How much does Christianity explain Western economic and intellectual development? Some considerations against:
Lack of comparable successes in most of the Orthodox Christian world.
Impressiveness of Classical Greece and Hellenistic world vs Europe until the Renaissance and scientific revolution.
Temporal correlation between Renaissance and scientific revolution and great uptick of interest in classical works (vs Christian texts).
AFAIK, Christians outside Europe (Ethiopia, Middle East) not being especially successful intellectually or economically.
Scandinavia being pagan till fairly late.
Jews in Europe being very successful economically and intellectually despite not being Christian.
Underperformance of places where Catholic Church has lingering strong influence (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Ireland).
What actual ideas from Christianity (that seem distinctive and not found elsewhere) do scientists, philosophers, economists, business people, political leaders (etc) draw on directly? My sense is not that many.
No actual answer, because I know little about history. Just some thoughts:
I would assume that the impact of religion on science is mostly indirect, but quite important. Do you believe in a god who wants to be known and has set up the rules of the universe as a puzzle for the believers to solve? Or do you believe in a whimsical micromanaging god who makes arbitrary decisions about everything, so the very idea of laws of nature is a heresy? More practically, are kids supposed to learn about secular subjects, or just memorize the holy scriptures? Are girls allowed to learn? Do your holy scriptures make specific (wrong) scientific statements; and are people who contradict those statements treated as heretics, or can we settle for “it’s just a metaphor anyway”? Does your faith even allow the concept of human learning and improvement, or is everything important already written in the holy scriptures and trying to invent anything new is naive at best, and a heresy at worst?
The answers to these questions will depend on the religious community, and may change over time. But you may get stuck with something that was written in the holy scriptures so clearly that it is almost impossible to pretend it is not there, or there may be a culture war in the history of your church that makes certain type of ideas immediately associated with certain historical heresy.
You mention the underperformance of Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism, but Protestantism is also a part of Christianity, and seems to have quite good results. Looking at the map, could the explanation for different performance of different branches of Christianity be explained by the geography? I mean, maybe Christian countries surrounded by Christian countries perform better than Christian countries next to non-Christian countries? (Why would that be? Dunno, maybe if you are next to non-Christians, you spend too much time talking about Jesus; if you live next to Christians, you already agree about Jesus, so you focus on other things?)
The success of Jews in Christian countries should be attributed to both, right? Perhaps Christians are good at creating a good environment, but are not so good at exploiting all the opportunities it provides?
You compare ancient Greece with medieval Europe, but what about ancient Greece vs ancient Rome (which didn’t start as Christian)? Maybe to do good science you need either independent city states or universities, and the era between ancient Greece and Renaissance was simply the era when cities were no longer independent, but universities were not invented yet.
Renaissance and reading classical texts, I suppose that after centuries of poverty following the fall of Rome, there was again enough food to feed everyone so some nerds could afford to have hobbies, which restarted science, and then some of the nerds found that reading ancient masters and stealing their forgotten knowledge is more profitable than inventing your own science. So it’s a combination of economics allowing you to do things not immediately needed for survival, and having an ancient treasure of knowledge buried right under your feet. (Similarly, there was an explosion of science in Islamic countries, when they were economically successful, and had lots of knowledge available because of conquest and trade.)
Seems to me that intellectual development is a consequence of economic growth (you need to feed all those nerds), and the economic growth probably depends a lot on geography, and who won the recent wars.
Echoing something in Viliam’s comment, but I think this is looking at the wrong category. It seems like there’s no correlation because Christianity is too broad a category of religions with a common history. Instead, the right comparison seems to be Protestantism vs. not.
Even within Protestantism I think there’s a lot of room for variation. For example, there might be a correlation with certain branches of Protestant Christianity and not with others.
All of this makes it very hard to tell how much was causally the result of Protestant Christianity or even just particular denominations vs. larger cultural forces of which those denominations were downstream.
