Would enlightenment have happened in Europe without Islam?

[Horatio Parker]

I think you have to look even further back.

The first university, the Universoty of Paris, was established so that texts out of Moslem Spain could be studied under Church supervision.

When the Academy was closed in 529, many of the scholars and texts made their way east, returning to Europe via the Moslem conquest of Spain.

 

[steve_bank]

Interesting thought. I agree.

At one point Persia and Arabia was the place to be in science. There was a PBS show on the topic.

Throughout history science goes where the money is. Science flowed from the Mid Eas to Europe.

You can see the influence in art and music.

One problem for Islam was a fear of printing presses making errors in the Koran which limited propagation into Europe.

Newton used Persian astronomical data in his synthesis of mechanics. Most of the underlying ideas that became the calculus were in print along with formulations of Newton's Laws.

In Europe science led to technology which led to efficiency which led to leisure time for thinkers to debate and write.

 

[Politesse]

So, wasn't the scientific climate of the Persians was already very strong and not greatly pushed around by religious concerns?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fe2oe/what_percentage_of_the_islamic_golden_age_was/

Also, gotta say that the Persian language sounds really cool and Arabic sounds aggressive as hell. Kind of like French vs German or Dutch.

Well, half of that is true! The ancient magi were no slouches at social control either.

 

[Politesse]

Interesting thought. I agree.

At one point Persia and Arabia was the place to be in science. There was a PBS show on the topic.

Throughout history science goes where the money is. Science flowed from the Mid Eas to Europe.

You can see the influence in art and music.

One problem for Islam was a fear of printing presses making errors in the Koran which limited propagation into Europe.

True facts, though the book did eventually migrate all the same. It's known that Martin Luther, though no friend to Muslims, saw their coming as the will of God (ie. punishing the prostituted Church), and was among the first Christian theologians to seriously study the Qur'an in Latin translation. More than that, he pushed to have it reprinted and put into wider circulation in 1543.

 

[steve_bank]

In the show which was made in Venice an old book in a Venetian library was shown. It was a businessman's guide to doing business with Muslims. Etiquettes and protocols.

I read a book about technology in the ancient world. When the Europeans were still slapping with their animals and pissing in the streets, Arabs and Persians were fairly sophisticated. Persia had an observatory that was the place to be for astronomy. Dormitories and lecture halls.

Water aqueducts powered by windmills. Hospitals and sanitary living, at least in relative terms. A domed house with an opening at the top and a tunnel leading up into the house. The Venturi effect off air flowing over the dome creted low pressure in the house drawing cool air through the tunnel.

I believe it was the 18th century wren conflict broke out in Islam in the Ottoman's between rationalists and fundamentalists. Science lost out and there was a purge.

I read two books on Islam. Up to a point in history Islam was generally like Jews and Christians. A diversity of thought and interpretations. The Koran translation I read dated to around 1900 by a Muslim who we today call a moderate. He saw no conflict between religion and science, they deal with different domains.

 

[rjh01]

I thought the enlightenment happened because of the printing press. Books became a lot cheaper so anyone could read what a few wise men knew about and not just depend on those few wise men teaching them personally.

 

[steve_bank]

There had to be enough leisure time and excess wealth to support philosohpers and intellectuals.

 

[DBT]

Excess wealth appeared to be a specialty of the Church.

 

[ronburgundy]

Why the Reformation? Maybe indirectly by the violence and wars that it caused. The Reformation essentially made Christianity *more crazy*. Luther was explicitly against using reason, and opened the door for modern fundamentalist Christianity.

You seem to think the enlightenment happened in spite of the Reformation.

My point was that the logjam of thought maintained by the church was broken. That some thoughts or beliefs went the other way i.e. crazier is beside the point.

These are good points. Luther's Reformation and the resulting Protestantism was largely anti-science and anti-intellectual, but that was because it was anti-Catholic and the Church controlled learning and scholarship. So, if one was going to attack the legitimacy of Church authority while still treating the Bible itself as valid truth, then promoting a more emotionally based non-intellectual populist form of Christianity made sense.

Thus, even though Protestantism was and still is an ideological/philosophical enemy of reason and enlightenment values, it served to weaken the power of the Church which benefited all the Churches enemies, including intellectual progress. It is analogous to how Stalin helped the West defeat the Nazis by fighting them on a different front, even though Stalin and the Soviet Union he would create were philosophically antithetical to the West.

