Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), (965–1039) making the first study of the pin-hole camera.
© Joshua H. Shrode – Reprinted with Permission
Alhazen was one of the great Arabian lights during that time when the Qur’an was interpreted by those in power to encourage science … well, “science” is overly generous. There doesn’t seem to be a precisely equivalent word. More accurately, it was interpreted to encourage the pursuit of various knowledge(s), knowledge of nature, religion, math, etc.
To put this in historical context, the Caliph Harun al-Rashid (around 800 AD) mandated that scholars from around the world gather together in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and translate the classical knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome into Arabic and thus enable the transmission of the gains of science into the Islamic world. Bootstrapping, if you will, a thousand years of research into the empire.
Scholars at an Abbasid library
It seems two passages have been cited, which were interpreted at the time to enjoin followers to seek knowledge.
“Travel throughout the earth and see how He brings life into being” (Q.29:20)
“Behold in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the alternation of night and day, there are indeed signs for men of understanding …” (Q.3:190)
Contributions to the corpus of human understanding wasn’t simply an Arabic version of these surviving works, though this was a feat of epic proportions in its own right, but real original scholarship into refining the scientific method, mathematics, optics, medicine, mechanics, astronomy, etc. was a direct consequence of these imperial edicts and the divine and imperial protections granted to scientists.
Yet continued contributions from Islamic scientists did not persist beyond the 15th century. Today, sadly, it currently falls well below statistical expectations relative to the general population for precisely the same reason that it flourished. Religious leaders interpreted the Qur’an to prohibit such heretic investigations into the regularity of nature, as this would imply a limit upon God or some other rationale that defies reason but solidifies a grip on power.
This is one of innumerable, heartbreaking examples of the incalculable consequences of believing certain humans can infallibly interpret an infallible deity. That their pronouncements are true. And that whatever science or any other religion says is false. Sound familiar? That God communicates to his creation via an inherently fallible medium — the written form of a dynamic, living, constantly evolving human language — necessarily creates subjective interpretations of the relationship between Islam and science.
Work in the observatorium of Taqi ad-Din
And so only a short time later, we see the demolition of Taqi al-Din’s great Constantinople observatory in Galata. An observatory which was “comparable in its technical equipment and its specialist personnel with that of his celebrated contemporary, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe.” But while Brahe’s observatory “opened the way to a vast new development of astronomical science,” Taqi al-Din’s was demolished by a squad of Janissaries, “by order of the sultan, on the recommendation of the Chief Mufti,” sometime after 1577 CE.
The good lord giveth and he taketh away…or maybe the learning is to not piss off the Chief Mufti or he’ll issue an interpretation that deprives humanity of untold discoveries of inestimable value for all eternity. The time lost can never be regained. That kind of evil can only be done in the name of God.
How odd that a compassionate God uses such a mode … a book … to communicate with his mostly illiterate creation. By odd, I mean ridiculous…not of God but of us to look at a book written in a real human language and think, “Perfect! Obviously God’s word!” A real human language is a constantly evolving thing. Meanings drift. Spellings change. Pronunciation shifts. Metaphors and even definitions lose their intelligibility or gain totally different ones.
Fortunately, the Qur’an says it will tell you when it is to be taken literally and when figuratively … and then doesn’t. Nor does it say when it should be taken historically or anecdotally, mystically, or of how a text can be read. Why would God choose such a terrible way to reveal himself?
A truly good God would just speak to us … all of us .. whenever we had a question. When someone was misrepresenting his intent, he’d correct them in real-time and discuss why he felt a certain way or gave such an injunction or command or allowed such evil to occur due to some greater good. If he did suffer himself to write a book, it would be self-translating and modify itself to the belief system of the reader, such that it could reveal itself with the clarity and distinctness of raw, uninterpreted sense data. We could still choose to believe or not believe, worship or not worship, follow or not follow, of our own free will, but there would be no disagreement that God was real, and this is what he says about himself and his creation. In fact, this is the only way a good God, a compassionate God, a God who did not revel in billions of blind men, women, and children stumbling in ignorance towards their eternal doom, would act.
