For part of the book I’m writing, I’m investigating the claim—one made by theologians and religious apologists—that science in fact was an outgrowth of Christianity, explaining the rise of science in Europe and nowhere else. (Yes, yes, I know about China and the Middle East, but their science fizzled out.) One of the most vociferous exponents of this claim is Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion who describes himself as “an independent Christian.” His book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom Capitalism, and Western Success, is often cited as the airtight proof of how science came from Christianity.

Of course there are lots of arguments against this, foremost among them that Christianity held sway for over a millennium in Europe during the Dark Ages, and there was simply no science on tap during that period. Although one can point to some promotion by the Catholic Church of learning (monks copying ancient manuscripts, the church supporting universities, and so on), at the same time there was a pervasive promotion of dogma and denigration of reason, and an active suppression and persecution of heresy. While we don’t know why modern science was a specifically European product, a more viable hypothesis is that Europe is where the Enlightenment arose—a movement that encouraged reason, observation, and questioning. (It’s another question why the Enlightenment occurred in Europe, but Steve Pinker has explanations in Better Angels, including the rise of the printing press.)

Stark’s arguments are maddening, but I’ve just read a devastating review of his book (and his thesis) by Andrew Bernstein, “The tragedy of theology: How religion caused and extended the Dark Ages“. The reference is below, the text is free, and it’s a good read. Some might object that Bernstein is a proponent of Ayn Rand’s objectivism, and he is, but don’t let that put you off, for he does a deft dissection of Stark’s arguments and levels a devastating attack on theology.

I want to leave aside the science-came-from-religion issue for the nonce, and just reproduce something Bernstein said about religion’s use of reason. His point is that religion does employ reason, but in a completely different way than science uses it. I won’t comment further except that I agree with Bernstein completely. The following segment will be good for you (bolding is mine). His passion and arguments here remind me of Robert G. Ingersoll:

Theologians, and religionists in general, start with a fantasy premise and then proceed to apply rigorous formal logic to tease out its implications. Stark himself points out that “theology consists of formal reasoning about God.” This is admirably exact. Theologians, beginning with a wished-for creation of their own minds, analyze that creation’s characteristics by rigorous application of the principles of formal—that is, deductive—logic. . . .In the history of philosophy, the term “rationalism” has two distinct meanings. In one sense, it signifies an unbreached commitment to reasoned thought in contrast to any irrationalist rejection of the mind. In this sense, Aristotle and Ayn Rand are preeminent rationalists, opposed to any form of unreason, including faith. In a narrower sense, however, rationalism contrasts with empiricism as regards the false dichotomy between commitment to so-called “pure” reason (i.e., reason detached from perceptual reality) and an exclusive reliance on sense experience (i.e., observation without inference therefrom). Rationalism, in this sense, is a commitment to reason construed as logical deduction from non-observational starting points, and a distrust of sense experience (e.g., the method of Descartes). Empiricism, according to this mistaken dichotomy, is a belief that sense experience provides factual knowledge, but any inference beyond observation is a mere manipulation of words or verbal symbols (e.g., the approach of Hume). Both Aristotle and Ayn Rand reject such a false dichotomy between reason and sense experience; neither are rationalists in this narrow sense. Theology is the purest expression of rationalism in the sense of proceeding by logical deduction from premises ungrounded in observable fact—deduction without reference to reality. The so-called “thinking” involved here is purely formal, observationally baseless, devoid of facts, cut off from reality. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was history’s foremost expert regarding the field of “angelology.” No one could match his “knowledge” of angels, and he devoted far more of his massive Summa Theologica to them than to physics. Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing. In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony—decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties—the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies. Again, these fundamental philosophical points bear heavily against Stark’s argument, yet he simply ignores them. Religion as a field, at its best, is rationalism—deduction from fantasy premises—not genuine rationality. (At its worst, it repudiates even this attenuated connection to logic in favor of adherence to unadulterated faith.). . .

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Bernstein, A. A. 2006. The tragedy of theology:How religion caused and extended the Dark Ages. The Objective Standard 1:11-37.