What Made the West Great?
Nearly everyone agrees that the West somehow is, or was, great. Even Progressives who argue the West is not or was not great still typically argue we should strive for some standard of greatness of theirs that is uniquely Western.
So what made, makes, or could make, the West great (again)?
As you’ve likely guessed, this article argues Christianity made the West great. But what if you disagree? What other possible answers might you give?
Here are 3:
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Our Power
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Our Goodness
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Our Freedom
For each of these, there is:
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A Foundation & Origin – Where did Western Power come from?
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A Certain Nature and Certain Limits – How do we come to know Western Goodness?
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A Purpose It’s Directed Towards – What is Western Freedom for?
This framework of reasoning can help us understand why exactly Western Power, Goodness, and Freedom exist, analyze whether or not they are in danger today, and instruct us on how we must preserve them.
Our Power Makes the West Great
The Scientific Origin of Western Power
Probably the biggest reason the West conquered the world was because of the Scientific Revolution, leading to the Industrial Revolution. The resulting technological superiority enabled the rise and spread of vast European colonial empires whose dominance culminated in the late 19th century.
But why did science arise in the West? After all, there have been many other sophisticated civilizations throughout world history that attempted and achieved some limited scientific success. But the Scientific Revolution arose out of the one that went through a so-called Dark Age – Why?
Because science was one of the intellectual fruits of Christianity. In order to flourish, science needed an intellectual milieu where Faith and Reason were understood as distinct but both valid ways of arriving at truth, rather than either identical or conflicting.1 It needed a rational universe with predictable laws, rather than a pantheistic universe full of chaos and animism. It needed a view of life and history full of hope and linearly directed towards an end, rather than pessimistic, cyclical, and eternal.2
The point of this article isn’t to convince a skeptic of this point, but simply to raise it as a discussion/debate. Was Christianity’s view of the cosmos and metaphysics the foundation for sustained scientific discovery? If so, can we keep the edifice while discarding the foundation?3
The Economic Foundation of Western Power
But what of Western Power today? The West might have conquered the world through its scientific prowess, but it rules today through its economic might. Our prosperity makes us powerful, and therefore great.
If science is the study of physical nature and its laws, economics is the study of man’s nature and the economic laws according to which he operates.4 In both, it is very clear that you can get the answer very wrong. When you get science wrong, you fail to achieve mastery over nature and things just don’t work. When you get economics wrong, you fail to achieve human flourishing and all of society ceases to function properly.
What does this have to do with Christianity? Well, Christianity5 teaches a very specific view of human nature – God made man by nature good, but he has fallen, and in his current condition something within him (Original Sin) turns him towards what is evil, even though he may intellectually desire what is good.6
This view of man was challenged at two different extremes by John Calvin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.7 Calvin taught man was by nature evil, and agreed with Martin Luther that grace was imputed to us rather than infused, leading to an overly pessimistic view of man’s ability to grow in virtue. Rousseau, by contrast, taught that man was by nature good and that we are perfectible, leading to an overly optimistic view of man if only he were properly educated.
So what happens if you get human nature wrong? The biggest failure of economics the world has ever seen – Communism. It’s no coincidence that the economic collapses and mass starvations of the 21st Century were perpetuated by staunchly Atheistic regimes, because core tenets of Communism are the belief that man’s nature can be remade and the belief that human society can be perfected here on earth, both without God. Communism got economics wrong because it got human nature wrong - it is not, in fact, good in theory, as one sometimes hears.
The danger of discarding Christianity is that, like the Communists were, we will be tempted to discard its view of human nature as well in either a fit of utopianism or despair, with unknown but disastrous consequences.
The Nature and Limits of Western Power
So if a correct application of science and economics can provide us with so much power, are these the source and summit of all human knowledge? Do we need anything else in the search for truth?
In order to understand the limits of science and economics, we need to take a step back and examine the underlying deeper question of epistemology – How do we come to know/discover/believe what is true?
Broadly speaking you can divide and caricature epistemologies as either Rationalist, represented by René Descartes and relying on Intuitive Reason alone on one extreme, or Empiricist, represented by David Hume and relying on Sensory Experience alone on the other.8 Christianity historically followed Aristotle, whose epistemology allowed for knowledge to come from an interaction between the senses and inner reason.9 Coincidentally, this is the epistemology of everyday regular people who aren’t brainwashed by bad philosophy, as well as the epistemology Descartes and Hume used in their everyday lives.10
In the case of science in particular, “Scientism” is a form of radical empiricism that holds scientific knowledge to be the only valid form of knowledge. This is self refuting – you can’t demonstrate the sole validity of the scientific method through the scientific method, since science itself relies on both Intuitive Reason and Sense Observation, as does any sort of deductive reasoning that would be required to make a claim for an epistemology of Scientism.
