Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion
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49. See Richard Carrier, "Hitler's Table Talk: Troubling Finds," German
Studies Review 26, no. 3 (2003): 561-76.
50. For a history of the Hitler Diaries, see Charles Hamilton, The Hitler
Diaries: Fakes That Fooled the World (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky,
1991) and Robert Harris, Selling Hitler (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).
51. SteigmannGall, The Holy Reich, pp. 243-60.
52. Carrier, "Hitler's Table Talk," p. 573.
53. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 113.
54. Ibid., p. 114.
55. D'Souza, What:r So Great, p. 218.
56. Ibid., p. 327 n. 12.
57. Hermann Rauschning, ed., Hider Speaks: A Series of Conversations with
Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939; Reprint:
Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2007), p. 63. On the unreliability of this source, see
SteigmannGall, The Holy Reich, pp. 28-29.
58. H. R. TrevorRoper, ed., Hitler:r Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private
Conversations (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), p. 59.
59. TrevorRoper, ed., Hitler's Table Talk, p. 61.
60. Carrier, "Hitler's Table Talk," pp. 566-72 (all four statements appear in the
entry dated the afternoon of 27 February 1942, in the original German).
61. TrevorRoper, ed., Hitler:r Table Talk, p. 76. Hitler routinely equated
"Bolshevism" and "Judaism." He also believed Jesus was an Aryan whose true
message was corrupted by the Jewish Paul (Carrier, "Hitler's Table Talk," p.
572).
62. See further, Peter A. Dykema and Heiko Oberman, eds., Anticlericalism in
Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 1993), which also
discusses various conflicts between Protestants and Catholics.
63. Diego von Bergen, the German ambassador to the Vatican, specifically
reported that the Pope feared that "a `third' faith is being organized and
encouraged" in addition to Catholicism and Evangelical faiths (Documents on
German Foreign Policy, series D, vol. 1, p. 988). This shows that the Vatican saw
Nazi religion as a competing faith, and not as "atheism," a term it sometimes
applied to competing faiths, as well.
64. D'Souza, What's So Great, p. 219; Richard Weikart, From Darwin to
Hitler. Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York:
Palgrave, 2004).
65. For my critiques of Weikart, see "Avalos contra Weikart: Part I: General
Problems with Dr. Weikart's Methods," at http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot
.com 200805/avalos-contra-weikart-part-i-general.html; and "Avalon Contra
Weikart: Part II: Weikart's Seven Darwinian Aspects of Nazism," at http://
debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com200806/avalos-contra-weikart-part-ii-
weikarts.html. See also Sander Gliboff, H. G. Bromm, Ernst Haeckel, and the
Origins of German Darwinism: A Study in Translation and Transformation
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
66. Denise O'Leary, "Post-Details: Expelling the Outrage: Hitler and
Darwinism," at http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2200804/15/ expelling-the -
outrage-hitler-and-darwin (accessed July 3, 2009).
67. "Guidelines from Die Bucherei," 2:6, 1935, p. 279, at http://www.library
.arizona.edu/exhibits/burnedbooks/documents.htm.
68. Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 9.
69. Richard Weikart, "Review of Annette Wittkau-Horgby, Materiali.rmus:
Enstehung and Wirkung in den Wissen.rchaften des 19. Jahrhunderts (Gottingen:
Vande-hoek and Ruprecht, 1998)," German Studies Review 24, no. 3 (October
2001): 610.
70. Richard Weikart, "Review of Richard SteigmannGall's The Holy Reich:
Nazi Conceptions of Christianity," German Studies Review 27, no. 1 (February
2004): 175.
71. See Mein Kampf, p. 312: "keeping his blood pure" / German (p. 342):
Reinhaltung seines Blutes.
72. See further, Linda Martz, "Pure Blood Statutes in Sixteenth-Century
Toledo: Implementation as Opposed to Adoption," Sefarad 61, no. 1 (1994): 91-
94; Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre.: Controversial entre los
siglos xvy xvii (Madrid: Taurus, 1985); Henry Kamen, The Spanish
Inquisition.A Historical Revision (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997),
especially pp. 242-54; Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1997), pp. 33-34.
73. Max Reichler, Jewish Eugenics and Other Essays (New York: Bloch,
1916), pp. 7-8.
74. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 249.
75. Ibid., p. 286.
76. Weikart, From Darwin to Hider, p. 186.
77. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex,
2nd ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1909 [1874]), p. 187 (in context: pp. 185-96).
See also Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of
Primitive Races 1800-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
78. George Fitzhugh, "Sociology for the South or the Failure of Free Society,"
in Antebellum Writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on
Slavery, ed. Harvey Wish (New York: Capricorn Books, 1960 [reprint of 1854
edition]), p. 61.
79. Robert Knox, The Races of Men (Philadelphia, PA: Lea & Blanchard,
1850), pp. 38-39.
80. John Campbell, "Negro-Mania," in E. N. Elliott, Cotton Is King and
ProSlavery Arguments: Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper Christy,
Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright, on This Important Subject
(Augusta, GA: Pritchard, Abbott and Loomis, 1860), p. 520.
