As a plus, to back up one of Ramadan's points that European culture was built in part on Islam, here is what Robert Briffault wrote in The Making of Humanity:
The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries or revolutionary theories; science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence. The ancient world was, as we saw, pre- scientific. The astronomy and mathematics of the Greeks were a foreign importation never thoroughly acclimatized in Greek culture. The Greeks systematized, generalized and theorized, but the patient ways of investigation, the accumulation of positive knowledge, the minute methods of science, detailed and prolonged observation, experimental inquiry, were altogether alien to the Greek temperament. [...] What we call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry, of new methods of investigation, of the method of experiment, observation, measurement, of the development of mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs.
22 comments:
With such confident, critical, and creative communication of tolerant citizenship seeking to make contributions to society, we definitely need more thinking like this. Perhaps we should build a lot more mosques quickly.
Actually, for all the scientific contributions by Islam to western culture, I found Tariq came up a bit short in mathematics (or geography). The 7 C's (Seas) were 1) confidence, 2) critical mind, 3) communication 4) contribution 5) - 6) citizenship 7) creativity. What is the missing C?
To suggest that all Muslims are good at math is like saying all Blacks are good at basketball.
I found this talk very enlightening and uplifting (similar to Glen Beck's speech at the Lincoln Memorial today - just kidding). But I think it is dangerous to suggest that Islam was the driving force behind preserving, contributing and bettering western philosophy, science, mathematics etc. I find it odd that on one hand we (and I think Ramadan is included in this) try to say that religion and culture are not the same. And then in the next breath we can say, well thank goodness for Islam because it preserved the and improved science and mathematics, when the two are not necessarily related at all. Regarding this point, I am not sure whether Briffault was simply equating Islam and Arab culture, but if he was actually making a conscious choice of the wording he used, I find it interesting that he chose to say that the debt of science is to the Arab culture (rather than to Islam).
Just as a side note, at the same time of Convivencia in Spain (where many of the great Islamic, Jewish and Christian minds did actively develop the sciences) there are plenty of other examples of Islamic peoples (the Berbers in North Africa come to mind) that were as "barbaric" (a relative term, I think) as any tribes or kingdom's in Europe. It's like saying today Islam is a terrorist or violent religion, or that Islam is a peaceful, tolerant religion. However, none of these points take away from the fact that Islam is an important and vital element of European history as well as the present, and much in the same way that students in the United States should learn about African-American history, women in history, Native Americans, etc. and be taught that history is just as much a part of the country's past and present, so too should Europeans regard Islam.
Ted, I think that your point is well-taken. In fact, while most of the intellectual contributions during the Golder Age of Islamic Civilization were Muslim, contributions were also made by Christians, Jews and Sabians.
The Jewish philosopher Maimonides springs to mind. Historian Bernard Lewis: "Much of this ["Islamic"] science, as of this art, is the work not of Muslims but of Christians and Jews living in Islamic lands and constituting a part of the Islamic civilization in which they were formed."
My point is not that Islam is more "scientific" or mathematical or intellectual than other religions. I mean to make only the more modest suggestion that characterizing Islam as somehow essentially anti-rational and non-scientific simply has no support in history. Islamic culture produced the first the public hospitals, public libraries and academic degree-granting universities. By the tenth century, Cordoba had 70 libraries, the largest of which had 600,000 books. The library of Cairo had two million books, while the library of Tripoli had three million books before it was destroyed by the Crusaders. Says one of the early Islamic hadiths: "The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of martyrs." Judgments about Islam as irrational without the least bit of study of the religion are themselves irrational.
The fact that important scientic discoveries arose in Islamic civilizations only proves that science and rationality can sometimes flourish in such environments, not that their emergence was in any way aided by Islam. It seems to me that using the same historical evidence, you could say that science and rationality has flourished in spite of Islam or Christianity.
By way of analogy, no one would say that Galileo's discovery of a heliocentric solar system was a contribution of Catholic culture.
Neither would anyone say Galileo's publicly supporting Copernicus's discovery of the heliocentric solar system was a contribution of Catholic culture.
Sorry, yes, I was being far too simplistic: Galileo was not the first person to propose a heliocentric solar system. Rather, he was a giant cog in the heliocentric machine, having conclusively disproved geocentrism by publishing the first paper based on the findings of telescopes, which revealed moons orbiting Jupiter.
As with the story of all scientific progress, it took a number of people a number of years to disprove the erroneous consensus view.
