The Civilizing God

National Review, July 28, 2003 by David Klinghoffer

For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch- Hunts, and the End of Slavery, by Rodney Stark (Princeton, 496 pp., $35)

Would the peoples of the Arab world be better off with a Bible in their hands or a Koran? In the recent debate about Christian evangelizing in Muslim lands, that's the question implicitly raised but rarely addressed in an explicit fashion. Time magazine devoted a cover story to the general subject -- "Should Christians Convert Muslims?" -- without ever touching on the most interesting and relevant point of all: the belief of Western missionaries that to Christianize is to civilize.

No one doubts that Muslims have a civilization, and a very impressive one in many ways. But Rodney Stark argues powerfully that the civilization of the Bible, of the Western nations, possesses advantages over those of the Koran and other non-Biblical religions precisely because Western culture emerged from Christian and Jewish Scripture.

A professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, Stark is a brave guy. His publishers at Princeton University Press are brave too. To say the things he does in an academic setting, or to publish them, is to invite contempt from professional colleagues, or worse. The fact that he writes with a clarity and concision that make him a pleasure to read, never cloaking his message in jargon, with flashes of mischievous humor, makes it all the more likely he'll drive the "liberals" (his word) nuts.

Stark's main point is that in the development of a civilization, what counts is how the people think and feel about their gods. The transition from gods to God is a key step. Oddly, he doesn't make clear the profoundest implication of monotheism: If there is only one God, a God who cares about how people treat one another as well as about how they relate to Him, then that implies there can be only one transcendently true foundation on which all of ethics is built. Relativism becomes impossible.

But the rest of the consequences of monotheistic faith are drawn out here in detail and with vigor. This is no whitewash job. Two of Stark's four chapters deal frankly with consequences that may make Christians wince: sect-formation and witch-hunts. Believing in one universal Deity implies that others who profess different understandings of that God, or who engage in supernatural practices from the pre-monotheistic past (magic), are not only mistaken -- but possibly have strayed into areas of belief that need to be forcibly suppressed.

Stark's most powerful chapter deals with the rise of science -- which, he emphasizes, arose only once, in Europe and nowhere else, and as a direct result of the researches of medieval Catholic scholastics. This fact has been obscured by three centuries of "atheist attack[s] on faith," seeking to propagate the false notion that there is a necessary conflict between science and religion. On the contrary: Science is the union of theory with empiricism -- one without the other is not science but mere speculation or craft. Aristotle, for instance, is full of speculation, but he disdained empiricism. He reasoned that two rocks dropped from a height will fall at the same pace only if they weigh the same. A heavier rock will fall faster. This is of course false, as Aristotle would have known if he had tried dropping a big rock and a small one off a cliff.

A number of fondly held myths get demolished in this book. Stark acknowledges that medieval Islam preserved a knowledge of classical Greece and its culture (so did medieval Christian learning, albeit in Latin translation), but he points out that Muslim veneration of the Greek philosophers actually held the Arabs back: "The result was to freeze Islamic learning and stifle all possibility of the rise of an Islamic science, and for the same reasons that Greek learning stagnated of itself: fundamental assumptions antithetical to science." Science never took root in the Muslim world for the additional reason that Muslims lack a Biblical perspective on God. For believers in Biblical religion, God is the creator not only of existence, but of the laws of nature. To discover those laws is to meet Him through the medium of His creation. By contrast, "Islam did not fully embrace the notion that the universe ran along on fundamental principles laid down by God at the Creation, but assumed the world was sustained by his will on a continuing basis." There were, therefore, no general principles to discover -- no theorizing to do. The same goes for Eastern faiths, which entirely lack the belief in a God as Creator.

Stark quotes John Maynard Keynes, commenting on the deeply held Christian faith of Isaac Newton: "[He] looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt. . . . He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements . . . but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down . . . in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty."