A Review of the "Victory of Reason" by Rodney Stark

Professor Rodney Stark is one of the world’s most renowned Sociologists of Religion. The full title of this book is "The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success". It received rave reviews in much of the American press. According the the Wall Street Journal the book is a “tour de force”. In his book, Stark argues that Christianity is responsible for reason, freedom, and science. He says that "the success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians." In a startling counter-factual claim, Stark announces: "had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls". Stark adds that if it wasn't for Jesus, we would live in a world where "most infants do not live to the age of five and many women die in childbirth". The argument is that science and freedom arose in Europe, and that Europe was Christian, therefore Christianity was responsible.

These are pretty strong claims for Christianity: the success of the West rests ENTIRELY on religious foundations, and all the people who brought it about were DEVOUT Christians. For Stark's thesis to stand, he needs to address several challenges to it, and unfortunately I think his book does not satisfactorily address those challenges.

1.
The first challenge facing Stark's thesis is the need to explain away the accomplishments of pre-Christian classical European civilisation - the achievements of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Stark ascribes freedom, individualism, democracy, science and technology to Christianity, yet NOT ONE of these concepts is promulgated in the New Testament, but ALL of these concepts are strongly and clearly advocated in pre-Christian Ancient Greek thinkers.

The Ancient pre-Christian world of the West produced Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Archimedes, Hippocrates, Euclid, Galen, Cicero, Plautus. It somehow managed to do all of this without Jesus and without the Bible. Ancient Greece's leading thinkers were notable for their defence of reason, perhaps in contrast to the New Testament, which frequently instructs people to embrace "faith".

Stark's grasp of the achievements of the Ancient world is tenuous. He says that "Ultimately, Greek learning stagnated of its own inner logic [what does that mean?] . After Plato and Aristotle very little happened beyond some extensions of geometry". But some of the greatest work in Greek science, e.g. Ptolemy in geography and astronomy and Galen in medicine, took place over the four hundred years after Plato and Aristotle. How can Stark leave out Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Plotinus, Galen, Hipparchus, all of whom were writing in the centuries after Aristotle? Most historians of science give the Greeks precedence in science, but Stark says he knows of no real Greek achievements after Aristotle, which is when much of the greatest Greek work in science took place. If one wanted to be harsh, one could say that this level of ignorance disqualifies Stark from being taken seriously.

2.
The next challenge for Stark's thesis is to explain why Christian Medieval Europe was not obviously superior to the other great centres of Eurasian civilisation at that time, such as China, India and the Muslim world. Stark would also need to explain away the accomplishments of these non-Christian civilisations, which happened with little or no influence from Jesus or the Bible.

During the Middle Ages (from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the beginning of the Early Modern period in the 16th century) Christianity dominated European intellectual life. One could argue that the civilisational accomplishments of Europe in this era were inferior to those of the Ancient European era that preceded it, as well as to the Modern European era that followed it. In fact, before the spread of the water-mill after 900 AD, Medieval Christian Western and Northern Europe contributed hardly anything in terms of innovation - and even between 1000 and 1450 the flow of philosophical ideas and technological innovations was predominantly from the Muslim world (and elsewhere) to Christian Europe, rather than vice versa. The reason for this? The non-Christian centres of Eurasian civilisation frequently had more to offer Christian Europe, than Christian Europe had to offer them.

To take the most obvious example, Medieval China was technologically more advanced than Christian Medieval Europe. China had invented the iron plough, matches, the compass, gunpowder, paper, printing - many of these technological advances only became known in Europe towards the end of the Christian Middle Ages. China's naval power was also superior to that of Europe during this period. All in all, China's cultural achievements (Confucianism, Taoism etc.) had not been noticeably inferior to those of anywhere else. China managed to accomplish all of this without Jesus and without the Bible.

