6 votes

Forging Islamic science

3 comments

  1. [3]
    patience_limited
    Link
    Predominantly Islamic nations made unquestionable contributions to the world's body of scientific and technical knowledge. While sciences in Western nations were developed at least partly through...

    Predominantly Islamic nations made unquestionable contributions to the world's body of scientific and technical knowledge. While sciences in Western nations were developed at least partly through opposition to religious doctrine, there were concurrent periods in the Islamic world where they were explicitly sanctioned by religious heads of state.

    In the context of current right-wing attempts to promote "Western" cultural supremacy, and the prior Tildes post about the EU essentially abandoning the Turkish integration project, it's interesting to see what amounts to counterpropaganda for claiming a modernistic identity.

    3 votes
    1. [2]
      bee
      Link Parent
      Can you explain your reasoning for holding this opinion? I'm just curious, as I haven't really seen a point where science has been developed in opposition to the common western religions, apart...

      While sciences in Western nations were developed at least partly through opposition to religious doctrine [...]

      Can you explain your reasoning for holding this opinion? I'm just curious, as I haven't really seen a point where science has been developed in opposition to the common western religions, apart from Galileo and the Catholic Church.

      1. patience_limited
        Link Parent
        There's some controversy over the degree to which Christian religion has supported or interfered with progress in science throughout history, aside from relatively modern disputes about...

        There's some controversy over the degree to which Christian religion has supported or interfered with progress in science throughout history, aside from relatively modern disputes about evolutionary theory and geological dating. It's proper to say that every major science tradition has faced an historical balancing act among religious doctrine, cultural norms, politics, and scientific study.

        Both Arabic and European scientific traditions drew heavily on pre-Christian Greco-Roman scholarship at the outset. Around the 12th Century, at the same time the Islamic Golden Age was being undermined by Mongol invasions, the beginning of institutional scientific scholarship, often within Catholic monastic/scholastic traditions, was occurring in medieval Europe.

        In at least one set of Catholic pronouncements, certain theoretical explorations were deemed heretical, and banned.. However, the ultimate effect was to break free from the grip of Aristotelian dogmas in favor of further exploration.

        It's known that [Andreas Vesalius, studying human anatomy in the 16th Century, was subject to the death penalty for grave-robbing and dissecting human cadavers, an institutional religious hold-over from Greek and Roman taboos on human dissection.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462973/)

        The intimate historical relationships among European progress in sciences, the medieval period, Enlightenment, and the Reformation are still being explored; historiography of science is a relatively recent academic development.

        1 vote