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.