God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (9 page)

However, there were theological objections to other Greek philosophers, notably Aristotle and, of course, Epicurus. Tertullian (ca. 155–230) denounced most philosophy as heresy. I have mentioned already, and we will discuss further in the
next chapter
, how the medieval Church came to grips with Aristotle, finding his teachings indispensable despite their many contradictions with Christian thought. Augustine popularized the concept that had been proposed before his time but afterward would be long adopted by the Church: philosophy should serve as the handmaiden of religion, put to use in the service of theology.
⁴⁹

By the thirteenth century, thanks mainly to Aquinas, the teachings of Aristotle and Greek scientific writings became incorporated into Christian theology.
⁵⁰
Included in Aristotle's scientific notions was the concept that the sun revolved around Earth. Aristarchus of Samos (died ca. 230 BCE) and Seleucus of Seleucia (died ca. 190 BCE) are the only ancients on record who suggested that Earth revolved around the sun.
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The heliocentric view was rejected by most of the greatest minds in ancient Greece as well as by Aristotle.
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However, Lucretius informs us that Epicureans held the view that there was no center of the universe and that Earth and its sun were just one planet-star system out of countless many, each star in the sky being a distant sun with its own planets.
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This is precisely what astronomy says today.

There were many Epicurean mathematicians and scientists in the period between Aristotle and the rise of Christianity, but because they were perceived as being atheists, their writings were largely suppressed.
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What all this means is that when Greco-Roman scientists stuck with the idea of Earth-centered cosmology, they did so knowing there was a contrary view, and it's likely that only their view was preserved because it agreed with Christian beliefs.

Religious historian Vern Bullough has also noted that Aristotle's teachings became fixed dogma in the universities, while science itself is continually changing and challenging old assumptions.
⁵⁵
As a result, Christian theology and academic Scholasticism were unprepared for the scientific revolution that was triggered when Copernicus proposed that Earth moves about the sun, Galileo and Johannes Kepler (died 1630) provided the data, and Isaac Newton (died 1727) provided the theory that demolished the ancient belief that Earth was the center of the universe.
⁵⁶
The new science they created transformed the world and made religion even more irrelevant.

Our advancement in natural science is not dependent on our faith. All the problems of physical science are worked out by laborious examination, and strict induction.

—Benjamin Silliman (1842)
¹

Physical science, at the present day, investigates phenomena simply as they are in themselves. This, if not positively atheistic, must be a dangerous tendency. Whatever deliberately omits God from the universe, is closely allied to that which denies him.

—James Read Eckard (1860)
²

ARABIC SCIENCE

G
reek civilization did not remain confined to the Mediterranean but spread to Asia and North Africa with the conquests of Alexander the Great (died 323 BCE). Over the centuries that followed, Greek culture and language were assimilated over a vast region. It did not reach into the Arabian Peninsula, however, where Muhammad (died 632) united the tribes under the banner of a new monotheistic religion that could not have been more dissimilar to Greek teachings.

Thus it is one of the ironies of history that it was Islam and not Christendom, whose scriptures were written in Greek, that preserved for the world much of the written record of ancient Greek thought after much of that record was lost with the fall of Rome.

Muhammad's successors had rapidly conquered Byzantium and Persia, and within a century had gained control of most of North Africa and Spain. The conquering Arabs came into contact with the educated elite in these lands and, even after being converted to Islam, this elite continued the Hellenistic tradition of serious intellectual activity. Within 250 years, many of the scientific works of the classical tradition as we know them today had been translated into Arabic.
³

However, there were some major exclusions, such as the Archimedes Codex, which includes almost everything we have of what Archimedes wrote. This work was abandoned by Christians and largely ignored by Muslims. Scholars only recently recovered a big piece of his work by using a particle accelerator(!) to read a book containing some of the writings, written over with hymns to God by some Christian who scraped off the ink.
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While Islamic religious scholars expressed concern with foreign ideas, all thinkers in the major urban centers, including Jews and Christians, still enjoyed considerable intellectual freedom in the empire. Scientific work was recognized for its practical value, especially in medicine, chemistry, and astronomy. As was the case elsewhere, astronomy was essential for the dating of religious events. Islam had a need for precise astronomical measurements that went well beyond the crude charts used in astrology, which essentially was rejected by Muslim scholars. Astronomy provided the means to precisely locate the direction of Mecca and to determine important dates on the Islamic lunar calendar, such as the beginning of Ramadan.