Nevertheless, the Christian world did have some accomplishments during the thousand years of the Middle Ages, and it would be churlish not to recognise them. But it would also be churlish not to recognise that, when these accomplishments occurred, many of them were very strongly influenced by non-Christian sources. For example, the greatest Christian thinker of the Middle Ages (Aquinas) owed much to the pagan Aristotle and the Muslim Averroes - so much so that in his writings Aquinas referred to the former as simply The Philosopher, and the latter simply as The Interpreter. Aquinas's cosmopolitanism and open-mindedness to non-Christian sources is a refreshing contrast to Stark's blowhard "it-was-all-down-to-Jesus" nonsense.

Another point: if the West's supposed "innovation" and "superiority" in the Middle Ages can be attributed to Christianity, then why were the same "advances" not realised in the Byzantine east, where Christianity also reigned? In other words, any unusual advances (if they occurred) in Medieval Western Europe need to be explained by factors other than Christianity, since Byzantine Europe was also Christian.

3.
The next challenge facing Stark's thesis is to explain why Europe's rise to genuine global predominance after 1500 coincided with a marked DECLINE in Christianity's hold over European intellectual life. From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, European technology and ideas advanced at such an exponential rate so as to virtually dominate the entire world. According to Stark the rise of Europe to global predominance was largely due to Jesus, the Bible and Christianity. But by the end of the Middle Ages, Christianity had been dominating Europe for over a thousand years, and Europe had not risen to global predominance.

What happened in the time after 1500? What happened was that Modern Europe emerged. The intellectual life of these centuries was marked by:
- the emergence of humanism
- the weakening of Christianity's intellectual authority
- the placing of pre-Christian classical learning on a more equal footing with Christian theology
- the emergence of secularism
- the increasing focus on naturalism
- the strengthening of science
- the increasing political separation of church and state
- the Enlightenment revolution in thought
- the notion that reason should be the source of authority rather than revealed religious texts, or church hierarchies.

It was during THIS period that Europe really did storm ahead of its competitors in terms of wealth, culture, science, and technology. And THIS period was marked, as I have said, by an increasing secularism and by the undeniable weakening of Christian intellectual authority in Europe.

4.
Yet another problem for Stark is the RESPONSE of Christianity to these new Modern European developments after 1500. Frequently it left a lot to be desired. The Catholic Church's index of banned books from this time almost reads like a Who's-Who of great Enlightenment thinkers: Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Hume, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant. In every case, the Catholic church banned all or some of their books. Other people on the list of banned books include Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus.

And what about the Protestant Christians? Calvin's Geneva had very little freedom of any sort, and was not a hotbed of modern innovation. As for Luther, his contribution to the defence of reason was to announce that "Reason is the Devil's greatest whore ... it ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed ... Reason should be destroyed in all Christians ... Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his Reason."

So the most influential Christian thinker of the last 500 years was a vehement opponent of reason - this hardly strengthens Stark's case that Christianity is responsible for the "victory of reason".

The Christian churches often did what they could to retard the development of Modern Europe. In many ways they were a reactionary force - they defended superstition rather than reason. Stark's case for Christianity is comically overstated.

Overall, one might say this: during the Modern period, in so far as Christianity made itself compatible with the Enlightenment, Reason, Humanism and Science, then it did not retard European development. In so far as Christianity REJECTED Enlightenment, Reason, Humanism and Science then it did, indeed, try to retard European development.

CONCLUSION:

One well-known professor of sociology, Alan Wolfe, has described Stark's "The Victory of Reason" as "the worst book by a social scientist that I have ever read". Perhaps this is a bit extreme. But unfortunately Stark's bias and prejudice are obvious. This is not a balanced or objective work of history. Indeed, it is not intended to be balanced or objective. It is an exercise in vulgar apologetics, and its appeal will be limited almost entirely to insecure Christians who need to be told that they are better than everyone else.

The rise of Modern Europe to global predominance was largely caused by more prosaic factors than those put forward by Stark. For those interested in the real reasons, I would recommend Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" and Michael Cook's "A Brief History of the Human Race".