Stanley Jaki, a Catholic priest and a prolific historian of science, has produced a series of scholarly, at times plodding, essays derived from lectures he delivered at Notre Dame. It purports to be the first full treatment of Chesterton and science. He offers us a fair picture of the intuitive genius of Chesterton, whose common and artistic sense allowed him to be both an interpreter as well as a champion of traditional science, while standing as a caustic critic of the eugenicists and those who would direct man’s development along “scientific lines.”

Chesterton’s paradoxical Thomism did not fail him when he dealt with the spirit of modern science and the practical horrors scientific mechanisms can bring forth. As Jaki points out, “Chesterton’s chief interest in science always centered on its possible threat to the freedom of the will,” that is, to the practical consequences of abstract scientific pontification on the social, artistic, and moral responsibility of being human. To Chesterton the consequences of science divorced from the divine reason from which the world sprang must inevitably result in terrible crimes.

It must be understood that Chesterton was not anti-science; his enemy was scientism. “Scientism, or the claim that only the scientific or quantitative method yields valid knowledge and reliable value judgments,” says Jaki, “provoked Chesterton to many devastating and penetrating remarks.” Of course, it did not take much to provoke Chesterton to wisdom or at least wit. He rose to battle the giants of the new religion of scientific reason with joyous fervor: Huxley, Spencer, Haeckel, Bradlaugh, and Wells. All fell before his happy dialectic.

Chesterton also had a great impact on the subject of evolution. He opposed Darwinism as a philosophy. This distinction between the philosophy of evolution and the mechanics of evolution must be kept clear. As Chesterton wrote: “If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called man, it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.”

What Christians cannot hold to, and what is presently the required creed of the religion of science, is the notion of chance evolution: the mindless, irrational, random, spontaneous generation of life and spontaneous generation of intellect. This is the unholy philosophy of evolutionary scientism which denies even the possibility of divine interaction with creation. Ironically, modernists are agnostic concerning the existence of God, but insist that if a God exists, he cannot make waves. “Men in earlier times,” Chesterton points out, “said unscientific things with the vagueness of gossip and legend, they now say unscientific things with the plainness and certainty of science.” Chesterton again: “It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend itself into anything.” As Christ said of another generation of wise fools, they strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

Chesterton rightly understood that the battle is not about evolution, but about the worship of randomness. The war is not about science, but scientific pretense and illogic.

In the end, Jaki suggests that Chesterton’s chief contribution to scientific thought lay in his understanding that reality is real—a tautological celebration of the quiddity of things. “Herein lies the principal and lasting relevance of Chesterton for science which dominates modern thought even more than was the case in his day. Since then no one has argued more persuasively on behalf of objective reality as a safeguard of sanity, including the sanity of science.” What lies at the core of all Chesterton’s writings, and what causes us to pause in admiration, is this incredible sanity. He saw clearly that everything is a miracle.

For this reason, Chesterton was not afraid to celebrate a blade of grass for being a blade of grass; nor did he deny that under the proper circumstances a jug of water might become a jug of wine. But he was firm in suggesting the antediluvian truth that “one must not get the water in the wine,” which, after all, is the essence of scientific methodology. Chesterton understood the necessity of boundaries. Modern science has yet to understand that there is something beyond its bounds, and that the ineffable Thing beyond its bounds has no fear of science, or of the puny creatures that send their towers skyward.

[Chesterton, Seer of Science, by Stanley Jaki; Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press]