Islamic astronomers improved on the Earth-centered model of the solar system developed by Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 90–168), a Roman citizen living in Egypt. Muslims built the first observatories—buildings solely dedicated to astronomical study. The observatory at Maragha in northern Persia, constructed in the thirteenth century, had a dome with an aperture for observation and a library said to contain forty thousand volumes, probably an inflated number.
⁵

In mathematics, Muslim scholars introduced Arabic numerals, based on the Hindu system. They also invented what they called “algebra.” Although it used geometrical methods, it contributed to the eventual development in Western Europe of symbolic algebra, so important to science.
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In Spain, Ibn Rushd (died 1198), known as Averroes in Christendom, produced many works on virtually every scholarly subject from astronomy to Islamic jurisprudence. He also commented on Plato and Aristotle. His name is attached to the philosophical school known as
Averroism
that reconciles Aristotle with faith, both Islamic and Christian.

Islamic science began to decline as the Abbäsid Empire, centered in Baghdad, slowly broke up into smaller emirates and came to an end in 1258 with the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols. Baghdad, however, continued as the center of religious authority. About the same time in the West, Christians recaptured Spain, and the knowledge accumulated by the Muslims began to trickle back into Europe.

In
chapter 1
, I mentioned the extensive review of Arabic science by physicist Jim al-Khalili, in his book,
The House of Wisdom
.
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I have followed alKhalili's suggestion that “Arabic science” represents a more accurate description of the subject than “Islamic science,” since the work we are describing was not done exclusively by Muslims, or by Arabs for that matter, but was largely written in Arabic.

Al-Khalili makes an important point:

In contrast to the Greek philosophers' abstract notions, Arabic scientists were grounded in something very close to the modern scientific method in their reliance on hard empirical evidence, experimentation, and testability of their theories. Many of them, for instance, dismissed astrology and alchemy as not being part of real science and being quite distinct from astronomy and chemistry.
⁸

While the translation of ancient texts was of great importance to the advancement of science, al-Khalili emphasizes the original contributions made by Arabic-speaking scientists. In particular, he informs us that chemistry began in the Islamic world and is not, as often thought, an outgrowth of European alchemy.

The Arabic word for chemistry comes from the word kīmiyā, and alchemy is just the same word with the addition of the definite article
al
(“the”). The two were not distinguished in Europe until the mid-eighteenth century.

The scholar whom al-Khalili credits with being the founder of the science
of chemistry is Jābir ibn Hayyān (ca. 721–815), known as Geber the Alchemist in the West. Although steeped in mysticism, Jābir transformed chemistry into an empirical science. He reportedly said, “The first essential in chemistry is that thou should perform practical work and conduct experiments, for he who performs not practical work nor makes experiments will never attain to the least degree of mastery.”
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Jābir perfected many chemical techniques, such as crystallization, distillation, evaporation, and calcination. Other important industrial processes developed about the same time include the making of paper and soap, although these had been invented elsewhere. Medieval European scholars were forced to copy texts onto much more expensive parchment and so produced far fewer books than Arabic scholars. And Europeans viewed bathing as unhealthy while Muslims considered it a sacred duty.

EUROPE AWAKENS

The thousand-year period from 500 to almost 1500 has been referred to as the Dark Ages, when ancient learning was almost completely lost in Western Europe. Less pejoratively, historians call this period the Middle Ages, or Medieval Ages. The era was not completely dark. Although little science or classical philosophy was taught, monasteries maintained at least the tradition of learning. While they focused on religious matters, some science seeped through.
¹⁰

The Muslims had captured Spain in 711 and built a great capital at Cordoba. There, Christians and Jews participated freely with Muslims in scholarly and other activities, even in government, and learning flourished. The library in Cordoba was reputed to have four hundred thousand volumes, also probably an exaggerated number.
¹¹

