God and the Cosmologists [Paperback]

Stanley L. Jaki (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 1991

One famous cosmologist claims that our universe may be a laboratory product from another universe. According to another the universe just happened by sheer chance. Still another argues that God himself could not have produced a different universe. Not surprisingly, the same cosmologist boasts of his atheism and gladly suffers being written up as master of the university. How did we get to this scientifically coated intellectual malaise? What has been the true role of scientific cosmology in this ominous process? In answering these questions the author, an internationally known historian of cosmology and the winner of the Templeton Prize for 1987, also unfolds some crucially positive contributions of 20th century scientific cosmology to the cosmological argument.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Regnery Gateway Inc.,U.S. (February 28, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0895267497
• ISBN-13: 978-0895267498
• Product Dimensions: 22.5 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,185,990 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars God and Cosmology, March 13, 2009

By 

Gerard Reed - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: God and the Cosmologists (Paperback)

In God and the Cosmologists (Washington: Regnery Gateway, c. 1989), Stanley L. Jaki continues his quest to tie together contemporary physics and traditional theology, insisting that "All great philosophical systems have been cos¬mologies" (p. ix). In his judgment, modern science facilitates the articulation of classical metaphysics. "True metaphysics implies series of assertions about a Reality beyond the universe, as the cause of the reality of the universe itself" (p. 84).
To do this, the reigning ideology of the past few centuries, loosely waving the Enlightenment flag, must be suitably buried. This means, especially, the final internment of Immanuel Kant, who exacted from his followers "the highest price that any rationalist philosopher can demand. The price was the universe" (p. 11). Kant did so in order to construct a universe in his own mind. Amazingly, he was "so self-centered as to write repeatedly, 'I am God,' in his last great work, the Opus postumum" (p. 12).
Repudiating Kant, Jaki obviously aligns himself with philosophical realism, a stance he contends science dictates. Furthermore--coming to the thesis of the book--the universe, inescapably and objectively real, also points "beyond its specific phases to an origin which has to be a factor metaphysically beyond the universe" (p. 52). Given the specificity and contingency of the universe, cosmological analyses and hypotheses and assertions are necessary.
There are those, of course, who fault any effort to make sense of the universe. One logical positivist, H. Reichenbach, insisted: "'We have no absolutely conclusive evidence that there is a physical world, and we have no absolutely conclusive evidence either that we exist'" (p. 224). Such allegedly "scientific" notions are easily popularized, so that M. Esslin, describing our era, can say: "'Suddenly man sees himself faced with a universe that is both frightening and illogical--in a word, absurd. All assurances of hope, all explanations of ultimate meaning have suddenly been unmasked as nonsensical illusions, empty chatter, whistling in the dark'" (p. 215).
Standing against such cosmic anguish, Jaki insists that we take common, ordinary events and experiences as realities which, rightly understood, point toward eternal realities. Thus, with the poet Robert Browning, we can declare: "This world's no blot for us, / Nor blank; it means in¬tensely, and means good: / To find its meaning is my meat and drink" (p. 201).
The essays collected in this volume help us do precisely that.