The
Savior of Science
Stanley L. Jaki
The very title of this book is an invitation to courageous
thinking. The
Savior of Science begins with a portrayal of a most neglected, yet
all-important facets of cultural history: the invariable stillbirths of
science in great ancient cultures, including Greece and the early Muslim
empire. This is the background for the first major thesis of the book:
belief in Christ, the only begotten Son of God (a belief absent in all
those cultures) secured for science its only viable birth in a period that
began in the High Middle Ages.
The author, a renowned historian and philosopher
of science, has been
known for some time for his erudite courage to oppose long-established
cultural cliches about scientific history. Those clich‚s are roundly contradicted
by his further and meticulously argued theses about Christian monotheism:
it provides intellectual safeguards for the cosmological argument (an argument
powerfully supported by modern scientific cosmology), it vindicates the
sense of purpose destroyed by materialist theories of evolution, and it
secures firm et hical guidelines against fearful abuses of scientific know-how.
On the cover: center part of the 12th-century
mosaic of Christ the
Pantokrator in the apse of the Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily.