Reviews for Evidence for Faith 101: Understanding Apologetics in Plain Language

The average rating for Evidence for Faith 101: Understanding Apologetics in Plain Language based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-11 00:00:00 Andres Carciente This book wasn't at all what I expected. I thought I would learn a lot about cities in the Greco-Roman world, how Christianity developed in those areas, what churches might have looked like in those contexts, etc. Instead I learned a little bit about life in Greco-Roman cities (only about 5 pages are devoted to a discussion of "urban life"), a few things about certain cults and heretical movements, and a LOT about how spectacularly condescending Rodney Stark can sound when he feels like he's being more scientific than historians. More than a real history, this book felt like an extended argument for a particular approach to historiography -- Stark thinks historians need to spend more time counting. He's really quite vehement about it, and about as subtle as a marble column falling on your head. Basically, Stark tries to answer questions about the spread of Christianity through the urban centres of the Roman Empire by, yes, counting: counting people, counting inscriptions, counting churches...suffice it to say, he likes it when things are counted. This is history via statistics, and it yields some interesting results. Stark basically takes the 30 or so largest cities in the Roman Empire from about 100 to 300 CE and starts looking at correlations between different variables related to the level of "Christianization" in the area. For example, he determines that port cities, cities with large Jewish populations, very Hellenized cities, and cities with high numbers of Isis worshippers all tended to have churches earlier than cities that didn't fit these categories. He makes some genuinely interesting observations that give him a chance to weigh in on some historical controversies, such as whether gnostic texts like the Gospel of Thomas prove that many equally valid "Christianities" circulated widely before being brutally silenced by the "orthodox" church. (He says no, which to my mind is the historically credible answer, though it's not clear that he contributes anything original to the conversation.) All this is relatively interesting. I had a few real problems with this work, however, especially because the tone Stark uses in his introduction and conclusion is frankly obnoxious. Stark is very much a sociologist and very much convinced of the superiority of his discipline's methods: he's out to tell the world how stupid it is that historians don't rely more on "objective" scientific methods like statistical analysis, and if they don't listen he'll just say it again, louder. It either doesn't occur or doesn't matter to him that he's on historians' turf here and might be straying out of his element. In fact, Stark does come across as out of his element in a few ways. He seems to think that he was the first to suggest applying social science methodology to historical study (he wasn't) and that this solves all of history's annoying little interpretive tangles (it doesn't). Social science history has been fashionable in the past and perhaps will be again one day, but it's not anything new at this point. Ironically, it seems to me that Stark inadvertently highlights some of the reasons why social science history's heyday was rather fleeting. First, Stark comes across as extremely confident in his numbers and statistics, but he gives little if any attention to how he came up with those numbers. He mentions that population estimates for ancient cities can vary extremely widely (40,000 to 200,000 in Pergamum, for example), but pretty much just tells readers to trust him that he has the right numbers (which are essential to the arguments he's making). Realistically, one of the reasons historians don't do more of what he's urging them to do is that making calculations about the past is extremely difficult when evidence is limited. Stark is either so overconfident in his statistics that he doesn't see the need to explain or argue for them, or doesn't respect his readers enough to share his evidence with them. Second, the whole framework of argumentation struck me as contrived. Stark wants to prove that he's doing "scientific" history, so he sets up his chapters as series of hypotheses that -- surprise! -- all seem to be confirmed by the statistical data. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I kept wondering how many unsuccessful "experiments" didn't make it into the book. That aside, the format made the book feel very fragmented, and it was sometimes hard to know what larger point, if any, Stark was trying to make. Some chapters felt more like collections of scattered factoids than coherent arguments. Third, even if we assume that all Stark's numbers and calculations are right and all his data-crunching is sound and relevant, we basically end up with a collection of correlations or relationships (e.g. Christianity and Isis-worship tended to be popular in the same places) but no real insight into their meaning. Stark proposes and sometimes seems to assume some conclusions from the correlations he finds, but he doesn't really argue for his interpretations. This seems to me to be a fundamental weakness of social science methodology applied to history: it can sometimes tell you THAT something happened, but it rarely tells you WHY. A sociologist studying contemporary phenomena can go and ask people questions about what's going on, but historians can't. In the absence of documentary evidence, Stark's methodology leaves a gap between data and interpretation that can't be bridged without serious speculation. Finally, for all Stark's insistence that historians need quantifiable data to be credible, there are only so many historical questions that lend themselves to quantifiable answers. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't find the questions that numbers can answer nearly as interesting as the ones they can't. Statistics can't tell us what it was like to live in the ancient world; they don't bring the past to life; they don't let the voices of the past speak for themselves. At the end of the day, that's why I think the "unscientific" narrative style of history that so obviously frustrates Stark isn't going anywhere: when we want to learn about people, sometimes counting them is less important than trying to listen to their stories.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-04 00:00:00 John Henderson An interesting quantitative approach to tracking the urban growth and influence in the Roman Empire. Stark undoes several caricatures about the process of Christianization and explains a very sociological account that is sympathetic to Christianity (though it unhelpfully minimizes the importance of the Holy Spirit and robust doctrine in conversion). Read with reservations. It's informative about religious trends both preceding Christianity and after its arrival in the classical scene, and definitively thought-provoking.