Stark and his book--continued

This section of my summary of How the West Won continues with Rodney Stark's debunking myths about Muslim history. It has been said that Islam was so tolerant back in the Middle Ages. Is that true? Stark says no.

Consider, he says, Moorish Spain. Didn't the Muslims treat people well there? No, thousands of Jews were murdered. In 1148 all Christians and Jews were ordered to convert to Islam or leave Spain immediately upon pain of death. By the end of the 14th century only tiny remnants of Christianity and Judaism remained scattered in the Middle East and North Africa, having been almost completely destroyed by Muslim persecution. And as these conquered peoples disappeared, they took all the qualities that had helped advance the Muslim culture with them. What was left was a culture so backward it couldn't even copy Western technology but had to buy and often even had to hire Westerners to use it.

When Rodney Stark begins his 15th chapter entitled "Science Comes of Age," he echoes something he had said earlier when discussing Copernicus. Science did not suddenly erupt in a great intellectual revolution during Isaac Newton's time. This era of superb achievements was the culmination of centuries of sustained, normal scientific progress. He sees it as more of a coming-of-age of Western science.

He begins by attacking the claim that most of the great scientific stars of this time had freed themselves from the confines of supernaturalism and faith. He lists all the scientific stars from 1543 to 1680 and ends up with a set of fifty-two scientists. Were they skeptics like many during the Enlightenment? Absolutely not. One fourth of them were members of the clergy, nine of them Roman Catholics. Nearly 2/3 of them were devout believers in God while 38% were conventional churchgoers. Only 2% could be labeled skeptics. So much for the idea of an Enlightenment freed from religious superstition.

England ended up having more scientists on this list than any other nation. Stark believes that's the case for the same reasons that England led the way in the Industrial Revolution: it had substantially greater political and economic liberty, which produced a relatively open class system that enabled the emergence of an ambitious and creative upper-middle-class.

OK, I'll stop here. More to follow.