In addition to Fuller's Science versus Religion, I also received my copy of Phil Dowe's Galileo, Darwin and Hawking last week, and today arrives Roy Davies' The Darwin Conspiracy (thanks, Roy; I will be as even handed as I can be), and Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God. So I am going to be busy over the next few weeks. I'll post a bloggy review here for those that I also have to review for a journal (I have a backlog on this - Bowler's Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons is also due).
I'm about one third through Schaeffer's book already - it's a good read. His father and mother come across as well intentioned, even socially aware – they did not demonise homosexuals, for example, even as they demonise Episcopalians as being hard to save because they already think they are, the fools. As a family memoir, one cannot criticise the Schaeffers. Everyone's family is nutso, and to be honest I would have preferred his early childhood to mine. But the contradictions are apparent, which is no doubt why Schaefferian Os Guiness gave it such a nasty review in that rag Christianity Today. God forbid we confront the problems of religion from within, right? Close ranks? Don't mention that Schaeffer Snr was abusive to his wife, the author's mother, or that Billy Graham had his 17 year old daughter marry a man twenty years her senior, and so on.
I haven't read a memoir not directly related to my research (the last one was Ed Wilson's Naturalist) for over twenty years. It's a pleasure to read this one.
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Read any Rodney Stark? I just started. I don't know enough to read him critically, yet.
From "The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success."
"The so-called Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century has been misinterpreted by those wishing to assert an inherent conflict between religion and science. Some wonderful things were achieved in this era, but they were not produced by an eruption of secular thinking. Rather, these achievements were the culmination of many centuries of systematic progress by medieval Scholastics, sustained by that uniquely Christian twelfth-century invention, the university. Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars." (Random House Trade Paperbacks ed., 2005, p. 12.)
"The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress, more fully revealing himself as humans gain the capacity to better understand. Moreover, because God is a rational being and the universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. This was the key to many intellectual undertakings, among them the rise of science." (Stark, p. 12.)
The ancient greeks achieved, in the end, only "nonempirical, even antiempirical, speculative philosophies; atheoretical collections of facts; and isolated crafts and technologies--never breaking through to real science." (P. 18.)
From what you quote, it is about 100% wrong.
These are his foundational tenets.
Disappointing. I had hoped to refill my party conversation reserves.
He sounds mostly good to me, but his "everybody is wrong" tone (here and in "Cities of God" and "The Rise of Christianity"), plus his tolerance (I hear) of the teaching of creationism in the classroom, gave me pause. (Which is why I said to myself, who do I know who's a philosopher of science who can clue me? Thank you.)
I am going to finish his books, if only for the sake of integrity, but I will gladly pay you Tuesday for additional recommended reading today. (Or I guess I can look at Stark's footnotes to see who he says has it all wrong.)
Adam
I just gaffed. This conversation started in the comments on PZ's blog under the post "What has Atheism Done for Us." I just posted your response in the comments there.
Apologies for not asking first.
De nada. Also see Thony's reply here.