HEY, WAIT, THE RELIGIOUS CAN'T BE SKEPTICAL ABOUT US!

Faith and Works: a review of 'For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and The End of Slavery' by Rodney Stark (Lisa Jardine, Washington Post)

In his latest book, For the Glory of God, Stark maintains that the extraordinary scientific and mathematical achievements of Newton and his contemporaries were in fact a direct consequence of their Christian beliefs. The so-called European Scientific Revolution, therefore, was a coherent rational development, driven by faith, and grew directly out of the strenuously rational theology of the medieval Church. [...]

Stark's argument is driven by the belief that "whether we like it or not, people acting for the glory of God have been a dramatic force for cultural change." It is hard to see why he should consider this view to be provocative. Most of us would concede that strong conviction drives those who aspire to alter the world in which they live. The case Stark goes on to make, however, is deliberately contentious. He claims that both enlightenment and bigotry are undertaken "for the glory of God." There is also something calculatedly obtuse about Stark's insistence that we ought to applaud the Church for its motivating rationality, while he freely admits that the officials of the established churches of the day were responsible for vigorously persecuting those who held beliefs incompatible with doctrine. Similarly, his apologetic claims that the witch-hunts resulted in far fewer deaths than conventionally claimed by historians and that the Church "strenuously opposed" slavery long before abolitionism seem perverse on the basis of the wealth of information now assembled by historians, and woefully under-documented compared with tables and statistics he produces elsewhere.

I fear that this book has been deliberately pitched at those who would dearly like to believe that the unifying thread through European and North American progress toward modernity has been and remains an explicitly Christian set of beliefs. I base this conclusion on a section that Stark tucks into the discussion of the emergence of science and which is headed "Evolution and Religion." Here he argues with characteristic directness that the hostility of Christianity to evolutionary theory derives from shortcomings within that theory, rather than from any more general difficulty the church may have had historically with science. Darwinism, he maintains, is not actually a theory at all but rather a set of surmises. Problems with evolutionary theory have been "hushed up." A recent survey of biologists found that 45 percent "acknowledged that the process of evolution is guided by God." In spite of his many disclaimers, stressing the even-handedness and sociological rigor of his approach, Stark appears here himself to adopt the skeptical position of the creationists.

And skepticism is inappropriate because it's a received truth or something? Should he adopt the credulous position of the Darwinists? Posted by Orrin Judd at August 26, 2003 9:36 AM