Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Al-Ghazali
Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Al-Ghazali

Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Al-Ghazali

Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Al-Ghazali

Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Al-Ghazali

While he identifies more as an agnostic than an atheist, astrophysicist and science populariser Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a favourite among anti-theist activists and their followers. This is not just because of his advocacy of a scientific world view and general scepticism toward supernatural claims – it is also because he makes occasional forays into history. Tyson presents easily digestible stories on the history of science that, generally, present science and religion in opposition to each other in what are essentially fables upholding the Conflict Thesis: a model of science history that historians have long since rejected. One of these is Tyson’s repeated claim that the Golden Age of Islamic learning was brought to an end by Al-Ghazali, who condemned rationalism and declared mathematics “the work of the devil”. Tyson repeats this tale, despite it being total and complete nonsense.

 

Tyson

Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a story he likes to tell. It is a moral fable, drawing on history, that he uses to teach the valuable lesson that if we turn from reason and science, we can veer into a dark age of superstition. He begins it with some photos of the World Trade Centre in New York that he took on the morning of September 11, 2001, and he talks about the reaction to this attack by US President George W. Bush. This can be seen in this video of one of several times he told this story:

I put these [photos of the World Trade Centre towers] up because a few days after this President Bush – I don’t remember where he said this on the steps of the White House and the Rose Garden or at the Capitol – in an attempt to distinguish “we” from “they” …. he loosely quotes a phrase out of the Bible by saying “Our God is the God who named the stars”. Now this is before I was on his rolodex, okay, because I could have helped them out there. The fact is, of all the stars that have names, two-thirds of them have Arabic names. So this was not … I don’t think [this was] his intent with that message, okay. While the constellations are Greek and Roman, the names are Arabic all right [displays slide with a long list of Arabic star names] and the list just goes on and on and on and on.

(3.37 mins)

The reason Tyson cannot remember where exactly Bush gave this speech and said this foolish thing is the speech never happened and Bush did not say what Tyson claims. Tyson initially tried to insist he had heard this speech in the wake of 9/11 and had made a note of it at the time, but it is clear he misremembered another, quite unremarkable and perfectly reasonable comment Bush made in 2003. This is also why some YouTube videos of Tyson telling his Arabic star names fable omit the Bush anecdote and begin with the star names list part of the story. After displaying this list, Tyson goes on:

How does this happen? How do you get stars named with Arabic names? How does this happen? And it happens because, of course, because …. there was this particularly fertile period that’s three hundred year period [when] the intellectual centre of the world was Baghdad. Baghdad – it was completely open to all visitors, all travellers: Jews, Christians, doubters – which today we might call atheists – they were all there exchanging ideas. Oh, all of them … and it was that period we had the advances in, like, engineering and biology and medicine and mathematics, all right?

(4.47 mins)

In his various versions of this talk Tyson the goes on to note the variety of things we have today that are a result of the Islamic Golden Age he is describing here: algebra, algorithms, astronomical terms like azimuth and horizon and even Arabic numerals (which he always neglects to note the Muslims adopted from the Indians). But he then tells a tale of how this remarkable period came to a terrible and sudden end. “Something happened”, he assures his audiences dramatically. In some versions of his story, such as this one, he gets in a kick against those silly historians, who – unlike Tyson the astrophysicist – apparently do not understand the real story:

Then it all stopped. It ended. It ended. If you’re historian typically you are just …. you focus on history as marked by changes of kings and leaders and wars. That’s the lens through which many historians look at the past, and so if you ask people [they] say “Oh the Mongols sacked Baghdad and so that’s why it all ended.” If that were the only force operating then later, when the Islamic culture rose [again] you would still see this tradition of scientific innovation. But it has not recovered – it has not come back at all compared to what was going on in that 300 years.

(2.05 mins)

That Tyson seriously thinks historians typically view history as “changes of kings and leaders and wars” shows how shallow and facile his grasp of history is. No historian of ideas and the development of science works this way, and (unlike Tyson) none would attribute something so complex to such a simplistic single cause. The reason the sack of Baghdad in 1258 is often referred to in relation to the end of the Islamic Golden Age is that this was a major event in the end of the Abbasid caliphate’s sponsorship of learning, but no historian presents this single event, as disruptive as it was, as the sole cause of the end of this fairly loosely defined period of sponsored scholarship. Tyson, of course, thinks he knows better than these (wholly imaginary) foolish historians. And he has the villain of his story to introduce:

[If] you read the writings of Al-Ghazali, who is a Muslim cleric, and he … he was to Islam what Saint Augustine was to Christianity. What he did was he taught you how to be a good Muslim he taught you how to read the Quran and how to obey the commands that … because back then people were just interpreting it for themselves. He came along … he was a an academic scholar … he interpreted the Quran. He said “this is how you must do it”. First [he] has social influence and then political and cultural influence. And basically his interpretation took over. And in that interpretation it included the perspective that the manipulation of numbers is the work of the Devil. This cuts the kneecaps out of any mathematical advances that would unfold math is the language of the universe. If you take that out of your personal equation, you no longer contribute to the advance of human understanding of that universe.

(3.01 mins)

So, according to Tyson’s fable, the wicked Al-Ghazali singlehandedly brought the scientific wonders of the Islamic Golden Age to an end by declaring mathematics to be the work of Satan. This, in Tyson’s telling, not only ended the Golden Age, but brought about an end to science in the Islamic world from that point on. He tries to demonstrate this claim by leaping a whole 800 years to the present day and noting the backgrounds of Nobel Prize recipients:

Take a look at the Nobel Prize from 1900 to 2010. I can do this do this for the Jews, for example. How many Jews in the world? It’s like fifteen million, tops. Tops. fifteen million out of seven billion people. These are the numbers of Jews who have won the Nobel Prize in the sciences [displays slide]. Twenty-five [per cent] of the Nobel Prizes …. To exhibit this, let’s look at the numbers for Islam. So these are Jews – there are fifteen million Jews … twenty five percent of the Nobel Prizes. There is [sic] 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. These are the numbers [displays slide] … two and a half. Okay I’ll give you three if you really want to include economics as a full number there. Now for me … by the way, you can analyse this in any number of ways … 50 times the number of Nobel Prizes … 180th the population … is 4,000 times the impact.

(4.12 mins)

Well, yes, you certainly can “analyse this any number of ways”. One way would be to also note that Chinese and other east Asian people make up about 21% of the population of the planet, yet just 13 Nobel Prize winners have come from that region. Sub-Saharan Africa represents 23% of the earth’s population, yet just five Nobel science laureates hail from there. Once analysed this way, the better question to ask is “why is Tyson using a clearly Eurocentric and biased metric to measure scientific thinking globally?”

