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USA TODAY
Columnists'
Opinion
A Christian
foundation
From the Web On
Religion, Illuminating the national conversation
By Dinesh D’Souza,
Monday October 23, 2007
Popular efforts to tuck Christianity
neatly aside as a footnote to this country’s history and to deliver a secular
society will fail. Why? Because the faith is inextricably tied to
our values, our institutions and even modern science.
We seem to be witnessing an aggressive attempt by leading atheists to portray
religion in general, and Christianity in particular, as the bane of
civilization. Finding the idea of God incompatible with science and
reason, these atheists also fault Christianity with fostering a breed of
fanaticism comparable to Islamic radicalism. The proposed solution:
a completely secular society, liberated from Christian symbols and beliefs.
This critique, which comes from best-selling atheist books, academic tracts and
a sophisticated network of atheist organizations and media, can be disputed on
its own terms. What it misses, however, is the larger story of how
Christianity has shaped the core institutions and values of the USA and the
West. Christianity is responsible even for secular institutions such as
democracy and science. It has fostered in our civilization values such as
respect for human dignity, human rights and human equality that even secular
people cherish.
Consider science. Although there have been many civilizations in history,
modern science developed in only one: Western civilization. And why?
Because science is based on an assumption that is, at root, faith-based and
theological. That is the assumption that the universe is rational and
follows laws that are discoverable through human reason.
The 'miracle' of our universe
Science is based on what James Trefil calls the principle of universality.
"It says that the laws of nature we discover here and now in our laboratories
are true everywhere in the universe and have been in force for all time."
Moreover, the laws that govern the universe seem to be written in the language
of mathematics. Physicist Richard Feynman found this to be "a kind of
miracle."
Why? Because the universe doesn't have to be this way. There's no
particular reason the laws of nature that we find on Earth should also govern a
star billions of light years away. There's no logical necessity for a
universe that obeys rules, let alone mathematical ones. So where did
Western man get this idea of a lawfully ordered universe? From
Christianity.
Christians were the first ones who envisioned the universe as following laws
that reflected the rationality of God the creator. These laws were
believed to be accessible to man because man is created in the image of God and
shares a spark of the divine reason. No wonder, then, that the first
universities and observatories were sponsored by the church and run by priests.
No wonder also that the greatest scientists of the West — Copernicus, Kepler,
Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Leibniz, Gassendi, Pascal, Mersenne, Cuvier, Harvey,
Dalton, Faraday, Joule, Lyell, Lavoisier, Priestley, Kelvin, Ampere, Steno,
Pasteur, Maxwell, Planck, Mendel, and Lemaitre — were Christians. Gassendi,
Mersenne and Lamaitre were priests. Several of them viewed their research
as demonstrating God's creative genius as manifested in his creation.
If modern science has Christian roots, so do our most basic political
institutions and values. Consider Thomas Jefferson's famous assertion in
the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." He
claimed this was "self-evident," but one only has to look to history and to
other cultures to see that it is not evident at all. Everywhere we see
dramatic evidence of human inequality. Jefferson's point, however, was
that human beings are moral equals. Every life has a worth no greater and
no less than any other.
The preciousness and equal worth of every human life is a Christian idea.
We are equal because we have been created equal in the eyes of God. This
is an idea with momentous consequences. In ancient Greece and Rome, human
life had very little value. The Spartans, for example, left weak children
to die on the hillside. Greek and Roman culture was built on slavery.
Christianity banned infanticide and the killing of the weak and "dispensable,"
and even today Christian values are responsible for the moral horror we feel
when we hear of such practices. Christianity initially tolerated slavery —
a universal institution at the time — but gradually mobilized the moral and
political resources to end it. From the beginning, Christianity
discouraged the enslavement of fellow Christians. Slavery, the foundation
of Greek and Roman civilization, withered and largely disappeared throughout
medieval Christendom in the Middle Ages.
The first movements to abolish slavery completely occurred only in the West, and
were led by Christians. In the modern era, first the Quakers and then the
evangelical Christians demanded that since we are all equal in God's eyes, no
man has the right to rule another man without his consent. This religious
doctrine not only supplies the moral justification for anti-slavery but also for
democracy. Yes, the idea of self-government is also rooted in the
Christian assumption of human equality. One reason the atheist philosopher
Nietzsche hated democracy is because he understood its religious foundation.
Rights and Christianity
Consider finally modern notions of human rights — the right to freedom of
conscience, or to property, or to marry and form a family, or to be treated
equally before the law — as enshrined in the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. The universalism of this declaration is based
on the particular teachings of Christianity. The premise is that all human
lives have equal dignity and worth, but this is not the teaching of all the
world's cultures and religions. Even so, it's appropriate that a doctrine
Christian in origin should be universal in application. Christianity from
the start promulgated its message as one for the whole world.
There are some atheists and even some Christians who admit that theism and
Christianity have shaped the core institutions and values of America and the
West. But now that we have these values, they say, why do we still need
God and Christianity? Oddly enough, the answer is supplied by Nietzsche.
Nietzsche argued that since the Christian God is the foundation of Western
values, the death of God must necessarily mean the erosion and ultimate collapse
of those values. Remove the base and the whole building will slowly
crumble. For a while, Nietzsche conceded, people would out of custom or
habit continue to respect human life and treat people with equal dignity, but
eventually there would be ferocious assaults on these values, and practices once
unthinkable such as the killing of people deemed inferior or undesirable would
once again occur. This is precisely what we have seen in our time, and
Nietzsche predicted that it will only get worse.
If we cherish the distinctive ideals of Western civilization, and believe as I
do that they have enormously benefited our civilization and our world, then
whatever our religious convictions, we will not rashly try to hack at the
religious roots from which they spring. On the contrary, we will not
hesitate to acknowledge, not only privately but also publicly, the central role
that Christianity has played and still plays in the things that matter most to
us.
(Illustration by Alejandro Gonzalez, USA TODAY)
Dinesh D'Souza's new book, What's So Great About Christianity, has just been
published.
GayPASG NOTE: I am thankful we live in a secular country. It
is my opinion this article would be better understood if it used “The Universal
Laws and Truths” we began to discover long before “Christianity”. Please
remember Confucius wrote the following 500 years before Christ: “Do not
into others that you would not have them do unto you…”
If you are not familiar with the Jefferson Bible, please go to:
http://WWW.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontlie/shows/religion/jesus/jefferson.html
John Crowell Campbell
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