Importance of the Islamic world for scientific development

[dmitry]

I would like to hear the opinions of people here on behalf of a question that plagues me.



It seems to me that before the scientific revolution took off in the west there were basically 3 periods of scientific development. The Greek/Hellenist one, the Islamic one (8-13th centuries) and the Medieval prescientific western one (13-17th centuries).



Now as far as I know there was quiet little scientific achievement during the roman imperial period (despite great technological improvements as well as a society that was far better ordered and structured than either the Hellenistic or the Islamic one (for most of its time)).



Now while I think that the Greek period was generally more productive in terms of accomplishments then the Islamic period it still seems to me that by the time the Arabs invaded the Middle East science was mostly dead. And not even because of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire but rather because it has already stagnated in the very same Roman Empire.



Now the Muslims have managed to revive scientific development, they didn’t just dig out the classics, they improved on them. Then in the 12th century the west started to build on this process of development and soon started to advance science by itself.



Now my question is: How crucial was Islam for reviving scientific advancement in the western world? Would Europe have developed its university system and system of scientific inquiry without it? while I believe that had the roman/byzantine empire survived as a Mediterranean spanning power with a developed (albeit stagnant) class of intellectuals, the west would have probably gained access to classical knowledge faster I wonder if it would have developed its tradition of intellectual curiosity or would have remained in the same stasis Rome was?



while I believe that the gradual spread of Christianity eastwards (especially after Heraclius victory over the Persians) would have improved European contact with India and china, giving it access to paper and Indian numerals I am wondering if Islam was necessary to reigniting a certain intellectual that the Greeks lost, and "infecting" the west with it.



I would be grateful for answers and I’m sorry for my bad English.

[dmitry]

Also a more extreme version of the argument would be: "Islamic sciense invented the scientific method and transmited it to europe, without scientific method no western sciense and only stagnation, thus Islam created the modern world, it stood at the begining of sciense".

[ignorantianescia]

Welcome dmitry. Because I'm not a historian of science, I'll give the more subtle formulation a pass, as I'm not qualified to assess the details.

The stronger version however is a bit less sophisticated and depends on the existence of a single scientific method. Though I think similarities between natural science, social science and the humanities are larger than commonly supposed, I don't think that applies to a single scientific method - methods vary a lot between disciplines and even between what could reasonably be regarded as specialisations within a discipline. It depends a lot on issues like whether the subject matter is quantifiable (most of the humanities isn't, most science is), measurable (natural science is, humanities and social science aren't) and/or replicable (this varies a lot within the three major domains, in theory and even more in practice). So the question "what scientific method" comes up. It's not clear at all that a scientific method that's widely used in one discipline is profitable in another.

That ignores even that scientific methods have a history of development that for a large part postdates the translation movement that sought Arabic texts out. For instance, in what we now call physics an important development took place in the Late Middle Ages in Europe when motion in the sublunar domain was mathematicised, an important step in the application of mathematics in natural philosophy. Earlier theories of motion drew a sharp divide between celestial and sublunar motion. I don't see how Islamic science would have contained the overthrow of that dualism before it realised.

[wraggy]

I was previously unaware of the Islamic contribution to natural philosophy. Lindberg's second edition of "The Beginnings of Western Science" has quite a bit of information on the Islamic contribution. It was considerably greater than I had previously thought.

Our new Prime Minster (or he was Prime Minister at the time that I started writing this post. Aussies will understand) has come in for some criticism in some quarters for some of his statements re Islam.

blog.markdurie.com/2015/12/rescue-by-conquest-myth-of-wests-debt.html

Durie seems to place blame on Muslims for the lack of scientific growth in the West in the middle ages. I saw no mention of the Germanic invaders. I may ask T.O'N what he thinks.

[dmitry]

ignorantianescia

thank you very much for your answer!

Thing is that Im only meant the natural sciences and have been using information like this explorable.com/who-invented-the-scientific-method?gid=1595

"Muslim scholars, between the 10th and 14th centuries, were the prime movers behind the development of the scientific method.

They were the first to use experiment and observation as the basis of science, and many historians regard science as starting during this period.

Amongst the array of great scholars, al-Haytham is regarded as the architect of the scientific method. His scientific method involved the following stages:

Observation of the natural world

Stating a definite problem

Formulating a robust hypothesis

Test the hypothesis through experimentation

Assess and analyze the results

Interpret the data and draw conclusions

Publish the findings

These steps are very similar to the modern scientific method and they became the basis of Western science during the Renaissance.

Al-Haytham even insisted upon repeatability and the replication of results, and other scholars added ideas such as peer review and made great leaps in understanding the natural world."

Thus even though Europeans soon surpassed the Muslims, Islamic science was the "spark" without which no sciense would be possible.

Are there any counterarguments to this statement?

