Dr. Rodney Stark pt 2

Dr. Stark makes the claim that the reason that Christianity was able to develop Science was because it raised reason to the level of faith and it had the concept of a personal God.  He's 100% right.  He points out that every society has had astrology but only the West developed astronomy, and all societies have alchemy but only the West developed chemistry.  Why is this?  Why did the Greek and Romans not develop science?  They had the engineering skills and knowledge to do so. They could build aqueducts and buildings that could last for millennia.  The Greeks produced thinkers like Socrates and Aristotle but they didn't develop science.  Aristotle was a natural philosopher par excellence.

I've read a number of possible explanations that have tried to explain why the Greeks didn't make leap and the best explanation was economic.  The Greeks knew about the steam engine but didn't develop it because they had slaves and it wasn't economical to develop machines when you had slaves.  They also had the technological skills to make clock works that couldn't be replicated until the fifteenth century, as demonstrated by the Antikythera mechanism.  That makes sense. Humans are almost infinitely flexible and even today can do more than any machine.  What doesn't make sense is why would slavery end?  Every culture has had slavery except one, and that is Christianity which saw all men and women as brothers and sisters.  However, when you see someone as a brother and sister you don't keep them as slaves.  Dr. Stark points out that by the year 1000 slavery had been mostly eradicated in Europe.  That's something that Christianity needed to arrive at because the Bible clearly condones slavery.  Dr. Stark also points out that that era around the year 1000 could be called the clock work era because there were literally thousands of clockwork mills doing all kinds of work, that formerly would have been done by slaves such as grinding grain.

St. Augustine was the first to write my reason informs my faith and that has informed Western culture since the time he wrote it.  Well what was the faith that informed their reason? Faith in a loving Father that created the World for them. A rational Father that made a World according to a plan.  Not one of the willful gods of the Greek Pantheon that could be bargained with according to the gods whims.  Why study something that could be changeable?  Islam took a different route.  They believed, not in a willful God, but in a God that couldn't be limited in any way.  So saying that gravity could act only one way would limit God therefore a Muslim wouldn't even consider studying something like that.

In my reading it seems like all the great monotheist religions reached a point where they have to ask the question about what their philosophers are doing when they try to discover more about God.  Al-Ghazali, a Muslim philosopher, wrote Incoherence of the the Philosophers in which he condemned metaphysics but that then spilled over into all branches of physics and the Muslim culture turned away from science.  Bernard of Clairvaux made much the same arguments at about the same time.  However Christians decided that since God is all powerful and could have made the world in any form the fact that he made it the way that he did says something about God.  Western Christians decided that their were two books the Scriptures and the Book of Life, or nature and that by reading the Book of Life or studying nature you could learn about God.  Robert Boyle, of Boyle's Law fame, felt that experiments in the study of nature were so worthy that they were an acceptable activity for the sabbath.  Johannes Kepler thought that that his studies into the rotations of the planets were a form of praising God.  I could go on, but it was this kind of thinking that led to the development of science only in Western Christianity.  Eastern Christianity took a more mystical turn where they praised God through rites, much like the Muslims did.  That resulted in Peter the Great realizing the West was much more advanced than Russia and him trying to force Russia to catch up.  Different mind set, different result.

Dr. Stark made a startling insight, at least to me.  He points out that science was the process of proving hypothesis, and that the whole endeavor of Christian Science should be considered the proving of a meta-hypotheses, which is my word, that there is a loving God, who is our Father, and deals with us in rational ways and we can learn more about Him by studying the world that we live in.  I would say that that is proven.  By science.  And the result is the wonders of technology.

Dr. Stark is also a guest lecturer in China.  He says that the Chinese have told him that they have studied the West and they feel that it is Christianity that caused the West's great scientific and technological advantages.  Obviously Dr. Stark agrees with that.  The interesting thing moving forward will be to see if science has a solid enough foundation and methodology that it can be pursued by atheists without a Christian foundation.  I guess the future will tell us that.

An interesting side note, for me, is that Dr. Stark revealed some of his personal thoughts in a forward of one of his books.  He said that he started his career studying religion as a sociologist as an agnostic at best, but that over the years he's become enough of a non-denominational believer that he felt that he could work for Baylor University, which is a Baptist affiliated university.  I thought that was a great story.

