Why are they Blaming Al-Ghazali for the Decline of Moslem Science?

Here is a strange YouTube video of  part of the first day's session from this conference. Steven Weinberg blames this man for Islamic civilization turning against the very idea of natural laws. Neil DeGrasse Tyson quotes him as saying that "mathematics is the work of the devil".

Weinberg's specific example of Al-Ghazali dissing the very idea of natural law is the following, which I quote from here:

Discussing the example that when fire touches a ball of cotton it causes it to combust, Al-Ghazâlî writes about the First Position that the fire alone causes combustion:

This [position] is one of those that we deny. Rather we say that the efficient cause (fâ’il) of the combustion through the creation of blackness in the cotton and through causing the separation of its parts and turning it into coal or ashes is God—either through the mediation of the angels or without mediation.

In other words, cotton is carbonized by fire because Allah wants cotton to be carbonized by fire.

It should have occurred to Weinberg that maybe Al-Ghazali is stating his own version of the Problem of Induction along with his solution to the problem. Just because something has always happened, there is no purely logical reason to expect it to keep on happening. Al-Ghazali's solution is that Allah prefers a universe that is not capricious (or, if you want to allow for miracles, a universe that is almost never capricious). You don't even have to be a theist to propose the problem. Here is how Bertrand Russell the agnostic stated the problem:

The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken. 

The Problem of Induction is more of a metaphysical problem than a physical problem. Al-Ghazali had no problem with scientific research. He just viewed it as discovery of Allah's will, rather than discovery of natural law.

I did not succeed in using Google to find out where Al-Gazali said what Tyson said he said about mathematics. Al-Ghazali had no problem with mathematics. His problem seems to have been with non-believing mathematicians. If your cynical neighbor doesn't believe, you can just ignore him. But if your neighbor is also a mathematician who has been trained in logic, you might be misled to think that your neighbor has disproved the existence of Allah as rigorously as he proves mathematical theorems.

I thought I had also seen a YouTube video in which Tyson quotes the cotton carbonization example, but now I can't find it.


Weinberg and Tyson are scientists, not historians, not philosophers, and not theologians, so they probably learned about Al-Ghazali only from tertiary sources like this one.

So why did Islamic science wither? I suspect that the cause was not intellectual, but rather sociological. There was something in Islamic society that led the believers to favor an obscurantist misunderstanding of Al-Ghazali. 

Biblical Evidence for Crypto-Pagans

Over the centuries, when Jews have been forced to convert to other religions (usually Christianity), some of the converts continued to practice Judaism secretly. (If you weren't aware of that, you can start making up the deficit in your knowledge by reading this Wikipedia article.)

What is less widely appreciated is that in Biblical times there were crypto-pagans among the Jews.

The clearest Biblical evidence for this is the Book of Esther. The idea that the story of Esther is a pagan story is not new. God doesn't appear in the story at all, and the names "Mordecai" and "Esther" have uncanny resemblances to the names of the two main gods of the Babylonian pantheon, Marduk and Ishtar.

Here is my conjecture. (It may not be original, but I haven't seen it on Google.) In early second Temple times there was a group of Jews who secretly worshiped the Babylonian gods. They preserved their myths of Marduk and Ishtar in a disguised form as a story about two Jews named Mordecai and Esther. Every Adar 14th they had a carnival-style party. When their neighbors inquired, they told them their tradition of the Purim story. The neighbors thought that was a cool idea and joined the celebration, and the idea spread.

The other Biblical story with pagan roots is the story, in the Book of Judges, of Samson. The Book of Judges reads like somebody in late first Temple times collected all the stories he could find about the era of the Judges and wrote them down to promote his agenda, that life under the Monarchy was better than the anarchy that had preceded it. Hence the recurring refrain,

In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

The story of Samson is tacked on towards the end, just for the sake of completeness. Like the story of Esther, the story of Samson looks very much like disguised pagan mythology, invented by a group of crypto-pagans to shelter themselves from persecution, starting with the name "Samson" ("Shimshon" in Hebrew, from "Shemesh" = Sun) and his miraculous birth. What the real meaning of the stories is is necessarily conjectural. One interpretation that I saw a long time ago, is here. There is another one here.

Update on Samson 31/1/22

 The Samson story includes an episode in which he tied burning torches to the tails of 300 foxes to burn down Phillistine crops, as an act of revenge. Recently I found out about something that took place during the Roman Cerealia festival. They used to tie burning torches to the tails of foxes and then release the foxes in the Circus Maximus. There has got to be some kind of connection there.