How the West Won

Do I sometimes detect a soupcon of hostility toward the singular achievements of Western civilization among those who post comments on Loose Canon? I would love for you to respond to these two quotes from a wonderful new book, "The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success":

"Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism. According to any edition of Webster's, 'scholastic' means 'pedantic and dogmatic,' denoting the sterility of medieval church scholarship. John Locke, the eighteenth-century British philosopher, dismissed the Scholastics as 'the great mintmasters' of useless terms meant 'to cover their ignorance.' Not so! The scholastics were fine scholars who founded Europe's great universities and launched the rise of Western science. As for theology, it has little in common with most religious thinking, being a sophisticated, highly rational discipline that is fully developed only in Christianity."

And:

"The so-called Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century has been misinterpreted by those wishing to assert an inherent conflict between religion and science. Some wonderful things were achieved in this era, but they were not produced by an eruption of secular thinking. Rather, these achievements were the culmination of many centuries of systematic progress by medieval Scholastics, sustained by that uniquely Christian twelfth-century invention, the university. Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars."

I'll be interested in what you have to say, especially Swami, who has put forward the unverifiable claim that he actually thinks about his posts before writing them, and who has several days to cogitate on this.