As with much of his rhetoric, Tyson is less concerned with accuracy or even logic, because he has a point to get to. The (actually valid) moral of his fairy tale is that if we let bad, irrational people who think science and mathematics is Satanic have too much influence, the abyss of a dark age will yawn before us. This happened to the Muslims, Tyson assures his audiences, and it could happen to us too!

And the usual suspects are happy to get the message and accept its historical premises unquestioningly. Many of the rabid teenage anti-theists of the /r/atheism subreddit happily accept Tyson’s version of Islamic history. So we see threads with titles like “Neil deGrasse Tyson on how Imam Hamid [sic] al-Ghazali pulled Islam into the dark ages, with a warning to contemporary America” or “An 11th century muslim cleric, Hamid [sic] al-ghazali, helped end the golden age of islam by declaring mathematics to be the work of the devil” or even the delightfully pithy “Fuck you, Al-Ghazali. Fuck you.” And short extracts from Tyson’s claims about al-Ghazali are now circulated by atheist activists on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, giving his claims a whole new lease on online life.

The problem with all this is, of course, that Tyson’s story is nonsense.

Al-Ghazali and Science

Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad aṭ-Ṭūsiyy al-Ġazzālīy (c. 1058-1111) was a Persian Sunni Muslim and influential polymath who was head of the Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad, the most prestigious school in the Islamic world at the time. As a theologian, he was generally aligned with the Ash’arite School, which maintained a combination of scriptural authority and theological rationalism. Asha’arī theology presented a middle path between the Atharī School, which stuck to a more strictly textualist interpretation of the Qur’an and the hadīth, and the Mu’tazila School, with its far more speculative theology that was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. While he was one of the most prominent opponents of the Mutazilites, he did not conform completely to Ash’arite positions. He was the author of over 70 influential works, including his magnum opus Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm ad-dīn (“The Revival of the Religious Sciences”). But the work that is most relevant to the issue of his attitudes to what we would call “science” is the Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (“Incoherence of the Philosophers”).

The Tahāfut followed on from his earlier work the Maqāsid al-Falāsifa (“The Aims of the Philosophers”), in which he summarised and explained fundamental philosophical concepts (e.g. judgement, concept, premise and logic) and gave an account of prominent Islamic schools influenced by Greek philosophy, particularly that of Ibn Sina (980-1037). It was Ibn Sina’s legacy that was the primary target of the Tahāfut, so it is somewhat ironic that it was the Maqāsid that became known in Latin Europe in the Middle Ages, where Al-Ghazali – under the Latinised name “Algazelus” or “Algazel” – was misunderstood as a devoted follower of Ibn Sina, who was in turn highly influential on Medieval Christian philosophy and revered as “Avicenna”. But in the Tahāfut Al-Ghazali detailed the issues he found with the metaphysics of those he called the Falāsifa: Ibn Sina and his followers.

Al-Ghazali’s particular concerns centred on metaphysical ideas that he felt placed limits on the omnipotence and omniscience of God. On the metaphysical key issue of Causation he argued for a generally Occasionalist position which he presented in opposition to Ibn Sina’s view that, given the nature of creatures (e.g. people), there are causally necessitating relations between creaturely causes and their effects such that the creaturely cause necessarily brings about the effect. For Al-Ghazali, if creatures genuinely necessitate their effects, this would seem to imply that even in the face of divine miraculous intervention, the natural effects would have to follow from the cause, which he found theologically unacceptable. He disputed the necessary link between creaturely causes and the observed effects:

The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary, according to us. But [with] any two things, where “this” is not “that” and “that” is not “this” and where neither the affirmation of the one entails the affirmation of the other nor the negation of the one entails negation of the other, it is not a necessity of the existence of the one that the other should exist, and it is not a necessity of the nonexistence of the one that the other should not exist—for example, the quenching of thirst and drinking, satiety and eating, burning and contact with fire, light and the appearance of the sun, death and decapitation […] and so on to [include] all [that is] observable among connected things in medicine, astronomy, arts, and crafts. Their connection is due to the prior decree of God, who creates them side by side, not to its being necessary in itself, incapable of separation.

(Tahāfut al-Falāsifa)

So Al-Ghazali argues that while it is God’s “habit” to allow certain effects to typically follow particular causes, this is not necessitated. He uses the example of cotton catching fire when in contact with a flame:

For we allow the possibility of the occurrence of the contact without the burning, and we allow as possible the occurrence of the cotton’s transformation into burnt ashes without contact with the fire. [The philosophers], however, deny the possibility of this.

(Tahāfut al-Falāsifa)

He goes on to argue that the position of the Falāsifa is actually not logical and so does not conform to their own reliance on logic. Of course, the Falāsifa disagreed and in 1180 Ibn Rushd (known in the Latin West as “Averroes”) wrote a reply to the Tahāfut called the Tahafut al-Tahafut (“The Incoherence of the Incoherence”): a rebuttal of Al-Ghazali’s arguments, though in places he agreed with Al-Ghazali’s critique of Ibn Sina. And all this is further complicated by a debate among modern historians of philosophy as to whether Al-Ghazali’s causation was genuinely Occasionalist or if it was more complicated than that. (See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy‘s article on “Causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought” for useful accounts of these disputes, which I have used as a reference here).

But the key point is that his critiques were very specifically of the metaphysics of Ibn Sina and the Falāsifa and these Falāsifa were very specifically the followers of Ibn Sina and not philosophers and philosophy generally. Tyson appears to have got the idea that Al-Ghazali rejected all Greek philosophy and so rejected all that went with it: the mathematics, geometry and natural philosophy that makes up what we call (as a shorthand term) “Greek science”. But he absolutely did not.

On the contrary, he was very clear that mathematics and natural philosophy were valuable, beneficial and to be encouraged and studied. Most importantly, Al-Ghazali did not say, as Tyson has claimed repeatedly and emphatically, that “mathematics and the manipulation of numbers is the work of the Devil”. He counted mathematics among the sciences that were mahmud (praiseworthy):

Sciences whose knowledge is deemed legally obligatory comprise those sciences which are indispensable for the welfare of this world such as: medicine which is necessary for the life of the body, arithmetic for daily transactions and the division of legacies and inheritances, as well as others besides. These are the sciences which, because of their absence, a community would be reduced to narrow straits.

(Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm ad-dīn)

He goes on to note those sciences which he considers madhmum (blameworthy) including “magic, talismanic science, juggling, trickery and the like”. And it is not just simple arithmetic that he praised. The complex mathematics that underpinned astronomy was also to be admired:

[T]here are those things in which the philosophers believe, and which do not come into conflict with any religious principle. And, therefore, disagreement with the philosophers with respect to those things is not a necessary condition for the faith in the prophets and the apostles (may God bless them all). An example is their theory that the lunar eclipse occurs when the light of the Moon disappears as a consequence of the interposition of the Earth between the Moon and the Sun. ….
We are not interested in refuting such theories either; for the refutation will serve no purpose. He who thinks that it is his religious duty to disbelieve such things is really unjust to religion, and weakens its cause. For these things have been established by astronomical and mathematical evidence which leaves no room for doubt. If you tell a man, who has studied these things— so that he has sifted all the data relating to them, and is, therefore, in a position to forecast when a lunar or a solar eclipse will take place: whether it will be total or partial; and how long it will last —that these things are contrary to religion, your assertion will shake his faith in religion, not in these things. Greater harm is done to religion by an immethodical helper than by an enemy whose actions, however hostile, are yet regular. For, as the proverb goes, a wise enemy is better than an ignorant friend.

(Tahāfut al-Falāsifa)

So not only does Al-Ghazali here note that the science of a lunar eclipse is well established by astronomy and mathematics, but he chides those who would try to dispute this on religious grounds. Not exactly the words of someone who considers “mathematics and the manipulation of numbers is the work of the Devil”. He is similarly full of praise for the study of physics:

The physical sciences are a study of the world of the heavens and their stars and the sublunar world’s simple bodies such as water, air, earth and fire, and composite bodies such as animals, plants and minerals. They also study the causes of their changing and being transformed and mixed …. And just as religion does not require the repudiation of science and medicine, so it does not require the repudiation of the science of physics.

(Al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl -“The Deliverer from Error”)

Here Al-Ghazali is working from the very broad Greek definition of “physics”, though he includes “study of the world of the heavens and their stars” – Tyson’s own field – and is emphatic that this is not to be repudiated by religion, contrary to Tyson’s claims. And if these quotes are not evidence enough that Tyson is completely wrong, Al-Ghazali not only condemns ignorant rejection of science by religious zealots, but declares this plays into the hands of unbelievers:

The greatest thing in which the atheists rejoice is for the defender of religion to declare these [astronomical demonstrations] and their like are contrary to religion thus the [atheists’] path for refuting religion becomes easy if the likes [of this argument defending religion] are rendered a condition [for its truth].

(Tahāfut al-Falāsifa)

So far from being a person who declares things like mathematics and astronomy to be “the work of the Devil”, Al-Ghazali roundly and repeatedly condemns anyone who does this, while upholding mathematics, astronomy and the physical sciences as praiseworthy and good. Tyson has things completely backwards. As one historian sums it up:

Ghazali makes it plain that his purpose is to refute the Islamic philosophers’ metaphysical theories and not their natural science. […] Indeed, the misguided zealot who attacks science in the mistaken belief that he is defending religion, inflicts damage, not on science, but on religion. He inflicts this damage, Ghazali argues, precisely because science is demonstrable and certain. If it does, in fact, contradict religion, then it is the latter that becomes suspect and not science.

(Michael Marmura, “Ghazali and Demonstrative Science.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 3, Number 2, October 1965, pp. 183-204)

Tyson has been called out on this “mathematics is the work of the Devil” claim and his claims about Al-Ghazali generally by blogger Hop David, who has a lengthy list of things Tyson has got completely wrong on a range of subjects, including “Ghazali ‘Math is the work of the devil’”. Tyson responded with a heavily qualified quibbling admission he was, sort of, not entirely right:

As for Al Ghazali, a more accurate representation of his views is that the manipulation of numbers was an earthly rather than a divine pursuit. And it was divine thoughts and conduct that were widely promoted — to the exclusion of earthly conduct. Earthly conduct became associated with being anti-God, which I characterized as the devil. In later speeches (over the past year or so) I leave it as the simple split between earthly and divine pursuits, realizing that I was misleading some people by mentioning the devil at all.

This is still nonsense. As the quotes above show, Al-Ghazali did not denigrate earthly pursuits, rather he said they were praiseworthy and necessary. And he and his attitudes did not see some kind of shift whereby these earthly pursuits, such as mathematics and astronomy somehow became “associated with being anti-God”. Not only is Tyson dead wrong about Al-Ghazali declaring mathematics etc. to be “the work of the Devil”, his whole characterisation of Al-Ghazali and his influence is also wrong. As is his claim that Arabic mathematics and astronomy declined after Al-Ghazali’s time.

Science and Islam after Al-Ghazali

Like most fairy tales, Tyson’ story is quite simple. Before the villainous Al-Ghazali science flourished in the Muslim world. After him, it died out. According to Tyson, the silly historians blame the Mongol sack of Baghdad for this, but he argues that “Islamic culture rose again” after this catastrophe, but “science and engineering discoveries were not a part of it”. He then uses his idiotic Nobel science laureates metric to “show” this. Except, like his claims about Al-Ghazali’s attitude to science and mathematics, this is also complete nonsense.

As already noted, Al-Ghazali’s critique of the Falāsifa was answered in the following generation by Ibn Rushd’s Tahafut al-Tahafut. But as well as dealing with metaphysical philosophy, Ibn Rushd also wrote extensively on medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology and, yes, mathematics. His commentaries on Aristotle had a huge influence on the Latin West and here he wrote on the Greek philosopher’s Physics and On the Heavens as well as books of his own on astronomy and cosmology such as On the Heavenly Sphere and On the Motion of the Sphere. Clearly he did not get the memo that Al-Ghazali had brought study of these things to a sudden end 80 years earlier. Ibn Rushd was one of a number of innovative scholars in Al-Andalus in this period who, together, are referred to as “the Spanish Aristotelians”. The Iberian Peninsula became a new centre of Arabic learning and a number of learned men who pursued the studies that Tyson claims Al-Ghazali ended.

So Ibn Bajja (c. 1085-1138) wrote his Kitāb an-Nabāt (“Book of Plants”), an influential botany manual that correctly identifies that plants have sexes. He also developed an alternative cosmology that consisted of concentric circular orbits without the complication of Ptolemaic epicycles. He disagreed with Aristotle on the nature of the Milky Way, concluding that instead of being a result of “fiery exaltations” in the upper atmosphere, it was the light of many stars far above the lunar region. He is also reported to have observed “two planets as black spots on the face of the Sun”. In physics he developed ideas about kinematics that also diverged from those of Aristotle and influenced later European writers on the subject, where he was read under the Latin name of “Avempace”. Related to his work on botany was his pharmacological treatise  Kitāb al-Tajribatayn ‘alā Adwiyah Ibn Wāfid (“Book of Experiences on Drugs of Ibn Wafid”), which classified plants based on their medicinal uses. Like Ibn Rushd, he does not seem to be aware that Al-Ghazli had completely ended Islamic science.

