RPC Articles
The truth about modern physics, man, and God
From the B.C. Catholic
Book review
By C.S. MORRISSEY
Anthony Rizzi, The Science Before Science: A Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century, Institute for Advanced Physics Press, 2004.
Truth cannot contradict truth. Pope John Paul II made a special point of proclaiming how the truths known by faith and reason are not at odds.
In a new book that takes up this great papal theme, Catholic physicist Anthony Rizzi shows how all advances in modern physics, like quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity, are eminently compatible with the philosophical and theological wisdom of the Catholic Church.
Many popular writers are fond of misinterpreting modern physics in order to make extravagant claims: that nothing is real until we observe it; that nothing is ever certain; that everything is relative to the observer; that the mathematical necessity of other universes has been proved; and that we humans mostly consist of the empty space of atoms.
With the perspective of a physics insider, Rizzi shows all such claims to be nonsense. They result from science overstepping its bounds and doing bad philosophy. Moreover, as a practising Catholic, Rizzi reconciles, in the best Thomist tradition, the discoveries of modern physics with the metaphysical wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas.
He exposes the philosophical contradictions implicit in the scientism prevalent today. As Tom Wolfe recently described this corrosive cultural prejudice, "We now live in an age in which science is a court from which there is no appeal."
Rizzi, however, has the requisite credentials to make the appeal. Rizzi's claim to physics fame is that in 1997 he gave the first satisfactory definition of angular momentum, something that Einstein's general theory of relativity lacked. Today he continues to research general relativity and gravity waves at the California Institute of Technology's Louisiana Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO).
In The Science Before Science, Rizzi explores the philosophical underpinnings of the grand enterprise of modern physics. He shows that there is more to reality than simply the physical universe. Rizzi argues that modern scientists have no adequate conception of their proper place in the order of human knowledge. Modern scientists wrongly think that their mathematical and quantitative methods can account for everything.
Rizzi reminds us of philosophy, the "science before science." His book demonstrates that modern science commits grave errors about man and his proper place in the universe when it thinks it can give no thought to the "science before science."
For example, how many scientists can admit the truth that our intellects are not material, that they are our immortal souls? Rizzi uses rational argument to establish that, contrary to scientific prejudice, we really can know that intellect is not material.
Thanks to the clarity and colloquial tone of Rizzi's presentation of St. Thomas, the general reader will find in this book answers to the questionable totalitarian claims of today's scientists.
Rizzi devotes his first three chapters to convincing the reader of the necessity of starting with first things first. Proper knowledge begins with the common sense available from our sensory experience. Rizzi shows how the Thomistic principle that we know nothing that does not originate in our senses, is the "realism" that we need today in order to counter the "idealist" errors of unchecked scientism.
In his fourth chapter, Rizzi explains Thomistic thought on being and the transcendentals (like truth, goodness, beauty) with admirable brevity and accuracy. The remaining chapters engage almost every topic that poses profound questions for the inquiring mind interested in faith and science: the big bang, time travel, evolution, relativity, animal souls, artificial intelligence, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
The book's argument builds up to an exposition of Aquinas's philosophical demonstrations of the existence of God, set forth in a way understandable even to sceptics trained by modern science. The book's argument also includes an explanation of how the advances of modern science only happened in history because of the Catholic faith.
Thanks to the cultural soil of Catholic Europe, modern science was able to build on the work of precursors like Aristotle and Aquinas. Modern science only came to fruition because Catholicism affirmed the intelligibility and non-necessary character of God's universe, which He freely chose to create with laws knowable by the human mind.
Like his predecessor John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI understands that we are in danger of squandering this cultural inheritance from which science was born. Our culture urgently needs St. Thomas in the age of modern science more than ever.
C.S. Morrissey teaches medieval ecclesiastical Latin at Redeemer Pacific College. More information about The Science Before Science is available at moreC.com/iap.
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