[Buddha-l] science #2

[Dan Lusthaus]

(CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS MESSAGE)

> > Of the more than 800 hits you will find on Amazon.com if you search
> > there for "Islamic science"
>
> Which proves that even Amazon.com is capable of making category
> mistakes,

Here is where you get silly. The issue is not how search engines work, but
the sources and information they make available to you and your judicious
use of that. I recommended several books on Islamic science, something you
seem disinterested in learning more about because you have already concluded
that the term Islamic science is an oxymoron.

Since you seem to have no intention of investigating Islamic science on your
own, let me at least suggest why it's not an oxymoron and give a least of
suggestion of what its contours might be like.

1. First, the bifurcation you are insisting on maintaining between science
on the one hand, and various religions on the other, is one forged in the
late Middle Ages and consolidated during the Renaissance. The particular
version of the bifurcation you are promoting solidified in the 19th c. -- by
which time it had consolidated with the Liberal political theories evolved
from Hobbes, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, et al.

As we all know, scientific theories (Galileo, Copernicus, etc.), especially
those with cosmological components, began to come in conflict with the
Church and its authoritarian exclusive control of cosmological thought. The
Church had encouraged "science" and "reason" up to that point (and vestiges
of that can still be found in current Catechisms -- alongside insistence on
the "mysteries"). The result: Faith and Reason (or intellect) parted
company. Luther virtually absolutized Faith; so for a European Christian ,
whether Catholic or Protestant, doing "science" and religion entered a
dangerous and testy period (and many inclined to the spiritual side
incubated a full blown rhetoric condemining "thinking," logic, reasoning,
science, technology as "unspiritual" -- which curiously has been transferred
by the Western mind into its image of Zen and "mystical East"; how many
eager students come to Buddhism seeking escape from logical thinking, and
most of our university offerings shield them from serious encounters with
Dharmakirti, letting them at most play with Nagarjuna as a mystic who can be
a partner in their condemnation of reason -- though Nagarjuna himself was a
hypo-rationalist... prasangika is impossible otherwise). All this is well
known.

What is probably less well known is that the development of the scientific
challenge in the 15th and 16th century -- in part due to the infusion of
Jewish scientists and the translation into Latin of Islamic and Jewish
scientific works (ironically the Inquisition in Spain -- 1492 -- led
eventually to a dispersal of Jews and Jewish learning into parts of
Europe -- not simply coincidentally precisely those parts, such as Italy,
Poland, Amsterdam, etc., where cabals of Christians studying with Jews
developed -- and the translation work allowed to disseminate even to places
where Jews themselves were forbidden to live, such as Britain, whose own
fortunes changed once Jews were readmitted in the 17th c.) produced a
different result amongst Jewish communities than it had amongst Christians.
While Christians largely drew a line between faith and reason, the Jewish
response was to consolidate, and in some significant ways, freeze and
overemphasize Halakhah (Jewish Law, the equivalent of Sharia in Islam).
Faith per se was not the issue, nor was there either a condemnation of
science or intellect. Why?

There are many reasons, but for our purposes the most significant is the
following:

>From its inception the Rabbinic tradition drew a different bifurcation. The
Talmud and its contents (and by extension, the hermeneutics with which the
Bible itself was studied) were divided into two very different types of
content:

1. Halakhah (the commandments, i.e., the ethical injunctions, rules of
living, etc.), and
2. Aggadah (stories, myths, speculations, homiletics, etc.)

Halakhah was considered binding. That is, for instance, the rules for
observing the Sabbath, against usury, regulating marriage and divorce,
ritual observances, property rights, and so on, were inviolable and to be
followed. In other words, the stress had always been on ethics, not
ontology, cosmology, or even theology.

Aggadah -- which included speculation about creation, Kabbalistic and
non-Kabbalistic speculations, and, in effect, all non-Halakhic portions -- 
was NOT binding. One could believe or not believe any of these theories or
ideas. Rather than insisting on a compulsion to adhere to one theory or
another, the ethos was to devise perpetually new interpretations, new
aggadah, new derash (the Hebrew term for this, which observant Jews continue
to do every Sabbath).

So the scientific challenge was easily assimilated as just one more derash,
and thus not intellectually threatening. What was threatened was adherence
to the halakhic lifestyle, a threat eventually exascerbated in subsequent
centuries when Jews were finally liberated from the ghettos, entering the
social mileau of Christian lifestyles so that halakhic living was no longer
reinforced by tight-knit communities. However, no Jew had to choose BETWEEN
being Jewish and being a scientist, especially since already through the
Middle Ages many of the leading Jewish scholars had already been comfortably
blended science and other philosophical and religious endeavors. For
instance, Gersonides' (1288-1344) astronomical theories already at that time
insisted (with mathematical and observational proofs) that the contemporary
estimates of the expanse of space in the universe were severely
underestimated. So the sorts of discoveries made by Galileo and Copernicus,
et al., were exciting, not shocking, and hardly unprecedented in terms of
intellectual interest.

I've gone into this so as to get the second point:

2. Again, in contrast to what, especially post-Augustine, had become
mainstream Christianity, mainstream Jewish and Islamic thinkers celebrated
the following axiom:

If God is the creator of the universe, then, just as creation reflects the
nature of its creator, the world concretely -- and in accessible ways -- 
reflects the nature of God, who otherwise in many ways is concretely
inaccessible. Thus physics, chemistry, biology, geology, etc., reveal
secrets about God. The laws of physics or chemistry reveal laws and
principles from the mind of their creator.

Some even went so far as to argue that God's real miracles are not
suspension of natural laws, but, on the contrary, the fact that there are
natural laws and that they are universal, invariably consistent, and
perpetual. The miracle, in other words, is that there is order, invariant
principles which can be shown operating anywhere and everywhere.

Thus, doing science (i.e., chemistry, physics, etc.), far from being an
unreligious pursuit, or something done in spite of or apart from one's
religious telos, was the highest order of religious pursuit. To understand
the universe through science was to gain a greater knowledge of its creator.

Another axiom, corollary to this, was:

Such-and-such a fact is not true because it is Jewish (or Islamic), rather
it is Jewish (or Islamic) because it is true.

Current creationists and Intelligent Design advocates have turned that
upside down.

What sort of science did these Jewish and Islamic scientists produce? Very
good science. Islamic scientists knew that fossils of sea shells could be
found on mountain tops. They didn't speculate that Allah put them there to
confound non-believers, but speculated with ideas not dissimilar in
principle to plate techtonics. They knew, in other words, that these
mountains had once been under water (some blamed it on the "flood," but the
better ones rejected such theories).

A compelling argument could be made that what held some of these scientists
back was not their Jewish or Islamic orientation, which, on the contrary,
motivated and encouraged them, but rather the Aristotelean "sciences" (by
which I mean ptolemaic astronomy, etc, not just Aristotle proper), but
that's an issue for another day.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Dan Lusthaus