David Bentley-Hart #2

A second set of quotes from David Bentley-Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies 2009 Yale University Press

Christianity, the only true revolution

'Among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilisation ... there has been only one—the triumph of Christianity—that can be called in the fullest sense a "revolution": a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as to actually have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good. 

On the New Atheists' use of Galileo 

Galileo's story is an embarrassment for the atheist critics because it's 'entirely anomalous within the larger history of the Catholic Church's relation to the natural sciences' and is 'the only noteworthy example of that truth they can adduce' and it has 'tended to obscure the rather significant reality that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian scientists educated in Christian universities and following a Christian tradition of scientific and mathematical speculation overturned a pagan cosmology and physics, and arrived at conclusions that would have been unimaginable within the confines of the Hellenistic scientific traditions.' (63)

Church fathers who denied historicity of the primaeval prologue (Gen 1-11) 

'When [Galileo] appealed to the church fathers, to Augustine in particular, in defense of his claim that the scriptures ought not to be regarded as a resource for scientific descriptions of reality, he was entirely in the right.' (63) 'Origen, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine—all denied that, for instance, the creation story in Genesis was an actual historical record of how the world was made

... And figures as distant from one another in time as Augustine and Aquinas cautioned against exposing scripture to ridicule by mistaking the Bible for a scientific treatise' (63)

Kepler, Galileo and Newton as Christian overthrowers of Hellenistic science 

'Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.' (68)
 (NB: Galileo's relationship with Kepler was odd: I believe he didn't like or accept what he taught.)

Christianity haunting, rather than dominating, the West 

Christianity's ...'extraordinary claims, it's peculiar understanding of love and service... down the centuries have not so much dominated Western civilisation as haunted it, at times like a particularly engrossing dream, at others like an especially forlorn spectre.' (p 222)

 

The relative claims to life of Down's Syndrome people and academic bioethicists

 Most of us who have known persons with Down syndrome also know that a great many of them seem more capable of cheer than the average run of mortal, and seem to have a spontaneous gift for gentleness, patience, and hope that is positively enviable. Their lives seem no more obviously impoverished or meaningless than those of academic bioethicists, nor any more burdensome than enriching for others. (p 235)