Joseph de Torre - Some Excerpts From His Works

Some Excerpts From His Works

In The Power of Christian Philosophy to Transform Man and Society", he states:

The scientific and technological breakthrough took place in 16th century Christian Europe, coinciding with the European evangelization and colonization of the American continent. But this breakthrough, which has accelerated at a bewildering pace ever since, did not occur out of the blue. It was the consequence of the philosophy of science elaborated by the early 13th century universities founded by the Church, in Paris, Bologna, Oxford, Naples, Padua, Cambridge, Cologne, Salamanca, etc., etc., as has been brilliantly demonstrated by Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki, among others.

The congenial and thorough epistemological realism of Christian philosophy led St. Thomas Aquinas, right in the middle of the 13th century, to describe the three levels of the mind's penetration into abstraction of pure quantity from them; and (3) the intellectual grasp of universal being in everything (the famous esse or actus essendi of St. Thomas Aquinas). Here was the seed of the scientific breakthrough. By joining (2) and (1), namely mathematical physics, the scientific method crystallized, namely the golden rules of (a) empirical observation, (b) experiment, and (c) quantification.

Some theologians then began to apply this method, such as Roger Bacon, Albert the Great, Robert Grosseteste, Alfred of Saxony, John Buridan and Nicholas Oresme, with remarkable discoveries in all the fields of physics, later on acknowledged by no less than Newton who said that “we stand on the shoulders of giants.”

The Thomistic method was the real cause of the scientific breakthrough, not the method advocated by Francis Bacon or that of René Descartes (both in the 17th century),since the latter reduced it to mathematical deduction (mistrusting observation and experiment), and the former reduced it to pure observation and experiment, excluding mathematics. The real creators of the scientific breakthrough, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler and, of course, Newton, followed the three golden rules formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, ignoring the philosophical controversies between rationalists and empiricists, as well as gradually purging science of all magic, superstition and mythology.