The following are chapter synopses and short quotes from the third section of Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About Christianity? This third section is entitled: “Christianity and Science”
Chapter 8:
D’Souza argues that Christianity is based on reason–and that Christian theologians throughout the ages have been masters of reasoned defenses of Christian thought.
“My point is that the kind of reasoning about God that we see in Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm is typical of Christianity. There is very little of this in any other religion. And out of such reasoning, remarkably enough, modern science was born.”
Chapter 9:
D’Souza states that a fundamental assumption of the modern scientist is that the world is ordered, logical, rational, and law following. He argues that this belief in an ordered natural universe is directly pirated from Christianity.
“God is sacred and made the universe, and the universe operates lawfully in accordance with divine reason. At the same time Christianity held that the universe itself is not sacred….The Christian universe is ordered and yet disenchanted. Moreover, Christianity…teaches that man was made in the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of God. This means that there is a spark of the divie reason in man, setting him apart from other things and giving him the special power of apprehending them. According to Christianity, human reason is derived from the divine intelligence that created the universe.”
Chapter 10:
D’Souza argues that the story of Galileo being persecuted by the church for his heliocentric theory is just that–a story.
“Galileo was a great scientist who had very little sense. He was right about heliocentrism, but several of his arguments and proofs were wrong. The dispute his ideas brought about was not exclusively between religion and science, but also between the new science and the science of the previous generation. The leading figures of the church were more circumspect about approaching “