1965 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 249

THE NATURE AND VALUE OF PHYSICAL KNOWLEDGE

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more than what is possible in the knowledge-relation between man and his environment. We had to give up th econcept of absolute „simultaneity at distance", because nature does not provide us with signals of infinite velocity. We had to abandon our claim of exact predictability, because we cannot eliminate ourselves from our observations. I think that it would not be difficult to derive from the history of physics more examples, which show that less pretentions resulted in more knowledge. A statement like „the school of physics is a first rate school of modesty" would indeed be an adequate inscription above the door of each lecture-room for physics. When we see physical knowledge as a relationship between created man and the created cosmos, which is essential for the performance of the cultural task of mankind, we are estimating it at the right value, rejecting both its overestimation and its underestimation. There was really question of overestimation in the objectivistic interpretation of physical knowledge, which found its extreme expression in the idea of the spirit of Laplace. This overestimation led modernistic theologians in the nineteenth century to base their denial of the possibility of miracles on the unlimited dominion of the general law of causality, which was said to have been proven by physical science. We may note with satisfaction that, by the development of science itself, this weapon against the christian belief has proved to be flimsy. However, if we should be inclined to derive from the present state of physical knowledge, for example from the probabilistic character of physical laws, arguments to justify the christian belief in the possibility of miracles, we are making ourselves guilty of the same overestimation of the value of physical knowledge. In so far as the subjective tendencies in the current thought about physical knowledge result from a recognition of the limits of physical science, we may note them with concurrence. However, when they go so far as to state that physical knowledge does not refer to an order which is present in the creation but to an order which man himself creates in the chaos of his sensations, following the rules of his ratio and in accordance with his deliberate intentions, we have again to do with a denial of the intra-creational character of physical knowledge, by which the modesty of the

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