On July 8 2018 the neuroscientist and New Atheist luminary, Sam Harris, sat down for an interview with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. In the course of their conversation Shapiro argued that western values are derived from Judeo-Christian roots. Harris disputed this and, in doing so, presented a sustained six minutes of total pseudo historical gibberish. Shapiro’s grasp of history was little better and neither did a particularly good job of making their case, but Harris’ string of historical howlers is typical and shows, yet again, why atheists should not get their history from scientists.

Sam Harris is, of course, one of the original “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism; along with Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. He remains one of the more active and outspoken of the anti-theistic polemicists, and is author of the bestselling non-fiction books The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, and Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Most of his arguments are standard secular humanist fare, though he draws on his neuroscience background as the basis for his moral philosophy and is rather less tolerant of Islam in any form than some more politically progressive atheists find comfortable. What Harris definitely is not is an authority on history and in the places in his books where he strays onto matters historical, it becomes clear his grasp rarely rises above the level of popular cliches, as we will see. Ben Shapiro is a conservative columnist and commentator with a Harvard law degree, who contributes to The Daily Wire website and hosts his own podcast radio show The Ben Shapiro Show. His interview with Harris was part of the “Sunday Special” interview series for The Daily Wire.

Harris and Shapiro are on opposite sides of many political and ideological issues and at around 22 minutes into the interview Shapiro questions Harris on the basis for morality, argues that a Judeo-Christian foundation is essential for “a civilisation that values human rights above the values of the collective, that says that people are to be treated, to use the Biblical phrase, as ‘made in the image of God'” and says “that does not happen in the absence of a Judeo-Christian value system” (20.52 mins). He goes on to say this is a historical argument and that therefore this is why, historically, “the West and Western Civilisation crop up in a Judeo-Christian system, but do not in, for example, crop up in Islamic countries” (21.33 mins). This is a highly dubious argument on several levels and Harris, not surprisingly, rejects this line of reasoning, but he then tries to use historical arguments to make his case. And this is where things go horribly wrong. It is worth quoting the ensuing 6.23 minutes of dialogue in full before taking each of the historical howlers Harris presents in turn:

(Begins 22.25 mins)

Harris: You could say that Christianity in particular was responsible for … in part responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire. Christianity undermined the notion that the Roman emperor was a god. It made it harder to recruit true soldiers and they had to farm it out to mercenaries. And it eroded what you might call ‘traditional Roman values’ and then the Western Empire fell and we ushered in the Dark Ages. And insofar as there was a reboot to civilisation at that point, it was largely as a result of Classical … the learning and philosophical insight of antiquity being preserved by, of all people, the Muslims.’

Shapiro: The Islamic world. Right.

Harris: So, I think it’s … you can have it any way you want looking at history, but it just doesn’t get you there in terms of the moral content and, in this case, the political and social content coming from the Bible or any other religious text.

Shapiro: So why here? Why in Judeo-Christian civilisation but not Islamic civilisation, because you mentioned the rediscovery of Aristotle and the reason of Aristotle in the tenth and eleventh centuries … was really beginning in the Islamic world long before Aquinas really repopularised it in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Harris: Well one I think it’s … from one point of view it’s impossible to ignore the influence of Islam. Islam is its own ideology and set of dogmatisms that are inflexible and at odds with the spirit of science, fundamentally, and despite the fact there was a brief period where there seemed to be some happy convergence between scientific and mathematical insight and Islam, for the most part Islam has been hostile to real intellectual life in the way that Christianity was hostile even when the scientific world view was struggling to be born in the sixteenth century … the fifteenth century. What we have historically is a real war of ideas … crystallised in the moment when Galileo was shown the instruments of torture and put under house arrest by people who refused to look through his telescope. So that was the genius of religion compared with the emerging genius of science in that room.

Shapiro: Well to be fair Galileo was originally sponsored by the Church and so was Copernicus. But there is no question there was a backlash by the Church to this stuff.

Harris: Yes, and the backlash makes sense because there is an intellectual progress on questions of how the cosmos is organised or where it came from or how life began. All of these questions are … scientific answers to which are in zero sum contest with the doctrines found in the books. Its true there are religious people and now even the Pope who have relaxed their adherence to tradition enough to make room for something like evolution. It is still a problem.

Shapiro: Not a super new idea. Aquinas was talking about this in the thirteenth century … fourteenth century … the idea that if it was in science and it was contradicted by the Book then you’re misreading the Book. That’s a pretty old idea.

Harris: But that is to subvert science rather than the Book in Aquinas’ case. I mean Aquinas thought heretics should be put to death, right? His argument for that, for capital punishment for heresy … and Augustine made the same argument … he thought they should be tortured. So those two brave lights of the Catholic Church gave us the inquisition and gave us more than a century of people being …

Shapiro: But I also think it is fair to say that they were more than instrumental in the development of modern science, so … the Dark Ages … are a bit of an exaggeration in terms of … the Dark Ages themselves saw a massive growth in technology and architecture for example, I mean … gothic cathedrals are built during the Dark Ages …

Harris: Sure, sure …

Shapiro: The scientific world is …

Harris: But that’s not science.

Shapiro: Well, virtually every major university in the western world was sponsored by the Catholic Church …

Harris: Sure, yeah …

Shapiro: … and I’m not a great Catholic defender, but all those universities were sponsored by the Catholic Church which saw consonance between science and religion as a reason to actually investigate the natural world.