Protestantism lacks a centralized social/political authority other than the Bible itself. So, while deference to the Bible and rejection of reason make Protestantism inherently anti-intellectual, it's lack of a mechanism to impose that viewpoint in an authoritarian way has prevented it from being the stopgap against post-Enlightenment progress that it's leaders and strongest adherents wish it could be.

 

[steve_bank]

Why the Reformation? Maybe indirectly by the violence and wars that it caused. The Reformation essentially made Christianity *more crazy*. Luther was explicitly against using reason, and opened the door for modern fundamentalist Christianity.

You seem to think the enlightenment happened in spite of the Reformation.

My point was that the logjam of thought maintained by the church was broken. That some thoughts or beliefs went the other way i.e. crazier is beside the point.

These are good points. Luther's Reformation and the resulting Protestantism was largely anti-science and anti-intellectual, but that was because it was anti-Catholic and the Church controlled learning and scholarship. So, if one was going to attack the legitimacy of Church authority while still treating the Bible itself as valid truth, then promoting a more emotionally based non-intellectual populist form of Christianity made sense.

Thus, even though Protestantism was and still is an ideological/philosophical enemy of reason and enlightenment values, it served to weaken the power of the Church which benefited all the Churches enemies, including intellectual progress. It is analogous to how Stalin helped the West defeat the Nazis by fighting them on a different front, even though Stalin and the Soviet Union he would create were philosophically antithetical to the West.

Protestantism lacks a centralized social/political authority other than the Bible itself. So, while deference to the Bible and rejection of reason make Protestantism inherently anti-intellectual, it's lack of a mechanism to impose that viewpoint in an authoritarian way has prevented it from being the stopgap against post-Enlightenment progress that it's leaders and strongest adherents wish it could be.

Nice dissertation.

 

[Trausti]

Why the Reformation? Maybe indirectly by the violence and wars that it caused. The Reformation essentially made Christianity *more crazy*. Luther was explicitly against using reason, and opened the door for modern fundamentalist Christianity.

You seem to think the enlightenment happened in spite of the Reformation.

My point was that the logjam of thought maintained by the church was broken. That some thoughts or beliefs went the other way i.e. crazier is beside the point.

These are good points. Luther's Reformation and the resulting Protestantism was largely anti-science and anti-intellectual

Oh, I don't know. Newton and Faraday were quite religious.

 

[DBT]

Maybe they kept their faith separate from their work in science?

 

[Politesse]

Maybe they kept their faith separate from their work in science?

Not by their own accounts.

 

[Tharmas]

There are those who argue the opposite - that Protestantism was essential to the formation of modern science. This article (extract/abstract only) gives two possible interpretations, a "strong" or "weak" influence. An abbreviated discussion of the complexities of the relationship between religion(s) and science can be found in the Wiki article:  Relationship_between_religion_and_science. It's not a simple question.

 

[bilby]

Newton was quite a kook - he believed in all sorts of woo, in particular in alchemy.

It never seemed to occur to him that the ideas he had in which gods were not required worked far better than the ones in which they played a central role; Which just goes to show that even very smart people can be incredibly obtuse when it comes to questioning their less well supported beliefs.

In fact, most celebrated geniuses in the history of science were only successful as specialists - people who had one groundbreaking idea, or a set of related spectacular successes, but who made similar boobs and pratfalls to everyone else, in every other area of their lives. This was particularly noticeable prior to the 20th Century, when polymaths were a commonplace, and it was quite possible for a person to know literally everything that was known, in a wide range of disparate fields. The explosion of new scientific understandings since the Great War has rendered this impossible, and it is now rare for any scientist to have deep knowledge of fields other than his own.

Of course, failures and errors never got a lot of fame in most cases - scientific failures and abandoned hypotheses rarely achieve much attention unless they are very widely accepted before being proven to be in error. And public opinion tends to want to put people into boxes - once a genius, always a genius. But that's not how reality works. A well regarded and brilliant scientist is no more immune from error in a new field than a colleague who has never achieved any notable successes.

