I have known, admired, and revered Fr. Jaki for over thirty years. I first met him in the mid-1970s when he came to John Jay College and gave a brilliant talk on what he called the "stillbirths of science" in ancient India, China, Egypt, Babylon, and Greece, and on the "only viable birth" of science in medieval Christianity. His account of the rise of science was a Copernican turn in historiography. All those ancient cultures had come to a stop after making a few steps in the direction of the three laws of motion (the basis of exact science) because they viewed the world as an eternal treadmill, doomed to endless returns after every Great Year (represented by the swastika). For those cultures, the status quo was the most that could ever be achieved. Christians, by contrast, believed in a creation out of nothing and a single one-directional movement in time. No wonder a Christian scholar named Buridan formulated the first law of motion in 1348. Historians of science are mum about these "stillbirths of science" in pagan antiquity and of its "only viable birth" in medieval Christianity. The supposed darkness of the Middle Ages turns out to be the "dark recesses" of the biased minds of historians. For more on this, read Fr. Jaki's Science and Creation.
