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.
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