The Road of Science and the Ways to God (The Gifford Lectures)

Science is very much a late-corner in human history, nowadays taken to be several million years old. Of that immense past, the history of science takes up perhaps twice twenty centuries. By contrast, science as we use it today is no more than a few hundred years old. During that time science has grown at an accelerated rate, which took on an explosive character during the twentieth century. Human life has become wholly science-conditioned, and yet it shows needs that remain vivid in spite of their antiquity. Religion is more alive than ever. Its relation to science keeps prompting a great many studies. A novel probing into that relation is offered in the pages of this book, the text of Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1975 and 1976. According to the thesis developed in these lectures the epistemology of the classic proofs of the existence of God subtly resurfaced in methodologies that are associated with great creative advances in science. It is also proposed that whenever a scientific method has been submitted which is implicitly or thematically contrary to that epistemology, science has become a real or at least a potential loser. The thesis is supported by a remarkable grasp of the history of physics, astronomy, philosophy, and theology. Stanley L. Jaki, an internationally recognized historian and philosopher of science, is the winner of the Templeton Prize for 1987.