Here is some other thoughts for you to ponder.
If Fr. Jaki reserves special disdain for those who push religion into the realm of science by insisting on creationism, he has at least as great a disdain for those scientists who urge science as offering a materialistic explanation of everything. “Nothing shows so effectively the atrophying character of scientific thinking, or rather of a thinking that wants to be exclusively scientific, than the denial, by great scientists, of man’s free will. Einstein was one of these to his eternal shame. … A world view in which the World, or the Universe writ large is the ultimate entity, allows no room for free will, not even for thinking freely about such an ultimate entity.”
He even invokes science to demonstrate that science cannot explain all. Specifically, he invokes Gödel’s Theorem. “Only those trained in mathematical logic would savor” Gödel’s Theorem as first expressed in 1931, but, he says, it was put “in a form comprehensible to the layman” in 1962. Basically, Gödel’s Theorem demonstrates mathematically that in any arithmetic system there will be a statement that can neither be proved nor disproved; the consistency of an arithmetic system cannot be proved within that system. To prove or disprove every conceivable statement about numbers within the system, one must go outside the system to come up with new rules and axioms - thus creating a larger system with its own unprovable statements.
I admit I was confused by Fr. Jaki’s discussion of Gödel’s Theorem, even after reading it several times. Indeed, to come to my layman’s understanding of the theorem that I set forth in the preceding paragraph, I had to go outside Fr. Jaki’s book by consulting Antony Flew’s A Dictionary of Philosophy. I readily concede a mathematician may consider my condensation of the theorem technically deficient. But, I believe, my condensation allows Fr. Jaki’s salient point: “Physicists, who by 1930 were working on a theory that would unify relativity theory and quantum mechanics, should have realized that Gödel’s paper was a handwriting on the wall of their fondest aspirations. After all, their theories of physics were becoming more and more mathematical and forbiddingly so.” And, “Gödel’s theorem dealt a grievous blow to hopes about a final physical theory because this could not be implemented without a very elaborate form of mathematics.” Thus, “such a theory is possible to formulate, but when it is on hand one cannot know that it is a final theory,” given Gödel’s Theorem.
Some scientists suggest they are working to establish a unified physical theory that would make a Creator unnecessary because it would show that the universe necessarily is what it is and cannot be anything else. They believe science would thus rebut the theological argument that the universe is contingent and therefore needs a Creator. But, because Gödel’s Theorem shows there cannot be a mathematical system with a proof of built-in consistency, and because physics must be highly mathematical, no one can construct a physical theory that would be strictly final. In other words, Gödel’s Theorem renders the scientific search for a provable unified theory a fool’s errand. And, of course, the fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
I chuckle at the "fools errand" so many clamor to deliver. Where is the man that knows secret of creating life? Damn! forget the fools errand, how many have spent a lifetime on that errand with no Climax?
