David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

And now a question: Does the Koran commend the study of the natural world? And an answer: It does. “At the last Judgment,” the Turkish devout Said Nursî remarked, “the ink spent by scholars is equal to the blood of martyrs.” But those scholars celebrated at the last judgment were apt to be scholars of religion and so bound by the inerrancy of the Koran. “Allah turns over the night and the day,” reads a well-known Koranic verse, “most surely there is a lesson in this for those who have sight” (24.44). It is hardly surprising that Moslem mathematicians and astronomers, from the late seventh to the early fifteenth century, regarded their scientific curiosity, on those occasions when they were called upon to justify it, as if their scientific pursuits comprised an exercise calculated to increase their devotion.

But of all the human emotions, curiosity is the one least subject to the general proscription against gluttony, and once engaged, even if engaged initially in the service of religion, it has a tendency to grow relentlessly, until in the end the scholar becomes curious about the nature of revelation itself. The more encompassing the scope of scholarship, the more open to doubt the scholar becomes, so that in the end only curiosity remains indisputably of value. This is true whether the object of curiosity is religion or science.

Writing in 1420 or 1430, the astronomer Ulugh Beg described science in a way that suggests nothing of the martyr’s blood. “Intellects are in agreement,” he wrote, “and minds are in accord as to the excellence of science and the worthiness of scientists.” By “science,” Ulugh Beg meant observation—the power of the eye, aided by various instruments, to see. The benefits conferred by sight are very often matters of self-improvement. “Science sharpens the intellect and strengthens it; it increases sagacity, and augments perspicacity.” But benefits transcend the personal. Those sciences whose principles are “indisputable and self-evident” have the merit of being “common to people of different religions,” Ulugh Beg affirmed.

These sentiments are entirely modern. They might well have been expressed by a committee of the National Science Foundation. They were expressed by a committee of the National Science Foundation: “Science extends and enriches our lives, expands our imagination and liberates us from the bonds of ignorance and superstition.” They are on display in every high school textbook.

And there is hardly any reason to suppose them true.

It is a point that did not fail to escape the notice of the most perceptive of the Arab philosophers, the gazelle, Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazâli. Writing with remarkable pre-science about the scientists he called naturalists, and this in the eleventh century, Al Ghazâli was quite prepared to admit that their studies served to reveal “the wonders of creation.” No one “can make a careful study of anatomy and the wonderful uses of the members and organs [of the human body] without attaining to the necessary knowledge that there is a perfection in the order which the framer gave to the animal frame, and especially to that of man.”

At once, Al Ghazâli withdraws the commendation that he has just offered. A complicated inference is set in play. The naturalists argue, he observes, that “intellectual power in man is dependent on [his] temperament.” It is a point that neurophysiologists would today make by arguing that the mind (or the soul) is dependent on the brain, or even that the mind is the brain. From this it follows that “as the temperament is corrupted, intellect is also corrupted and ceases to exist. ” When the brain is destroyed, so, too, the mind. Death and disease mark the end of the mind. On the naturalistic view, Al Ghazâli argues, “the soul dies and does not return to life.” The globe of consciousness shrinks in each of us until it is no larger than a luminous point, and then it winks out.

But if this is a matter of fact, Al Ghazâli argues, it is a matter of profound scientific and moral consequence. Why should a limited and finite organ such as the human brain have the power to see into the heart of matter or mathematics? These are subjects that have nothing to do with the Darwinian business of scrabbling up the greasy pole of life. It is as if the liver, in addition to producing bile, were to demonstrate an unexpected ability to play the violin. This is a question that Darwinian biology has not yet answered. By the same token, to place in doubt the survival of the soul is to “deny the future life—heaven, hell, resurrection, and judgment.” And this is to corrupt the system of justice by which life must be regulated, because “there does not remain any reward for obedience, or any punishment for sin.”

With this curb removed, Al Ghazâli predicts, men and women will give way to “a bestial indulgence of their appetites.”

As he so often does, Al Ghazâli has managed to express a very complex current of anxiety common not only in the Moslem world but in the world at large.

If it is hardly unknown, this medieval Arabic anxiety, it no longer controls the moral imagination in any secular society. It does not control mine and I suppose it does not control yours either. A great many men and women do suspect that scientific curiosity, if unchecked, might be a dangerous force. Like any dangerous force, scientific curiosity is dangerous because in the end it turns upon itself. The stories both of Faust and Frankenstein suggest that this is so. But a bestial indulgence of appetite? This is not a phrase, nor does it evoke an idea, that anyone in the West now finds plausible. Quite the contrary. It is religion, Christopher Hitchens claims, that is dangerous, because it is “the cause of dangerous sexual repression.” Short of gender insensitivity, what could be more dangerous than dangerous sexual repression? Among the commandments that Richard Dawkins proposes as replacements for the original ten, the first encourages men and women “to enjoy [their] own sex lives so long as it damages nobody else.” What Hector Avalos has called “the Enlightenment project” of allowing men and women to regulate their own conduct by means “reason and experience” may in the early twenty-first century have led to a certain tastelessness in public entertainment, but what of it?

Worse things have happened.

The conviction that in Western Europe and the United States nothing worse has happened is one reason that so many scientific atheists affirm that they are of the Enlightenment party. It is a party everyone is eager to join, Noam Chomsky because he is a “child” of the Enlightenment, the rest of us because for the moment, there are no other parties at all.

Children of the Enlightenment do not, of course, dwell overly on the dreadful acts undertaken in its name when the Enlightenment first became a living historical force in France: all perished, all—/Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks, /Head after head, and never heads enough /For those that bade them fall.

Why should the sins of the fathers be visited on their children?

For scientists persuaded that there is no God, there is no finer pleasure than recounting the history of religious brutality and persecution. Sam Harris is in this regard especially enthusiastic, The End of Faith recounting in lurid but lingering detail the methods of torture used in the Spanish Inquisition. If readers require pertinent information concerning the strappado, or other instruments of doctrinal persuasion, they may turn to his pages. There is no need to argue the point. A great deal of human suffering has been caused by religious fanaticism. If the Inquisition no longer has the power to compel our indignation, the Moslem world often seems quite prepared to carry the burden of exuberant depravity in its place.