First Philosophy

Extract

When Sir Arthur Eddington writes that “Religion first became possible for a reasonable scientific man about the year 1927” and when apologists expound their novel vindications of the classical cosmology in the light of quantum mechanics, it is clear to a metaphysician that both sides have missed the point. For the metaphysical approach to reality, with its immediate determinations in psychology and cosmology, either transcends the contingent data of individual research, or it does not exist. Yet apologists and even representative metaphysicians have not always appreciated this essential preliminary to philosophy and apologetics.

Hence it is all the more a remarkable fact when a non-Catholic writer appreciates it, independently, it would seem, of any manifest contact with a philosophical tradition. And in spite of the charges of buffoonery and leg-pulling sure to be brought against him from academic strongholds, the fact that he penetrates again and again to radical metaphysical realities, scattering pseudo-scientific question-begging postulates right and left in his convinced insistence, evidently commands our conscientious attention. We do not praise him precisely for his individual work, but rather because he is representative of an approach greatly, but often vainly, sought. The added fact that he is a professional mathematician, nurtured in the atmosphere of modern physics and thoroughly familiar with it, inevitably inclines many of us all the more to give him a hearing—not because he is a physicist, but because he is a physicist who has gate-crashed the conventional postulates of the physicist philosophers of the last three decades—intelligently, that is to say, and not by mere reaction.