Page 4 - Week2

Newton’s epistemology was a subconscious, or at least an inarticulated middle ground
between Francis Bacon’s empiricism and Descartes’ rationalism. For Galileo, Boyle,
Newton and others “the world was rational only because the Creator was supremely
rational.” Jaki insists that it was only in this conceptual matrix that the viable birth of
science became a full reality.
The next and most instructive phase which Jaki elaborates in the interaction between
the fortunes of science and the Christian doctrine of creation relates to the thought of
Kant. Jaki unfolds in detail the little-remembered fact that Kant endorsed something
closely equivalent to the Great Year in his youthful, and scientifically largely worthless,
cosmological work. He also shows the equally ignored fact that the later Kant
emphatically endorsed pantheism in a context that was antiscientific to a shocking extent.
Kant, as Jaki points out, held a different perspective on God and the cosmos, as he tried
to make it appear that reason was denied access to God, the soul and the universe; indeed
he regarded the universe as a “bastard product of the metaphysical cravings of the
intellect” which was thus no longer a stepping stone to the existence of the Creator.
Kant’s main aim was to secure for man his autonomy vis-à-vis God; here he was partly
inspired by his reading of Rousseau.
Owing to his a priori approach, Kant held that “the infinite perfection of God must
evidence itself in an infinite creation.” The notion of the universe as a perpetuum mobile
“foreshadowed Kant’s gradual shifting into pantheism.” In the Allgemeine
Naturgeschichte (1755), Kant had stated that the teleological way was a valid proof of
God’s existence, but later, in 1763, Kant rejected the cosmological and teleological
arguments in Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins
Gottes (The only possible argument for a demonstration of the existence of God). The
only proof accepted by Kant at that time was the ontological way which, as Jaki notes,
“did not lead to a really existing God.” In Kant’s idealism the noumenon or Ding an sich
was inaccessible to the intellect and hence the impetus of knowing the real world, which
is the motivation for science, was threatened.
After Kant, the idea of the Great Year, which had for two centuries almost disappeared
from the printed page, made its return through German idealism. The old pagan notion of
eternal recurrence found a further spokesman in Nietzsche, who opposed those scientists
involved with the formulation of the entropy principle, as he feared this would have
undermined his idea of the eternity of cyclic progression in the universe. Once more Jaki
discredits these thinkers by showing in detail the nullity of their claim that they had any
competence, let alone great competence in science.
Such is a brief outline of the historical landscape, which Jaki presents with massive
documentation as a proof on behalf of a twofold proposition. On the one hand, science
suffered stillbirths in all ancient cultures, as they were dominated by a cyclic world-
picture and by pantheism, doctrines antithetic to the Christian doctrine of creation. On the
other hand, science achieved a viable birth in a cultural matrix which had already been
steeped for centuries in that very Christian doctrine. In other words, the philosophical
consequences of this belief were able to penetrate the mentality of the scientist, so as to
become almost second nature.
In the Middle Ages, ideas about the created universe had developed which were greatly
conducive to scientific enterprise. This world vision included the idea that the cosmos is
good, and therefore attractive to study. Also the universe was considered to be single entity

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