Dr. Rodney Stark pt 1

I first heard of Dr. Stark a few years ago (probably around 20 or so apparently) when he wrote an article that said that Mormonism was possibly a rising new world religion.  Of course that article caused people who were against Mormonism to discount his projections, and Mormons to make a great deal of it.  Dr. Stark put the article in a book called Latter-day Saint Social Life:Social Research on LDS Church and its Memebers.  I bought the book basically because Dr. Starks article was included with a postscript.  I bought the book because of that.  Dr. Stark's article was interesting but not much else in the book was.  (By the way it looks like it's now online if anyone is interested.)  Dr. Stark in his postscript talks about how he is aware of people who were critical of his methodology, he covers many of the problems and handles them.  Basically he says that he stands by his statements and projections and thinks the Mormon Church will continue to meet them.  In fact in the year that he wrote the postscript 1994 the church growth was 10% above his high projection.  In other words the church was well on the way to being 256,000,000 members by 2080.

A few years ago I was on Amazon and discovered that Dr. Stark has written a number of books, as all good academicians should.  One was called "God's Battalions."  Luckily I was able to find that book in the library.  It was a good book.  Dr. Stark debunked a bunch of ideas about the Crusades, such as that it was not a chance for excess sons of the nobility to go to the Middle East and come back rich.  In fact most families that sent people to the east at a great cost to the families.  In fact he talks about one family that had to mortgage its land.  It was very interesting and eye opening.  Some of the stuff that he talked about were comments that came from Muslims that were under the Crusaders who wrote that things were better under the Crusaders than under Muslims.  I later listened to a set of lectures on the Crusades from the Great Courses.  Nothing in the lectures disputed what was said and much of what was said reinforced what was said by Dr. Stark.  This has really shown to me that any event in history has two sides to it.  Now I'm embarrassed to admit that I've always thought the crusades were an assault on the Moslems by the Christians.  In fact at one time I heard a General Authority say something about Islam that I disagreed with because I'd been brainwashed, and I thought the GA was misinformed.

After reading that book I decided that I needed to read more of what Dr. Stark had to say.  He has a Trilogy consisting of "For the Glory of God", "The One True God" and "The Victory of Reason."  I read them, and they were interesting.  In one of those books he talks about how at one time sociologists thought that they could learn about ancient religious beliefs by studying very primitive peoples religions.  People like the aborigines of Australia.  Unfortunately instead of finding animistic beliefs like projected in "The Golden Bough" they found very sophisticated beliefs about a Monotheistic God, and so they dropped that source of study.  So actually Polytheism is a digression from Monotheism not a progression from animism or spiritualism.  

I do know in his book One True God he talked about the different monotheistic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  This was the first real introduction to Islam that I'd ever had.  He talked about Mohammad as bandit and murderer, and said that Muslims don't shy away from any of these stories about Mohammed but celebrate them.  Only Western Apologists try to cover up for Mohammed and try to portray him as a religious person in the Western tradition.  That was eye opening for me, I'd never heard anyone talk about Mohammed that way before.  I did some research on my own, and turns out everything Dr. Stark said about Mohammed was true.  He did lead caravan raids.  He did massacre people.  He did marry women on the same day he'd killed their husbands.  He was a very bad person by Christian standards, and Muslims accept this.  The scary thing is they consider Mohammed as the perfect man worthy of emulation in every way.

One thing that Dr. Stark mentioned in these books is that Christianity developed capitalism and science.  He mentioned that the monasteries almost had to develop capitalism as a response for all the capitol they were amassing.  He talked about some of these things, and was going to develop them in the final book The Victory of Reason.  I didn't read the final book then because the library didn't have it.  As I thought about what he said i could see the truth of it and thought a lot about it.  In fact I thought about it so much that I emailed Dr. Stark and said that I agreed with his ideas about Christianity and that I thought it would only be Western Christianity that would have led to Science and Capitalism that Eastern Christianity would not have.  He actually emailed me back and said that he agreed with me.  I emailed him again and he didn't email me back.  He lives in Corrales during the summer and I think I wrote that I lived near him so he probably thought that I was stalking him.