Similarly unaware was Ibn Tufail (c. 1105-1185), another Spanish Aristotelian. Totally oblivious of Al-Ghazali’s declaration that all Islamic science had ended, he wrote his Raǧaz ṭawīl fī aṭ-Ṭibb (“Long Poem in Rajaz Metre on Medical Science”) as well as works on astronomy that disputed the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian model and influenced Ibn Baija’s alternative cosmology. His work circulated in Europe under the name “Abubacer”.

Also completely oblivious of the fact that Muslim science had ended was Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji (died c. 1204). He was influenced by both Ibn Tufail and Ibn Baija and developed their ideas about an alternative cosmology. In the Kitāb al-Hayʾah (“Book of Astronomy”) his model includes the adoption of ideas about impetus to explain the differing speeds and types of movements of the planets. His book was widely read in Europe under the name “Alpetragius” and Copernicus came to acknowledge him in his De Revolutionibus (1543). A crater on the Moon is named after him, yet Tyson seems unaware that he existed after Al-Ghazali.

I could keep listing astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians in the Islamic world who continued to do high quality and influential work in the centuries following Al-Ghazli and Tyson’s supposed end to Islamic science, but that would be labouring the point. Tyson and some of his defenders have tried to back-track and claim that while these scientific studies did not come to a sudden end, the slow influence of Al-Ghazali’s meant it petered out and was never the same as the previous Golden Age. This too is nonsense. This extensive list of medieval Muslim scientists shows clearly that it continued. Centres of learning changed and disruptions (like the Mongol invasions that Tyson dismisses so blithely) interrupted traditions of learning, but there was no end, sudden or otherwise, of medieval Islamic science. Tyson is simply wrong.

What makes his errors particularly ironic is the fact that many of the stars on the list of Arabic star names he uses to begin his fairy tale version of history were named and recorded well after Al-Ghazali’s time. This is because one of the heydays of pre-Copernican astronomy – Tyson’s own discipline, it should be remembered – came in the thirteenth century thanks to the patronage of the Mongol khan Hulagu. He sponsored the building of a large observatory at Margeheh in the mid-thirteenth century and was the patron of its leading astronomer, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274). Like his Spanish predecessors in Al-Andalus, Al-Tusi pursued a range of scientific studies completely unaware that Islamic science had ended with Al-Ghazali a century earlier. He complied star lists and tables of planetary motion and also came up with alternatives to elements of Ptolemaic cosmology that is thought to have influenced Copernicus. In addition, he wrote on biology, chemistry, engineering and mathematics and is considered by some the inventor of trigonometry.

Equally unaware that he should not exist at all is the fifteenth century Muslim astronomer Ulugh Beg (1394-1449) who worked at another huge observatory in Samarkand which was the pinnacle of the Timurid Renaissance in the arts and the sciences that Tyson seems to think never happened. Despite Tyson not knowing he existed, Ulugh Beg also managed to get a crater on the Moon named after him and also gives his name to a dinosaur: the Ulughbegsaurus, discovered in Uzbekistan. Then there was the disciple of Ulugh Beg, Ali Qushji (1403-1474), another Timurid astronomer who defied the alleged total lack of Islamic science by doing a great deal of science. His work Concerning the Supposed Dependence of Astronomy upon Philosophy established a astronomical physics independent from natural philosophy and set out empirical evidence of the rotation of the earth, foreshadowing Copernicus (though there is no evidence of influence). Considering Tyson is an astrophysicist himself, you would think he would be interested in someone like Ali Qushji, but according to Tyson’s claims Ali Qushji could not have existed. Except, he did.

It should be obvious by now that there is no way Tyson’s claims about Al-Ghazali can be in any way accurate. He did not declare “mathematics and the manipulation of numbers is the work of the Devil” and actually upheld the study of the sciences as worthy and not in contradiction in religion. Therefore he did not have some chilling effect on the study of mathematics and science in the Islamic, as the multiple examples of a continuing and flourishing tradition in the Islamic world in the centuries after his time clearly shows. So where did Tyson get this garbled pseudo historical nonsense?

Ernest Renan

The Origin of the Myth and its Propagation

In 1798 Napoleon invaded Egypt and began over 150 years of European colonialism and meddling in the Middle East. In doing so he also began a vogue for all things Egyptian, Arabic and exotically “Oriental” which began in France and spread through Europe. Of course, the Republican French saw themselves as liberators not conquerors and saw the culture and history of the Arab world through a thoroughly European lens. The Muslim world, they decided, was well and truly overdue for both a Reformation and an Enlightenment and scholars who took an interest in Islamic history in the nineteenth century tried to force it into a framework that paralleled their conception of how European religious and intellectual history had played out.

French historian of philosophy, Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was one of this period’s most influential Orientalists. His books Averroes et l’averroisme (“Averroes and Averroism” 1852) and L’Islamisme et la science (“Islam and Science” 1883) framed the history of Islamic thought as a parallel to nineteenth century conceptions of the history of Western thought – with freethinking rationalistic scientists battling obscurantist, superstitious religious fanatics. For Renan, Ibn Sina and, particularly, Ibn Rushd represented rationalism and Al-Ghazali was the irrational villain who prevailed over them and dragged the Islamic world into the darkness from which enlightened modern Europeans (like Renan) were, luckily, here to rescue them. Imposing a western European paradigm on Muslim history, Renan assured his readers the twelfth century saw “a war against philosophy” triggered by a “theological reaction similar to the one that followed in the Latin church after the Council of Trent.” To Renan, this reaction warped the whole Islamic world up to his own day:

… [At the age of ten or twelve the Muslim child] turns suddenly fanatic, full of an inane pride of possessing that which he thinks to be absolute truth … This mad pride is the radical vice of the Muslim. … convinced that God gives fortune and power to those who obey him, irrespective of education or personal merit, the Muslim has the most profound contempt for education, science, and everything that makes up the European mind.

(L’Islamisme et la science)

Renan was depending on earlier work on Al-Ghazali by the German Orientalists Salomon Munk (1803~67) and Franz August Schmölders (1809-80) and it was Munk who established the idea that Al-Ghazali’s theory of causality was wholly Occasionalist. But it was Renan who took this and created the grand narrative of the Islamic “war against philosophy” led, successfully, by Al-Ghazali. Under Renan’s influence, this story became one of a war against science; another parallel with European thinking in the nineteenth century, with the enthusiastic adoption of the Draper-White Conflict Thesis.

