Spirit on the Brain

Taner Edis, on The religious state of Islamic science:

If you’re talking about the proto-scientific thought that was inherited from the Greeks and Romans, all of the action [in the 9th through 12 centuries] was taking place in the Islamic world. Western Europe at the time was a land of barbarians—intellectually, totally negligible. In fact, Muslim thinkers developed Greek science; they didn’t just preserve it. But it is a mistake to think of this as analogous to modern science. What Muslims were doing back then was still a medieval, pre-scientific intellectual enterprise. They never quite made the breakthrough, the scientific revolution, that took place in Europe….

They did some very interesting things in medicine and optics. But all of this was mixed in with astrology and alchemy and what today we would consider dead ends. This was not thinking of nature mechanistically, as happened in the scientific revolution in Europe, but in almost an occult sense….

[I]n Europe, you had a three-way interplay between science, orthodox religion and more occult religious alternatives. You could have interesting alliances. These end up being separated through historical accident—I don’t see anything special about Western Christianity that sets it apart from Islam—and they go their separate ways. This type of separation never really happened in the Muslim Middle East….

Much of the praise heaped on medieval Muslim science is due to a very selective reading of history. We tend to pick out ideas that are similar to what eventually became successful and downplay ideas that seem occult and outright crazy today. But medieval Muslim thinkers took the weird stuff as seriously as anything that fed into modern science….

[A] number of factors came together so that scientific institutions in Europe got lucky. They were able to break free of church constraints and unleash a powerful technology that plugged into emerging capitalism at that moment in history. After that, it was too late to go back and strangle science even if somebody wanted to….

[I]f you want to talk about the Catholic Church seeking an accommodation with modernism and science, you really have to come into the 19th and 20th centuries….

In the Western world, the institution of law achieved a kind of autonomy from religion early on. Some historians argue that this was really a precursor to science achieving autonomy as well. In the Muslim world, law was never entirely disentangled from religion….

It’s not so much a story of Islamic decline as Europe inventing an entirely new way of thinking about the natural world and really making a break with medieval ways of thinking. That didn’t happen in the Islamic world….

One of the features of medieval Islamic science that some modern Muslim thinkers want to revive is the way of perceiving the universe as a spiritual, God-centered place. This tends to work against the independence of science from religious institutions. It’s precisely this autonomy that helped science make the breakthrough in the Western world. In the Muslim world, this is still a relatively controversial concept. There is a tendency to say that science should operate under the guidance of religious concerns….

You can find many Muslim thinkers who say that Western Christians made a mistake by allowing science to operate independently of religious constraints….

People who read the Book of Genesis literally believe in a creation that happened 10,000 years ago [er, actually 6000 years ago, in 4004 BC—it was agriculture that began 10,000 years ago, and which gave us the myths which, ironically, lead people to believe that the world is only 6 ky old], literally done in six days. But the Quran is much vaguer about the time frame of divine action. Therefore, they are not as committed to fitting earth history into thousands of years. So Muslim creationists are almost invariably “Old Earth creationists.” They tend to think of Noah’s flood as a local event— not such a big thing—unlike the American creationists who think of the flood as the major geological event in earth history.

From the same piece, as this branches into a separate issue:

If you look into the literature on Islam and science, one of the names you will very soon encounter is Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is a Muslim philosopher of science…. Seyyed Hossein Nasr says he’s trying to revive certain distinctly Muslim ways of thinking about the universe. But it’s a revival of all the strands of classical Islamic thought, including those strands which are very antithetical to science as we understand it today.

I remembered that name. Guess from where?

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of [Fritjof] Schuon’s main disciples, was actively involved with promoting as well as working for and supporting the unjust regime of the Shah of Iran. The Shah embodied a puppet dictatorship in Iran, a client state set up by the U.S that was both fascist and monarchist. The Shah had a secret police organization which tortured, maimed and killed thousands from 1953-1979. Nasr was closely allied with this government even up to its final days. Nasr seems to have transferred this political zeal to Schuon, after the fall of the Shah in 1979. But besides serving the Shah, Nasr also had some influence on helping the Iranian revolution come about, since Nasr ran the Iranian academy and promoted Traditionalist ideas. The Khomeini revolution of 1979 was a Traditionalist revolution of sorts. Nasr would end in disliking its populism. It was not aristocratic enough for him. But he had an influence on it. Both the Shah’s regime and the Iranian revolution resulted in violating the human rights of the Iranian people. Nasr contributed to both systems. The free floating nature of Spiritual Fascism allows these kinds of multiple reactionary influences. Nasr’s Spiritual Fascism allowed his ideas to be acceptable to various far right dictatorships….