Forgive my whimsy. Your point is not diminished by my spurious comment. Indeed, Copernicus was fearful for many years before publishing his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium Galileo's problems are more widely known. The reason for the comment is a traumatic personal tale.
In 7th grade I had a scheduling conflict and had to switch to a different Public Speaking class. For some strange reason the students in the new class were excited about me entering their class. I have no idea why they thought this, but the grapevine was saying that my presence in the class was going to significantly raise the entertainment value of Public Speaking.
The first speech was an information speech. I made a very poor judgement by asking my dad for a topic. As an amateur astronomer, he suggested "The origins of the universe." My second poor judgement was accepting his suggestion. By the time I finished talking of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe, the class was ready to send me back. Even the teacher wrote "Not relevant to the audience."
So Copernicus has been indelibility scarred on my psyche. (Later I partially redeemed myself with a very funny humorous speech—no help from dad—but by then I think I had lost all my friends anyway.
[N]o one would say that Galileo's discovery of a heliocentric solar system was a contribution of Catholic culture.
No one, that is, but me. As a self-styled philosopher I must believe that everything is connected to everything else. But beyond that, as Jim suggested, Galileo might not be your best example. For centuries, Catholic culture had been preparing Europe for the scientific revolution. If you can believe Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization, the only people who gave two hoots about knowledge during the dark ages were Catholic monks, who carefully preserved what record there was of scientific inquiry.
And then, señor Católica himself, Thomas Aquinas, added to the groundwork by emphasizing the importance and power of reason – particularly as to knowledge of the physical cosmos and its operations. He insisted that scripture must not be interpreted rigidly and dogmatically: it might later be proved false by physical evidence, which would then lead to a loss of credibility. And so, at one point, he proposed an eternally existing universe just so Catholic thought would not fall afoul of ancient Greek view that “from nothing, nothing comes” (ex nihilo, nihil fit), the primitive expression of the law of perseveration of matter and energy. Aquinas argued that being eternal did not make the universe any less dependent on God for its existence.
Two more Catholic clerics established the use of the scientific method in Europe directly leading to Galileo’s discoveries. Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln in England, whose Posterior Analytics devised a method of inquiry which moved from particular observations to a universal law, and then back again from universal laws to prediction of more particulars. Roger Bacon, a Franciscan, picked up on the writings of Grosseteste and refined the method. Bacon described a repeating cycle of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and the need for independent verification. He also recorded the way he had conducted his experiments in precise detail, so that others could reproduce and independently test his results.
Finally, Catholic culture’s heavy imprint on the move to a heliocentric universe is made more evident by the fact that the originator of the theory, Copernicus, was also – surprise – a Catholic priest.
The evidence suggests that, not Galileo, but the inquisition that sentenced him, was the aberration.
Too often contemporary discussions about the relationship between science and religion suffer from an ignorance of history.
While I couldn't agree more with your last statement (regarding the historical relationship between science and religion - and philosophy of course), I find no evidence of Christianity or Catholicism leading to scientific inquiry (1000 years of Christianity before Bacon and Aquinas seems like a very very long time to suggest that Christianity was preparing the way for scientific inquiry when the groundwork had already been laid). Greek philosophical and scientific thought, while admittedly out of the mainstream, seems to have been significantly derailed by a centralization of faith-based philosophy, rather than reason-based. I don't know whether we can argue that "Catholic culture" led to scientific inquiry (and what medieval Catholic culture are we talking about here - Armenian? Irish? Slavic?) This goes back to the point over whether Islam pushed and/or nurtured scientific thought. I think James' point is well taken that "important scientific discoveries arose in Islamic civilizations only proves that science and rationality can sometimes flourish in such environments". A not on inquisition - it was anything but an aberration and was as significant and important an element of Christianity as were the learned monks of Ireland. It was used as a tool to suppress heresy for hundreds of years.
Myk-What other profession during the Middle Ages would be best to be a scientist, a priest who has the luxury to pray all day or the peasant toiling the fields to feed priests and kings? Would it be advantageous today to learn science by going to seminary school or take a biology course? Thus, does a person's background disprove James' point that scientific progress occurs regardless the culture it is confined in? Just because Copernicus was a Catholic priest doesn't prove that Catholicism drove scientific progress anymore than the idea that Einstein being an atheistic Jew rdrove the discovery of relativity.
