Western civilization was built on the proposition that human beings are created in the image of God

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1 Claim
2 Source
3 Responses
4 Fallacies contained in this claim
5 Related claims
6 See Also
7 Acknowledgments

[edit] Claim

Western civilization was built on the proposition that human beings are created in the image of God.

[edit] Source

The Discovery Institute's Wedge document

[edit] Responses

The popularity and cultural importance of this idea (Christian doctrine) are irrelevant to its validity.
If society has built so much based on a false premise, imagine what it could do with a more accurate understanding of human nature.
History teaches us that Western civilization was born in the various states of Greece, most notably in Athens, hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. These states did not subscribe to the notion of a single deity, on the contrary - the archaeological record and their mythology show us that they worshiped numerous Gods. Western civilization was up and running in many parts of Western Europe prior to the founding of the Christian faith. Furthermore the ancient Greeks did not believe that human beings are created in the image of God. This notion comes from Judaism, is a teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and was popularized by the Roman Catholic church in the early centuries of the first millennium AD. Western civilization was developing for centuries independently of the influence of Christianity. While it is true that Christian theology permeates modern Western civilization, the West's founding principles pre-date Christian influence.
This idea has not stopped many Western civilizations from engaging and promoting slavery and other forms of institutionalized exploitation of other human beings, in some cases, even using justification from Biblical sources, e.g. using "The Curse of Ham" to justify the exploitation of black slaves.
Western civilization, to a large, startling, and mostly unnoticed extent, is actually built mainly on principles that derive from ancient Greece, and predate Christianity by centuries. In fact, Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Even when Christians speak of the morals and ethics in the Bible, they are doing it largely using words with Latin or Greek etymologies, that reflect originally Greek concepts, including the terms "moral" (Latin) and "ethics" (Greek) themselves. The oldest complete editions of the Christian Bible were, in fact, written in Koine Greek.
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