Posted on 06/28/2006 1:35:50 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback
Earlier this year, Britain’s Channel Four aired a two-part special entitled “The Root of All Evil.” No, it wasn’t about money, greed or materialism. Nor was it about racism and other forms of hatred. The “root” was religion, specifically Christianity.
The special featured Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, arguably the most famous apologist for the Darwinian worldview. While Dawkins may be an expert on Darwin, it’s clear that he knows little about history, especially the history of Christianity.
Besides the old saw that religion causes violence—as opposed to peaceful atheism, as practiced by Stalin and Mao—Darwinists charge Christianity with promoting superstition and ignorance. Dawkins calls faith a “process of non-thinking” where the “hidebound certainty” of believers stifles human curiosity. According to Dawkins, for science to take off at all, humanity had to escape the “little” and “pokey” view of the cosmos it inherited from medieval Christianity.
The only “hidebound certainty” here is the nonsense that Dawkins is spouting. The truth about Christianity and science is, in fact, exactly the opposite.
As Rodney Stark tells us in his recent outstanding book, The Victory of Reason, when Europeans first began to explore the rest of the world what surprised the most wasn’t what they saw—it was “the extent of their own technological superiority.”
What made the difference? Why was it that while “many civilizations,” such as the Chinese, had pursued alchemy, but only in Europe did it lead to chemistry?
According to Stark, the answer ultimately lies in European Christianity. While other religions emphasized “mystery and intuition,” Christianity “embraced reason and logic as the primary guides to religious truth.” From the start, the Church Fathers “taught that reason was the supreme gift of God and the means to progressively increase understanding of Scripture and revelation.”
This regard for reason wasn’t limited to theology. St. Augustine wrote of the “wonderful—one might say stupefying—advances human industry has made.” He attributed these to the “unspeakable boon” to our “rational nature.”
This view of reason gave rise to the medieval universities of whose existence, or at least origins, Dawkins seems to be totally ignorant. As Stark puts it, “faith in the power of reason infused Western culture” in a way it did no other society. It prompted “the pursuit of science and the evolution of democratic theory and practice.”
The very Middle Ages Dawkins belittles saw great scientific and technological advancements that Stark chronicles, including the desire to explore God’s created world—the impulse that gave rise to Christians who were scientists producing what we now know as the scientific method. To say that these were nothing more than the Dark Ages is not only wrong—it’s a lie. Unfortunately, it’s a lie with legs as Britain’s Channel Four demonstrated. That makes the Victory of Reason must reading for any serious Christian. It contains some of the best apologetic arguments I’ve come across yet.
Stay tuned to BreakPoint this week for more on this extraordinary book.
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Another body-low to the belly of ID.
BreakPoint/Chuck Colson Ping!
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What else to expect from a tenured nitwit?
I don't see how you're making that case. Elaborate, please.
Wasn't Hitler opposed to the Theory of Evolution?
Not surprised this kind of crap runs in England.
If anyone wants to quetion the validity of Dawkins vs. acedemic freedom one only as to look at the development of Western culture vs. Eastern culture.
Case closed!
Here's a guy who has admitted in his writings that Darwinism makes him comfortable in his atheism. Which indicates that Darwinism is less a scientific theory, and more a philosophical worldview.
ping...
That's gonna leave a mark.
What's a "body-low"?
According to this article, the influence of Christianity was to promote 'reason and logic', leading to rational evaluation of scientific evidence over superstition. ID (lacking evidence of any kind) is the clear loser in all such evaluations.
Here's a good article: http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/scientists/lunacrat.htm
"While other religions emphasized “mystery and intuition,” Christianity “embraced reason and logic"
"Immaculate conception"
"Burning bushes"
"speaking in tongues"
"rising from the dead"
"parting the seas"
Things that make ya go Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Indeed!
I once had a real, live Communist try to tell me that the Bolshevik's commission of violence was reall no different from the tarring and feathering of some Tories in our revolution. I asked how killing the entire Romanov family, including little kids, was anything like tarring and feathering a Tory. I didn't get a coherent answer.
Your god is too small.
People who believe that miraculous events are outside the scope of reason are working with a bad definition of reason.
More detailed response to follow.
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