Article: "Does Islam Stand Against Science?"

[Pterodactyl]

Interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Does Islam Stand Against Science?
By Steve Paulson

We may think the charged relationship between science and religion is mainly a problem for Christian fundamentalists, but modern science is also under fire in the Muslim world. Islamic creationist movements are gaining momentum, and growing numbers of Muslims now look to the Quran itself for revelations about science.

Science in Muslim societies already lags far behind the scientific achievements of the West, but what adds a fair amount of contemporary angst is that Islamic civilization was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. What's more, Islam's "golden age" flourished while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages.

More at the link.

http://chronicle.com/article/Does-Islam-Stand-Against/127924/

[MidwestTransplant]

1. Not sure, but Teabaggers do.

[madrchsod]

2. that`s really sad...

they pretty much saved the western world.

[Igel]

5. That's often said.

I'm not sure it's true. In the sense that they preserved a lot of mss from N. African monasteries and libraries, yeah; in the sense that they motivated a fair number of monks to take their mss to safety in Europe, yeah. On the other hand, the way they "preserved" them was by looting the libraries; and the motivation was, after all, conquest.

There's also the idea that they did the same in the regions east of Arabia and helped bring novel ideas, such as the zero, from where they had been developed to Europe. On the other hand, they used the same "glorious" practices in "collecting" those ideas.

The "Muslim" golden age relied extensively on empire--in order to gather information, in order to have leaders powerful enough and awash in enough booty to be able to fund scholars and find ways to use them, in having enough excess manpower (largely through captive peasants and slaves) to enable others to not have to go grubbing for food and shelter.

I often wonder if in the absence of the Islamic conquest Byzantium would have returned to reassembling the Roman Empire, as they had been doing before their crippling war with Persia. What would have happened to Europe if Spain, France, the Slavs, Thracians and Dacians, Italians and many others hadn't had to deal with the threat of war and actual war on their southern and south-eastern peripheries; if France and other countries didn't have to deal with the Atlantic raids that the Muslims launched pretty much about the same time that the Vikings had tired of such games.

The Golden Horde established the same kind of confession-as-ethnicity that was common under Islam. This led to Jews clearly not being "Russian" and accentuated their status. It also clearly established that the Kievan Rus' system and the quasi-democratic system in Novgorod would die under a strongly autocratic, nearly theocratic system.

Sometimes I have the general impression that the Muslim "saving" of the Western "world" is rather like the story of the grateful dog whose owner, when the dog was hungry, cut off its tail, cooked it, and fed it to its former owner.

[Psephos]

3. The general form of the question is: "Does fundamentalist religion stand against science?"

And the answer is: yes, wherever it is found, and whatever form it takes.

By definition, religion is adherence to a system of beliefs based on faith and received dogma, not evidence and reason.

[kestrel91316]

4. Somebody needs to bone up on the roots of mathematics, astronomy,

scientifically-based medicine, etc etc etc.

Wow. Sad that people are so clueless.

[Igel]

6. Check out the reasons for the end of the Golden Age.

They're a diverse lot, but most were present in most cases.

The Muslim Golden Age was pretty much a collection of scholars who lived in spite of the imams. As soon as the glory and gold ended, God came to the fore. In Andalus it meant expulsion of Jews and persecution of Christian; check out Averrhoes and Maimonides. In the Middle East, it meant decay and decline. In many cases, the Arabs left things as germs of a theory and the monks in Europe picked up practical applications. If we use the standard that allows us to attribute some of the things to "Muslim" science as is often done, we should properly say tha da Vinci designed the Apache attack helicopter.

Or, perhaps, we should say that Galileo and Newton are good examples of Christian science.

Both are absurd. We tend to be humble if not self-effacing about our achievements, and assume that the grandeur claimed by other cultures, with other traditions, must be rooted in equal humility.

[Confusious]

7. Curious. Who "somebody" are you talking about

because it mentions the Islamic roots of much of that in the article.

The question "does Islam stand against science" refers to todays Islam, not the Islamic world of the past. They are not the same.