Interbane asked (Wed Mar 26, 2014 11:13 pm): "Muslims made contributions to science that were direct
Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2014 10:54 am
Dr. Trasancos responds: This is discussed in Chapter III, Section A, subsection vi "Arabia." They made notable and significant advances in translating Greek texts, building schools, and in medicine. However they did not make advances in any area that depended on physical laws of matter. They did not refute the errors of Aristotelian animism, which was based on the idea of a Great Year and that matter had a soul that sought its resting place.
Quote:
As the new religion codified in the Koran was imposed, a giant empire formed “steeped in the conviction that everything in life and in the cosmos depended on the sovereign will of a personal God, the Creator and Lord of all.” [202] The continual study of the Koran inspired intellectual curiosity among faithful Muslims, as did the meticulous scholarship of the Greek philosophical and scientific body of knowledge. [203] So serious was the promotion of knowledge that “Houses of Wisdom” were erected, notably in Baghdad (813– 833), Cairo (966), and in Cordova (961– 976). [204] Cordova amassed over 300,000 volumes for the library and immediately attracted scholars from the Christian West, who were welcomed with hospitality. [205] Chapter III, Section A, subsection vi, paragraph 2
He also asked: "I don't see how cyclical ideologies are supposed to have caused stillbirths. Much of nature is in fact cyclical. Why would this hamper understanding? Sure, there's correlation, but showing causation is a different animal."
The Greeks and the Muslims assumed, based on Aristotelian teaching, that falling bodies fell because of their soul's desire to seek a resting place.
Nature is cyclical, that appreciation is also found throughout the Bible as evidence of God's faithfulness. For non-biblical cultures, observation led to the conclusion that the universe must be cyclical too. It was a matter of faith in divine revelation to instead assert that time had an absolute beginning. By doing so, the Christian scholars refuted the physical error of Aristotle and questioned whether terrestrial and celestial matter moved by physical laws that could be quantified, rather than by their souls seeking rest.
Quote:
Aristotle asserted that if two bodies were dropped from the same height at the same time, the one with twice the weight of the other one would fall twice as fast because it had twice the nature and twice the desire to do so. [190] Even though simple observation would prove that false, the hold on the mind of the Greeks of this animistic orthodoxy would not allow it. The Greeks thought of motion as a function of the magnitude, a “striving,” in nature for objects living and non-living. Aristotle dismissed the idea of unresisted motion as unreal or over-abstract. [191] This orthodoxy caused even a genius like Aristotle to be so wrong about the free fall of objects. It is perplexing that no one noticed this falsehood in daily life, not just among the ancient Greeks but, as will be discussed later, among those who followed Aristotle’s orthodoxy into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as well. These views were—as has been noted in the Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, and Babylonian cultures already— the result of pantheism. Chapter III, Section A, subsection vi, paragraph 8