The New Gospel

The triumph of Christianity was a symptom of that fall [the 3rd Century Crisis], not its cause … Had the Empire maintained the Pax Romana of the glory years, with the wealth and progress of the 1st and early 2nd century, and had the Senate established a stable constitutional government by the 3rd century (as the movie Gladiator pretended was the real plan of Marcus Aurelius) instead of fifty years of civil war, I suspect Christianity would have been doomed—not to oblivion, but at least to obscurity ... [Had this happened] Christianity would not have had as much to offer anymore, as peace and prosperity would gradually claim more and more potential converts by giving them what they wanted: material happiness and security at the hands of a successful—and therefore “obviously” divinely sanctioned—pagan government.

Pagans did set the stage for the end of ancient science—just not for any of the reasons Christians now claim.  By failing to develop a stable and effective constitutional government, the Roman Empire was doomed to collapse under the weight of constant civil war and disastrous economic policy; and in the third century [AD] that’s exactly what it did.  Pagan society responded to this collapse by retreating from the scientific values of its past and fleeing to increasingly mystical and fantastical ways of viewing the world and its wonders.  Christianity was already one such worldview, and thus became increasingly popular at just that time.  But as one could predict, when Christianity came to power, it did not restore those scientific values, but instead sealed the fate of science by putting an end to all significant scientific progress for almost a thousand years.  It did not do this [at first] by oppressing or persecuting science, but simply by not promoting its progress and by promoting instead a deep and enduring suspicion against the very values necessary to produce it.  Likewise, modern science did develop in a Christian milieu, in the hands of scientists [like Newton] who were indeed Christians ... Christianity only had to adapt to embrace those old pagan values that once drove scientific progress ... craftily inventing Christian arguments in favor of the change, because only arguments in accord with Christian theology and the Bible would have succeeded in persuading their peers.