Harris: Again, I think that’s backwards. I think the reality is there was no-one … everything that was good that was done anywhere at any time prior to … pick your year … was done by some religious person there was just nobody else to do the job, right? You could make the argument that Catholics built every bridge in Europe until the Protestants came around and they built their half of the bridges – there was just no-one else to do the job. And we’re human beings who want to pursue various ends, many of which require breakthroughs in learning. Engineering got born in the religious context. Physics … the first physicists were Christians … as is often pointed out, Newton spent about half of his time worrying about Biblical prophecy. Now I think that was a waste of his … an objective waste of his time. He also spent a lot of his time worrying about astrology, right?

Shapiro: And alchemy, yeah.

Harris: And alchemy. And alchemy, in so far as there is anything to it, emerged from the internal mythmaking that may be of use to some people … it edged into chemistry, like, so there was often a real science at the back of a lot of merely mortal confusion where people were trying to work things out, I would argue, very under the shadow of religious commitments that they need not have had and were not actually serving their ultimate ends.

(Ends 28.08 mins)

Clearly neither Harris nor Shapiro are working from anything like a detailed or sophisticated grasp of the subjects this dialogue stumbles across, and Shapiro is as obviously out of his depth on matters historical as Harris. He is not clear on which century Thomas Aquinas lived in (he got it right the first time, then got it wrong when he corrected himself) and does not have much knowledge of the the relevant topics beyond “a massive growth in technology and architecture” in the Middle Ages and something vague about Church “sponsorship” of universities, Copernicus and Galileo. But this is far better than Harris’ efforts, which are a remarkable example of profound nonsense spoken with vast self-assurance.

Christianity and the Fall of Rome

Harris begins with his claim that “Christianity in particular was responsible for … in part responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire”. This is an argument with a long if highly undistinguished pedigree. Here, yet again, we find Edward Gibbon’s eighteenth century polemic continuing to influence modern New Atheist ideas about history. Gibbon’s six volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89) was the most influential book on the subject of the fall of Rome for more than a century after its publication, though virtually none of his conclusions are accepted by historians today. His anti-Christian animus and the lack of any modern historiographical restraints like objectivity on his clearly polemical work mean that people like Harris accept his hoary analysis without question – oblivious to modern corrections to Gibbon’s assumptions and biases. Even at the time of publication critics found his arguments that Christianity was a major contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire unconvincing and this thesis has not gained any kind of strength since. But at least Gibbon was a lot better read than Harris and was certainly more eloquent:

“As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.” 

(Gibbon, Vol. 1, Ch. 39)

This summarises the main elements of Gibbon’s argument on this point – Christianity taught pacifism or at least passivity, the manly “active virtues” of the old Empire were suppressed, money was wasted on clergy and churches and the former Roman “military spirit” declined. Of course, historiography has advanced greatly since the 1770s and, unsurprisingly, there have been a great many scholarly studies of the causes of the fall of the Western Roman Empire since then. They have generally rejected Gibbon on these points. Oxford’s Peter Heather has summarised the flaws in Gibbon’s argument in his recent work on the fall of the Empire (see Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, 2005, p.120 ff). He notes:

“Christian institutions did, as Gibbon asserts, acquire large financial endowments. On the other hand, the non-Christian religious institutions that they replaced had also been wealthy, and their wealth was being progressively confiscated at the same time as Christianity waxed strong. It is unclear whether endowing Christianity involved an overall transfer of assets from secular to religious coffers. Likewise some manpower was certainly lost to the cloister, this was no more than a few thousand individuals at most, hardly a significant figure in a world that was maintaining, even increasing, population levels. Similarly, the number of upper-class individuals who renounced their wealth and lifestyles for a life of Christian devotion pales into insignificance beside the 6,000 or so who by AD 400 were actively participating in the state as top bureaucrats.”

(Heather, p. 123)

So the idea that the church was some vast drain on Imperial coffers to the detriment of the Army or that top talent became “idle mouths” in the cloister rather than generals does not really stack up. It also fails a key rule of thumb that can be applied to any claim about the fall of the Roman Empire. This is because it was the Western Roman Empire that collapsed – the Eastern Empire not only survived for another 1000 years, but actually expanded not long after the fall of the West and went through several periods of economic boom before its long decline and final fall, centuries later. So any claim about a cause of the fall of  the Western Empire has to pass the “East/West Test”: is the claim based on an element found only or more substantially in the Western Empire and not in the Eastern one? If not, the claim fails. In this case, the Eastern Empire was every bit as Christian as the West, if not more so. Just as much money went from the emperors and wealthy patrons to the Church in the East as in the West, if not more. The monastic ideal began in the East and was even more popular there, with even more people choosing to reject the world and live an ascetic existence. Yet it was the West that collapsed.

