scholarship, particularly in the sensitive field of science and religion. The answer is set forth in a combination of topical and chronological meditations that will be of great value to anyone pursuing academic work today.
By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki
ISBN 0-8028-3960-6 • 311 pages • soft cover • $18
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Creation and Scientific Creativity: A Study in the Thought of S.L. Jaki
Father Stanley Jaki (1924-2009) was one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century and his contribution to Catholic thought and culture has been profound, especially regarding the relationship between science and religion. This work focuses on the close link joining science and Christianity, despite the differences between them. Through his study of modern science, theology, and history, Stanley Jaki showed faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. The problems arise because of those ideologies which seek to eliminate God from the ultimate equation. Jaki highlighted the Christian origins of the modern natural sciences. He showed that the concept of the cosmos as both contingent and rational, together with the acceptance that God could work through secondary causes, providing the unique environment for the natural sciences to flourish, from the Middle Ages onwards. He explored the crucial role played by belief in creation out of nothing and in time, reinforced by faith in the Incarnation, in enabling this birth of science. This book contains the firest systematic treatment of the ideas of the late Stanley Jaki, and is the only complete work, with an entire bibliography, approved by him during his lifetime.
By Fr. Paul Haffner
ISBN 978-085244-454-2 • 352 pages • soft cover • $25
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God and the Sun at Fatima
God writes straight along crooked lines, so goes a Portuguese proverb, which sums up the story unfolded in this book.
The story is about the far from adequate attention which writers on Fatima paid to the eyewitness accounts of what is usually referred to as "the miracle of the sun."
Contrary to the stereotype claim that the sun "danced" over Fatima on October 13, 1917, something else did that "dancing." The great majority of eyewitness accounts, our sole source of information about what was observed on that day in Cova da Iria, refer to thin clouds that covered the sun as it "danced."
Therefore it should seem logical to approach the miracle of the sun as a meteorological miracle and do thereby justice both to science and religion.
As a true miracle, "the miracle of the sun" put a divine seal on a message that determined in the long run and in a "crooked," that is, most unpredictable, way the outcome of twentieth-century world history.
By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki
ISBN 1-892548-C4-6 • 381 pages • soft cover • $21
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