In the century or so since Renan, Draper and White, our understanding of the history of both philosophy and science has progressed greatly. Historians of philosophy no longer accept Renan’s simplistic Orientalist misreading of Islamic philosophy and theology and historians of science know that, as detailed above, Al-Ghazali did not kill off Islamic science and Draper and White were wrong about science and religion being enemies down the centuries. But these things take much longer to penetrate the popular consciousness, which often lags a century or more behind the historians. Unfortunately, much pop history on the subject of the history of science is not presented by historians, but by scientists. And scientists are often terrible at history.

So in February 2007 the Times Literary Supplement published a review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion by Nobel laureate and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, Steven Weinberg, titled “A Deadly Certitude”. In it, Weinberg presented Al-Ghazali as an anti-science zealot:

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

When correspondents to the TLS objected this was not the case, Weinberg defended his claim in a feisty, but not particularly accurate or convincing counter-letter to the editors, where he tried to dismiss the actually very valid counter examples given and also pretended those were the only counter-examples available (again, see above for the many, many more that show he is completely wrong). And Weinberg, it seems, is the source of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s bungled conception of Al-Ghazali. Weinberg appeared with Tyson at the sixth “Amazing Meeting” – a conference of sceptics sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation held between 2003 and 2015 – that is seen in the first video of Tyson quoted from extensively above. In fact, Tyson refers to earlier remarks by Weinberg in his presentation (5.10 mins) and these can be seen here. In his account, Weinberg is every bit as bald, bold and assured as Tyson:

But then there was a reaction against science in the Islamic world in the twelfth century, and it was not a reaction so much against any one particular conclusion of science as against the very idea of laws of nature. Because it was felt that the laws of nature put God’s hands in chains. This was particularly uh the view of an influential philosopher Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, who wrote a book, “The Incoherence of the Philosophers” – he rejected the idea of the laws of nature.

(i.16 mins)

He goes on to qualify Al-Ghazali’s impact slightly (“whether it was Al-Ghazali’s influence or whatever or perhaps the depression due to military defeats in Spain”) but concludes emphatically that “Islamic science really ended by the end of the twelfth century”. Whether Weinberg is the source of Tyson’s confusions about Al-Ghazali and the history of philosophy and science in the Islamic world or not, both represent the same problem: scientists with high public profiles and a particular ideological bias making grand pronouncements about history and getting them spectacularly wrong.

So, yet again, anti-theist activists need to stop listening to muddle-headed and biased scientists on history and instead pay attention to actual historians.

(Many thanks to Dr Joshua Little and Dr Khalil Andani for their assistance and comments on this article. Islamic history is not my main area of study, so this was greatly appreciated)

Further Reading and Listening

Luke Dunne, Al-Ghazali: Philosopher of the Islamic Golden AgeThe Collector, August 5, 2022

Frank Griffel, “The Western Reception of Al-Ghazali’s Cosmology From The Middle Ages To The 21st Century”Dîvân: Disiplinlerarası Çalışmalar Dergisi, 2011/1, cilt: XVI, sayı: 30, s. 33-62 İngilizce

George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, (MIT Press, 2007, 2011)

“Causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought”Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

History of Philosophy Without the Gaps – “Ep. 143: Special Delivery – Al-Ghazali” (29 September, 2013)

History of Philosophy Without the Gaps – “Ep. 144: Miracle Worker – Al-Ghazali Against the Philosophers” (6 October, 2013)

History of Philosophy Without the Gaps – “Ep. 145: Frank Griffel on Al-Ghazali” (13 October, 2013)

57 thoughts on “Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Al-Ghazali”

  1. Great work as always Tim. It’s difficult to know how to get these pseudo historical tropes of the enlightenment out of the public consciousness. Once they’re on TikTok they seem more powerful than anything in any educational curriculum..

    PS. Just one very minor typo … “ but there was so end, sudden or otherwise, of medieval Islamic science.”

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  2. As always Tim, an excellent analytical essay strong on real factual history exposing the myths that people like blabber mouth NdGT spew out. In fact, I think this time, you have even exceeded you normal high standards. I have a couple of comments to your second NdGT quote:

    “And it happens because, of course, because …. there was this particularly fertile period that’s three hundred year period [when] the intellectual centre of the world was Baghdad.”

    Although Baghdad under the Abbasid Caliphate was the major centre for the development of science and philosophy it was by no means the only one. You mention some that became highly influential after the decline of Baghdad but there were others that existed and flourished at the same time, such as Cairo.

    Of those Islamic cultures developing science post al-Ghazali, you neglected to mention the Ottoman Empire, which had a strong scientific tradition.

    “Baghdad – it was completely open to all visitors, all travellers: Jews, Christians, doubters – which today we might call atheists – they were all there exchanging ideas. Oh, all of them … and it was that period we had the advances in, like, engineering and biology and medicine and mathematics, all right?”

    The claim that Baghdad “was completely open to all visitors” [including] “doubters – which today we might call atheists” is, of course rubbish. Early Islamic culture tolerated Jews and Christians because they were “people of the Book” but they certainly would not have tolerated atheists.

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    1. As always Tim, an excellent analytical essay strong on real factual history exposing the myths that people like blabber mouth NdGT spew out.

      Ah Thony, you sweet-tongued old devil!

      The claim that Baghdad “was completely open to all visitors” [including] “doubters – which today we might call atheists” is, of course rubbish.

      Yes, I probably should have found the space to knock that on the head as well. He also makes some snide comments about how the Golden Age occured “when medieval Europeans were busy disembowelling heretics”, to sniggers from the audience. The hysterias over heresy actually came later, from the thirteenth century onwards. So there was little killing of heretics in the relevant period and “disembowelling” was not a form of execution generally used for heretics or anyone much else (traitors in England notwithstanding). But who needs facts when you have glib patter? Weinberg makes a similar sneer when he says the Golden Age occurred “when Charlemagne and his nobles were struggling with writing”. This ignores the fact that pre-modern literacy had several levels and being able to read and being able to write (and write well) were separate things. Charlemagne was multilingual and could read several languages. I wonder if Weinberg can, or if – like most Americans – he’s monolingual. I suspect the latter.

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  3. Thanks for this excellent essay, Tim.

    I’m struck by the way he compares Al-Ghazali to Augustine of Hippo – another ‘villain’ in the popular mind. And interestingly, they say much the same thing about science ‘versus’ religion – i.e. that if a religious person challenges competent scientists on their findings on the basis of religious belief, they do harm not to the scientists but to their own religious ideology, making themselves look ridiculous. This is what Augustine says on the matter:
    • Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram I, 19, xxxix – “Usually even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions …. about animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth. And this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably interpreting the Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to avoid such an embarassing situation which which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.”

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  4. Very minor … I think there’s a word missing in the following quote above: “And just as religion does not the repudiation of science and medicine …”

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  5. You have an excellent grasp on this material for someone who doesn’t specialize in Islamic history. This is a thorough debunking of a nebulous popular myth.