Sam Harris does not elaborate on his claim that “Christianity undermined the notion that the Roman emperor was a god”, though he clearly seems to think this was a major factor in the fall of the Empire. Leaving aside the fact this change did not seem to affect the long term viability of the Eastern Empire, the idea that it had some kind of significantly deleterious effect on the West is highly dubious. To begin with, if the cult of the emperors was so stabilising, Harris needs to explain why it did nothing much to steady things in the chaos of the third century “military anarchy”. The period from 235 to 284 AD saw the Roman Empire fracture and all but collapse from a combination of political turmoil, near constant civil wars, economic depression and barbarian invasion. In a period of 50 years the Empire saw more than 26 claimants to the emperorship, several of them making the claim at the same time. Some of these emperors and usurpers only lasted a few months, while others stayed alive for a year or two before being toppled and usually killed by the next claimant. The pertinent point here is that virtually all of these emperors were declared divine by the Senate as a matter of course, though this did little to shore up their long term viability or the stability of the Empire. The post-Constantinian Christian emperors of the fourth century, by contrast, represented far greater stability and longevity. The only fourth century emperor who was afforded divine honours both before and after his death was the sole pagan emperor of that century – Julian – and he also happens to be the one who reigned for the shortest time, dying in battle after just two years.

So the idea that the divine status of emperors gave the Empire some measure of stability and the abandonment of this practice made it more unstable does not stand up to even the mildest critical scrutiny. Secondly, there seems to be very little practical difference between the status of pre-Christian and post-conversion emperors anyway. Most modern people who hear that the emperors were given divine status picture this in modern terms; imagining a great gulf between the natural world of ordinary humans and the supernatural status that must therefore have been bestowed on the divine emperors. But the ancient world did not conceive of a hard division between natural and supernatural realms and saw many people and things as existing on a complex continuum of status between the ordinary and the numinous. An emperor could be regarded as a divus (a deified human) but this was distinct from a deus (god) proper. A living emperor could receive worship, though strictly speaking it was his numen and his genius that was honoured while he was alive – all of which makes exactly how this veneration differed to the worship of the gods proper rather difficult to translate into modern language.

But in practical terms it meant that he received honours, reverence and acclamations well beyond those for other humans. And the key point here is that this did not change much after the conversion of Constantine. The complex court ceremonial instituted by Diocletian as part of his stabilisation of the Empire in the wake of the Third Century Crisis was maintained, and while the Christian emperors were not declared to be gods (obviously), they were declared to be God’s chosen and anointed and this differed very little from the way the former deified emperors had been regarded and treated in practical terms. In December 438 the Roman senators assembled in the palatial house of Glabrio Faustus, Praetorian Prefect of Italy, to receive the official copy of the collected laws of the Emperor Theodosius II. On presentation of the new codex, the senators hailed the (absent) emperor and his co-emperor Valentinian III with a succession of ringing shouts:

“Augustuses of Augustuses, the greatest of Augustuses!” (repeated 8 times)

“God gave you to us! God save you for us!” (repeated 27 times)

“As Roman emperors, pious and felicitous, may you rule for many years!” (repeated 22 times)

“For the good of the human race, for the good of the Senate, for the good of the State, for the good of all!” (repeated 24 times)

“Our hope is in you! You are our salvation!” (repeated 26 times)

“May it please our Augustuses to live forever!” (repeated 22 times)

“May you pacify the world and triumph here in person!” (repeated 24 times)

This ostentatious (and for the participants probably rather tedious) ritual may not be emperor-worship per se, but it is very close to it. As Heather observes, “the adoption of Christianity thus made no difference to the age-old contention that the Empire was God’s vehicle in the world” (p. 125).

Harris’ claim that “[Christianity] made it harder to recruit true soldiers and they had to farm it out to mercenaries” is also stated without explanation or any kind of substantiation. It is hard to know where exactly he has got the idea that Christianity made recruiting “true soldiers” harder, though it does seem to be a dim echo of Gibbon’s quaint ideas about how “the active virtues of society were discouraged” and how Christianity made everyone meek and pacifist. Interestingly, there has been a strong tradition in some Christian circles that early Christianity was innately pacifist and so avoided military service until it was corrupted by the wicked Constantine. Both this idea and Harris’ claim, however, are nonsense. As early as 173 AD we have references to Christians serving in the legions along with archaeological evidence of soldiers’ tombstones with Christian iconography and inscriptions from the second and third centuries. They seemed to have been serving in sufficient numbers for Diocletian to precede his general persecution of Christianity with a systematic purge of Christians from the army.

But the idea that the conversion to Christianity made the Roman Empire weaker and more pacific is clearly nonsense to anyone who has even the vaguest grasp of Late Roman history. This was a period in the which the army expanded to its largest size – possibly up to half a million troops – and in which it saw almost constant warfare. Pressure from the Sassanian Empire to the east, from larger and more organised Germanic federations east of the Rhine and north of the Danube and new Indo-Iranian and Turco-Mongolian enemies from Central Asia meant that the Later Roman Army was almost constantly at war. Christianity has always been adept at finding Biblical justifications for almost anything and the Old Testament and Patristic writers furnished theological frameworks in which any Christian, from emperor to lowly trooper, could fight and kill in good conscience, even when it meant fighting other Christians.