Therefore, the success of science itself points to its own limits and shows that there must be other valid forms of knowledge and ways to arrive at truth besides science. Say, for example, Philosophy. Or Revelation/Theology.
If you destroy the Christian/Aristotelian epistemology that led to the rise of science with science itself, you’re not only doing science and epistemology wrong, you’re endangering the foundation of all human knowledge and refuting your own position.11
The Purpose of Western Power
Finally, the claim that Power makes the West great is not self-evident - what is the purpose of Western Power? How does it make the West great? Can science provide us meaning? Can prosperity make us happy? Can science prove that our mother loves us? Can a higher GDP make her love us more?12
The evidence of modernity seems to fall pretty clearly on the side of no for all of the above. Like the Bensalemites in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, we have pursued scientific knowledge and material prosperity. Like them, we have mostly forgotten God. But unlike them, we have not ended up in Utopia.
The whole purpose of science, economics, and Western Power in general is supposed to be that they enable us to pursue truth, help us to enact what is good, and bring us happiness. Power alone can’t make the West great because Greatness includes Goodness. The same science that can provide us with nuclear energy can be used to wage nuclear war. Science can be a bringer of great good, as well as of unspeakable horrors.
Thus, we need to know what the origin and foundation of Western Goodness is, the nature and limits of that Goodness, and the purpose it’s directed towards…
Come back or subscribe for Parts 2 and 3!
This article originally debuted at ’s debate “Does the West Need a Religious Revival” on February 27th, 2025 in Austin, Texas.
Compare e.g. the idea of “Two Truths,” taught by Averroës and Maimonides that Religion and Philosophy could arrive at different answers without impacting the truth of either with St. Thomas Aquinas, or modern Fideism with Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical “Fides et Ratio” – https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio.html.
For a fuller exposition of this argument, see “Science Was Born of Christianity” by Stacy Trasancos. Articles summarizing the stillbirths of science in Egypt, China, India, Babylon, Greece, Arabia can be found on strangenotions.com.
There is some evidence we cannot. See e.g. the resignations of Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker from the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s honorary board over the Foundation’s apology for even posting a defense of the scientific definition of sex against the Transgender ideology as part of a debate, discussed in ’s article Atheism Without Reason:
E.g. The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. The difficulty with economics vs. the physical sciences is that the subject of economics is man, who is distinct and less predictable than the natural world (even that observation is problematic for atheistic materialism). Compare e.g. Praxeology, Austrian economics, and e.g. Ludwig von Mises’s “Human Action” with e.g. the Chicago School of Economics for approaches that deduce from first principles vs. those that make inferences based on measurable observation.
And by Christianity we mean Catholicism. It’s pretty obvious from a secular and atheistic perspective that Catholicism is “what Christianity is,” with Protestantism being a 16th century innovation and deviation.
This view of human nature is directly observable, and we all experience it, atheist and Christian alike. Whatever our beliefs, we all tend to fail to meet even our own moral standards. This is why G.K. Chesterton argued that Original Sin was the only Christian Dogma that could be proved – “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannnot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and Man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.” – Gilbert Keith Chesterton in “Orthodoxy.”
Coincidence they’re both from Geneva? I think not.
Yes this is a very broad caricature. See Peter Kreeft’s “Socrates’ Children, An Introduction to Philosophy from the 100 greatest Philosophers” for a better overview.
Again, we mean Catholicism – Luther hated Aristotle (imagine hating Aristotle). Kreeft includes Kant’s epistemology as a fourth major option, but the nature of his philosophy is unknowable in itself, so I couldn’t possibly include it.
This makes it pretty self-evidently the correct epistemology.
See e.g. the common pseudo-philosophical question posed of “how do we know we aren’t living in a giant simulation?”
Higher GDP can actually make her love you less. When she stays home, takes care of you, and makes you chocolate chip cookies GDP goes down, but when she puts you in daycare with some other woman and then goes to work in an office for some other man, GDP goes up by her salary + the nanny’s.
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