Stark on the history of the West--continued

I'm still on Rodney Stark's book How the West Won. Right now I'm covering the rest of chapter 8.

Stark deals here with the rise of universities, which were the product of the medieval church. They were not limiting their scholarly work to reciting received wisdom. Instead, the scholastics who founded the universities esteemed innovation. They were dominated by empiricism from the start. If it was possible to put an intellectual claim to observational tests, then that is what should be done. Faculty members gained fame and invitations to join other faculties by innovation, not memorization of the ancients. Stark shows that Copernicus, who pushed the heliocentric model of the solar system, succeeded because of an invaluable legacy of centuries of scholastic scholarship. He says there is no such thing as a scientific revolution, a term invented to discredit the medieval church by claiming that science burst forth in full bloom only when Christianity no longer could suppress it. Again, we see there have been many modern myths set up to discredit Christianity's role in history.

Stark ends this chapter by saying the pursuit of knowledge did not suddenly appear in the 17th century. Actually, from early days Christian theologians were devoted to thinking about the world. That provided the fundamental basis for the creation of universities, thus giving an institutional home to science. The Christian thinkers who studied and taught at these universities were responsible for remarkable advances in an era supposedly short on progress.

This whole section reminds me that historians are not neutral observers of their filed. Many famous (and not so famous) ones have slanted their reports to make Christianity look bad. So much for intellectual honesty in many cases.