Many of the traditionalists, like Hossein Nasr, Ananda and Rama Coomaraswamy and Guenon were alienated and displaced individuals who were forced out of their parent countries or left it in the hopes of finding a romanticized and idealized culture elsewhere. They idealized the nostalgia they felt for cultures they romanticized as lost or on the brink of being lost. These idealizations are what the call ” traditions”….

Schuon Guenon, Whitall Perry and Hossien Nasr have all written absurd, silly and empty denials of evolutionism. Their arguments are basically the same as the creationists which have been refuted thoroughly….

Placebo controls, exorcisms, and the devil:

In 1784, Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier undertook medicine’s first publicly performed placebo-controlled experiments; they were seeking to debunk the healing practices of mesmerism….

What is peculiar about the Franklin commission’s report is that the placebo controls are introduced without any explanation, as if they were routine. The report does not mention that the direct inspiration for its methods came from Christian exorcism rites enacted at least 200 years earlier. It was not necessary to state the obvious: readers of the report were familiar with what were called “trick trials” from the celebrated devil controversies of the 16th century….

The most prominent and emblematic such trial occurred in 1599, in a small town in the Loire Valley of France. A high stake political struggle set the stage and the trial is documented in multiple contemporary sources. In 1598, Henri IV formalised peace with the Huguenots (French Calvinists) with the Edict of Nantes. Although some Catholics exhausted from the Wars of Religion supported this rapprochement, others did not. It was against this background that a family from Romorantin claimed that Beelzebub and other demons had possessed their daughter, Marthe Brossier. During a process of almost daily repeated exorcisms by priests, who also happened to oppose the religious détente, the demons possessing the young woman testified that “all the Huguenots belonged to him.” Fearful of the consequences, Henri IV dispatched a commission to discredit this subversive supernatural dissent. Away from the crowded public exorcisms, in a more private place, the commission proceeded to secretly administer genuine holy water to Marthe Brossier on consecutive days but with no effect. Later, when given ordinary water poured from a special flask usually only used for holy water she contorted in pain. When an ordinary piece of iron was taken out of an ornate enclosure and presented to the young woman as a relic of the true cross, she fell to the ground tormented. Priests read to Marthe Brossier a Latin text, misinforming her that it was the Holy Scripture. In actuality, it was Virgil’s Aeneid, and she nonetheless squirmed in agony….

Many other well publicised exorcisms involving exposures to sham religious objects are recorded. For example, in 1565, King Charles IX arranged to meet a notorious demoniac who testified to Protestant ungodliness. This demoniac had been tested with ordinary wine deceptively mixed with holy water. Her violent reactions to the concealed holy water confirmed to observers that her possession was genuine.

Aside from the possibility that the supposed demoniac was just “guessing right,” these people had not yet understood the importance of double-blinding their experiments, so that the tester (who knew the “correct” result) could not unconsciously telegraph that information to the person being tested—as happens, for example, in searches for the new Dalai Lama, where the “sages” doing the testing know which objects belonged to the previous Lama, and could (and surely do) unintentionally convey that information to the child being tested, as in the Clever Hans effect.

Other “tricks,” for example, substituting ordinary wafer for consecrated wafer, were also reported in France and elsewhere….

Parallel to this religious skepticism, Renaissance humanists began to discuss their doubts about medical practices and worthless treatments that promised unimpeachable experiences of healing. In his influential essay On the Power of the Imagination (1580), Montaigne argued that physicians exploit the credulity of their patients with “false promises … and their fraudulent concoctions” and that much of medicine’s efficacy is “the power of imagination”….

Franklin and Lavoisier were avid readers of Montaigne and borrowed from his compilations of Renaissance theories of medical skepticism and the imagination. Their pioneering efforts with placebo controls represented the simple absorption of an already well known 16th-century method for deciding veracity in the midst of social controversy and colliding claims. For Franklin’s contemporaries, the commission was an unmistakable re-enactment of the devil trials (placebos and all).

Amazing to think that that most-important principle of skepticism had its origin in exorcism rites and politics! It does at least show, though, that religious believers can be just as capable of scientific thought as are non-believers, even though basing their worldview on drastically different “peer-reviewed” evidence. As Steven Dutch put it:

Scientists may think they use the term “believe” differently from Biblical literalists, but Biblical literalists do not. They are convinced they “believe” in the same sense as scientists, based upon “reliable empirical evidence and sound arguments.” They regard the Bible as an accurate record of real events that are as reliably documented as any historical events or one-time events in the scientific literature….

Almost every difference between science and Biblical literalism is traceable directly to the issue of the Bible as valid data. Although outside observers find the attitudes and behavior of Biblical literalists alien and puzzling, every distinctive feature of their belief and behavior flows in a straightforward way from the single premise that religious doctrines are objectively and factually true….

