I thought the article I cited was pretty astute in its analysis of why it worked and what went wrong, but I didn’t buy the al-Ghazzali theory either.
Popup – perhaps you are thinking of Maimonides (Moses ben Maimun, 1135-1204)? He was a Talmudic scholar who produced proofs for the existence of God what were similar to Thomas Aquinas, but his allegorical interpretations of Scripture didn’t go over well with more conservative rabbis and scholars of his time…
There is also the Muslim scholar Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198), who is one of the last of the great Arabic philosophers, and he was very keen to study and write on Aristotle, especially to present Aristotle’s writings and theories without any compromise or contradiction. He ended up exiled and disgraced, because he had argued that the Koran contained only an approximation to the universal truth as humans could grasp, and not the universal truths, and this philosophy was attacked by orthodox Muslim scholars…
I confess this is not my area of expertise, so I am afraid this is rather simplified!
Absolutely untrue. Science and religion essentially don’t overlap. For instance: Many folk claim that science disproves the existance of the soul. In actual fact, science says absolutely nothing about the existance of the soul. So nothing a religion says about souls can be contradictory to science.
I looked in Science and Civilization in Islam by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and he does acknowledge that al-Ghazzali turned the mainstream of Islamic thought away from Peripatetic (Aristotelian) philosophy, while Europe, starting with Thomas Aquinas, learned it from Averroës and took an intellectual course that eventually led to modern science. al-Ghazzali’s critique of philosophy was titled The Incoherence of the Philosophers, while the rebuttal by Averroës was titled The Incoherence of the Incoherence.
However, the later development of science in Islam, according to Professor Nasr, depended on two Iranian figures who are less well known in the West. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi mounted a determined attack on science and rationalist philosophy, much more intense than that of al-Ghazzali. Following him, science and reason were defended by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who is the real father of later medieval science. However, his influence was mainly in Iran, as he wrote in the Persian language.
Nasr writes:
“It was this reply of al-Tusi, more than The Incoherence of the Incoherence of Averroës, that exerted a lasting influence in the Islamic world, so that al-Tusi is remembered in the East today more for his philosophical writings than for the mathematical ones, which have made his name famous in the Occident.”
I agree that my statement, as expressed, may be untrue. However, what I meant was that an absolute belief in scripture does not promote the inquisitative mindset necessary for scientific research. That doesn’t mean that religion per se is incompatible with science - only the uncritical belief in a single written source. For example, it is difficult to study cosmology, if you think that a Creator created the universe in seven days. That does not mean that it is impossible to be a christian cosmologer, only that in order to combine cosmology and christianity it is necessary to interpret that part of the bible allegorically.
There are numerous successfull scientists who have a deep religious belief, but I believe that their belief is a lot more profound than just a blind acceptance of the bible (or other religous text).
I concede that religion per se is not incompatible with science - but I maintain that an uncritical belief in religious writings is incompatible with the scientific method.
Thank you Jomo Mojo for your research. I think indeed, that it was Fakhr al-Din al-Razi who was mentioned by deSprague.
Re the OP: I just found another excellent site, muslimheritage.com, which has many quality articles - PDF format - on Muslim history, including the sciences.
This indicates the difficulty many Westerners have in studying the history and philosophy of Islamic science. Islamic thought is so unfamiliar to them that they fall back on the Christian experience to make analogies with it. Not picking on you, Popup, but this is a general difficulty I always see here at the Dope. Whenever the topic is religion and science, it always comes back to the struggles specific to Christian Europe. This does not necessarily shed any light at all on the relation of Islam and science. What happened in Islamic thought is different and specific to that civilization, and to generalize about it based on what happened to Galileo is bound to be misleading. All I’m saying is that Islam or any other particular civilization has to be studied on its own terms and not in terms of what happened in the Vatican. Since there are few if any Dopers who are equipped for this, it may not be possible to really do justice to the topic here. Although I do wish Tamerlane could contribute to this thread.
Thank you for pointing that out Jomo Mojo. I’m the first to admit to ignorance of muslim philosphy. Thank you for helping to alleviate this.
However, I still believe what I stated above: an absolute belief in scripture does not promote the inquisitative mindset necessary for scientific research
I might well be misstaken, but I would have thought that the uncritical belief in the ‘revealed word of God’, would foster a mindset where it’s difficult to criticise accepted theories - the cornerstone of scientific advance.
But, as you say, I’m seeing this with eyes tinted by western philosophy. Please tell me why the same would not be true in ‘the East’.
Popup: the articles at Muslimheritage.com are worth reading regarding this question. Also read the article about the rise and fall of Islamic science I cited earlier.
One interesting point, in my view, is that the Quran is unlike the Bible. Beyond a basic statement that Allah created the universe and some simple accurate observations about the world, it makes no cosmological claims. There’s nothing in it like the Bible’s detailed creation stories, amazing longevities, unproven histories, etc, that easily crash head-on with science. So essentially anything you find out about the universe is not going to clash with the Quran. And furthermore it encourages you to enquire, to get knowledge from any source, because the more you find, the more it demonstrates how harmoniously the universe has been designed.
Not exactly. The Christian majority and Jewish and Muslim minorities (though the muslims had some local concetrations) lived more or less peacefully. However, then another group of muslims invaded Spain from the south. They were religious fanatics, cruel and rather ignorant. And they had this nasty policy concerning heathens.
The Christians, not being ones to take this lying down, renewed their faith and set aout killing or expellin the sons-of-bitches, and they weren’t too concerned about what sort of muslim you were. The Reconquista only formally ended an era that was already on its deathbed. Although, the love of science and intellectuallism spread throughout Europe thereafter, so we can indirectly thank them all. C’est la vie.
Rather snide. Western medicine was not exceptionally advanced, but they certainly knew the modern sort of basic first aid. The Muslims certainyl had advanced the field more, but the Westerners were hardly unusual, world-wise.
Not exactly. Such things were known in Europe, but they were known mostly along the Med; it was only after the Crusades that other sections of Europe came into contact with such things, however.
First of all, the author I attempted to quote earlier was L. Sprague deCamp, and it was from his book Ancient Engineers.
Secondly, the muslim guy he singles out as singlehandedly responsible for the decline of the east was al-Ghazzali.
Actually, it looks like there can be similarities drawn between the Christian approach to science and the Muslim one.
This is a passage from Science in Medieval Islam, by Howard R. Turner, page 18.