George Saliba's Islamic Science

Sorry for the recent lack of posts. Things have been a bit busy. Actually, they still are and posts will remain infrequent for the moment.

The main object of this post is to report on George Saliba’s Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. I’ve got no time for Edward Said and I expect Saliba’s politics would disgust me, but he knows a great deal about Islamic Science. Let me make absolutely clear that this book is no fun to read. It is terse, badly edited and Saliba’s writing style is that of a professor who has no interest in attracting lay readers. It is the content of the book which makes it important and worth struggling through.

Saliba has two targets in view and he hits both of them. Firstly, he rejects the classical narrative that the conquered Syriac-speaking Christians population taught the Arabs Greek philosophy. He insists, I think quite rightly, that the assimilation of Greek learning into Arabic culture was an internal process within the Caliphate. It was not a case of ignorant Arabs learning philosophy from the Syrian Christians who had already mastered it. Rather, people living under the Islamic Caliphate decided for themselves that they wanted to acquire the philosophy of the classical Greeks and so went off to find it. There was no pre-existing advanced culture for them to take over – they created it from scratch. I don’t agree with all the details of Saliba’s case. He assumes on too little evidence that there was no indigenous scientific tradition in Byzantium at all. I think there was but it just wasn’t from this source that the Arabs acquired their own knowledge.

Why does this matter? In part, because it means the Arabs picked up ancient Greek philosophy in much the same way that Western Christians discovered Arabic thought in the twelfth century. In both cases, no one came to teach the new learning. Both the medieval Arabic and Catholic worlds were autodidacts. Contrast this with the recovery of Greek language scholarship in Renaissance Italy. That was very much driven by teachers fleeing from the wreck of Byzantium and educating the ignorant (but interested) Italians.

Saliba’s second attack is on the widely held belief that Arabic science declined after the thirteenth century, either due to religious pressure or the Mongol invasions. Saliba makes two points. The first is that Arabic science continued to advance until at least the sixteenth century. He convincingly shows how Copernicus used several unacknowledged cutting-edge astronomical techniques from Arab sources. These techniques for calculating planetary movements were not developed in Western Europe, but in Persia after the Mongol invasion. His second point is that talk of a decline is misleading. What needs explaining is how western science began and maintained its stratospheric progress from the fourteenth century onwards. Noting that Arabic science couldn’t keep up is not something that needs an explanation. The historical conundrum is western advance, not eastern stagnation.

I also tried Michael Morgan’s Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists. It’s awful and I couldn’t get through even one chapter. Avoid.



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Shattering the Christ Myth

J.P. Holding of Tektonics apologetic ministry has edited (and substantially written) a new book providing a detailed rebuttal of the Christ Myth in its various guises. I have written an introduction to the book which compares the Christ Myth to the theory that Shakespeare didn't write the works of Shakespeare. I also offer a brief resume of the historiography of the Christ Myth going back to its nineteenth century origins.

This book should now, I believe, be the standard reference for anyone wanting to find a response to the various internet and published mythologists. You can get it from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. However, best of all would be if you order a copy from your local store and demand to know why they aren't stocking it.

No reviews yet, but do please let me know if you see any.


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Implant Update

I owe you all an update on how I’ve been getting on with the cochlear implant. It has been turned on for almost three weeks now and the prognosis so far is very good. I went to Guy’s Hospital in London for the switch-on not really knowing what to expect. After some diagnostics to make sure it was working properly, Terry, the audiologist in charge of my case, ran through the different frequencies that the implant can deliver. They were all functioning and I could hear up to 8000Hz which is more than I managed in my early teens and a huge improvement on the 300Hz or so that I’ve been functioning with recently.

