Free Republic

WACO, Texas, JAN. 14, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The conventional wisdom that Western success depended on overcoming religious barriers to progress is "utter nonsense," says the author of a new book. Rodney Stark defends this thesis in "The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success" (Random House). Stark, a professor of social sciences at Baylor University, maintains that, in contrast to other beliefs that emphasize mystery and intuition, Christian theology privileges reason. This factor -- not geography, a more productive agricultural system, or the Protestant Reformation -- is behind the rise of the West, he argues. The...

Christian faith in reason and in progress was the foundation on which Western success was achieved. When Europeans first began to explore the globe, their greatest surprise was not the existence of the Western Hemisphere, but the extent of their own technological superiority over the rest of the world. Not only were the proud Maya, Aztec, and Inca nations helpless in the face of European intruders, so were the fabled civilizations of the East: China, India, and Islamic nations were "backward" by comparison with 15th-century Europe. How had that happened? Why was it that, although many civilizations had pursued alchemy,...

Rodney Stark's latest book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House, 2005), is scheduled for publication next Tuesday. It's a useful corrective for folks in Austin, Boston, and other blue spots who think of Christianity and rationalism as opposite historical forces and philosophical concepts. The veteran Baylor professor discussed with WORLD how the Christian sense of progress led to political, technological, and economic advances. WORLD: How is Christianity unique in emphasizing the idea of progress? STARK: The other great faiths either taught that the world is locked in endless cycles or that...

Rodney Stark's latest book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House, 2005), is scheduled for publication next Tuesday. It's a useful corrective for folks in Austin, Boston, and other blue spots who think of Christianity and rationalism as opposite historical forces and philosophical concepts. The veteran Baylor professor discussed with WORLD how the Christian sense of progress led to political, technological, and economic advances. WORLD: How is Christianity unique in emphasizing the idea of progress? STARK: The other great faiths either taught that the world is locked in endless cycles or that...

To paraphrase the opening of a popular ESPN show, these four things everyone knows are true: Before Columbus’s first voyage, people thought the world was flat. When Copernicus wrote that the Earth revolved around the Sun, his conclusions came out of nowhere. The “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth century invented science as we know it. And the false beliefs and impediments to science are Christianity’s fault. There’s just one problem: All four statements are false. As Rodney Stark writes in his new book, For the Glory of God, “every educated person” of Columbus’s time, especially Christian clergy, “knew the earth...

For many, the image of women burned to death for practicing witchcraft is a potent symbol of both Christian intolerance and Christian irrationality. That's why critics of Christianity are so quick to bring the subject up. But as a new book demonstrates, nearly everything we've been told about Christianity and witch-hunts is wrong. Feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly claim that up to nine million European women were burned at the stake for witchcraft. And even non-feminist historians write about how the witch-hunts "consumed millions of innocents." Historian Rodney Stark calls these claims "absurd" and "nonsense." In his new...