Catholic culture maybe interconnected with science, as it may directs scientific research in what fields we study, (sorry no stem cell research for us). But that is not the same as arguing that scientific progress is independent of religion. Analogy, humans and time are interconnected in that humans' existence depends on time to go forward but time is independent of human existence. Scientific progress occurred before Catholicism and will continue long after Catholicism is gone.
Also, Catholic culture wasn't preparing Europe for scientific revolution, they were just lucky to be there when man had advance technologically enough to have a knowledge explosion (Hard to be a cell biologist without a compound microscope-invented to help counterfeit coins). People wouldn't argue that the printed Bible lead to a vast increase in human literacy and knowledge but instead that the technology of the printing press did, the Bible was at the right place at the right time.
Sidenote, Cahill's book is just a continuation of the misguided Irish superiority complex that gives rise to jokes like- the Irish always fight each other because they haven't found any other worthy opponent. Civilization continued on fine regardless of the Monks, from the giant Mayan temples to Arab math to the Chinese fleet that would make the Spanish Armada look like a collection of model boats.
I was going to give a summary of the above discussion with what we had learned, but with the latest salvos, that will have to wait. Instead, if I have time, I will add what can be gleaned from the absolutely fascinating The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. It doesn't directly address the science-religiious controversy, but it adds an incredible amount of detail as to the lives, thinking, and influences of those Europeans who started scientific revolution from 1769 to the 1830's.
In the meantime, I think Peter's post is a bit harsh. Who knows what G(g)od is, but one attribute universally cited is "Truth." Whether current scientific methods continue or not, who knows, but it's more likely that mankind's powerful desire to search for truth—that endless search for meaning—will continue.
Also, everyone wanted to claim Einstein, but he was very reluctant to express his personal feelings as to God. He would rather people focus on his science. He did say:
I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.
Of course if Einstein would have lived to see the acceptance of Quantum Theory and the disproof of his EPR treatise, he might have had second thoughts of saying he wasn't an atheist. (That's a joke—sort of.)
Let me start by saying that I like Ted's comment that it took over 1000 years to arrive at Grosseteste. This seems to damn Christian scientific culture with feint praise. Perhaps Myk will show us otherwise.
Just to reduce the ignorance a bit, I'd like to briefly look at the rise of science during what is generally called THE scientific revolution. I eventually want to discuss a 'second' scientific revolution during the Romantic Age. But first let's glance at this 'original' scientific revolution:
1543 Andreas Vesalius publishes On the Fabric of the Human Body
1543 Nicolas Çopernicus publishes De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
1620 Francis Bacon publishes Novum Organum
1630 Galileo publishes Dialogue on the two Chief Systems of the World where he refutes Aristotle and supports Copernicus' view of the solar system
1633 Galileo forced to recant his earlier work and condemned to house arrest.
1687 Isaac Newton publishes Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica
I know little of these men, but let's do a cursory look. Vesalius doesn't appear to be influenced by Christianity much, but he did make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He also was investigated for his human dissection methods (he worked on dead criminals), but it seems like he stirred up controversy more for refuting Galen and Aristotle than for anything to do with the church.
Copernicus, as Myk has pointed out, was deeply religious. He was a cleric and scholar of canon law. I'm not sure how much Christianity inspired him to develop his heliocentric view of the world, but he was urged to present his theories by bishops and cardinals. He hesitated in publishing his work, but it is unclear whether he feared criticism from the church or from those who would find mistakes in his work.
Bacon was a middle-of-the-road Anglican, more concerned with empirical evidence than religion. I'm not sure religion had any big influence on him one way or another.
Galileo we know about—a tragedy of Church meddling.
Newton wrote more on religion than he did on science. I don't pretend to have studied or understand Newton's religious views, but he definitely was inspired by a God that he felt designs along rational and universal principles. This wasn't a particularly Christian God.
So, if anything can be drawn from this superficial review, it is that each was unique in his religious views and influences. Certainly Christianity, as well as Islam, added some stability during the thousand years of Ted's concern and both, I think, broke new ground in tolerance and love of fellow man. But as the institutions developed, I'm not sure how much they promoted scientific thought.
By the way, the term 'scientific revolution' to describe this era was coined in 1939. This is true of most historical terms. Our brains are too weak to grasp all the myriad influences and diversity as things happen, so we wrap them up in more understandable, if inaccurate, boxes. But people do make a difference. During the 'next scientific revolution' (about which I may post) of the Romantic Age, Bacon was cited over and over again as an influence by these new scientists.