In the eighth and ninth centuries, Charlemagne united much of the territory of modern France, Germany, Belgium, and Holland. He was literate himself and encouraged a renewal of scholarship. Again the emphasis was on sacred needs, with astronomy applied to timekeeping for monastic rituals and establishing the dates for religious holidays such as Easter. Nevertheless,
important ancient works were translated into L
atin in the monastery and cathedral schools that Charlemagne created.
¹²

While learning was deemphasized after Charlemagne, history can supply the names of several scholars in the following centuries who pursued the rational study of nature as a tool for learning about the Creator. For example, Thierry of Chartres (died ca. 1156) managed to merge Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic natural philosophy with the account of Creation in Genesis.
¹³

The full return of scholarship to Western Europe did not occur until the Christians regained control of Spain. Cordoba fell in 1236, but the reconquest was not completed until the capture of Granada by Queen Isabella of Castile and her husband King Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1492. Coincidentally, this happened the same year Columbus, whom they had commissioned, landed in the New World. Thus the year 1492 marks the end of the Dark Ages in more ways than one.

In the meantime, the golden age of Arabic science also came to an end. What were the reasons, since it had made such an auspicious start 700 years before? Al-Khalili lists several factors. He downplays the common claim of Western scholars that it was primarily the result of growing Islamic orthodoxy in which Greek philosophy was attacked as being anti-Islamic.
¹⁴
This dispute was purely philosophical and did not affect other disciplines such as mathematics, medicine, and astronomy. He also rejects the notion that the golden age came to an abrupt end with the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, since by that time there were a number of other centers of Arabic scholarship.

One rather intriguing suggestion made by al-Khalili is that the rise of the printing press in Europe was a major impetus for science, while the cursive nature of Arabic script was very difficult to typecast. Furthermore, in the Islamic world, calligraphy was a major art form, and reducing it to a mechanical process was strongly resisted.

SCIENCE IN ISLAM TODAY

Although out of sequence with the historical timeline being followed here, this seems the best place to contrast the golden age of Arabic science with
what we find in the Islamic world today. That contrast could not be more marked. There are more than a billion Muslims in the world today in over fifty-seven nations. These states spend less than 1 percent of their GDPs (gross domestic products) on research and development, five times below that of the developed world. They have fewer than 10 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1,000 of the population compared to an average of 4 per 140 in the developed world. Except for Turkey and Iran, the scientific output in terms of cited journal articles is negligible.
¹⁵

However, as physicist Taner Edis points out in his enlightening 2007 book,
An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam
,
¹⁶
many of the conservative Islamic thinkers who enjoy great influence in the Islamic world today refuse to accept any division or discordance between science and Islam, where the Qur'an contains all revealed truth. As al-Khalili notes, “Thousands of elaborately designed Islamic websites [purport] to prove that the Qur'an predicts the Big Bang, black holes, quantum mechanics, and even the notion of relativistic time dilation.”
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He adds, “Science is attacked therefore on the grounds that it seeks to explain natural phenomena without recourse to spiritual or metaphysics causes, but rather in terms of natural or material causes.”
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The incompatibility of modern science and faith could not be better illustrated than in the world of Islam where everything is centered on God.

THE FIRST EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES

In 1100, small urban schools existed in Europe that in the following century grew into the first universities. Initially these were not fixed locations but consisted of corporations of teachers who moved around from city to city. Gradually they settled down, with the first university in a fixed setting appearing in Bologna in 1150, followed by Paris in around 1200, and Oxford in 1220. These became the models for future institutions. In the fourteenth century the typical medieval university had about eight hundred students, although Oxford had more than a thousand and Paris over two thousand.
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Students at these universities were under the protection of the Church, with certain privileges of clergy even if they were not training to assume the
cloth. However, their masters were not as bound to ecclesiastic regulations as we might be led to think. Within limits, scholars debated and criticized almost every philosophical and theological doctrine, and teachers of the natural sciences generally were not restricted by Church authority. Nevertheless, a fairly uniform curriculum was taught in all the universities, with emphasis on logic and other teachings of Aristotle eventually becoming compulsory. Christian theology was not forgotten, of course, but was integrated with Greek and Arabic learning.
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