The implant initially made everyone sound like R2 D2. All I seemed to get were bells, whistles and beeps. Despite this, I could understand my wife quite well, but that might be more down to empathy than hearing. Over the following few days I still needed my hearing aid in the other ear to get by but it also distracted me from the sounds coming from the implant. So, as I had a week off work, I ditched the hearing aid (big relief – it was uncomfortable and I hated it) and just used the implant from then on. Gradually, the R2 D2 sounds began to resolve into voices, especially while following the subtitles on television. I also found I could hear my three year old a bit better.

When I got back to work on Monday, it was clear that I had already exceeded how well I had managed with the hearing aids. Colleagues whom I had previously had enormous trouble understanding even when I was lip-reading had become much clearer. On Tuesday, I went back to Guy’s Hospital for the implant to be retuned (which is necessary as I get used to it). Terry also ran some comprehension tests. I scored 92% in the hearing while lip-reading test (up from 86% with the hearing aids) and 55% when not lip reading (twice what I had managed before).

Already, things are a lot better and I can expect continuing improvement over the next few months. Aside from feeling very tired from having to interpret all the extra aural information, the implant has been a huge blessing already.


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Overtaking the Greeks in Science

In a comment on my recent post about Greek science, I was asked why it took fifteen hundred years for the Christian West to catch up with the ancient Greeks. It's a good question.

Firstly, a quibble. We had definitively overtaken the Greeks in natural philosophy by about 1350. That's a thousand years, not fifteen hundred, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and could reasonably have become dominant enough in philosophy to make a difference.

I have to answer the substantive question of why it took so long in two parts. The reasons why Western Europe took a thousand years to catch up are explained in the first chaper of my book God's Philosophers which you can read online. It was essentially because the Roman Empire was overrun by waves barbarian invaders and all knowledge of the ancient Greek language was lost. It took a long time to rebuild.

More puzzling is what went wrong in the Eastern Byzantine Empire where Roman rule went on until 1453 and the final fall of Constantinople. The history of Byzantine science is not a well-developed subject and I for one simply don't know enough to answer this question for the moment. What we do know is that John Philoponus, a Byzantine Christian from Alexandria, was the most important natural philosopher of late antiquity. But after him, there is very little more science. I certainly hope to investigate this question more closely and when I have some better answers I'll report back.

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Parents versus peer groups

Daniel Finkelstein has been on the Judith Rich Harris again. His latest article quite rightly takes politicians to task for assuming that parenting skills have the slightest effect on the way children turn out. As I've argued many times, they don't.

However, Finkelstein seems to believe that environment must have some effect. He casts around and comes across Rich Harris's thesis. She claims that it is our peer group that forms us. This is almost certainly rubbish too. Peers have no more effect than parents.

The key to the confusion of both Finkelstein and Rich Harris is that they fail to distinguish between innate characteristics and learnt behavior. Some examples of characteristics are intelligence, extroversion, shyness, propensity to addiction, laziness, mathematical ability and optimism. You get the idea and can probably add many more. Behaviour includes language, reading and writing (although how good you are is largely a characteristic) and mathematical knowledge.

Now it is true that you can learn from both parents and peers. It may also be true that you are more likely to learn from your peers than your parents. But Rich Harris is wrong to extend the ability of peers beyond imparting behavior to also shaping our innate characteristics. They can't. Environment (aside from diet) as almost no effect on them at all.

By assuming we can change people by changing their peer group, I fear Finkelstein will send us off on a wild goose chase as pointless as the nurture assumption.

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Could the Greeks Really Do Science?

Asking whether the ancient Greeks were any good at science might seem a silly question. After all, the conventional wisdom is that the Greeks invented science. But look a little more closely, and the Greek achievement is not quite as spectacular as it appears. Ask someone to name a scientific theory developed and proved by the Greeks and you may not get much of an answer.

Actually, there were a few genuine Greek scientific discoveries. Most important is Archimedes law of displacement and the work on statics that goes under his name. For instance, he knew how to calculate the mechanical advantage gained from a lever. Aristarchus of Samos famously suggested that earth goes around the sun, but the idea did not catch on. Eratosthenes’s measurement of the circumference of the earth is often brought up as a scientific achievement although he neither proposed a theory nor tested a hypothesis. I suppose you should say that proving the earth is a sphere is truly a scientific discovery, especially as early Greek natural philosophers doubted it.

