Patterns or Principles & Other Essays

by Stanley L. Jaki

The Essays Collected in PATTERNS OR PRINCIPLES deal, from various perspectives, with the central confrontation within modern culture. The confrontation is between two irreconcilable philosophies of life. One is centered on mere patterns of thinking that obey only the fashions of the moment. The other is steeped in principles whose truth is not independent on momentary preferences. The different kinds of correctness-political, academic, societal, educational and scientific-have one thing common, they aim at establishing the rule of mere patterns. According to that rule any pattern of behavior, which is acted out by people whose number is statistically significant, is entitled to full legal recognition and political support. And the same holds true of any set of ideas, subversive or distasteful as they maybe when measured up against the traditional of western Civilisation. While these principles have always been held to be synonymous with absolute, unchangeable truth, patterns are always subject to perpetual reshaping and therefore strictly relative. The expression "statistically significant" should readily evoke the scientific veneer which this crusade against Western Civilization uses in order to appear intellectually respectable. A major aim of these essays is to throw light on this abuse of science for purposes wholly alien to it.

237 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Stanley L. Jaki, a Hungarian-born Catholic priest of the Benedictine Order, was Distinguished University Professor at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. With doctorates in theology and physics, he has specialized in the history and philosophy of science. The author of almost forty books and nearly a hundred articles, he served as Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and as Fremantle Lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford. He has lectured at major universities in the Unites States, Europe, and Australia. He was a honorary member of the Pontificial Academy of Sciences, membre correspondant of the Académie Nationale des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts of Bourdeaux, and the recipient of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize for 1970 and of the Templeton Prize for 1987. He was among the first to claim that Gödel's incompleteness theorem is relevant for theories of everything (TOE) in theoretical physics.

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