Free What's So Great About America by Dinesh D'Souza Page B

“enchanted universe” governed by spirits that is characteristic of many ancient peoples. To believe in the Greek notion of a reality that is not arbitrary, that obeys mathematical laws, a reality that is reasonable and susceptible to human understanding, is to have a certain kind of faith—a faith in reason.
    The Greeks did, and in subsequent centuries this faith was strengthened in the West by the Christian notion of a divine being who embodies reason and truth and who created the universe and man. 20 Many of the greatest scientists of the West—among them, Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton—believed that their work demonstrated the hidden hand of God in the universe. Their science was inspired and fortified by their Christian faith. The faith is much weaker among scientists today; probably very few practicing scientists see their work as confirming a divine presence. But all of them, even those who have never heard of the Greeks and who reject Christianity, nevertheless operate on the Greek and Christian assumption that reality is rational. Without this assumption, without this faith, science itself becomes impossible.
    A second notion that is crucial to the development of science is the idea of development itself—the idea of progress. Sociologist Robert Nisbet terms it “one of the master ideas of the West.” 21
We see it, for instance, in the teenager who says to her mother, “Mom, how can you believe that? This is 2002!” That cliché is freighted with philosophical significance: it presumes a higher consciousness for the present than existed in the past. The belief in progress is also evident in the widespread expectation that our knowledge and our economy will continue to grow, and that our children will know more and have a better life than we do. Europeans and American take these things for granted, but they are novel concepts that arose quite recently in the West.
    The idea of progress, like the idea of reason, is a doctrine that cannot be proved but must be taken on faith. The Greeks didn’t have this faith: they believed that history moves in cycles. One may say that the Greeks believed in change, but not in progress. To the degree that the Greeks found a pattern in this change, it was largely one of degeneration. For many Greek thinkers, the golden age was in the past and things had been going steadily downhill since then. Of course the Greeks admitted that things could get better, but they believed that they could just as easily get worse. What governed human destiny was chance or fate. These notions of cyclical change and degeneration and fate were not unique to the Greeks. They were shared by the Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Confucian Chinese, and by virtually everyone else in the world.
    The modern West is the only civilization to entertain the idea that there is a meaningful pattern in history, that this pattern is onward and upward, that knowledge is cumulative and that its applications to human betterment are continuous and never-ending, that the future is certain to be better than the past. “Utopia” is in this sense a Western concept, because it
locates perfection in the future. For most people in the world these notions—that history is somehow encoded with meaning, that we know in advance that things will improve instead of degenerate—are even today considered nothing short of ridiculous. In the West, too, the idea of progress continues to be debated. For instance, there is ongoing argument about whether progress is comprehensive, i.e., whether progress involves only material gains or also moral gains. But in some form the faith in progress is very widespread in the West, and the belief in it holds because it is supported by the contemporary experience of the people of the West.
    Where, then, did the Western belief in progress come from? From Christianity. It is Christianity that introduced the idea of a divine plan for