as for christianity-i’ve addressed it before on that blog. i haven’t read murray’s book, but my problem with the christian ~ science thesis is many people get an unclear version-since i’m sure murray is implying christianity is perhaps a contingent condition necessary for scientific advancement, but not the only one needed (ie; most christian societies did not develop science in both most ages). additionally, i would assume that murray goes into the the details that it seems protestant nonconformists, and earlier heterodox catholics, contribute disproportionately to the scientific advancement in europe (i remember reading a vignette on james clerk maxwell’s life, and one thing that was noted as peculiar was that he was conventially religious-a practicing anglican in good standing, rather than a nonconformist like priestly or faraday or what not).

Sailer. You argue that one big reason that most of humanity’s highest achievers came from what used to be called Christendom was … Christianity (specifically, rationalist, optimistic Western Christianity — Thomas Aquinas is a major hero of Murray’s book “Human Accomplishment.”) Did you expect to reach that conclusion?

A. Michael Novak foretold I would come to that conclusion, but I didn’t agree at the time. I didn’t think you needed anything except the Greek heritage and some secular social and economic trends to explain the Renaissance.

On this score, I have plenty of witnesses in the form of my colleagues who were getting nervous as the years went by. They kept asking me what the thesis of the book was, and I kept saying, “Beats the hell out of me.”

The last chapters of the book were all written in the last nine months of work, and at the beginning of those nine months, I still didn’t know what was going to be in them.