Book Review: The Moral Arc

The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom by Michael Shermer.

I bought this book because I heard about it on Michael Medved’s show and he said it was a good book.  I guess that this is the last time I take a recommendation from Mike.  Actually the real reason that read this book is that I’ve always kind of thought that it was actually the decoupling of State and Religion was brought about by atheists, or deists that turned into atheists, and not by religious people.  Also, it seems to me that the world has become a much better place, at least parts of it, and this is another argument that Mike and the author made on the show.

Because this book was plugged by Michael I found one part of the book funny.  Dr. Shermer talks about how he tells his friends in Europe about how a talk show host in the US starts his show by saying that “American is the greatest nation of Gods green Earth.”  He then goes on to say that the Europeans just roll their eyes.  The funny thing about this is that Michael Medved is the talk show hosts that says that.  Dr. Shermer then goes on to do something that I always find disingenuous.  He pulls out some reports that talk about how European nations have higher and better living standards.  What Dr. Sheerer, and others who make these claims, don’t point out is that the US is a country of 300+ million people, which has taken in all sorts of nationalities.  The US has raised all these people to an incredible living standard.  Comparing the US to small European nations that have a mono culture is like comparing apples and oranges.  How about comparing the US to other large nations that are multicultural, like China, India or Russia.  How does the US compare then?  Or barring that how about comparing US states that almost have mono cultures like Utah, or Minnesota or another state.  That’s never done by europhiles like Dr. Sheerer.  I always wonder why europhiles like Dr. Shermer don’t emigrate to one of those other nations?  Oh yeah I know.  Dr. Shermer probably realizes that since he wasn’t born in one of those nations he finds so salutary.  He knows will never be accepted as a native because, while you can become an American by coming here and working hard, you can’t become a Frenchman or any other type of European unless you’re born there.

I’ve read some some articles by Michael Shermer and his articles seem fairly balanced.  This book however makes me reconsider my opinion of Dr. Shermer.  He now seems like another atheist that hates Christianity and anything that comes from the Bible, and he does what most atheists do is to cherry pick things out of the Bible to make people who believe in the Bible look like idiots.  He does the same thing with Christian History.  The same thing could be done in the reverse.  There is no equivalent to the Bible that atheists accept that can be cherry picked and mocked.  The same is not true with famous athiests in history.  Take the secular atheist saint Margaret Sanger who started Planned Parenthood.  She's never presented as a mad women who believed in eugenics and started Planned Parenthood as a way to kill African American babies.  That's because eugenics is now consider a pseudoscience that is disavowed by all atheists like Dr Shermer.   However practically all atheists and progressive thinkers in the first half of the 20th Century used to think eugenics was a great thing, and lets face it, if breeding works with animals, shouldn’t it work with humans if we're just progressive enough to think the unthinkable?  The only thing that caused the progressive atheists to disavow eugenics is that the mad man Hitler, the Nazi’s and the Germans showed what a terrible idea it was.  But atheists today pretend atheists would never have  believed something that stupid, but they did. 

Pretty much all of Dr. Shermer's treatment of the Bible was shallow and is practically a straw man argument the way it is presented.  Only ad idiot would not see this, and I'm sure Dr. Shermer is not an idiot so he must assume that his readers are.

I’m LDS and I found one part of the book exceptionally insulting.  Dr. Shermer showed his "deep" knowledge of LDS theology by showing how ridiculous he thought it was.  And what was his point?  Apparently that LDS theology changes!  However when atheists stop believing what the progressive atheists believed last century, like the belief in eugenics, they are progressive, while when a religion changes it's doctrines they are hypocrites.  I guess what’s good for the goose is not good for the gander.  