As a new generation of historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science has
proven, biblical religion was not the enemy of science but rather the intellectual
matrix that made it possible in the first place. Without the key insights that
Christianity found celebrated in the Bible and spread throughout Europe, science
would never have happened.... The evidence is incontrovertible: It was the
rational theology of both the Catholic Middle Ages and the Protestant
Reformation-inspired by the explicit and implicit truths revealed in the Jewish
Bible-that led to the discoveries of modern science.1
Belief in the rationality of God not only led to the inductive method but also led
to the conclusion that the universe is governed rationally by discoverable laws.
This assumption is vitally important to scientific research because in a pagan or
polytheistic world, which saw its gods often engaged in jealous, irrational
behavior in a world that was nonrational, any systematic investigation of such a
world would seem futile. Only in Christian thought, which posits "the existence
of a single God, the Creator and Governor of the universe, [one that] functions in
an orderly and normally predictable manner," is it possible for science to exist
and operate.2
hese two quotes succinctly describe a new delusion creeping around
the halls of conservative academia: the belief that Christianity not only caused
modern science, but was necessary for modern science even to exist. As the
story now goes, not only has Christianity never been at odds with science and
never impeded it in any way, but it was actually the savior of science, the only
worldview that could ever make science poss
ible. And that's why the Scientific
Revolution only ever sparked in one place: a thoroughly Christian society.
This is not only false in every conceivable detail but so egregiously false that
anyone with even the slightest academic competence and responsibility should
have known it was false. Which means its advocates, all of whom claim to be
scholars, must either be embarrassingly incompetent, perversely dishonest, or
wildly deluded. That so many scholars would be so incompetent seems
improbable. That they are all lying, even more so. Of course, we've all seen the
conservative political tactic of repeating a lie so often, in so many places, with
such confidence, and from so many sources, that everyone begins to believe it.
This may be one such lie. Or these scholars may really be this mind-bogglingly
incompetent. But I'm inclined to doubt it. Delusion seems a more likely
explanation for how so many can repeat a claim so demonstrably false without
ever being corrected by their peers.
An obvious objection to this delusional claim is that it violates one of the most
basic principles of causality: when the cause is in place, its effect is seen.
Christianity fully dominated the whole of the Western world from the fifth to the
fifteenth century, and yet in all those thousand years there was no Scientific
Revolution. A cause that fails to have its predicted effect despite being
continually in action for a thousand years is usually considered refuted, not
confirmed. Excuses will be made, claims of impediments, but no Scientific
Revolution occurred in the Eastern half of the Christian world either, which had
none of the West's excuses. The East was not overrun by barbarians and
remained prosperous and developed for five centuries. Such excuses are usually
denied anyway-the new trend is to insist even the Western Middle Ages were
shot through with an unrivaled spirit of innovation and economic and intellectual
vigor. But even if you reject that and accept the West was held back, why did the
Scientific Revolution still never happen in the Byzantine Empire, despite being
just as Christian, and in every respect more successful? Those caught by this
question usually solve it by denigrating the Byzantines as somehow the "wrong
kind" of Christians.3 But once you start down that road, the notion that
Christianity is the solution goes out the window. Now you need a special kind of
Christianity, which is evidently not an inevitable outcome of the original
Christian Gospel. Either way, the fact remains, whether East or West, once
Christians dominated the culture, no Scientific Revolution ensued. It took over a
thousand more years.
So, right from the start, something is amiss. Maybe you can work your way
around that conundrum. But some claims associated with this new delusion are
just too obviously false. Dinesh D'Souza declares with unquestioning confidence
that of all ancient religions "only" Christianity "was from the beginning based on
reason" and consequently "there are no theologians" in the history of any other
religion.4 Yet surely even an attentive high-school student knows the pagan
Greeks invented reason, in the very sense he means, developing the formal
sciences of logic, philosophy, mathematics, and rhetoric. And any attentive
reader of the Bible knows Christianity was from the beginning based on
scripture, inspiration, and revelation, not "reason."5 To see what a religion
actually based on reason looks like, just look at the formal theologies of the
GrecoRoman philosophers. Yes, the pagans invented theology, too .6
But facts aren't the only thing getting in the way of the idea that science
needed Christianity. Paucity of logic is another.
COMMON FALLACIES
Most arguments for this conclusion rest on a number of common fallacies. That
no effort is made to detect or avoid them is another sign of delusion.
The whole notion begins with a simple correlation fallacy: just because
modern science only arose in a Western Christian culture, it does not follow that
a Western Christian culture caused it (or even more absurdly, that such a culture
was the only one that could). This is as fallacious as assuming that because the
inventors of formal geometry were polytheists, therefore polytheism caused the
invention of formal geometry, or even more absurdly, that only polytheists could
invent it. Neither is plausible. It's simply an accident of history when formal
geometry was invented, at which time the dominant religion just happened to be
polytheism. In most respects the same is true of Christianity and the Scientific
Revolution.