I think Jim made some excellent points. Let me add that Galileo himself was devout (for all the good it did him). His eldest daughter, "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me," was a cloistered nun.
But Ted unfairly tags the Church for not advancing science in its first thousand years. Well, for the first 300 of those years, it was a persecuted minority in no position to advance much of anything. And then there were those inconvenient bararian invasions that destroyed the Roman Empire and plunged Europe into chaos. I think the church gets a pass on that.
But there's just no getting around the fact that from about 800 until the enlightenment, the only scholars of any stripe in Europe were associated with the Church. To turn around and now suggest that the Church somehow stands opposed to scienctific inquiry is like accusing Microsoft of being opposed to making profits.
I suspect that Pete is right in saying that clerics pursued science in the Middle Ages because everyone else was spending 24/7 trying to survive. But, they could have been doing any number of other things with all that free time, and at least some chose science and scholarship. I think that says something significant.
There is a theory I'm not sure I buy that says there is a correlation between the rise and scientific thought and monotheism, that it's no accident that science arose in Islamic and Christian countries. Polytheist gods are capricious and unpredictable. Nothing is to be gained from studying their handiwork. But a single god who rules like a king is apt to have laws just like a king does. Looking for those natural laws, the theory goes, is an obvious outgrowth of monotheism.
But to bring this down to a more individual level. There is a clear reason in my mind for why science so easlily emerges from religion. Religion encourages meditation. When you meditate, free of the distractions of the everyday life, you think. And when you think, you begin to wonder. And when you begin to wonder, that is the beginning of scientific inquiry.
Myk- I think you may be too generous in granting partial credit for Galileo's discoveries to his religion. I understand that when taken together, Galileo's unique intellectual, religious, and cultural traits make up the tapestry from which his inspiration sprung. They are essentially what makes Galileo Galileo, after all, and Galileo was brilliant. But that doesn't mean that all of those traits deserve equal credit for his discovery, nor does it imply that all of those traits were equally helpful to Galileo's intellectual discoveries.
Now, I can't prove that non-religious Galileo would have made the same discoveries. Maybe religion was his muse that inspired him to build his first telescope, I have no idea. But I do know that the invention of the telescope and the discovery of planets around Jupiter would have happened without the church. Religion and the Catholic church were extra unnecessary steps to reach the conclusion of a heliocentric system. And far from an inspiration, they were a consistently overbearing and threatening retardant. I believe that had the church had not existed, someone somewhere, with an innate and burning curiosity, would have made the same discovery.
That being said, I have two questions for you Myk. I think they’ll tease out where we may just fundamentally disagree (and anyone else can jump in to answer these as well). The first is, do you think religion is a prerequisite for the pursuit of knowledge or science? The second is, if religion is not a prerequisite for human curiosity and scientific advancement, does it have a net positive force on them? I believe the answer both questions is "no", because even when religious belief is practiced in its most ideal form, even when it's well-intentioned and meditative and pro-science, the fact is that believing in something without reason is ultimately in conflict with a scientific mindset. It subtly encourages you to ascribe what you don't yet know to the workings of an unknowable God.
For elaboration on this, watch this short lecture by the always excitable Neil deGrasse Tyson called God of the Gaps.
Tyson speaks about Newton, whom he considers the most brilliant mind to ever walk the earth. Newton discovers calculus, gravity, and the laws of motion all before the age of 26. But when he encounters a complex anomaly in planetary motion, he stops searching and invokes God's intervention as an answer to this mystery. Then, 100 years later, a much lesser mind, P.S. Laplace, invents perturbation theory to solve the problem. Tyson says:
"[When Napolean called in Laplace], he asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. This is the kind of question Newton would ask, right? Laplace replies, "Sir, I had no need for that hypothesis." And so what concerns me now is, even if you're as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops. It just stops. You're kind of no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for someone else to come behind you who doesn't have God on the brain, and who says that's a really cool problem, I want to solve it. They come in and solve it.
But look at the time delay! This was a hundred year time delay. And the math that's in perturbation theory is like crumbs to Newton. He could have come up with that. The guy invented calculus just on a dare practically. When someone asked him, Ike, how come planets orbit in ellipses and not some other shape, he goes home for two months and comes up with integral differential calculus because he needed that to answer that question. And so that's the kind of mind we're dealing with Newton. He could have gone there, but he didn't. He didn't. Because religiosity stopped him."
