Arabs Once Dominated Science

KSHB ^ | April 13, 2004 | Michael Woods

[Cronos]

True, they managed to take advantage of the power vacuum. If only there had been a Justinian or a Cyrus the Great or a Sennacherib, then slam would have been squashed like the bug it is

[RightWhale]

Breaking news, no doubt. Why did the Arabs turn from science to mysticism? Oh, wait, so did the West. Science is too hard.

[Taliesan]

OK, here 1s the whole story:

1. Aristotle

Science is Aristotle's method. Later, Aristole's method would create conclusions which conflicted with some of Aristotle's conclusions. After Aristotle's substantive errors were cleared out the Renaissance and Enlightenment flared, in a SPACE created by:

2. Jesus.

In the Christian West, Jesus' words inserted a SPACE between the state and religion.

This space was only a potential spce until Constantine, then for 1000 years Christendom fought over this space, which took on an intellectual life of its own by the year 1100, whether the individual thinker believed in Jesus' words or not.

The separation of church and state is an implication of Jesus' attitude to the state in the NT.

Islam lacks the words of Jesus. Hence, there is no space between secular power and real or imagined religious truth.

In Islam, the natural tendency of religions to demand compliance with their worldview choked off Aristotle when his method began to produce conclusions at odds with Islam.

In Christendom, there was a great struggle, but the Jesus space survived and expanded to allow the Aristotelian explosion of knowledge in the Modern West.

So it was Aristotle's brain plus Jesus' attitude toward coercion.

[ApplegateRanch]

...and the Spanish created gold, and made silver, in factories they built in the New World. They lost the technology when their colonial empire crashed.

I wonder why nobody credits the Arabs for 'creating' all the silk, since, like knowledge, it also passed through their hands on its way west.

>>"The Koran enjoins the believer and the unbeliever alike to examine nature for signs of the creator's handiwork, evidence of his existence<<

Looking for signs of God's handiwork, does NOT automatically mean to look for SCIENTIFIC explanations. It often means look for ways to use the Koran to to "explain" the world around us, much as "Creation Science" operates. It contributes NOTHING to science, anymore than librarians write the books they catalog and arrange. The difference is, librarians don't try to pass themselves off as creators rather than custodians of knowledge.

Can I have a truck load of this for my garden?

[Cronos]

...and the Spanish created gold, and made silver, in factories they built in the New World. They lost the technology when their colonial empire crashed.

err.. where DID you get that line from?

[Ready4Freddy]

"But if we made a fetish of Shakespeare (much richer and more profound than the Qu’ran, in my view), if we made him the sole object of our study and the sole guide of our lives, we would soon enough fall into backwardness and stagnation." ~(not sure who said it :)

"Goes to show you that the koran isn't knowledge or a useful skill....

[boojumsnark]

About 1 in 4 Arab adults can neither read nor write. This is a particular problem among Arab women, 50 per cent of whom are illiterate.

Assuming the population is about half female, does this mean that 100% of males are literate?

[livius]

Yes. What Islam, which was an agressive force that spread through bloodshed and conquest, did was to move into the power vacuum left by Rome. In the time after the fall of Rome, the area was plagued by warring kingdoms with no central power, and furthermore was devastated by the Arian heresy, which nearly destroyed any power the Church might otherwise have had in the area. It was easy pickings for the right world-domination oriented lunatic, and unfortunately...one came along.

[FreedomSurge]

And Christianity had two great theologians, Agustine and Aquinas, who reconciled the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle to the Church.

[arielb]

The problem is, they don't need to dominate science-they are doing a pretty good job dominating the world without becoming an advanced civilization. They have the middle east, much of africa and southern asia. They are making inroads on Europe and already proven they can manipulate the Spanish elections. Secular Europe is very weak and gullible and will be taken over relatively quickly.

[livius]

This is very true, they are not Arabs. I wish we had a more accurate term for people from that area, since the thing they have in common is their geography and not their ethnic group, language, culture, history, etc.

[Parmy]

Also, One has to remember that Mohammed was an illiterate, idiot. Like Lenin,and so many other so-called great thinkers who came later, he was supported by his wife so he could contemplate his higher thoughts.

It is also necessary to remember that since he was illiterate, he couldn't write. Others did his writing for him.

[Cronos]

The problem is, they don't need to dominate science-they are doing a pretty good job dominating the world without becoming an advanced civilization. They have the middle east, much of africa and southern asia.

Not really. They have northerm Africa, north of the Sahara. they don't have South Asia, that's Hindu and Buddhist.

[Cronos]

Near-Easterners? Tha would include Israelis as well

[Cronos]

I didn't know he was illiterate, I thought he jotted down the words spoken to him by the injil something or the other el

[ApplegateRanch]

...and the Spanish created gold, and made silver, in factories they built in the New World. They lost the technology when their colonial empire crashed.

err.. where DID you get that line from?

The same place people get the line that Islamic Arabs discovered or created the scientific & mathematical knowledge they appropriated and translated.