Never taken into account, for example, is that in the early second millennium
any motive, to be respectable in such a strict and paranoid cultural matrix, had to
be framed in terms agreeable to Christianity-indeed as fulfilling Christianity, if at
all possible. For anything that even had a whiff of being unchristian was
condemned and its advocates punished-socially to be sure, sometimes physically.
This was not a time when you could enjoy the liberty of being a heretic or an
atheist, much less a pagan or infidel, without facing repercussions that could put
an end to your career, your freedom, or even your life. Such an atmosphere
compelled everyone to find inventive ways to sell any new ideas as perfectly
Christian, even biblical, regardless of their actual motives or inspiration. Hence
finding in that period Christian or biblical arguments for embracing new ideas
does not confirm Christianity or the Bible was the cause of those ideas, rather
than just the marketing strategy required to sell them at the time.
Another fallacy is the conflation of necessary, sufficient, and contributing
causes. A good case can be made that scientific thinking was actually a
byproduct of early pagan theology.? But even if so, no one would conclude from
this that paganism was required. I could point to many aspects of pagan religion
that contributed to the rise of science (its increasing commitment to religious and
intellectual freedom, its reliance on evidence and reason over scriptural and
institutional authority, its devotional interest in nature and the stars), but it
doesn't follow that only paganism can have these attributes. It's not even certain
they're all required. GrecoRoman paganism could have been a sufficient or just a
contributing cause of ancient science, but it was hardly a necessary one; and it
may have provided values that helped science develop, which science could still
have developed without, or that other worldviews could have encouraged just as
well. So, too, Christianity.
Finally, all too frequently advocates of this new delusion repeatedly confuse
reason (as the use of logic to achieve consistency) with scientific reasoning
(testing the predictions of your claims against the evidence, using a method that
aggressively searches and controls for empirical errors and fallacies, and
collecting and documenting actual facts about the world by observing and
confirming them). Or they confuse "science," as scientific methods, research,
and progress, with "science," as the transmission and use of past science in
pro
fessional practice (as by doctors, astronomers, and engineers) with no
significant effort to improve it (beyond armchair revision or the refining of
measurements). Very often evidence of one will be touted as evidence of the
other. But that's a fallacy of equivocation. Sci-ence2 can persist without science,
and in fact clearly did in medieval Christianity, just as reason could be praised
and pursued while scientific reasoning is hardly to be seen, as was also clearly
the case through much of the Middle Ages.
HISTORICAL FANTASIES
Perhaps a well-constructed argument could avoid those fallacies. But then you'd
have to get the facts straight. And no one does. The notion that science needed
Christianity had many progenitors, but its fully delusional form appears to
originate with a devout Catholic physicist, Father Stanley Jaki.s It has since
filtered into the conservative Christian mindset, and is often represented as the
new consensus in the history of science (even though it isn't).9 Rodney Stark is
probably its best representative. He summarizes Jaki's arguments more
succinctly and intelligibly than Jaki himself, and unlike most, Stark at least
attempts to cite his sources. So I'll examine his version of the argument.10 Stark
has been criticized already.11 But not yet by an expert in ancient science and
Christianity.
HISTORICAL FANTASYNUMBER i. "No REAL SCIENCE INANTIQUITY"
Rodney Stark is an excellent sociologist but a lousy historian. He has no formal
training in history as a profession, or in ancient history in particular. Actually,
none of the advocates of this theory do. But we needn't cite a lack of credentials.
Stark's incompetence is decisively exposed in a single sentence: "Greek learning
stagnated of its own inner logic. After Plato and Aristotle, very little happened
beyond some extensions of geometry"12 That Princeton University would
publish a book with that sentence in it is one of the most appalling things I've
ever encountered in my career (and it might be no accident that Stark had to
publish his next book with Random House).
The truth is that the Greeks and Romans achieved tremendous and continual
advances in science and mathematics after Aristotle. Aristotle's generation
marked only the beginning of the history of ancient sciencealmost every
amazing thing they discovered came after him. And they discovered a lot.13 So
in a single sentence Stark has erased the entire history of ancient science. Yet his
entire argument rests on that sentence. Had he done what any scholar is
obligated to do, and actually checked the current histories of ancient science, he
would know this key premise, and hence the entire argument founded on it, is
rubbish. Already by Aristotle's time, in the mid-forth century BCE, there were
many important scientists, from Hippocrates and Eudoxus to Callistratus,
Archytas, and Aristoxenus, none of whom Stark shows any awareness of. But
after that, up to the end of the second century CE, I can ascertain the names of
over a hundred published scientists, almost all of whose work was not preserved
by medieval Christians.14 Stark shows no awareness of any of them, either-not
even the ones whose work was preserved.
Here's just a sample ...
Aristotle performed numerous dissection and vivisection experiments in
animal anatomy and physiology and composed the most scientific range of
zoological works then known. Immediately afterward, his successor
Theophrastus extended this work to botany and plant physiology, and also
produced the first known scientific works in pyrology, mineralogy, and other
fields. His successor, Strato of Lampsacus, extended their experimental method
to machines and physics, by which time many of Aristotle's physical theories