Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief by Rodney Stark
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A Whiggish Sociology of Religion

What does it mean to say that one religion is better than another? Or that religion has evolved as a cultural artefact to assist in environmental adaptation? Rodney Stark thinks he knows the answers. But he does make a few presumptions that make his answers somewhat less than useless.

The first presumption is that he knows what constitutes successful cultural adaptation. For Stark success is measured in terms of longevity (and some other equally arbitrary metrics). The longer a religion persists, the better adapted it is to the conditions of the relevant culture. And for him, the apex of religious evolution is monotheism, just like the apex of physical evolution is Homo Sapiens. Isn’t that the obvious cultural destination to which several thousand years of recorded history (and genetic development) has led?

Well perhaps, if one excludes the religions of the East like Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and dozens of others which do not posses a divine figure at all. Or discount the tribal religions of Africa, North and South America, the Pacific, and the Arctic which persist still without the concept of a single all-powerful creator and may be longer lived than Christianity (and like the cockroach, will probably outlive Homo Sapiens). Stark eliminates these as irrelevant because they are not constituted by divine revelation but some kind of spiritual hearsay. That is, they do not claim that God has disclosed himself to their founders. The circularity as well as cultural arrogance of this reasoning is overwhelming.

The second presumption is that divine revelation, in addition to being necessary for true religion, is also able to evolve through human reason. This explains the development of monotheism (or its original dualistic forms) in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. His claim is that as the implications of monotheism have been worked out by theologians, it has become more coherent and intellectually compelling, as if religion were a scientific theory having certain rational characteristics.

Such ‘religious method’ is obviously bunk. To make such a claim, Stark must first of all ignore the contradictions of monotheistic religion acknowledged by its own adherents. The testimony of St. Paul that divine logic is simply inaccessible by human beings and the proclamation of Tertullian regarding Christian faith that “It is certain, because impossible” disprove Stark’s claim that there is a growing rationality to monotheism, or indeed rationality at all. And Reason, as St. Augustine insisted, is corrupt so cannot be trusted to reach sound conclusions, particularly when it comes to identifying or elaborating revelation. And this quite apart from the obviously varied, frequently contradictory, revelatory claims made historically by innumerable sects.*

Quite apart from his tendentious reading of both Scripture and history, Stark seems unaware of the only truly authentic Christian invention: faith. Thanks to the triumph of Pauline Christianity, faith, unconditional belief not ethical or ritual practice, has become a synonym for religion. And this is why Stark purposely makes the error of equating religion with revelation. It is only the ‘religions of the book,’ - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - which claim divine revelation. And it is only Christianity which defines its adherents solely as those attesting to its formal creeds (to be a Jew is a genetic fact; to be a Muslim is to submit to Allah and follow the other four behavioural ‘pillars’ of Islam).

Faith is the ultimate religious conquest by language. Faith is language worshipping itself in the most idolatrous manner possible. Stark’s pseudo-erudition is a paean to the power of language to distort and degrade what is not language. His is an academic’s religiosity proclaiming the best of all possible worlds because it is a world composed entirely of language which he uses to exert power.

Like scientists or philosophers who claim to know the criteria for ‘true science,’ Stark claims he knows the marks of true religion. His presentation of the history of religion progressing from a dark and terrible past to a glorious present is ludicrous, a wonderful example of Whig historiography. His final statement contradicts the entirety of the rest of his book: “I find it far more rational to regard the universe itself as the ultimate revelation of God.” So Stark is in direct communication with the Almighty. How enlightening. And he apparently wants to start his own religion. The world shudders in anticipation of further divine news.

* As an aside, the most important theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth, would be horrified at Stark’s claim that revelation is a linguistic phenomenon. For Barth, a very conservative evangelical Protestant, revelation is the “grabbing of one’s spirit by the throat.” As he put it, “God’s Word is not man’s word,” and even scripture is man’s word. Barth was aware, as Stark is not, of the terrible human consequences of burying religion in the credal tomb of language. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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