Possessed by an Alien Philosophy

The author of this book, Fr. William J. Slattery, is a man with a message, a message about which he cares deeply and about which he writes in an excited, exuberant style. We can divide his message into three parts: his critique of the modernism most Catholics have embraced, his attempt to ground that critique in the work of more recent physicists, and his vision of our eternal destiny. Let us deal with each of these in turn.

Modernity is nothing other than the worldview created by the engineers of the scientific revolution of the 17th century. They came to see the universe as functioning like a great machine with clockwork precision that could be understood and manipulated using mathematical tools. This understanding of the cosmos, Slattery writes, “was constructed in opposition to the Catholic worldview as it had been synthesized from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries during the era of Christendom.” He elaborates:

Isaac Newton’s laws of motion enabled scientists to predict the functioning of both the solar system and objects on earth…. Rapidly, the opinion spread that both the cosmos and everything in it functioned on the basis of mechanical laws. Since these laws regulate only matter, intellectuals began to think that any efforts to understand the universe need only reckon with concrete stuff…. This led, first, to the birth of materialism as a method of analysis [but] over time, it became the cornerstone of a new worldview, which saw the universe as made up of only matter or, at least, as a reality that functioned as if that were all.

But modernity did more: It separated the various aspects of our life and environment into discrete spheres, all likewise working like small machines, with little or no connection to the other aspects of existence. Thus, religion, for example, was seen as a personal realm affecting our private lives but having little relevance to anything else. “Modernity has successfully taught us to apply the machine model to economics, politics, the arts, home, work, science, and religion,” Slattery says. And since each of these areas was seen as distinct, we proceeded to pollute “our air, rivers, soil, and oceans with toxic substances as if this would have no effect on our health.”

Fr. Slattery is particularly good in his discussion of how modernity’s model of reality has been applied to medicine and our understanding of our bodies. He points out that only recently have researchers come to admit that nonphysical factors can have a significant impact on health. In the modern worldview, it is a puzzlement that “the body’s sicknesses can be prevented or healed, partially or totally, by methods other than surgery or pharmaceuticals.” If either the body is the only reality, or the soul something only loosely connected to the body, then how can the physical body be healed “by having and making friends, getting involved in volunteer groups, and strengthening family ties”? Although current medicine has come to accept such kinds of alternative or holistic therapies, it generally does so as simply “one more prescription: socialize with friends to stay healthy,” instead of realizing that this “single relational discovery alone challenges the most basic assumptions of modern medical science.” There is not much room in either the Cartesian or Newtonian worldviews for the idea that something like friendships could affect the workings of the material body. This realization leads Slattery to refer approvingly to alternative healing therapies, such as homeopathy, and to note that although many “seem novel, their ‘newness’ is due rather to our rediscovering them. Many of these so-called advances in healthcare and education were simply common sense to our ancestors.”

Modernity also came to think that the “right way to understand complex wholes is always to break them down into their smallest parts.” Thus, our lived reality — the people, animals, trees, and houses we see around us every day — are, for science, mostly illusions, and it is at the level of atoms, or subatomic particles, that the truly real exists. And since it is only by the mathematical techniques of physics or chemistry that such particles can be detected, it came to be assumed that “‘real’ knowledge belonged to the hard sciences; all else was merely opinion.” One result of this is that “artists, poets, and musicians” — not to mention philosophers and theologians — “are pretty add-ons at the edges of society.”

Fr. Slattery points out that this worldview has infected most Catholics, even if we would deny it. For in our unconscious reactions, we too privilege the pronouncements of modern science and regard other types of knowledge as, at best, secondary. “We have a scientific mindset outside of the church building but a religious mindset inside,” Slattery observes. One sign of this is that the original meaning of the word science was sure and certain knowledge, and what for medievals were the two most important and demonstrative sciences, theology and philosophy, are no longer considered sciences at all.

Our author’s critique of modernity is the best part of his book and can supply a needed jolt to contemporary Catholics. But about his effort to ground this insightful critique in 20th-century developments in the sciences, especially in quantum physics, I am much less sure. He claims:

Contemporary physics confirms Catholicism’s convictions about the nature of the deepest levels of space and time. Even though our spiritual ancestors had a primitive picture of the physical universe, their metaphysical explanation for the physical and their answers to the why and final purpose of everything cosmic has been found to harmonize with contemporary scientific breakthroughs.

My objections are twofold. First, the picture of reality that quantum physics paints for us is hardly that of the Aristotelian-Thomistic universe. Certainly, physicists, beginning around 1900, did much to explode the old Newtonian picture of the clockwork universe, but the principle of uncertainty, for example, hardly corresponds to anything in the medieval understanding of the cosmos. Nor can the experimental sciences ever truly recognize the existence of what Aristotle called final causes, that for the sake of which something is done or occurs.

