There is a nice piece in The New Republic (Jan 16th, unfortunately not online) titled "A Reason For Everything" in which Alan Wolfe reviews Rodney Stark's book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random, 2005; Amazon). Stark is a sociologist (rather than an historian) at Baylor University, and has previously written such works as For The Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton, 2003; Amazon), One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton, 2001; Amazon) and The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, 1996; Amazon), so I think you can see where this is going.
To put it bluntly, Wolfe does not like the book; he sees it as revisionist, triumphalist, anachronistic, Manichaean, and just plain wrong (both in fact and spirit). Stark's claims are "an ugly little scenario" that ignores anything (for example Greek culture) that opposes his thesis that Christianity is responsible for everything that is true and good in this world. Greek influences are ignored; Jewish influences are ignored; Islamic influences are ignored. The Greeks did not have science, but "lore, skills, wisdom, techniques, crafts, technologies, engineering, learning, or simply knowledge" (because it's not modern science, to Stark it ain't science period). Aquinas and Augustine are (predictably) valorized, Spinoza is (as predictably) ignored. The Dark Ages are dismissed as "a hoax" and the Inquisition is brushed aside along with Christian support of slavery. The Scientific Revolution was truly revolutionary and owed nothing to the past; Newton owed no debt to those who went before (despite his "standing on the shoulders of giants" comment which Stark tells us we should not believe). Judaism has no concept of free will, lacks an idea of progress, and does not pose questions of ultimate meaning. Alone among religions, Christianity is oriented towards the future. And so on, and so on.
The whole review is six pages of small print and well worth reading if you are tempted by Stark's book. As Wolfe notes, "Stark writes in an age of reason to advance the cause of prejudice ... Other faiths made their contributions to reason as well. Wise people know this; blowhards and bigots do not."
It's probably best to leave the last word on this to Wolfe:
[Stark's] history is so shoddy because, when you come right down to it, history does not matter to it. All that matters is Jesus.
The Victory of Reason is the worst book by a social scientist that I have ever read. Stark's methodology has nothing to do with history, or the logic of comparative analysis, or the rigorous testing of hypotheses. Instead he simply makes claims, the more outrageous the better, and dismisses all evidence that runs contrary to his claims as unimportant, and treats everyone with a point of view different from his own as stupid and contemptible, and reduces causation in human affairs to one thing and one thing only. How in the world, I kept asking myself as I read this book, could anyone spend so much of his life trying to understand something as important as religion and come away so childish?
I will note that Stark is sure that "[t]here is no plausible scientific theory of the origin of species!" (AEI Online, Sept 2004) ... I'm glad I have a sociologist to clue me in to that. In For the Glory of God, Stark claimed that, from the start, evolution "has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator - an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work" (source). Given the historical ability Wolfe has detected in The Victory of Reason, I think we (Discovery Institute aside) can safely dismiss anything that Stark has to say about history of science in general, and Darwinism in particular.
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I was thinking about how common various types of revisionist history a while ago, and I came up with a phrase for what I sometimes think the world is becoming: "the age of gilded lies."
Basically, if you have money or are highly motivated, it is now possible to craft any intellectual, historical, or scientific movement you want regardless of it's correspondence with reality. Of course, this was always possible. However, it seems to me that this behavior is becoming more common and these movements are becoming more effective.
The phenomenon seems more common in right-wing, nationalist, and religious circles but is by no means confined there. Green radicals, hard-line Marxists, and new-age types also engage in the construction of alternate realities.
Even holocaust denial threatens to lapse into a kind of perverse fashionability, as evidenced by it's presentation here alongside so many more fashionable forms of nonsense: http://www.rense.com/
I think there are a number of factors responsible for this. Here are a few that I can think of:
1) Anything fringe has become fashionable. I know lots of people who claim to "think for themselves" and to be "skeptics," when what they really do is dismiss anything supposedly mainstream while at the same time issuing a blank check to anything that comes from the fringe. I fail to see how this is either skeptical or open-minded, but is has become fashionable to think this way.
2) There are no gatekeepers anymore. On balance I think this is a good thing, as it opens up the media to more and more people and removes artificial barriers to the flow of information. However, I think it's a myth that this is going to automatically make things more honest. Gatekeepers did perform at least a minimal editorial role. I also think that part of the problem is that people don't know how to think criticially without gatekeepers to help them.
3) The growth of fake scholarly organizations (a.k.a. think tanks). These organizations masquerade as serious intellectual concerns but their real agenda is to push a specific conclusion by cherry-picking evidence for it. This is sometimes agenda-driven and is sometimes done merely for hire. I call it the "conclusion-selective research industry."
... and finally ...
4) The general inbred nature of a lot of real academic philosophy these days. Google "Sokal affair." Some academics seem to have effectively neutered themselves intellectually. This reminds me of a favorite quote of mine:
"... confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world."
- Stanislav Andreski
Stark, now at Dembski's old Baylor stomping-ground, continues in the tradition of Nancy Pearcey, author of Christianity: The Soul of Science, evangelical young earth creationist, fellow of the Discovery Institute, philosopher closely associated with Phil Johnson and the ID movement.
http://www.pearceyreport.com/about.php
The point is that there is a well-developed sub-culture creating the apologetic scholarship that has fed Stark lines like it's a "hoax" to call the Dark Ages "Dark" etc.
Yes, it is certainly true that Stark is - consciously or subconsciously - feeding on the same sub-culture as Pearcey ... see, for example, The Soul of Science by Pearcey & Thaxton.