Pythagoreans Celebrate the Sunrise (1869)

In our previous post, the philosopher Joshua Shrode demonstrated how the Islamic religion had turned its back on the scientific and logical thinking of the Greeks and Romans. Commenting on the post, the historian of science Chris Crawford showed how Jewish and Christian thinkers mostly did the same until the work of Thomas Aquinas. Here is their exchange.

The historian of science Chris Crawford.

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 several 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 backward 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.

The Reply from the philosopher Joshua Shrode:

@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

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