Harris’ references to “true soldiers” and “[farming] it out to mercenaries”  indicate he has bought the common misconception that the Late Roman Army was an inferior fighting force compared to the “real” Romans of the Empire’s heyday, and was corrupted and “barbarised” by foreign soldiers who fought for the pay alone. This is a nineteenth century idea based on the erroneous image of a morally decadent Empire and its outdated and second-rate army being overwhelmed militarily by hordes of barbarian invaders. More modern analysis, however, shows the barbarian armies were generally small, the Western Romans won almost all military engagements with them right up to the end of the Empire and that the army remained a formidable, flexible, well-equipped and effective fighting force. The collapse of the Western Empire was primarily a political and economic affair, with the barbarians more one of its symptoms than its cause and the army only dwindling in its very final decades because of collapsing finances and spiraling political disintegration. And, once again, Harris’ claims fail the “East/West Test” because the army of the Eastern Empire was much the same in structure, organisation, equipment and tactics as that of the West, yet it saw no collapse. The fall of the Roman Empire was not primarily a military affair.

Harris’ “mercenaries” reference seems to be to the use of foederati – allied non-Roman warriors who fought for Rome alongside or instead of Roman troops. This had been a practice of the Romans since the days of the Republic and had been part of the Imperial “divide and conquer” strategy applied to frontier tribes, with the Romans paying and equipping friendly tribes to fight or guard the border region against other, unfriendly peoples. Paying a foederatus was also an excellent way of obtaining fresh troops quickly, as convincing a barbarian warlord to march under Roman banners brought highly effective and often battle-hardened troops under Roman command almost immediately – far more useful than the time, expense and risk involved in raising, training and then fielding green recruits.

The idea that these “mercenaries” were somehow less effective than Roman troops is undermined by the simple fact that the whole reason the Romans used them is that they were formidable units. They were recruited from warlike peoples – Germanic tribes, Isaurians, Arabs, Alans, Sarmatians and Huns – precisely because these warriors made excellent soldiers. Hugh Elton’s analysis also shows that far from proving less loyal to the Empire than Harris’ “true soldiers”, barbarian troops proved rather less likely to rebel or support a usurper than regular units – Germanic troopers in particular took oaths of loyalty very seriously (see Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe, AD 350-425 , Oxford, 1996, especially pp. 272-8). And, yet again, Harris’ claim here fails the “East/West Test”, given that the Eastern Empire made extensive use of foederati  and drew on non-Roman sources of regular recruits both in the period the collapse of the West and the centuries that followed. Hunnic, Arabic, Alanic and, later, Bulgarian and Turkic troops all fought for the Eastern emperors and, for its final four centuries, the elite palace guard was made up of the Varangians – Swedish and Russian Vikings and, later, Anglo-Saxon “mercenaries”. It would be interesting to see Sam Harris tell a Varangian that he was not a “true soldier”.

The Dark Ages and the Muslims

Still in High Gibbonian mode, Harris assures Shapiro that Christianity “eroded what you might call ‘traditional Roman values’ and …. ushered in the Dark Ages”. Again, he does not bother to elaborate on what these “traditional Roman values” were or why Christianity only managed to erode them in the Western Empire but left them intact in the East. I also cannot think of too many “values” that the pre-conversion Roman Empire held to that the later Empire “eroded”. Constantine seems to have banned crucifixion and he and his successors issued a series of edicts banning gladiator fights, but somehow I doubt that an enthusiasm for nailing people to crosses or watching men fight to the death are the values Harris refers to.

Whatever he thinks they were, Harris seems certain that their erosion led to “the Dark Ages”. Given that he goes on to talk about “Classical …. learning and philosophical insight” being preserved by Muslims, I think we can assume that his use of the term “the Dark Ages” refers to the loss of this Classical learning.

As I have discussed here before, the idea that Christianity was uniformly hostile to this Classical learning is nonsense and the idea that it was lost mainly or even largely because of active Christian suppression or even deliberate Christian neglect is not sustainable. Whatever Classical learning Harris has read has been preserved thanks to a succession of Christian scholars and scribes and the material that was lost was because all texts – pagan or Christian – had the odds of survival stacked against them (see “The Lost Books of Photios’ Bibliotheca” and, particularly, “The Great Myths 8: The Loss of Ancient Learning” for much more detailed discussion of this). Given the naïveté of his other comments, it is very likely Harris has absolutely no idea that, even in the “dark age” of the early medieval period, Alcuin of York swapped quotes from Ovid, Horace and Cicero with his fellow scholars, Abbo of Fleury cited Sallust and Virgil, Abbess Hroswitha of Gandersheim wrote plays in imitation of Terence and Irish monks returning from pilgrimage to Jerusalem played tourist in Egypt with ancient Greek works as their guides. Early medieval scholars preserved what had survived the wreckage of the collapse of the Western Empire and the loss of key works in Greek was due to a decline in Greek literacy in the western half of the Empire that began in the early third century and so pre-dated Christian dominance by at least a century.

Given his prejudices against modern Islam, which he judges mainly by its political extremists, Harris clearly finds it somehow ironic that the lost Greek works were “preserved by, of all people, the Muslims“. Of course, he seems to be totally unaware that the texts “the Muslims” translated into Arabic did not fall from the heavens and were, in fact, passed to them by … Christians. Those Islamic translators were working from copies in Syriac and Greek preserved by Nestorian and Orthodox Christian scholars, which does not quite fit Harris’ simplistic “Christianity ushered in the Dark Ages” narrative.

