“There is an immense philosophical message in the fact that integers, on which rest all the procedures of measuring, must be defined in non-quantitative terms. In a sense much wider than this may appear, in the beginning was the word. And once one has grown to appreciate what a word, a noun or a verb or an adverb, stands for, one has made the first step toward relishing the rest of that passage, namely, that the word itself was with God. As such it had to be God himself.”
Stanley L. Jaki
Whatever does he mean by:
“…the fact that integers, on which rest all the procedures of measuring, must be defined in non-quantitative terms.”?
Here is what immediately precedes the quote, for context: “Materialism is a term that unlike pieces of matter cannot be measured. To science, which measures things, pertain therefore all things, or all aspects of reality, that are measurable. But whatever is not measurable is no business of science. Science therefore should not presume to deal with purpose, with freedom, with moral responsibility, let alone with Hamlet’s question: to be or not to be? Science, exact science, cannot even deal with the multiplication table singlehanded, as Eddington once put it.” From Darwin’s Designs, p. 15
As I understand him, Fr. Jaki is pointing out that science presupposes math, and even math presupposes numbers, integers, quantitative relationships, etc. However it is that we end up defining integers or understanding numbers, it isn’t science or math, quantititative studies, that will lead us there. There is a realm of meaning, or “word”, that comes before.