The notable thing about religious scientists today is that they are always convinced that the areas in which they specialize don't require divine intervention - while remaining confident that in areas outside their speciality, such intervention is quite possible, and even commonplace. 'Obviously gods are not needed to explain the fluid dynamics in cumulonimbus cloud formations peripheral to tropical cyclones', a meteorological physicist might say; 'But there's no way that life could possibly arise without a divine creator'.

 

[J842P]

Maybe they kept their faith separate from their work in science?

Not at all, at least not Newton. He was also very big into alchemy.

Reading up on it now, he may not have been too public about his particular beliefs because they would have been very heretical at the time.

 

[bilby]

Maybe they kept their faith separate from their work in science?

Not at all, at least not Newton. He was also very big into alchemy.

Reading up on it now, he may not have been too public about his particular beliefs because they would have been very heretical at the time.

He grew up during the Commonwealth Protectorate (He was born in the year the Civil War started, and was eight years old when it ended with the execution of King Charles I) a time when republicanism was considered an excellent thing in England, and puritanism was flourishing, particularly in London and amongst the intelligentsia. But in his early 20s, the monarchy was restored, rendering republicanism (and to a lesser extent, puritanism) highly dangerous ideas.

As a politically as well as intellectually savvy individual, he would have been very adept at not discussing religion or politics in the wrong circles - and simultaneously at not failing to express the 'right' opinions on these subjects when it was required or expected of him.

An astonishing number of people in the late 1660s were declaring publicly and loudly how they had always and implacably hated the Protectorate, Cromwell, and excessive puritanism (while still eschewing any hint of popery) throughout the '40s and '50s. Indeed, if you take the surviving documents from the period as being typical, it is almost impossible to imagine how Cromwell failed to be instantly deposed in 1650, given how much everyone hated him. It's almost as though they were in fact mostly supporters of the Lord Protector, but were smart enough not to say so - and to burn any paperwork that might say otherwise.

The reality is that during his time in power, Cromwell was hugely popular. But finding his former supporters after the restoration was like tring to find a Nazi in Germany in 1946. Everyone knew of others who were devoted to the cause, but nobody would admit to having done so themselves.

This delicate political and theological environment would have been difficult to navigate, and renders all but the most private of papers and diaries from the time highly suspect as sources of information about any person's true beliefs.

Newton was able to be more forthright later in his life, but his experiences as a young man no doubt shaped his thinking. The 1640s in particular were a time of wild and outrageous theological, political, and social ideas, as control completely broke down during the war. Who know what ideas Newton was exposed to before his eighth birthday, when most people form their firmest religious convictions. Those first eight years were a time of theological chaos not seen in England since the end of the Roman period.

It would almost be a shock if Newton had NOT held some seriously strange theological positions.

 

[DBT]

Maybe they kept their faith separate from their work in science?

Not by their own accounts.

How does theology help when it comes to doing science? It appears difficult to argue that it was Newtons religious beliefs that enabled his discoveries in Science.

 

[steve_bank]

The RCC had a stranglehold on education. If you had nothing you could become a cleric and get an education. The RCC was an odd mix of religion and pragmatic science as long as it conformed to theology. IMO the reformation ended the RCC monopoly on what got taught.

Descartes was educated by Jesuits.

As to kooks I read a short set of bios in Sci American of the more well known physicists. They all had idiosyncrasies including AE.

 

[bilby]

The RCC had a stranglehold on education. If you had nothing you could become a cleric and get an education. The RCC was an odd mix of religion and pragmatic science as long as it conformed to theology. IMO the reformation ended the RCC monopoly on what got taught.

Descartes was educated by Jesuits.

As to kooks I read a short set of bios in Sci American of the more well known physicists. They all had idiosyncrasies including AE.

By the time of Newton's birth, The RCC had been out of power in England for almost a century, most of which time they had spent as a severely persecuted minority. The Civil War that broke out in the year Newton was born was in part precipitated by the King taking a Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria; This led to (untrue) rumours that the King himself was considering convertion to Catholicism, which would have had the potential to destroy the Church of England of which he was the head.

Nobody in Newton's England was educated by Roman Catholics - except in secret, and under serious threat of torture and death if discovered. And by the time of his birth, that had been the case in England for the whole of anyone's living memory.

Doesn't anyone care about history anymore? It's not kept secret; These things are easy to find out. And not everything that happened in the past happened at the same time or place.