Now the bad news. Greek medicine, both in general and in almost every specific was conceptually wrong and useless in practice. Greek astronomy and cosmology got almost nothing theoretically correct at all beyond the earth being a sphere and the light from the moon being a reflection from the sun. The basic principles of Greek kinematics and mechanics were erroneous and as a result everything derived from them was also false. Greek chemistry was devoid of any truth whatsoever and although many different atomic theories were suggested they never raised themselves to the status of a hypothesis. The ‘scientific method’ did not exist and the Greek alternative of ‘demonstration’ was incapable of generating natural knowledge.

None of this was the fault of the Greeks. The problem lay in the reasons they had for doing science. Almost none of the Greeks, certainly not Aristotle, did science for its own sake. They had no conception that discovering the way the world worked could be a good in itself. Rather, all science was at the service of philosophy and all theories about nature were intended to provide ballast for ethics. While medicine was practical, it was based on a holistic concept of man rather than the workings of the physical body.

So, no. The Greeks were not too hot when it came to science. And their mistakes took an extremely long time to shake off. Where they did excel was in the field of mathematics. There was a good reason for this. Greek thinkers considered the pure realm of numbers to be far superior to the tawdry material world. Thus, they devoted all their attention to it. It took Christianity and its belief in divinely-fashioned nature to re-orientate scientific attention towards reality.



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The Easterlin Paradox RIP

Back in 1974, the economist Richard Easterlin did some work on happiness. He gathered research from different countries asking people how contented they were and then compared the results to each country’s GDP per head. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that money can’t buy you happiness. Beyond a certain level, increased wealth made no difference to how content people were.

This became known as Easterlin paradox and has become one of the standard weapons with which to critique capitalism. Our absolute wealth did not seem to make us happy and being poorer than the neighbours made us miserable. A new Mercedes gave no joy if the Joneses next door had a Maserati. This idea has been developed further by left-wing thinkers to explain, for reasons beyond natural justice, why economic inequality is a bad idea. Reducing the gap between the rich and poor would actually cheer the country up. Oliver James, a pop-psychologist, took the idea to extremes in his book Affluenza, but being a psychologist of the old school didn’t bother supply any evidence.

Now it turns out that Easterlin paradox is an illusion based on poor data. A much larger survey have revealed a reasonably clear correlation between GDP per head and general happiness. It appears that money does make us feel better.

I have to admit that, despite being a conservative, I was disappointed to hear this. I liked the Easterlin paradox. It was the sort of counter-intuitive conclusion that I find intellectually satisfying. Secondly, it seemed good that money was not all it was cracked up to be. Still, there is hope. Although the Easterlin paradox may be no more, no one is saying that money is all you need for happiness. Family, friendship and intellectual enjoyment are as important as ever. And, if we are honest, the idea that economic growth is not a good thing is dangerous because it amounts to keeping people poor. Hopefully not even Oliver James will be daft enough to suggest that now.




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Are Atheists Cleverer than Theists?

Professor Richard Lynn thinks atheists are brighter than the Godly.

We’ve heard this sort of thing before, most especially that scientists tend to be less religious than non-scientists. This has always left me feeling a little confused as to how I became a Christian studying for a physics degree. Maybe I’m not a real scientist as my PhD is in an arts subject.

Dr Giles Fraser thinks Lynn’s argument is a front for racism. Fraser, sadly, has yet to recover the credibility he squandered when he claimed Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto was really about the Jews. Still, with Lynn he might have a point, as he is on record saying that black people are less clever that whites.

But I think Lynn might have a point (on religion rather than race). It seems to me that your average atheist is of above-average intelligence. He reads books by Dawkins and Sagan that do require a bit more in the way of brain cells than the football pages of the tabloid newspapers. Likewise, he is likely to have a reasonable education.

