ADVANCEMENT AND CHRISTIANITY

In “How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity,” historian Rodney Stark shows that the success of the West can be summed up by one Word - Christianity. It was in the Christian West that modern science was born, and for good reason, according to Stark:

·       Christianity was essential to the rise of science, which is why science was a purely Western phenomenon.

Stark challenges the idea that the Greeks had been scientists:

·       Aristotle was not a scientist because he based his “theories” on logic without any concern for testing them through appropriate observations. Consequently, as James Hannam wrote in “The Genesis of Science,” “not even Aristotle’s powers of reason could prevent blunders in his arguments.”

Stark also argues against the notion that Islam had produced an advanced society of learning, and that Moorish Spain had been “a shining example of civilized enlightenment.” After lengthy descriptions of the horrors that Jews and Christians had experienced at the hands of Muslims, Stark concludes:

·       By the end of the fourteenth century only tiny remnants of Christianity and Judaism remained scattered in the Middle East and North Africa, having been almost completely destroyed by Muslim persecution. And as the dhimmis disappeared, they took the “advanced” Muslim culture with them. What they left behind was a culture so backward that it couldn’t even copy Western technology but had to buy it and often even had to hire Westerners to use it. So much, then, for the “mystery” of how Muslim culture was somehow lost or left behind. The notion that in the medieval era Islamic culture was advanced well beyond Europe is as much an illusion as recent ones about an “Arab Spring.” The Islamic world was backward then, and so it remains.

Stark exposes the Enlightenment myth:

·       ...that science could arise only during the “Enlightenment” because by that point the churches, sufficiently weakened, could no longer suppress science...[And] that most of the great scientific stars of this time had freed themselves from the confines of supernaturalism and faith.

Instead, it seems that the biblical revelation of a God, who rules through universal laws and who wants to be known, had uniquely inspired the devout to pursue an understanding of these laws. Stark quotes the late renowned mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, in support:

·       “The greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement [was] the inexpugnable belief … that there was a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind? … It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of faith in rationality.“

According to Stark, scientific and technological advancement are largely to be credited to the Christian faith:
 

·       advances in both science and technology occurred not in spite of Christianity but because of it. Contrary to the conventional narrative, science did not suddenly flourish once Europe cast aside religious “superstitions” during the so-called Enlightenment. Science arose in the West—and only in the West—precisely because the Judeo-Christian conception of God encouraged and even demanded this pursuit.

Stark entirely rejects the Christianity-against-science narrative concocted by “enlightenment” thinkers. To do this, he identified the 52 most significant scientists starting in 1543 and including all born before 1680. He subsequently found that 60% were devout Christians, 38% were less ostensibly devout about their faith, and only one could be considered a skeptic. One of the devout, Johannes Kepler, who had exemplified thinking of many Christians, stated that:

·       “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony imposed on it by God and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”

They were convinced that God was a God of order and to learn about His creation was to learn about Him. Although Albert Einstein resisted the belief in a personal God, his observations irresistibly pointed to an intelligent Creator, closely resembling the God of the Bible:

·       “A priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.… That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly being reinforced as our knowledge expands.”

It was this kind of observation that had motivated Christian thinkers to believe that the pursuit of knowledge was the pursuit of God, leading them to build schools and universities:

·       The university is generally regarded as a formal institution that has its origin in the Medieval Christian setting. Prior to the establishment of universities, European higher education took place for hundreds of years in Christian cathedral schools or monastic schools (scholae monasticae), in which monks and nuns taught classes. Evidence of these immediate forerunners of the later university at many places dates back to the 6th century AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_university

The story of the origin of the Universities in American is no different. The vast majority of colleges founded in the USA were founded by Christians for Christian purposes:

·       Of our 119 first colleges and universities, 104 were founded to teach biblical values…Even public universities commonly had Christian roots. (Michael Hickerson, Hickerson.com)

This demonstrates that truth and learning had been recognized as servants of the Christian faith. Consequently, an honest search for truth was a search for God.

Today, such an equation is unacceptable to the vast number of Western thinkers who associate Christianity with the closure of the mind. However, for the knowledgeable Christian, this association is obvious. To believe in Christ is to believe in truth-based evidence. To nurture a child’s mind is to liberate it from the shackles of ignorance.

As secularism has advanced, the university has become increasingly shackled by political correctness. This raises the question, “Can secularism nurture the quest for truth or is it becoming too mired in its politically correct agenda?” After Allan Bloom wrote about “The Closing of the American Mind” (1987), writer and professor, Roger Kimball, picked up the baton in 1990 to show how the universities were being converted from educational institutions into institutions of political indoctrination:

·       Demands for ideological conformity have begun to encroach on basic intellectual freedoms. At an increasing number of campuses across the country, university administrations have enacted anti-harassment rules that provide severe penalties for speech or action deemed offensive to any of a wide range of officially designated victims. Ostensibly designed to prevent sexual, ethnic, and racial harassment, these rules actually represent an effort to enforce politically correct attitudes by curtailing free speech…What this alarming development portends is nothing less than a new form of thought control based on a variety of pious new-Left slogans and attitudes. (“Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education,” xv-xvi)

Increasingly, secular thought control is killing the mind. Without God, there is no higher authority to shed light on our narrow political aspirations.