THE WATER WE SWIM IN:
Slog and Sacrifice: You don’t have to be religious to appreciate what millennia of religion have given us. (Jonah Goldberg, October 4, 2024, The Dispatch)
Human rights, universal equality, the sovereignty of the individual, higher education, and scientific inquiry—even the idea of secularism itself—are products or byproducts of Jewish and Christian thought.
For instance, Western science flows straight out of the Abrahamic revolution. “Postulating a single creator for the entire universe,” writes Walter Russell Mead, “leads to the belief that the universe is predictable and rule driven.” Therefore, the universe outside of our heads is discoverable and knowable through investigation. The scientific method has many catalysts —from alchemy to dye-making to the necessities of war—but even these things had religious aspects, and the systemization of science itself was the product of religious scholastic orders and institutions (like Harvard used to be). Modern astronomy is largely a Christian invention. (Yes, the Chinese had astronomers, too. But when they discovered that the Christians were better, they imported Jesuits to jobs the Chinese couldn’t do.)
Or take the ideal of “universal brotherhood”—i.e. Equality. It’s a Christian idea flowing straight out of Paul’s exhortation to believers in Christ: “You are all sons of God.” And Paul, a heretical Jew, owed much of his thinking to his religious upbringing. You could argue that the idea of the right to follow your conscience started with Socrates—though given how things ended for him, that’s debatable. But the idea of conscience—conscientious objection to war, civil disobedience, etc.—became a thing thanks to folks like Aquinas and Martin Luther.
I suppose it’s possible that there could have been an alternative timeline where we got driverless cars and microwave ovens, democracy and the Bill of Rights, without Abraham and his theological progeny. But the indisputable fact is that we didn’t. And remember, God gave us plenty of time to figure this stuff out without Him.