    Wasn’t Weinberg the fellow who argued that only religion can make good people do bad things? Someone get him a copy of Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men”.

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    1. You have an excellent grasp on this material for someone who doesn’t specialize in Islamic history.

      Well, this one took a while to research and write because I had to give myself a crash course in Islamic history and theology. But thanks.

      Wasn’t Weinberg the fellow who argued that only religion can make good people do bad things?

      Yes, I think that was him. This was a particularly dumb argument that Dawkins likes to use. He used in The God Delusion a page after briskly dismissing the idea that religion could motivate anyone to do anything good on the grounds “they are probably good people and so would do good anyway”. The great Dawkins didn’t see any contradiction there.

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  6. I learned a lot I didn’t know about Islamic history from this. Thank you for writing it. You do exceptional work, and your history is always right on target.

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  7. Excellent piece. I greatly enjoyed it. I think it nicely illustrates that scientists and experts are prone to the same biases and prejudices as their culture, especially when talking about things outside of their own area of expertise.

    1. The Dunning-Kruger effect is an equal-opportunity effect. We can all fall under its baleful influence.

    2. something common to all these badhist writers (NdGT, William Manchester, Pinker) is the attitude that history-writing is just a glorified op-ed: that is, in order to be a historian you don’t need to do things like familiarize yourself with the subjects, go to primary archives, or evaluate sources’ motives: all you do as a historian is sit in the uni library (or occasionally make an ILL request), right? it’s the same as when Tyson snapped philosophy was all just talking about the sound of one hand clapping

      so to them “history of science” means just any old thing written before 2023 about a scientist, so they’re perfectly happy to treat some cat-fancy book from 2000, Celtic nationalist works from the 1920s, or some overheated jeremiad from the 1870s as trumping actual collection and analysis of primary sources

  8. It’s not often that I see claims about Islamic history covered on this blog, so this was an interesting read. The claims that Al-Ghazali condemned philosophy remind me a lot of the claims that St. Augustine (& other church fathers) condemned mathematics, where the fact that wrote something titled like “Against [X]” is taken to mean that they condemned the study of [X] itself.

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    1. the claims that St. Augustine (& other church fathers) condemned mathematics

      Yes, it’s on that level of stupid. Augustine was actually condemning mathematici, who were astrologers and diviners of the future, not mathematicians. Yet we still see claims (often by mathematicians) that he condemned mathematicians as satanic.

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    2. they often brandish Aquinas’s condemnation of “curiositas” as “the Church” damning the entire concept of investigation and inquiry–and aren’t even aware that he prescribes “studiositas” instead in the literal next half of the sentence

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  9. Yes, the sudden and terrible end argument is nonsense; Tyson is, unfortunately, a great purveyor of bullshit.

    But for all the errors and exaggerations that have come into the accounts over time, there’s still a kernel here. Stripped of specific nuances that in any case would not have filtered down to the masses, the Islamic orthodoxy rooted in the greatest theologian of Islam in the High Middle Ages was Occasionalist in its causality, while the Catholic orthodoxy rooted in the greatest theologian of Catholicism in the High Middle Ages was Aristotelian in its causality. The former approach leaves no room for the would-be scientist to hope to develop a system of the world without being a heretic; the latter does.

    1. The former approach leaves no room for the would-be scientist to hope to develop a system of the world without being a heretic

      That is simply not true. The difference is purely metaphysical. Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism is perfectly compatible with a system based on known rules of nature, he and others in his school just attribute these to God’s “habit” of doing things consistently. Their metaphysics uses this to avoid any limits on God’s omnipotence while also allowing for the observed fact that certain things always follow (seeming) causes.

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      1. If one cannot do science with occasionalism in the air, then 17th and 18th century French occasionalism should require that no science was done in France, either…

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        1. And that’s without mentioning Berkeley (and I guess Hume). British science soldiered on somehow …

          1. And Leibniz would seem to also forestall science — there are no physical laws, only the unfolding programs of all these monads. And yet Leibniz himself was doing mechanics.

  10. A very useful article I think! I learned a lot of Mediaeval Islamic scientists from it, whom I was not aware of before. It is great to see someone explore this topic without either claiming that Europe was in the “Dark Ages” compared to the Islamic world (the New Atheist view), or that the latter never contributed to the development of science (the Western chauvinist view). Still, it would be interesting to see an explanation of why Europe eventually came to dominate scientifically. But perhaps this is too vast a topic to deal with for your blog.
    Thanks!

  11. Great article as always. I’ve been binge reading your articles since I came across your website.

    That said, I have a question: When NDT was compared the nobel prizes won by Jews vs Muslims, is he not engaging in categorical error? Because I thought being Jewish can be a race and Islam is a religion which has people from different races subscribing to it. And if he’s using Jew as a religion and religion is the problem, then doesn’t this comparison undermines that assertion?

  12. Do you know Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society? Tyson fits mosts of the areas Sowell describes.

  13. “the studies that Tyson claims Al-Ghazali ended”
    Even if Renan was right “and [someone] dragged the Islamic world into the darkness” there is the same issue that arises when asserting that Emperor Theodosius I ended Roman paganism: they might have wanted it, but lacked the means to enforce it.

  14. ” If you’re historian typically you are just …. you focus on history as marked by changes of kings and leaders and wars. ”

    I recently read ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’ by the late James Loewen. It’s subject is the warped American history that high schools (and lower) provide students. One of the thngs he noted was the effect of standardized testing which results in an emphasis on factoids and promoted a ‘kings, leaders and wars’ approach to history. Lowen noted the lack of history of ideas (along with other ‘social history) as those are had to present as unquestioned, atomistic factoids. In addition, the book showed very few university stupdents in America take history course there, pretty much only those actually pursuing history as their field of study. I wonder if the ‘kings, leaders, wars’ idea of history held by Tyson (and Weinberge?) is the product of that impoverished version of history dating back to high school, likely the last time Tyson actually ‘studied’ history.

    Not an excuse, mind. I’m sure Tyson would be scathing of someone who was spouting an impoverished idea of physics that reflected no more than a high school education of someone without any further interest in physics. He’d see the problem clearly enough then, no doubt.

    BTW, it seems to me the proverb referred to by Al-Ghazali could be the motto of this blog: “a wise enemy is better than an ignorant friend”.

    1. No, for several reasons.

      History lessons that only focus on kings and battles, emphasize rote memorization of facts and uncritically exalt the achievements of European empires have not been the norm for decades in any Western country I’m familiar with. They are uncommon just like the academics which Tyson alleges “focus on history as marked by changes of kings and leaders and wars”. In reality, academics who focus on kings and battles are at a disadvantage when applying for research grants and military history has been relegated to the fringes of academia.