We call this “informed consent”. When I have more information and more knowledge, I can make better choices or at least make more informed choices. As I’m writing this now, I am being misinterpreted by every reader at some point in my argument. But anyone need only ask and I’ll clarify…personally. How is it that I, a being so much more limited than God, can do what God never does? I want people to interact with as accurate an interpretation of my ideas as is possible. To do that most effectively, I must know that misunderstandings will happen, and I will try to correct them to the best of my ability. If I am unwilling to clarify even the grossest misunderstandings, I cannot hold someone responsible for failing to understand my intent or my belief.
The assumptions in the quote from the Qur’an above are manifold, but I’ll only focus on two. The first is that it is God who defines whether the pursuit of knowledge is good or not. Second, is the bold claim that whatever we find … it either is God or is attributable to God.
To the first, I say, “In translating, Euthyphro, you seem to have forgotten to read it.” Divine Command Theory is either the height of irrationality or a dark Gestapo morality of which I want no part. Adoption of it as a justification for your morality precludes any honest discussion. If this is the case, good luck to you, Sir, as you sally forth in your Quixotic quest to mix reason and unreason and come up with Truth.
Yet this is what we see in one religion after another. The pursuit of Knowledge should be done because it is an expression of an essential feature of humanity, not because God told us to do it. What a wretched thought, a scientist forced to investigate something not out of curiosity or passion or desire to understand and possibly make the world better, but because God commanded it, and so I must obey. Yet another example of how religion poisons by usurping authentic motivations and inserting some divine autocratic command.
To the second assumption, that whatever we find is God, well, fine, I say. God is the total of the product of scientific inquiry, a.k.a. the universe. Great, what we haven’t found is some immaterial, timeless, spaceless, mind with limitless powers either generating or sustaining any part of reality, so until such evidence becomes available, we’ll hold off on those attributes. What we also found is that mankind creates God and gods as a result of an overactive yet evolutionarily useful propensity to assign agency where there is none.
Unfortunately, we decided at some point that our stories were Truth and that science was a threat because both make claims about the natural world, and often these claims conflict. There is a battle for the future of humanity. If Science wins, we may actually have a future. We will at least face our problems in the here and now and tackle them in a manner up to the task and not colored by theological squeamishness. If Theism wins, then God help us all. My money, as much as it saddens me to say, is on theism stamping out progress. Theism has a long and glorious dalliance with fear and has cultivated its use to high art. And as science has shown, fear is the most motivating of forces.
Excellent piece! Sheds additional light on the propensity for educated self-destruction among God-fearing men and, probably, some women. There are more and better clues to this than one may find in the best detective stories, including the erstwhile Sherlock Holmes. The clues have deepened my fascination with Islam and other less-well-known faiths: as a primitive rule of thumb, adherents to these “disciplines” do not want acolytes to know much. Why? Because education is dangerous to the fold. More so, perhaps, to survival of civilization as we have come to know (and mold) it. I think I understand better now the disdain held by some atheists towards true believers. Thanks.
The door to science in the Islamic world began closing around the turn of the first millennium. I recall that there was an Islamic scholar, whose name I cannot recall, who, upon reading Aristotle’s works on logic, realized that this powerful methodology might help resolve some nasty theological debates. So he pushed the idea, writing a number of books, and other scholars began investigating the concept.
This constructive idea threatened the status of the scholars who had spent their entire lives learning all the finer points of theological commentary on the Quran. They condemned those “radical extremist ideas” and had all the books about theology and logic burned.
The story continues in an interesting way. Some time later, a Jewish scholar came up with a brilliant idea: why not use Aristotelian logic to resolve theological disputes? He developed the concepts and published them. Guess what all the top Jewish scholars thought of the idea? The “radical extremist ideas” weren’t burned, but they were decidedly eliminated from the mainstream of Jewish theology.
Some time later, the backwards Christian world brought up the rear. Thomas Aquinas realized that Aristotelian logic (which the Christians had learned from Islamic scholars in Spain) might help resolve some of the frustrating theological disputes bedeviling the Christian world. What a concept! Sure enough, the established Christian theologians and the University of Paris were threatened by Aquinas’ book, the Summa Theologica, and condemned it as heretical.
But this time there was a difference. By condemning the book, the professors at the University of Paris made it seductive to the students there — young men are that way. So they secretly studied the Summa Theologica and grew increasingly excited about its potential. One generation later, those rebellious students were now the professors, and Aquinas’ ideas transformed from heresy to dogma with a snap of the fingers.
This led to Scholasticism, a determined effort to put Christian theology on a sound logical basis. Initially, it led to many advances in everything except theology, and in fact became the foundation for the Western development of science, especially under the influence of the Oxford Calculators. Yes, we owe the development of science to the Church.