Quantum physics, moreover, in its efforts to understand and portray reality, looks as much as, or more than, Newtonian physics did to the ever smaller and smaller subatomic particles it claims to have discovered, the very method Fr. Slattery points to as one of the hallmarks of “the modern approach to understanding — by dissecting it into its parts, going down to its smallest components to know what a thing is.” No, however useful 20th-century physics has been in banishing the kind of adulation shown in Alexander Pope’s projected inscription for Isaac Newton’s tomb — “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night / God said, Let Newton be! and all was light” — it is not a return to an Aristotelian or Thomistic view of nature.

More fundamentally, it is always a mistake to try to link our theology or philosophy to the ever-shifting views of the experimental sciences. Someday, the physics of today will be seen as outmoded, and if we have based our apologetic on it, we run the risk of being seen as outmoded ourselves. Even on the conventional view of science, as constituting a progressive accumulation of the knowledge of nature, this is true. But even more so is this the case in the understanding of the history of science championed by both Thomas Kuhn and C.S. Lewis, the latter in The Discarded Image. And, in fact, Fr. Slattery refers favorably to both authors, quoting more than once from Lewis’s book. If it is true, as both these writers aver, that the history of science is marked by sometimes radical readjustments or repudiations of previous theory, and moreover that the general cultural atmosphere of the times is as much responsible for these scientific revolutions as are the hard data of observation or experiment, then to ground a Catholic worldview in any scientific paradigm or model is mistaken. Better, perhaps, to embrace, as St. Thomas did, the ancient and medieval idea of “saving the appearances” and grant to scientific theories merely their ability to account for the facts, without necessarily vouching for their truth.

Last, we must look at Fr. Slattery’s vision of the next life, what he calls dwelling on a “heavenized Planet Earth.” Here our author seems to be writing for those whose view of Heaven is too individualized and too ethereal, people who might object that “surely, Heaven is about me and God,” and who hardly advert to the fact that the Church teaches the restoration of our physical bodies — transformed, to be sure, but still our bodies. But Slattery goes further than simply this needed correction. Basing himself chiefly on the visions of St. John in the Apocalypse, he envisions eternal life as taking place on “a very earthy Earth.” Thus, in the next life:

You feel your skin tingle with cool summer breezes wafting in from the ocean. You are mesmerized by the light from the claret-red sun that bathes the meadows where the cows are calmly masticating. You gaze on the foals nuzzling. You hear grown horses neighing and, a moment later, hear the intoning of the bumblebees. The soul-lulling smell of the sweet honeysuckle surrounds you.

And so on, even to the enjoying of the “rich, fruity, orchard-sweet taste of the blackberries picked off the hedge.” And what will we be doing with ourselves? “It will be a world in which everyone in varying degrees and with extraordinary diversity will be beautifying the world. Everyone, in every action, will build others up and birth new wonders in art, music, literature, architecture, gardening, and, above all, in human relationships.” Perhaps we will have coyotes as pets and “be able to experience the delight of falling asleep under starlit skies with a tiger cub at our feet.”

It is difficult to distinguish this picture of the afterlife from that proposed by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Where, we might wonder, is God in all this? “Thus, we see that the civilization on the heavenized Earth is not a distraction from the vision of the Triune Creator-Lover,” Slattery supposes. “Besides our immediate vision of the Blessed Trinity, our eyes will also thrillingly behold him through the civilization and its beauty.” And again, “Ultimately, we will experience the Creator-Lover-Rescuer through everything around us because that is the way we will know him as he really is.” It is true that, at one point, our author exhibits a certain unease at this picture of eternal life, wondering, when “I see the Lord Jesus still bearing the marks of those wounds by which I have been healed,” whether “I will forget everything else except him.” But this is not the vision of the next life that captivates Slattery, nor that which occupies so many pages of his book; rather, it is his concrete picture of the “earthy Earth” described above.

Holy Scripture and the visions of the saints and mystics use numerous images and metaphors to speak of the life to come, and many Catholics find one or more of these metaphors particularly attractive. But it is wrong to push any of them too far, and perhaps the best approach is to say with St. Paul, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). If we regard Fr. Slattery’s picture of the next life as due to his excitement that Heaven is not a void inhabited by disembodied souls, and if we are skeptical of his overreliance on the scientific model of quantum physics, then we can value his critique of modernity and its worldview as a means of alerting Catholics that many of us have unconsciously allowed an alien philosophy to take possession of our minds, even while we continue formally to profess allegiance to an older and timeless understanding of God, man, and the created order.

©2026 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.

To submit a Letter to the Editor, click here.