I think this discussion has led us back to the root question that Jim raised earlier, and it's a question on which we probably disagree fundamentally. Is religion a net positive for human knowledge and well-being? Again, I don't think it is, even after I concede the point that religion has at times in history fostered and cared for the advancement of knowledge.
Beautifully crafted, and your questions (and exposition) WILL 'tease out' some interesting differences. You are dipping into the nature of man, so Myk will grace us with something nice, though it may not be what we expect. I probably have different thoughts than Myk, but I want to hear what he has to say first.
I don't really have answer to your two questions. It is a curious historical fact, however, that science emerged from a religious context -- something for a doctoral thesis that I'm not prepared to write at this very moment. And, as for religions' overall effect on science around the world and over the years, who knows?
But when you say that religion necessarily must inhibit science: there's where I take issue. I would have to write a small book on this, but I see the realm of religion to be something quite other than that of science and that it need not take refuge in the gap of what we don't know.
My main man Rudolf Bultmann makes the argument that being a Christain has zero to do with accepting 1st century cosmology. Karen Amstrong goes further: "what religion was really about, [was] not about dogmas, not about propping up the church, not about converting other people to your particular wavelength, but about getting rid of ego and approaching others in reverence." The 12th century Hindu philosopher and a social reformer, Basava, said "Compassion is the root of all religious faiths." St. Augustine seems to back this up: “Whoever thinks he understands divine scripture or any part of it, but whose interpretation does not build up the twofold love of God and neighbor, has not really understood it."
I don't really see how these ideas inhibit science. As even the most cursory review of the new testament reveals, Christianity's main message is that other people are important. As Hillel noted: "The rest is commentary."
I listend to Tyson's talk and he's very entertaining, but I suspect a bit glib.
Newton did not abandon his quest to figure out planetary perturbation because of his religion, he simply lacked the self-confidence and the imagination: "The orbit of any one planet depends on the combined action of all the planets, not to mention the action of all of these on each other. But to consider simultaneously all these causes of motion and to define these motions by exact laws allowing of convenient calculation exceeds, unless I am mistaken, the force of the entire human intellect."
I just don't buy the idea that religion had anything to do with putting the breaks on Newton on any other scientist's inquiry.
Plus, I've read some on the decline of the Islamic golden age, and this is the first time I have ever seen the cause laid at the foot of al-Ghazali. Mostly, I've read that, like the fall of Rome, the reasons are complex and very likely will never be fully understood. Most historians put a lot of the blame double-barreled impact of Mongol invasions and the crusades.
But, here from Loren Eiseley is perhaps the best statement of why we need religion quite apart from every imaginable scientific advance: "Man is not as other creatures and. . . without the sense of the holy, without compassion, his brain can become a gray stalking horror -- the deviser of Belsen."
Einstein wrote in a letter to Raner Jr., "I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."
I agree with the weakness of human intellect. Humans practice a crude form of scientific inquiry. We were not built to think in the quantum world nor perceive the world other than in three dimensions. My post was hard of Catholicism but I think all human culture retards the practice of intelligence observing, testing, predicting. Humans fundamentally suffer from our pattern seeking ape brains (natural selection makes crappy scientists). I think the evidence that Catholicism (or myk assertion about monotheism) did not significantly foster nor hinder science comparatively to other cultures is that every Catholic scholar can be paired with polytheistic, agnostic, Jewish scientists (many Nobel prize winners). Science is independent of human culture and humans themselves. Science does not seek "human truths" instead science creates ever more accurate models of the system being observed. The observer need not be human. Human thinking and behavior is required for human religion and philosophy. Our descendants will most assuredly not be human but will likely still practice- observing, testing predicting (probable much better than us)
Einstein talks of a child walking into a great library, with every generation that child's understanding will grow. In May of this year humans created new life, designing and combining nucleotides in a novel genome to create a specie. Our brains however could not compute the numbers required to make the three dimensional structure instead we relied on a brain built for crunching numbers, the computer. Science is the legacy we will leave to our descendants, human culture will belong in the history books.
I completely agree with your assertion that religion has hindered science (and perhaps helped it sometimes). See my new main post [since I feared for comment print space].
But the notion that science is independent of human thinking and activity, I'm afraid I have to strongly disagree. I could be wrong but I don't think many scientists or thinkers of any kind would agree. This is a whole separate subject—I touch upon it in the new post and Myk commented on it many weeks ago—but it is a very interesting, and not obvious. We should do more on this topic.
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