Harris’ slightly grudging admission that Muslims did actually do something positive leads Shapiro to note “the rediscovery of Aristotle …. was really beginning in the Islamic world long before Aquinas”, so Harris has to work quickly to get the conversation back onto his ideological track. He assures listeners that “Islam is its own ideology and set of dogmatisms that are inflexible and at odds with the spirit of science, fundamentally, and despite the fact there was a brief period where there seemed to be some happy convergence between scientific and mathematical insight and Islam, for the most part Islam has been hostile to real intellectual life.”

So, for Harris, the Islamic scholars and thinkers who gave us algebra, fundamental aspects of chemistry, advances in accurate astronomy, trigonometry as a separate mathematical field, the collation and expansion of Galenic medicine, critical expansions in optics, key concepts in physics and everything from “algorithm” to “zenith”, only did so because of some kind of “happy convergence”. But he is quick to add that all this happened in a “brief period”, after which Islam presumably reasserted its true nature and this “convergence” was quashed. Nothing to see here, says Harris, please move along.

Here Harris is gesturing toward another dusty historical cliche that is regularly repeated in New Atheist circles – the stillborn scientific golden age of Islam that was crushed by the fundamentalist theology of al-Ghazali. This is another nineteenth century idea, presented most forcefully by Ernest Renan in his famous lecture “L’Islamism et la science” in 1883 and long accepted as dogma. According to Renan and other Orientalists of his period, Islam was simply not conducive to scientific inquiry and the “Islamic Golden Age” of the eighth to the fourteenth century was merely a kind of aberration, after which things reverted to their true state. Anything scientific done after this aberant period was dismissed as being done despite the (assumed) theological dead hand of Islam.

This view makes very little sense. The idea that a state of affairs that continued for six whole centuries could somehow be an mere abnormality is clearly ridiculous – about as ridiculous as Harris calling this 600 year span “a brief period”. That aside, there is far too much evidence of on-going proto-scientific natural philosophy continuing after the supposed end date of this “brief period” for the idea that it had been stifled by theology to work. Long after the villain of Renan’s story – al-Ghazali – we see the “Spanish Aristotelianism” of Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufail, Ibn Rushd, and al-Bitruji. Then in the eastern regions of the Islamic world in the thirteenth century there was a newfound interest in astronomy, as seen in the huge Maragha observatory in what is now Iran, built under the patronage of Hulagu Khan, and then the later astronomical centre of Ulugh Beg in Samarkand. The latter’s meridian sextant, with a radius 40 metres wide, was the largest astronomical instrument of the time and one of remarkable sophistication. These centres and the schools and libraries associated with them continued to do valuable and innovative scientific work, including reform of the Ptolemaic model. Even if Copernicus was not aware of or influenced by the work of Ulugh Beg’s disciple, Ali Qushji, the fact that the latter was doing sophisticated work on the motion of the earth long after the supposed end of the “brief period” shows that the notion of a short Islamic scientific golden age is an artefact of western prejudice. As George Saliba notes, “if we only look at the surviving scientific documents, we can clearly delineate a very flourishing activity in almost every scientific discipline in the centuries following Ghazali” (Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, 2007, p. 21).

But people like Harris get their grasp of history second or even third hand. The convenient fiction of the “brief period” of Islamic proto-science, brought to an end by the wicked theologian al-Ghazali has become entrenched in New Atheist circles, partly thanks to it being peddled as a moral fable by another scientist and public educator, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson tells this fairy tale in several of his public lectures, one of which can be found in a YouTube video that is regularly circulated on New Atheist fora. As already noted, the idea that Islamic proto-science ended with al-Ghazali’s influential book, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, is simply wrong. So is the claim that al-Ghazali argued against the pursuit of scientific knowledge. On the contrary, he attacked the Aristotelian metaphysics of the Islamic falasifa precisely because it is not founded on quantifiable principles:

Ghazali makes it plain that his purpose is to refute the Islamic philosophers’ metaphysical theories and not their natural science. […] Indeed, the misguided zealot who attacks science in the mistaken belief that he is defending religion, inflicts damage, not on science, but on religion. He inflicts this damage, Ghazali argues, precisely because science is demonstrable and certain. If it does, in fact, contradict religion, then it is the latter that becomes suspect and not science.

(Michael Marmura, “Ghazali and Demonstrative Science.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 3, Number 2, October 1965, pp. 183-204)

Or in the words of the man himself:

The greatest thing in which the atheists rejoice is for the defender of religion to declare [that the results of an astronomical observation] are contrary to religion. Thus, the [atheists’] path for refuting religion becomes easy if the likes [of such an argument] are rendered a condition [for its truth]. 

(Quoted in Basit Bilal Koshul, “Ghazzālī, Ibn Rushd and Islam’s Sojourn into Modernity: A Comparative Analysis”, Islamic Studies Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 207-225)

It is curious that al-Ghazali attacking a rigid devotion to the metaphysics of Aristotle is painted as the tragic end of a “brief period” of Islamic science, yet when Copernicus and Galileo do the same thing this is hailed as the glorious beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Tyson also perpetuates some outright falsehoods (probably also picked up second hand), claiming al-Ghazali said “the manipulation of numbers is the work of the Devil” – a sentiment found precisely nowhere in al-Ghazali’s work.  It is depressing that Tyson’s video on al-Ghazali has had 374,302 views to date, nearly 4,000 upvotes and over 2,600 comments, most of which express their delight that Tyson’s fable confirms the commenters’ prejudices about Islam and the conflict between religion and science. Yet again, a scientist mangles history and the internet laps it up.