All of which only goes to prove the adage “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” For while I’m willing to concede that atheists may be brighter than the norm, they think they are a tribe of geniuses, which patently they are not. And, as Christopher Howse has pointed out, a few years ago many of our brightest academics were paid-up Marxists. Not the best of precedents, you might think.




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Is Religion a By-Product?

If anyone remembers the Darwin Wars, they will recall that one of the skirmishes centred around spandrels. These are triangular areas between arches, most obviously on the base of the dome of a church as a result of the way that the vaulting interacts with the columns holding it up. They make good places to put frescos or mosaics. Stephen Jay Gould argued that spandrels are by-products of the way churches are constructed. No one builds a church with the intention that it should contain spandrels, but when you have them you find they are useful display spaces.

Gould believed (correctly in my view) that evolution also throws up by-products of the body’s architecture that, once they have appeared, could be subject to natural selection. However, their actual appearance is essentially random. Gould went on to argue (less convincingly, in my view) that this means if you re-run evolutionary history, you would most likely get a very different result to the variety that we see today. The randomness of the spandrels would defeat the non-randomness of adaptation and give us another pattern of life to the one we see today.

Among the most vocal of opponents to Gould’s views were Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (the latter in chapter ten of his brilliant Darwin’s Dangerous Idea). Which makes their views about religion really very odd. Both of them have decided (in The God Delusion and Breaking the Spell) that religion actually is a spandrel. They believe it is a by-product (and an undesirable one at that) of useful evolutionary traits. Other atheists with access to the media are peddling the same idea.

Their arguments are pretty weak because no one seems to be able to agree about which evolutionary traits religion is a spandrel of. But is it possible for it to be a spandrel at all? Probably not. The essence of their criticism of Gould was that traits can only start off as spandrels. As soon as they exist, evolution can start acting on them. Only a trait that had absolutely no effect at all on an organism’s reproductive chances can be a true spandrel. Everyone agrees that religion has had a pretty big effect on the course of human history, so evolution must have had plenty of opportunity to act on it. And that being the case, it must be an adaptation or else evolution would have got rid of it.

So, religion at its earliest stage could well have been a by-product. But once it started to have an effect on human behaviour, it became a trait in its own right. That being the case, it is almost certainly a beneficial adaptation.



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The Violence of Communes

The New Guinea highlands were long thought to be an inaccessible and uninhabitable wilderness. Then, in the 1940s and 1950s, over-flying planes revealed that the highlands contained a patchwork of valleys full of farms and villages. Anthropologists learnt that the native people were Neolithic farmers who may have been one of the few peoples to have independently invented agriculture. each valley contained a tribe, ruled by its elders and engaged in some trade with the neighbours. It sounds quite idyllic, the noble savages of imagination, but this would be an illusion. The civilisation was blighted by endemic warfare. Because it was impossible to keep an army in the field for long, wars of conquest were out of the question. Nobody could annex the next-door valley, let alone found an Empire. Thus violence was restricted to low-level raiding and minor skirmishes year in and year out. These conflicts burnt up resources, not least human capital, and helped ensure that New Guinea highland society had not developed in the millennia since it was founded.

The pattern is repeated all over the world. The Mayans used to be the poster boys for peace-loving mezzo-Americans. Sadly, as Jared Diamond documents at many point in his book Collapse, it turns out they were constantly engaged in attacking the neighbours and making off with enemies for execution and sacrifice. In short, Thomas Hobbes was right. It is a romantic but false notion that human beings can live in small communes living in peaceful association with other small communes. Thousands of years of bitter experience show that we can’t.

I have previously suggested that religion is one of the major reasons that humans have been willing to gather themselves into larger groups, with the commensurate reduction in the level of everyday violence they encounter. This could be one of the reasons that natural selection has favoured religious behaviour in humans. It is, as atheists still can't quite accept, unlikely to be a by-product of another trait.


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