      Vague accusations leveled against the education system are popular, but in reality most history students are lazy and quite disinterested in what their teacher has to offer. They retain little, but later allege that they were never taught about X while in fact they simply did not pay attention. In general, there is now less emphasis on rote memorization in favor of creativity compared to previous generations. I’m not sure why standardized tests should have altered that trend so much as to leave students unaware of the perils historiography. In any case, men like Tyson and Weinberg have no excuse not to educate themselves. There are reputable historians of science whom they could have consulted.

      The lack of self-awareness can be stunning: Recently I read a Redditor’s complaint about how historians only focus on military history, comparing weapons systems and ranking generals. His view of history was probably strongly influenced by Paradox games, but it never occurred to him that this was the result of his own choices, not a lack of scholarship in other areas.

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      1. I agree that cultural history is at least as important as military history.

        But if so? Then what in culture accounts for the relatively low economic (and scientific) status of many Near- and Middle East countries today?

          1. You mean, instead of us plundering each other in turns, as per usual?;)
            The ( re ) discovery of the New World might have something to do with that.

  15. NdGT’s version of “Cosmos” is laden with historical errors. Do you plan on addressing them all in summary on a single blog post in the future?

  16. Great article, although one minor issue:
    “Weinberg defended his claim in a feisty, but not particularly accurate or convincing counter-letter to the editors”
    The hyperlink to Weinberg’s letter goes to this page (https://sites.tufts.edu/cogstud/) but not to any actual letter.

    1. It seems the link is no longer working, so I’ve removed it. I can’t find the Weinberg letter anywhere on the site now.

  17. Hi Tim,
    I was wandering how you would comment on “Islam and Rationality – The Impact of al-Ghazālī” VOLUME 1 Edited by Georges Tamer, specifically “Al-Ghazālī’s Changing Attitude to Philosophy” by Wilferd Madelung.
    In that paper the enmity between al Ghazali and rationalism seems to be defined as quite influential: “Strict traditionalist Muslims have ever treasured al-Ghazālī’s last work and at times have understood it as an invitation to burn his books on theology and philosophy. A case can be made for such an interpretation, for while al-Ghazālī clearly did not suggest to restrain the elite from meditating about religious questions, he wanted them to do so in their hearts only lest their thought might disturb the firm belief of the simple-minded.”
    Also, I wander if you considered in your investigation of al ghazali’s stance his “the saviour from error” adequately given that he esplicitly seems to state that math is a danger for which people learning it should either be “admonished” because of “the principles of their sciences” or “those who devote themselves eagerly to the mathematical sciences ought to be restrained” and “since they belong to the foundations of the philosophical sciences, the student is infected with the evil and corruption of the philosophers” depending on different published translations (specifically I’m relaying Watt and Holland translations here). I’d also be curious of knowing if you considered that in the very same text, right after discussing math, al ghazali spoke against logic and physics. Would you consider that to be merely theological or would you agree that saying “When someone studies their logic and appreciates its clarity, he may assume that the blasphemies transmitted by them are supported by such clear proofs, so he rushes to unbelief before completing his study of the theistic sciences”/” Thus this drawback too leads to unbelief” constitutes an open condemnation of logic itself?

      1. I see, can you point me to published peer reviewed literature that contradicts that paper? Or is it your own judgement? In the latter case, what’s it based on?
        Also, no comment on the other translated passages I quoted?

        1. I present the peer-reviewed literature that contradicts that paper in the article above, along with all the evidence that shows it’s completely wrong. Ditto your strange interpretation of the other passages you quoted. Did you actually read my article?

          1. I must be missing the reviewed references consistently then, because I checked again and in the paragraph about the influence of al ghazali all I could find was a series of examples of post-ghazali advancements and people with wiki links and a link to a list of them (that too on wiki). I also tried checking the “further reading” list, but all I found were links to : thecollector (not peer reviewed, just vetted authors, doesn’t say anything on the positive or negative impact, just says ghazali was influential), a podcast (3 episodes), a peer reviewed article by Griffel on the european, not arab, reception of ghazali, a SEP article on one of the philosophical issue that doesn’t seem to touch on the issue I’m inquiring about and lastly there’s a book (by mit, but not a peer reviewed jurnal article) by george saliba who takes your very same approach to the issue of just namedropping some later developments as if a model of ghazali planting a seed of decline by virtue of his anti-philosophical stance would only be interpretable as an instant and total termination of every and all scientific/philosophical activity rather than a gradual decline that would entail numerous progressions after the first seed is planted. He also doesn’t address at all the arguments from the “classical narrative”, just seems to dismiss it as an orientalist trope without even mentioning what authors he’s referring to.
            So, could you help me overcoming my inability to spot the sources you are referring to by explicitly saying what they are?
            As for the other passages quoted, how is my interpretation “strange”?
            Do you find “strange” to read “those who devote themselves eagerly to the mathematical sciences ought to be restrained” as an opposition to the study of “mathematical sciences”?
            Or do you mean to say that the translation is strange?
            And yes, I did read the article, I just find it unconvincing due to the above mentioned issues that seems to me now you are just handwaving away. Ah, let me clarify: I’m not defending tyson’s extreme view, I just find unconvincing your position that al ghazali wasn’t against math, logic and physics and that he didn’t have a negative influence on the development of said disciplines. But hey, maybe I just missed the relevant sources and you have a good answer to the passages I highlighted that you didn’t include in your post, hence I’m asking.

          2. The examples I give and the detailed analysis I provide via the Further Reading (especially in those podcasts) should be enough for you. And now that I’m less jet-lagged and not on my phone in a departure lounge in Singapore, I’ve re-read the quote from Madelung and I can’t see it as providing any evidence for the “emnity” you claim.

            As for the quote you gave from Al-Ghazali himself, you need to read its context. He’s talking about the two extremes of reaction to the study of mathematics. The first is one that leads to extreme scepticism about anything that isn’t as precise as mathematics, including religion. This is what he says needs to be “restrained”. Then he talks about the other extreme – those who think mathematics undermines religion and so must be rejected totally. He says both extremes are wrong.

  18. I’m sorry, do you mean that there were indeed no peer reviewed sources to be found in the first place and that you were actually referring just to your wiki examples and the podcasts? Did I understand this correctly? If so I must confess to be a bit irritated by the useless goose chase.

    As for Madelung, I didn’t quote him to prove the enmity, I quoted him to discuss the influence of an enmity-based interpretation. I am fully aware that the author there isn’t making a case for it being a correct interpretation, but he IS stating quite explicitly that such an interpretation was present and influential. Could you comment on that?