It is patently obvious that the Spanish PLUNDERED the wealth of the New World; likewise, it is patently obvious that the Muslim Arabs PLUNDERED the knowledge current apologists attempt to credit them with creating in Islamic-Arab "knowledge factories" called universities.

It is a logical device to demonstrate the absurdity of the premise, by creating an equally absurd, but easier to recognize fallacious analogy, by substitution.

It was one of the standard essay techniques when I was taking English 1-A about forty years ago.

Of course, back in the Stoned Age, we also were taught to examine ALL definitions of a word, as well as the connotations, listed in a dictionary. I notice that only the first seems to be given credence these days. Also, simple, or at most, complex sentences now seem to be preferred; compound and compound-complex, seem to be anathama.

Times and education change, and not always for the better.
Is there an analagy with the main topic in this, also?

[nightdriver]

"That is unfortunate," Cooper said. "Much of our modern science and philosophy owes a large debt to Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages for preserving the classical heritage in all intellectual fields, and for improving upon it in many of these fields. If the average American understood this, there would be fewer smug citizens looking down on 'backward Muslims' with hate and fear."

If moslems would throw away their "scriptures" enjoining them to murder all non-moslems, it would do quite a bit to keep "citizens (from) looking down on 'backward Muslims' with hate and fear," also.

[JasonC]

Aristotle is not the definition of human reason. In fact, modern science began as a revolt against an Aristotlean orthodoxy. The church of the high middle ages accepted Aristotle as a modification - its previous philosophic underpinings had been essentially Platonist - thinking that it was accepting the position of reason and science. But the science it was accepting turned out to be flat wrong. Because Aristotle was flat wrong.

"Oh, he may have been wrong about the doctrines but he was right about the method". No, he wasn't. He thought demonstration (logic) covered more than it actually does. He thought speculation was out of place in matters that "should be" deductive - when actually science has to just plain guess and see what works by trial and error. "OK, so he didn't know the method yet but he was right about empiricism". No, he wasn't an empiricist. He taught that strictly speaking there was no scientific knowledge about anything that could change, including all perceptables. Aristotle is not the definition of human reason.

But in the high middle ages, lots of people thought he was. They thought so in part because that position was defended by people like Averroes, his ablest commentator and the one who transmitted a recovered Aristotle to the west. Averroes was in an argument with intellectual theologians of medieval Islam, before their descent into literalism.

Those theologians defended the claims of revelation against reason using the weapon of skepticism. Against them, Averroes used Aristotle as a dogmatist, as an optimist about the power of logic to achieve certain demonstrations. He presented things as though reason were based on logic and could not be doubted, while theology was speculative and debatable, producing only confusion and division as a result.

The propositions that he was defending as though they were demonstrated truths were things like the non-existence of any vaccum, the continuity of matter and falsehood of the hypothesis of atoms, the existence of a fifth element in the region above the moon, the eternity of the visible, physical world, Aristotlean physics, the earth at the center of the heavens, and certain human knowledge of unvarying natural necessities. His opponents taught against these the weakness of human reason, the existence of atoms moving in void, the temporal creation of the world, the uncertainty of all human knowledge outside logic and pure mathematics.

Nobody today, thinking of the results of modern science on the one hand and what Galileo rebelled against on the other hand, would recognize the latter position as the theological one. But so it was, in Islam. The Asharites were not defenders of human reason. But their actual estimate of its abilities was closer to Hume and Popper than Averroes' views were. Averroes thought he was defending human reason. But Galileo was persecuted for disagreeing with essentially his understanding of human reason and its supposed results, transmitted to the west via Acquinas.

The whole tale cannot be understood as a morality play in which the truth was already the secure possession of one side or another at every stage, with white hatted defenders of that truth beset by persecuting ignorant black hats who had to be pig-headed not to know better. The sober reality is that none of the parties to these disputes was right. They all made different errors. None was in possession of the truth. Not in actual doctrine, not in method, not in proper assessment of the actual abilities and limitations of human reason.

And not because there is no truth in these matters or it all depends on somebody's point of view or as children of their times etc. No, just plain wrong, about matters where it is possible to be right. People you might want to think are on the right side are making arguments that are insupportable. They are losing arguments justly, sometimes against people who are worse than they are. The individual human mind is weak - even the strongest human minds. Thought depends on advances previously made and on repeated correction of error. And those will always be in tension with each other. They have to be - it is precisely that tension that stresses doctrines and exposes errors.

As for space and Constantine, um, it was with Constantine that Christianity was first used as a buttress of absolute monarchy. Read Acton's "History of freedom in Christianity" sometime. It is a much more convoluted story than you present. No, doctrines of plentitude of power and indexes of forbidden books did not create the space that made possible modern science. Nor rival doctrines of literalism. The most one might say is that violent struggles between principles hostile to liberty and free inquiry, sometimes created a space between less hostile to those things. And that many movements at various times made appeals to such principles to combat persecution, where and while they were weak.

[John Frum]

Totally non sequitur. Shakespeare is not a religion.