Galileo! (Galileo!) Galileo! (Galileo!)

But no New Atheist stumbling into matters historical is complete without a mention of Galileo, and Harris does not disappoint. “Christianity was hostile even when the scientific world view was struggling to be born in the sixteenth century” he declares, invoking the good old “Conflict Thesis” model of the history of science that New Atheism loves so well,  adding, “What we have historically is a real war of ideas.” And so, right on cue, he leaps straight for a mangled version of the Galileo story: “[This was] crystallised in the moment when Galileo was shown the instruments of torture and put under house arrest by people who refused to look through his telescope. So that was the genius of religion compared with the emerging genius of science in that room.”

To begin with, there is no reference anywhere in the documentation of the trial of Galileo to him being “shown the instruments of torture”. This phrase is used so often in popular accounts of Galileo’s 1633 trial that it has taken on a formulaic status and is often assumed to refer to something that happened or even to be a phrase from the documentary evidence. In fact, the closest thing we can find to it in the documentation is in the minutes of the fourth and final interrogation of Galileo before the Inquisition, dated 21 June 1633 and signed by Galileo himself. The minutes note “he was told to tell the truth, otherwise one would have recourse to torture” (see M. A. Finocchiario [ed.] , The Trial of Galileo: Essential Documents , 2014, p. 134). No mention is made here or anywhere else to Galileo being “shown the instruments”, which is the second step in the Inquisition’s process and which was followed by several more before any actual torture took place. The first step was, as recorded in the June 21 minutes, a verbal reference to torture, which is the extent reached on this, the final day of the trial’s questioning of Galileo.

This, of course, leads to the question of whether this was a genuine threat of torture or merely a legal formula in this kind of session. Harris’ repeating of the “shown the instruments” fiction shows he clearly thinks it a real threat, though he is perhaps slightly better informed than Stephen Fry who, in a debate with two Catholic apologists along with Christopher Hitchens in November 2009, confidently referred to “Galileo and the fact that he was tortured, for trying to explain the Copernican theory of the Universe”, adding with great assurance and vehement emphasis “that’s history”.  Actually, it is fantasy. Others later tried to excuse Fry’s blunder by arguing that Galileo was threatened with torture and so could be said, in a way, to have been subjected to a form of psychological torture.

The problem here is that there is little evidence there was any genuine chance of Galileo actually being tortured or that Galileo could even have thought there was any such danger. As Finocchario summarises elsewhere, there are multiple reasons to think that everyone involved knew there would be no actual torture no matter what Galileo said at that point. Leaving aside the fact that the Roman Inquisition rarely resorted to torture, its rules prohibited its use on the old or the sick, and by June 1633 Galileo fell squarely into both those categories; being 69 years old and having recently been too ill to travel and suffering from both arthritis and a hernia. Further, the rules forbade the torture of clerics and Galileo also met that criterion, having recently received the clerical tonsure (April 5, 1631) so he could be eligible for an ecclesiastical pension. Finally, torture was only allowed in trials for crimes serious enough to receive corporal punishment, and Galileo was not accused of formal heresy and so the accusation against him did not meet this level (see Finocchario, “That Galileo was Imprisoned and Tortured for Advocating Copernicanism” in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, R.L. Numbers [ed], 2009, p. 77).

Thankfully Harris spares us Carl Sagan’s error that Galileo “languished in a Catholic dungeon”, noting correctly that his sentence was house arrest in his Florentine villa. But he does claim that this sentence was passed by “people who refused to look through his telescope”, thus summoning up yet another historical myth. In the “Conflict Thesis” version of the story it is Galileo who is the one who has science and reason wholly on his side and his accusers are ignorant obscurantists who refuse to even consider the solid scientific proofs Galileo can show them, even to the point of refusing to look through his telescope. Unfortunately this is all nonsense.

To begin with, not only was everyone involved in the case well and truly conversant with the relevant science, as well as more than capable of grasping the arguments involved, the Church actually had the overwhelming consensus of the science of the time on its side (see “The Great Myths 6: Copernicus’ Deathbed Publication” for a more detailed discussion of this point). Galileo, on the other hand, had not only not proven his theories, but had pinned his thesis to an argument – his argument from the tides – which could be shown at the time to be dead wrong. Furthermore, there was nothing he could show anyone through his telescope which definitely proved either heliocentrism or earthly movement, given that there were several other valid models available at the time that explained all the observable phenomena yet required neither. And they were more widely accepted by scientists in 1633. Galileo knew all this, as did everyone else involved, which is why he made no offer to anyone to “look through his telescope” in the trial and so no refusal to do so was made.

Harris is, again, half remembering a garbled idea based on something else. When Galileo first made his revolutionary telescopic discoveries, beginning in 1609, telescopes were very new and often quite primitive instruments and there was a debate about whether some of the things they observed were actual or some artefact of the process of observation. This was in part because some of the things Galileo reported in his sensational 1610 book Siderius Nuncius (“The Starry Messenger”), such as mountains on the Moon, contradicted the Aristotelian cosmology, though it was also because not all of those first telescopes were as well-made and reliable as Galileo’s. So the myth of the stupid inquisitors who “refused to look through his telescope” is loosely based on three elements, none dating to Galileo’s trial and none involving any inquisitors.

