The Victory of Reason
In his marvelous book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, Rodney Stark writes that "Christianity created Western Civilization." Without Christianity's commitment to "reason, progress, and moral equality, today the entire world would be about where non-European societies were in, say, 1800."
This would be a world "with many astrologers and alchemists but no scientists. A world of despots, lacking universities, banks, factories, eyeglasses, chimneys, and pianos." The "modern world," to which globalization aspires, "arose only in Christian societies. Not in Islam. Not in Asia. Not in a 'secular' society—there having been none."
posted by Travis at
6/29/2006 07:59:00 PM
2 Comments:
While a valid point, and one which I have often emphasized, it does allow two points of doubt: 1. hasn't Christianity (albeit in a perverted form) been the cause of some of the worlds greatest systems of perpetuated ignorance, hatred, violence, and discrimination? 2. isn't it possible that, if Christianity had not appeared, the advances made in the context of Christianity would have been made by another culture (Rome, perhaps, since it might have survived if Christianity had not undermined its religion)?
But that's exactly Rodney Stark's point, it didn't happen. I agree that in the philosophical use of the word Christianity isn't necessary for such ad vances to occur. The greater significance, I think, is in the worldviews, the core beliefs about reality and expectations based on those beliefs about how the world works. Stark's point is that the basic Christian worldview, that we should expect the world to be orderly and consistent because it was created by an orderly and consistent transcendent creator and that individual humans have a unique dignity because they were created in God's image.
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