Professor and author Thomas E. Woods has mustered convincing evidence to establish the overwhelmingly positive role of Christianity (as it was then personified in the Roman Catholic church) during the era after the fall of the Roman Empire. The church offered major contributions in the development of civilization, science, and free governments:
1. It was the Catholic church that was responsible for what has become known as the scientific revolution through its creation of the university system.
2. Catholic priests were pioneers in the fields of geology, Egyptology, astronomy, and atomic theory.
3. Medieval monasteries were responsible for either preserving from classical times (generally accepted as the era of the Greeks and Romans), or initiating on their own, significant advances in agriculture.
4. Medieval monasteries pioneered the use of water power, factories, and metallurgy.
5. The church was pivotal in the preservation of the written words of the ancients—perhaps even literacy itself.
6. Early Christian theology was the foundation of the Western legal system (the rule of law) as well as international law.
7. Christian philosophy led to challenges to slavery in both the Old and New Worlds. And, of great import, the moral code of the West, including belief in the sanctity of human life and marriage, derived from Christian teachings.
Despite these achievements, great negativity has crept into modern thinking when it comes to evaluating the influence of Christianity in human progress. Many contend that religious faith is at the root of most of the world’s historical woes, blaming it for poverty, war, atrocities, bloodshed, genocide, slavery, and even the most subtle intolerance or personal bigotry. How many wars have been fought, how many people killed, in the name of religion? The question is frequently asked.
Woods responds to this viewpoint:
That Western civilization stands indebted to the Church for the university system, charitable work, international law, the sciences, important legal principles, and much else besides has not exactly been impressed upon them with terrific zeal. Western civilization owes far more to the Catholic Church than most people—Catholics included—often realize. The Church, in fact, built Western civilization.
Western civilization does not derive entirely from Catholicism, of course; one can scarcely deny the importance of ancient Greece and Rome or the various Germanic tribes that succeeded the Roman Empire in the West as formative influences on our civilization. The Church repudiated none of these traditions, and in fact absorbed and learned from the best of them. What is striking, though, is how in popular culture the substantial—and essential—Catholic contribution has gone relatively unnoticed.
Another scholar who has devoted much of his career to writing on this subject, Rodney Stark, explains in a number of his works how Christianity affected the development of the West. He argues that it was Christianity’s devotion to reason that distinguished it from other religious faiths and allowed its adherents to progress as they did:
While the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth. . . . [F]rom early days, the church fathers taught that reason was the supreme gift from God and the means to progressively increase their understanding of scripture and revelation. . . . Encouraged by the Scholastics and embodied in the great medieval universities founded by the church, faith in the power of reason infused Western culture, stimulating the pursuit of science and the evolution of democratic theory and practice.
Another author, David Brog, argues that the early Christian Jews were the first champions of human rights. For example, even among the most civilized cultures, they were the first—and many times the only—defenders of infants and children.
The Romans were proud practitioners of infanticide. So were the Greeks before them. Both Plato and Aristotle recommended that the state adopt a policy of killing deformed infants. The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote approvingly of the common practice of drowning abnormal or weak children at birth. The earliest known Roman legal code, written in 450 BCE, permitted fathers to kill any “deformed or weak” male infant or any female infant, no matter how healthy. Indeed, female babies were the primary victims of Roman infanticide.
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