[sandwiches]

I will have to re-read my copy of Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart:

www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/anthony_kenny_on_atheist_delusions_20100514

The only innovative physicist of late antiquity, we are told, was the Christian John Philoponus. During the four and a half centuries of its scientific pre-eminence, Islam made “no more progress than a moderately clever undergraduate today could assimilate in less than a single academic year”

I'd be interested to read evidence to the contrary. Perhaps what the Islamic world lacks is a belief that Islam can contribute to progress.

[evangelion]

As I understand it, scientific advancement in the Islamic world was almost entirely due to their preservation and study of Greek classical literature. The Muslims spent most of their time copying, rather than innovating. Then fundamentalism came along and plunged the Islamic world into centuries of cultural and intellectual stagnation, from which it has never truly recovered.

Sam Harris has a strong opinion on this topic, as you'd expect: youtu.be/9I2WyY_R_hA

[evangelion]

Mar 31, 2017 17:07:32 GMT sandwiches said:

I will have to re-read my copy of Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart:

www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/anthony_kenny_on_atheist_delusions_20100514

The only innovative physicist of late antiquity, we are told, was the Christian John Philoponus. During the four and a half centuries of its scientific pre-eminence, Islam made “no more progress than a moderately clever undergraduate today could assimilate in less than a single academic year”

I'd be interested to read evidence to the contrary. Perhaps what the Islamic world lacks is a belief that Islam can contribute to progress.

The biggest problem with the Islamic world is that it never experienced a Reformation or Enlightenment.

[jonkon]

Actually, evangelion, the biggest problem with the Islamic world is that Surah 5:101 explicitly forbids Muslims to engage in the kind of questioning essential for scientific progress. The scientific advancement during the height of Islamic culture was an exclusive contribution of fundamentalist Christians (Nestorians & Mosarabs) seeking to preserve the Greek cultural context for proper understanding of the New Testament text. The handful of their Muslim students faced severe persecution with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and consequent collapse of Islamic culture.

[ignorantianescia]

There's a chapter in Galileo goes to jail tackling the idea that medieval Islam was inhospitable to science, calling it a myth. It claims that Islamic science even had a late boom after the Mongol invasions, so that's well after "Islamic fundamentalism" is said to have killed enquiry in the above readings.

However, the chapter is short and not very generous in giving examples and in-depth descriptions of innovations, so I can't assess the claim in that quote, sandwiches. The most notable mentions from the chapter are the Tusi couple and algebra. But I wonder, isn't much the same true of scientific innovations in the medieval Christian world as well?

[James Hannam]

Apr 2, 2017 17:55:24 GMT ignorantianescia said:

There's a chapter in Galileo goes to jail tackling the idea that medieval Islam was inhospitable to science, calling it a myth. It claims that Islamic science even had a late boom after the Mongol invasions, so that's well after "Islamic fundamentalism" is said to have killed enquiry in the above readings.

However, the chapter is short and not very generous in giving examples and in-depth descriptions of innovations, so I can't assess the claim in that quote, sandwiches. The most notable mentions from the chapter are the Tusi couple and algebra. But I wonder, isn't much the same true of scientific innovations in the medieval Christian world as well?

I've had no success generalising about Islamic science and I'm coming to the view that is probably because there is little to generalise about. The initial golden age was dependent on particular circumstances and the status of rational investigation in later Islam gyrated alarmingly. There were important advances, including the adoption of Hindu numerals and advances in algebra, criticism and improvement on Ptolemy's geometry and Alhazen's optical work. There was also a lot of sterile debate between schools of thought (of which Al Ghazadi v Averroes is only the most famous). Problems that simply didn't arise in Christian Europe over the status of God's intervention in nature, as well as cause and effect, dominated Islamic philosophy for centuries. The debates in Paris were settled after about 50 years of wrangling in 1277. They were never settled in Islam and eventually faded away only when they became utterly irrelevant.

I don't think Islamic fundamentalism had a lot to do with this. Rather, the opposite: Islam lacked any authority to decide who was right. The central theological authority of the Catholic Church allowed Christian thinkers to park all sorts of issues as the orthodoxy they had to agree on. It happened that Christian orthodoxy was conducive to science. We can't argue over whether this was the case for Islamic orthodoxy because it doesn't exist. Muslim theology is too simple to take the metaphysical weight that Christian orthodoxy does. Even the Nicene Creed on its own far exceeds the total of all theological statements agreed by Muslims.

We cannot know what orthodoxy a central Muslim authority would have imposed if it existed. We certainly can't know how fruitful that would have been to science. But I think the Islamic experience tells us that you have to agree on something to make any sort of progress. Islam had one of the problems of ancient Greece in that respect - when everything is up for discussion there is no reason ever to stop talking about it.

So, counter intuitively, I think Muslim thinkers had too much freedom to speculate, not too little.

Best wishes

James