Scholasticism, however, did not fare so well in theology. The logical techniques it developed were satirized in the old line about the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin, and by the early 16th century, Erasmus could condemn the “logic chopping” of the professors at the University of Paris, to wide applause.
thanks for the comments.
thanks for the history lesson Chris.As for the Islamic scholar, you are likely thinking of Averroës or Avicenna. The Jewish scholar is likely Abraham ibn Daud. Aw, the benefits of grad school were you had to take medieval philosophy!
Thanks for filling in those blanks, John. And you have my sympathy for surviving the ordeal of medieval philosophy. I must confess to my low aptitude for philosophy, but I find the medieval flavors, all trying to reconcile philosophy with the meandering content of their holy books, especially incoherent.
@Chris Crawford – Your historical dive into the tangled dance of Aristotelian logic across Islamic, Jewish, and Christian worlds is a brilliant addition to this conversation! Thanks for shining a light on those all too dusty corners of history! You’re spot on that the Islamic scholar who dared to wield Aristotle’s logic against theological quagmires sparked a fire that threatened the gatekeepers of divine truth. And isn’t it grimly amusing how the same script played out across many faiths? Islamic scholars torching logic books, Jewish elders sidelining ibn Daud’s bright ideas, and Christian theologians clutching their pearls over Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, all because reason dared to turn on their sacred certainties.
Your point about Scholasticism laying the groundwork for Western science is a delicious irony. The Church, that great arbiter of divine will, accidentally birthed the tools of its own intellectual undoing when those rebellious Paris students snuck copies of Aquinas under their cloaks (what an image!) But let’s not give the Church too much credit. Scholasticism’s real triumph was in the hands of secular minds like the Oxford Calculators, who took those logical toys and ran with them, leaving theology to squabble over angels on pinheads. This is the familiar story I’m hammering at…when curiosity is shackled to divine command, progress stumbles, when it’s set free, we get scientific revolution.
Your examples underscore the tragedy I highlighted with Taqi al-Din’s observatory—smashed to bits by a sultan bowing to a Mufti’s whim. Why did the Christian West eventually let reason slip through the cracks while the Islamic world slammed the door shut? Perhaps the Church’s fractured authority gave rebels room to breathe, unlike the Ottoman stranglehold of centralized dogma. Tragically , every time a religious elite stamps out inquiry to protect their version of God’s word, humanity pays the price. Lost discoveries, lost time, millennia of progress gone forever, courtesy of “infallible” interpreters of a fallible text. Given the compounding rate of scientific progress I can only weep for the suffering that might have been prevented and the soaring heights you and I will never know. I sometimes just console myself by saying, “Hey, maybe we would’ve blown ourselves up in this alternate timeline.” Of course, that threat is oh so very real today. It’s a small consolation bred from the pain of what we lost.
My contention with God is but a sideshow, I highlight the absurdity of a supposedly compassionate God relying on ambiguous scriptures to guide us. Those theological disputes you describe—Islamic, Jewish, Christian—stem from the same flawed medium I rail against. A divine presentation would know each reader, communicate ,-update and respond. It, would’ve spared us centuries of book-burning and observatory-wrecking. Instead, we’re left with human squabbles over divine intent, proving my point: a good God wouldn’t play hide-and-seek with truth. And so we can dispense with the notion. Teaching people to be moral, to respect the human dignity in each of us, to hold ourselves to a high standard, to strive for the sublime, all of this is possible without God…at least I hope it is.
Thanks for the history lesson, Chris, it’s a stark reminder that reason’s victories are hard-won against the tide of theism.
Best,
Joshua
it was tough but part of a program in history of philosophy.
Could we add to Theism other beliefs that thrive on certitude and emotion?
Nationalism.
or
Racial/eugenic descriptions of “others”
or
Any world view that has morphed into an ideology.
Inquiry is exhausting. I sometimes suspect we prefer belief simply because it is, well, simple.
Bertrand Russell opposed religion but also all arrogant dogmatism that claims to have a monopoly on truth. So yes you can add other “religions” to the list. And humans definitely prefer belief to the search for knowledge which entails ambiguity. Most prefer to believe rather than to know.
“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.” ~Francis Bacon
“Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief, in anything else. On the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe.” ~Charles Sanders Pierce