First, we have a reference in a letter by Galileo’s friend Paolo Gualdo to a comment by Cesare Cremonini – another friend and colleague of Galileo’s at the University of Padua who was a professor of Aristotle. Addressing the issue of Galileo’s observations of the Moon, Gualdo quotes Cremonini as saying: “I do not wish to approve of claims about which I do not have any knowledge, and about things which I have not seen .. and then to observe through those glasses gives me a headache. Enough! I do not want to hear anything more about this.” (July 29, 1611) So this is not a report that Cremonini “refused” to look through any telescope. Rather, it seems he did do so (long enough to get a headache, in fact) and just did not see what Galileo reported – see above about the reliability of these early instruments.

Second, we have a quip made by Galileo on hearing of the death of Guilio Libri, another Aristotelian though this time at the University of Pisa and definitely no friend to Galileo. Noting his enemy’s death in a letter to Marcus Welser, Galileo said of Libri: “never having wanted to see [the moons of Jupiter] on Earth, perhaps he’ll see them on the way to heaven?” (17 Dec 1610)

Finally, at the initial reports of Galileo observing the moons of Jupiter, the leading Jesuit astronomer, Christopher Clavius, was initially sceptical and dismissive. Referring to the poor reputation that telescopes still had at this point, Clavius said “one would first have to have built a spyglass that creates them and only then would it show them”. But Clavius changed his mind once he instructed a committee of Jesuit astronomers from the Collegium Romanum to construct a telescope and see if they could confirm Galileo’s observations. The Jesuit scientists Christoph Grienberger, Paolo Lembo and Odo van Malecote did this and reported back that the observations were correct.

Once his telescopic discoveries had been confirmed, the Church did not dismiss them, let alone refuse to look through telescopes. On the contrary, they celebrated them. On March 29 1611 Galileo arrived in Rome from Florence and met first with the great patron of science and art, Cardinal Francesco del Monte. The Cardinal had helped Galileo secure his first lectureships in Pisa and then Padua and he listened to Galileo’s account of his astronomical discoveries with great interest. The next day Galileo went to the Collegium Romanum where he met Clavius and two of the Jesuit scientists who had confirmed his observations: Grienberger and Maelcote, who he noted in a letter were working on further observations of the moons of Jupiter “to find their periods of revolution”. Far from rejecting his findings as heretical, these churchmen were working to add to them. On April 2 Galileo visited the powerful Cardinal Maffeo Barberini – later to become Pope Urban VIII – who afterwards wrote to pledge his assistance to Galileo in any way within his power. Then he visited Cardinal Ottavio Bandini, who invited him to give a demonstration of his telescope in his private garden for members of his household and Roman high society. Finally, Galileo was granted an audience with Pope Paul V at the Vatican and later wrote about the way the pope had greatly honoured him during the meeting (see W.R. Shea & M. Artigas, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius, 2003, pp. 19-49). So Harris’ image of Galileo being condemned by wilful ignoramuses is yet more nonsense.

Catholic and Protestant Bridges. Or Something.

The exchange that follows Harris’ error-laden account of Galileo is increasingly confused and even less coherent. Shapiro tries to object to Harris’ picture of the Church as inherently hostile to science, saying “Galileo was originally sponsored by the Church and so was Copernicus”, but then undercuts this by saying “there is no question there was a backlash by the Church to this stuff”. Of course, it could be argued that Copernicus was sponsored by certain churchmen in a sense, but the support he received from ecclesiastics as high ranking as the Bishop of Culm, Cardinal von Schönberg and Pope Clement VII was more in the form of enthusiastic encouragement (again, see my earlier Copernicus article). Similarly, and as already noted above, Galileo received high praise and encouragement from the Pope down.

But Harris knows nothing about any of this, so he leaps on Shapiro’s reference to “a backlash by the Church”, saying “the backlash makes sense because there is an intellectual progress on questions of how the cosmos is organised or where it came from or how life began. All of these questions are … scientific answers to which are in zero sum contest with the doctrines found in [their holy] books.” Yet again, Harris’ simplistic picture here is essentially wrong. To take the Galileo case once more, the Church had no problem with his ideas prior to 1616. As already noted, his discoveries contra Aristotle were received with great interest, despite the way Aristotleian thinking was intricately entangled with Catholic theology. Even Galileo’s explicit support of heliocentrism as a physical idea was noted without the Church authorities batting an eyelid. When, in 1612, Galileo published his Letters on Sunspots, he made his acceptance of heliocentrism very clear. As was standard at the time, his work was examined by censors, and given it was to be published in Rome the censors were ecclesiastical rather than secular – four scholars from the Roman Inquisition, no less. They removed a quote from the gospel of Matthew from the preface and a reference to the author being guided by “divine goodness” in his inquiries was considered a bit much, but they did not so much as blink at his championing of Copernicanism. It was not until Galileo strayed into theological questions with his widely-circulated “Letter to Castelli” in 1615 that the Inquisition began to take an interest in him – in the post-Council of Trent context of the Counter Reformation, it was a mere mathematicus making pronouncements on the interpretation of the Bible that raised the hackles of prickly theologians (see R.J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible, 1991, especially pp. 53-85) .