Another thing that really annoyed me is the lightness he made of Dr Stark’s idea that Christianity led to the discovery of science, the enlightenment, and Western Civilization in general.   He's written a number of books that lay out his arguments and ideas.  I've read most of Dr. Starks books and it think he makes very good points.  Dr. Shermer quotes one paragraph from one book and then all he does to discount the fact that Western Christianity led to our Western Civilization was to point out that there were great civilizations in China and India.  Wow!  That's some great reasoning and I'll bet Dr. Stark never realized there were great civilizations in China and India.  Let me boil Dr. Starks idea down.  Did India and China have astrology?  Yes they did.  Did they develop astronomy?  No they didn’t.  Did India and China have alchemy?  Yes they did.  Did they develop chemistry?  No they didn’t.  And that’s the point of Dr. Starks books that Dr. Sheerer dismisses in a paragraph.  Why didn’t any other society ever develop science?  Well they didn’t because they didn’t have Christianity.  Take my word for it Dr. Stark has a compelling reason why Christianity led to what we have in Western Civilization.  However, another way to look at this is as a compliment to Dr. Stark because he's discounted like the Bible with the same straw man arguments that only idiots will believe.

Dr. Shermer made a big deal about how bad slavery was, which everyone agrees was a bad thing.  I kept wondering about how he was going to deal with the fact that it was Christians in general that led to the abolition of slavery, and a specific Christian that led to the abolition of slavery in Britain.  Well Dr. Shermer does give credit to William Wilberforce for bringing the abolition of slavery in Britain as a bill to the English parliament for 27 years until slavery was legally abolished.  But then he does his best to discount the work that William did trying to portray him as a regressive prude for getting King George III to issue a proclamation against vice.  He doesn't mention anything about the "Clapham Sect", which was a group of people in The Clapham area of England which started and moved forward most of the social programs in England such as better working conditions for children and miners, cruelty to animals and other projects that seem they would be close to Dr. Shermer's heart.  What Dr. Shermer tries to do is to claim that enlightment French philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot are the ones that helped rid the world of slavery by quoting some things that these men wrote.  However, that's all they ever did was write things.  The French never abolished slavery until forced to due so because of English warships enforcement of anti-slavery by raiding slaving ships and it became embarrassing to keep supporting it.  Was there a movement to abolish slavery during the French Revolution, that was supposedly based on the ideas of the Enlightenment?  No.  Did Napoleon abolish slavery as he tried to take enlightenment ideas to the rest of Europe as he built his empire.  No.  All atheists do is talk.

This fact that all atheists do is talk was made clear to me once when I was on Christian discussion board and was visiting the atheist section, which is something I liked to do back then.  Someone had started a thread and was railing that it was embarrassing that during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina there were hundreds of Christian organizations that were down there helping people and not a single atheist organization.  I couldn’t resist asking him why he didn't organize a group of atheists and take them there.  I don't remember his response but ever since then I've been amazed by the truth he pointed out.  Where are the atheists hospitals?  There are hundreds, if not thousands, of hospitals that have been started by Christian organizations.  Most towns have at least one, and bigger towns have multiple ones.  Then the are the Christian adoption agencies, etc.  The atheists just don’t do things to help the world.

Dr. Shermer makes one claim in the book that I found absolutely astounding.  He has a ton of data to show that wars became less common during the 20th Century.  The data as far as I’m concerned is very compelling.  Then he makes the arguments that wars have become less common because of science and enlightenment.  Then he makes his astounding claim.  He says that all wars before WWII were the result of religion!!  Including WWI!  This is the first that I’ve ever heard or read this claim.  Most people that have talked about WWI have said that it was a tragedy and the end of the modern enlightenment.  People were thinking that enlightenment and science were going to continue to make life better, and then the three nations that were the leaders of the enlightenment became locked in the most horrendous war the world had ever known.  One of the sad facts is that all of the nations in Europe were Christian, and all prayed to the same God.  That adds to the tragedy, but Dr. Shermer is the only person I’ve ever heard that has said it was a war of religion.  Also, he apparently thinks that the civil war during the French Revolution was religion based.  Were the Napoleon Wars?  Dr. Shermer is making claims that are crazy to try and prove his points.

With all that I did like parts of the book.  His writing is very engaging so it was easy to read, at least the parts that weren’t infuriating. He brings a lot of statistics to the book to show that the world is much less violent today than it was before.  I just think that his reasons for why it is are wrong.   However, I still think that science and the enlightenment and the types of governments that have risen since then contribute to the fact that the world is a better place.  I wish he had made some better arguments for why this has happened.

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.