It is simply not true that religious faith has no counterpart in science. Scientists routinely use their personal experience, subjective appraisal, hunches, and intuition as guides for selecting research directions. Indeed, when the outcome is unknown, as it must be in choosing a fundamentally new direction for research, subjective thinking must dominate, sometimes even a faith-like insistence that there must be a pattern to phenomena….

In addition, Biblical literalists have a vast body of supporting literature analogous to the technical literature in science. Commentaries exist on just about every aspect of scripture and religious doctrine, and there is a huge literature on apologetics, justifications for belief and answers to objections by outsiders….

Biblical literalists regard their beliefs as susceptible to testing in many of the same senses that scientific ideas are testable. Miracles and communications from God are not repeatable on demand, but then neither are earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and meteor impacts. To Biblical literalists, miracles and communications from God are replicable in the sense of showing consistent patterns, the content of the communications is verified (in their eyes) by experience, and the Biblical accounts have survived innumerable failed attempts at refutation (in the view of literalists if not their critics). In short, Biblical literalists consider the Bible to have been as rigorously tested as any scientific literature….

Biblical literalists differ from scientists principally in their acceptance of the Bible as valid data, but in all other respects they can reason quite rationally.

From Ronald H. Fritze’s Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions (p. 184-5):

The English scientist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) promoted uniformitarian ideas in geology, and Charles Darwin (1809–1882) adapted them to underpin his theory of biological evolution. Lyell’s work eloquently rejected the age-old concept of Catastrophism, which claimed that most changes in nature occur suddenly as a result of great and universal calamities. Chiefly through the cosmic drama of the biblical account of Noah’s universal flood Christianity had programmed people to think in terms of catastrophism. Other cultures throughout the world held to similar legends of universal floods or other great catastrophes like the supposed sinking of Atlantis.

From Hellfire:

The Holy See had given its official approval to a particular line of scientific thought, the vacuum, to specifically allow for immaterial forms such as weightless souls and armies of angels in what would otherwise be a filled universe. Without vacuums, places where measurable matter does not exist, both Heaven and Hell and all their denizens would have no place in the cosmic order of things. The time-honored Aristotelian assertion “Nature abhors a vacuum” had to be (and was) elbowed out of the way because the vacuum was a theological necessity.

From Reclaiming the Christian Roots of Modern Science:

Thomas Aquinas: “In [lunar] eclipses the outline [of the earth] is always curved: and, since it is the interposition of the earth that makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of the earth’s surface, which is therefore spherical.”

That’s an observation which could have been made by even the most primitive hunter-gatherer.

Johannes de Sacrobosco (1195-1256), an English monk, wrote an astronomical textbook that was used in universities for many centuries.

That the earth, too, is round is shown thus. The signs and stars do not rise and set the same for all men everywhere but rise and set sooner for those in the east than for those in the west; and of this there is no other cause than the bulge of the earth. Moreover, celestial phenomena evidence that they rise sooner for Orientals than for westerners. For one and the same eclipse of the moon which appears to us in the first hour of the night appears to Orientals about the third hour of the night, which proves that they had night and sunset before we did, of which setting the bulge of the earth is the cause.

To compare readings at different places, you’d need to have a record of the positions of stars/constellations at the former locations, and obviously also be able to travel between the different locations. You wouldn’t actually need to have written language, as you could simply make marks corresponding to the major stars, in clay.

Galileo showed that the Copernican system could explain phenomena that the Ptolemaic system could not—such as the phases of Venus—and he argued that the moons of Jupiter provided circumstantial evidence that bodies in the solar system were not required to orbit the Earth. However, these were not considered to be conclusive proofs for the Copernican system, as the Tychonian system could also preserve the appearances and explain the same phenomena.

Interesting.

The conflict between heliocentrism and geocentrism was an example of science versus science, not science versus faith.

Galileo’s battle was with the scientific establishment of the day led by the Aristotelian scientists. Galileo was trying to prevent the church from becoming irrelevant in clinging on to an obsolete understanding of the world.

Which, of course, is why he was tried by the Inquisition, and sentenced first to prison, and then simply to be confined to house arrest by them for the rest of his life. For heresy. Riggghht.

“Lies for Jesus,” indeed.

Man was created in the image of God, so humans could reason and were also capable of discovering truths about God through nature, His creation.

The “image of God” thing is, like “as above, so below,” a product of sympathetic-magical thinking.

Of course, in their same (overreaching) claims about the “Christian roots of modern science,” they sorta fail to mention the whole burning of Giordano Bruno at the stake, for heresy if not for his Copernican sympathies. “Lest we forget.”

Consider the introduction of the English Bible half a millennia ago, and the rise of Christian fundamentalism from that:

[B]eing able to read the sometimes frightening set of moral codes spelled out in the Bible scared many literate Englishmen into following it to the letter, said James Simpson, a professor of English at Harvard University….

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