The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, by Rodney Stark (Random House, 304 pp., $25.95)
Social Science has long tended to treat religion as fundamentally irrational. Never mind that scientific methods are by definition incapable of adjudicating theological propositions: Throughout the 20th century, the discipline's leading explanations of religious belief and behavior were predicated on the assumption of irrationality. Religion, ...