    Lastly regarding the quotes from ghazali, I don’t see how you could say he’s speaking of just “two extremes of reaction” given that in the text at no point such a specification is done. It’s true that he speaks of two dangers, but he presents it with the sentence “It
    has yielded two detrimental consequences:” whereas to be construed as you claim one would expect rather an introduction along the lines of “at it extremes two dangers can arise”. Compare that for example with this line introducing the dangers in ethics: “From the mixture of the teaching of Prophecy and the teaching of
    Sufism, concocted by the philosophers in their books, two disastrous consequences resulted: a disaster afflicting the accepter, and a disaster afflicting the rejecter [of their ethical teaching]. ” In this case the “two extremes” are clearly labeled and presented and not left for the reader to guess out of thin air, why would he not do the same for mathematics?
    Not only that but I invite you to reconsider how the second negative consequence is explained. Although the dynamic starts with the “friend of islam who is ignorant”, it’s then only “when
    that reaches the ears of someone who knows that what they say
    is based on definitive proof, he does not doubt its proof, but he becomes convinced that Islam is based on ignorance and denial
    of the definitive proof. He thus acquires a greater liking for the
    philosophers, and a greater distaste for Islam.” So even in that second danger it’s *knowledge of math that causes the danger*. It’s not presented as a result of just ignorance in islam, nor is stated that said ignorance is dangerous to the ignorant, as it would be needed to establish a symmetry. He then proceeds to state that the “sacred law” makes no statement nor in affirmation nor in negation of such matters and that it’s an offense against islam to claim that it makes such statements (in any sense, not just against arithmetic, as a symmetry would need in order to be established).
    So, in short, there’s no trace of an explicit framing presenting this as only pertaining extremes, where such an “extremes only” case is made it’s explicitly stated later in the text, there’s also no symmetry of any sort to be found in the two dangers. In both cases knowledge of math is presented as a source of danger and in one case it’s explicitly stated that the mathematician should be restrained.

    And if we go on to read about physics and logic there’s not even a motif of weighing extremes either. I’d still like you to comment on that condemnation of logic by the way, why aren’t you addressing it?
    I’ll paste it here for your convenience :
    Would you consider that to be merely theological or would you agree that saying “When someone studies their logic and appreciates its clarity, he may assume that the blasphemies transmitted by them are supported by such clear proofs, so he rushes to unbelief before completing his study of the theistic sciences”/” Thus this drawback too leads to unbelief” constitutes an open condemnation of logic itself?

    1. “I must confess to be a bit irritated by the useless goose chase.”

      And I must confess to be a bit irritated by your sneering, passive aggressive tone. Where I come from, that tone makes you a tedious prick. And where I come from, tedious pricks are not met with snide, mealy-mouthed passive aggression. This is your first and final warning.

      The resources I gave you show that the old view that Al-Ghazali was anti-science and/or led to an anti-science backlash is nonsense. This includes Griffel’s article, which you admit is peer reviewed, as well as the extensive discussions in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the three detailed podcast discussions, including the interview with Griffel. I don’t have access to the Madelung article, so no I can’t comment on it and don’t know what “present and influential” interpretations he’s referring to. Since he thinks they are wrong (whatever they are), I have no idea why I need to bother.

      And al-Ghazali IS talking about two extremes and saying both are to be rejected. “Detrimental consequences” = “dangers”. If you can’t see that’s what he’s saying, then I’m afraid I can’t help you with your reading comprehension. And no, I don’t consider that quote a condemnation of logic itself. On the contrary, he valued logic highly and agreed with Aristotle that logic was the only way one can achieve new certain knowledge. Maybe you need to read his work better.

  19. I went back and read some of James Burnham’s comments on his blog and it’s really good I really recommend his one on the pernican and the one debunking the the claim that the church stopped women from getting anesthesia

  20. It’s interesting you quote Weinberg, as I’ve recently came upon a quote of him on the history of Science in the islamic world.

    “When working scientists like myself write for the public we have the opportunity to engage in controversy. The polemic mode of science writing goes back at least as far as the golden age of Muslim science, when it centred on the value of science and on its relation to Islam. One of the most accomplished of Muslim astronomers, the Persian al-Biruni, complained about anti-scientific attitudes among Islamic extremists, while the medical scientist Rhazes, who was admired by al-Biruni, argued that scientists are more useful to mankind than religious leaders and that miracles are mere tricks. In response, the famous physician Avicenna said that Rhazes should have stuck to matters he understood, such as boils and excrement.”

    Is this quote accurate?

    For now the only error I think to have gathered is that Rhazes wasn’t really admired by al-Biruni, who seemed to have a critic of his.

    1. I haven’t seen that quote before and am not aware of what it’s referring to. Pretty much any period and culture that has people who use reason to examine the world have to contend with those who think they shouldn’t. But I’m not sure how this is relevant to my article.

      1. Yeah sorry, an acquaintance had reposted the quote and considering from who it came from I wanted to check its accuracy, but I didn’t think things through and realize it didn’t have much relevance to the topic, forgive me.

        By the way, I recall reading that you plan to do an article on Galileo? Am I correct?

          1. Yes, I knew already about your response to Cosmic Skeptic, I was just under the impression that your next article would have been about the reception of heliocentrism by Catholic world after Galileo’s trial.

          2. That’s been delayed by some further reading I have to do and some other very busy activity in my life. This is one of my hobbies, and so often doesn’t take priority over more important things.

  21. I found Tyson’s facebook page randomly, and there was some anti-religious bullshit. I tried to correct some historical inaccuracies in the comments, but was repeatedly declined. I guess Tyson only wants yes-men.

    1. edit your comment, and then add a space, before or after the last punctuation . Usually it’s an auto-decline, not an admin.

  22. Hi, Tim. I know that my comment will not be much about history, but still it has to do one of Tyson’s arguements. Specifically the Nobel arguement. You raise the question: “why is Tyson using a clearly Eurocentric and biased metric to measure scientific thinking globally?” Actually there are more issues with his arguement. First, the hard sciences Nobel prizes are given to individuals with multiple peer reviewed studies. Sure, Nobel prize isn’t the only way to measure science globally but I think that Euroscentrism isn’t that much of a motivation in the case of hard sciences (maybe Literature but that has to do more with language rather than countries) because -and that’s something that Tyson is forgetting- Nobel isn’t awarded to countries or backrounds, but to individuals. And in the case of hard sciences peer reviewed studies and findings are the main criterion. But still you are right because there are more ways to measure scientific advancements than just accolades. I don’t have any critism of your article. It’s perfect and well documented.
    P.S Also, it’s suprising how often the atheist community makes culturally determinist arguements like here.

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