How much does Christianity explain Western economic and intellectual development? Some considerations against:
Lack of comparable successes in most of the Orthodox Christian world.
Impressiveness of Classical Greece and Hellenistic world vs Europe until the Renaissance and scientific revolution.
Temporal correlation between Renaissance and scientific revolution and great uptick of interest in classical works (vs Christian texts).
AFAIK, Christians outside Europe (Ethiopia, Middle East) not being especially successful intellectually or economically.
Scandinavia being pagan till fairly late.
Jews in Europe being very successful economically and intellectually despite not being Christian.
Underperformance of places where Catholic Church has lingering strong influence (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Ireland).
What actual ideas from Christianity (that seem distinctive and not found elsewhere) do scientists, philosophers, economists, business people, political leaders (etc) draw on directly? My sense is not that many.
No actual answer, because I know little about history. Just some thoughts:
I would assume that the impact of religion on science is mostly indirect, but quite important. Do you believe in a god who wants to be known and has set up the rules of the universe as a puzzle for the believers to solve? Or do you believe in a whimsical micromanaging god who makes arbitrary decisions about everything, so the very idea of laws of nature is a heresy? More practically, are kids supposed to learn about secular subjects, or just memorize the holy scriptures? Are girls allowed to learn? Do your holy scriptures make specific (wrong) scientific statements; and are people who contradict those statements treated as heretics, or can we settle for “it’s just a metaphor anyway”? Does your faith even allow the concept of human learning and improvement, or is everything important already written in the holy scriptures and trying to invent anything new is naive at best, and a heresy at worst?
The answers to these questions will depend on the religious community, and may change over time. But you may get stuck with something that was written in the holy scriptures so clearly that it is almost impossible to pretend it is not there, or there may be a culture war in the history of your church that makes certain type of ideas immediately associated with certain historical heresy.
You mention the underperformance of Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism, but Protestantism is also a part of Christianity, and seems to have quite good results. Looking at the map, could the explanation for different performance of different branches of Christianity be explained by the geography? I mean, maybe Christian countries surrounded by Christian countries perform better than Christian countries next to non-Christian countries? (Why would that be? Dunno, maybe if you are next to non-Christians, you spend too much time talking about Jesus; if you live next to Christians, you already agree about Jesus, so you focus on other things?)
The success of Jews in Christian countries should be attributed to both, right? Perhaps Christians are good at creating a good environment, but are not so good at exploiting all the opportunities it provides?
You compare ancient Greece with medieval Europe, but what about ancient Greece vs ancient Rome (which didn’t start as Christian)? Maybe to do good science you need either independent city states or universities, and the era between ancient Greece and Renaissance was simply the era when cities were no longer independent, but universities were not invented yet.
Renaissance and reading classical texts, I suppose that after centuries of poverty following the fall of Rome, there was again enough food to feed everyone so some nerds could afford to have hobbies, which restarted science, and then some of the nerds found that reading ancient masters and stealing their forgotten knowledge is more profitable than inventing your own science. So it’s a combination of economics allowing you to do things not immediately needed for survival, and having an ancient treasure of knowledge buried right under your feet. (Similarly, there was an explosion of science in Islamic countries, when they were economically successful, and had lots of knowledge available because of conquest and trade.)
Seems to me that intellectual development is a consequence of economic growth (you need to feed all those nerds), and the economic growth probably depends a lot on geography, and who won the recent wars.
Echoing something in Viliam’s comment, but I think this is looking at the wrong category. It seems like there’s no correlation because Christianity is too broad a category of religions with a common history. Instead, the right comparison seems to be Protestantism vs. not.
Even within Protestantism I think there’s a lot of room for variation. For example, there might be a correlation with certain branches of Protestant Christianity and not with others.
All of this makes it very hard to tell how much was causally the result of Protestant Christianity or even just particular denominations vs. larger cultural forces of which those denominations were downstream.