So the “backlash” that Shapiro and Harris agree on was not simply because science was intruding on Holy Scripture. It was because a scientist was intruding on the theologians’ turf. Cardinal Bellarmine, who was soon to preside over the first trial of Galileo in 1616, made the Church’s attitude to any seeming contradiction between science and the Bible very clear in his “Letter to Foscarini”:

I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the centre of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than what is demonstrated is false. But I will not believe that there is such a demonstration, until it is shown to me . . . . and in case of doubt one must not abandon the Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Holy Fathers

(12 April, 1615)

Here Bellarmine is not saying that Scripture automatically trumps science. In fact, he is saying precisely the opposite – he notes that if heliocentrism were demonstrated, it would be Scripture that would need to be reinterpreted to fit with the new scientific understanding. But he notes with wry understatement that no such demonstration has been shown to him; both he and Foscarini knew full well that, at that stage, heliocentrism had not been proven. So he goes on to say that until it is, the traditional interpretations of the relevant Biblical passages stand, which is a not entirely unreasonable position given the state of knowledge at the time.

This is what Shapiro is fumbling towards when he refers to Aquinas and characterises the scholastic attitude of people like Bellarmine as “if it was in science and it was contradicted by the Book then you’re misreading the Book”. But Harris is so muddled in his understanding of this subject that he does not even grasp what Shapiro is saying and responds “that is to subvert science rather than the Book in Aquinas’ case”. This is precisely the opposite of what Shapiro just said and, more importantly, it is the opposite of the Church position, as illustrated by Bellarmine’s observations above. Reinterpreting “the Book” in the light of new science is not somehow subverting science at all, it is respecting it. Harris is clearly now totally out of his depth.

And so now he flounders further. Picking up on the reference to Aquinas, he begins a kind of stream of consciousness blurting: “I mean Aquinas thought heretics should be put to death, right? His argument for that, for capital punishment for heresy … and Augustine made the same argument … he thought they should be tortured. So those two brave lights of the Catholic Church gave us the inquisition”. Nothing in those tangled sentences has anything to do with the Church’s attitude to new scientific knowledge in the face of Biblical exegesis, but Harris seems to be simply throwing out anything he can think of vaguely associated with Aquinas and completely loses track of the line of argument.

Shapiro tries to at least get back to the Church’s attitude to science, arguing again that the Church was “more than instrumental in the development of modern science”. But since he obviously does not have a much more detailed grasp of the history than Harris, all he can come up with is noting “the Dark Ages themselves saw a massive growth in technology and architecture”. That is true, but it would be more relevant to note that the foundations of modern science were laid in the second half of the Middle Ages, with no hinderance by the Church and the active participatiom of churchmen such as Jean Buridan de Bethune, Nicole d’Oresme, Albrecht of Saxony, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Theodoric of Fribourg, William of Occam, Roger Bacon, Thierry of Chartres, Gerbert of Aurillac, William of Conches, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Nicholas of Cusa and many others (see E. Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts, 1996).

Harris is having none of this and interjects (correctly enough) “that’s not science”, but Shapiro manages to make a slightly better argument when he notes “universities were sponsored by the Catholic Church [and] saw consonance between science and religion as a reason to actually investigate the natural world”. And here Harris’ counter argument gets very strange.

“I think that’s backwards” he declares, in a comment that he does not bother to explain and which actually makes little sense as a response to what Shapiro has said. What, exactly, is “backwards”? How, exactly, can Shapiro’s point be inverted to make some opposite argument? Harris does not say. Then we get this: “everything that was good that was done anywhere at any time prior to … pick your year … was done by some religious person there was just nobody else to do the job, right? You could make the argument that Catholics built every bridge in Europe until the Protestants came around and they built their half of the bridges – there was just no-one else to do the job.”

This seems to be a version of a common New Atheist argument used when confronted with the awkward fact that most of their early scientific heroes were religious people. The argument is that this is purely incidental and has no bearing on their scientific interests. Thus Harris’ strange comments about Catholic and Protestant bridge building: the people who built these bridges were likely religious believers as well, since pretty much everyone was at that time, but the bridges had nothing to do with their religion. He then meanders slightly from his argument by noting “the first physicists were Christians … as is often pointed out, Newton spent about half of his time worrying about Biblical prophecy” but saying this was a waste of Newton’s time. But his key point is that any religious belief of Newton’s was as incidental to his science as those of the bridge builders was to their bridges.

And this is total nonsense. If Harris had actually bothered to read any of Newton’s work he would find ample evidence that Newton’s science was intrinsically informed by and absolutely fired by his deep religious convictions. In fact, Newton saw his science as working to increase his own faith in God and helping others in their belief. Writing to a young clergyman, Richard Bentley, on this theme, Newton said:

“When I wrote my treatise about our system, I had my eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose.”

(10th December, 1692)

Newton goes on in the same letter to note elements in his cosmology which he feels are a “contrivance of a voluntary Agent” and “arguments for a Deity”. For Newton, his science was not incidental to his religion, rather it is an essential and motivating part of it.

And even the most cursory reading of the leading lights of the Scientific Revolution shows this understanding was commonplace. Kepler was not just devoutly religious, but also devoutly scientific. He pursued the mathematics that lie behind his Three Laws of Planetary Motion out of his conviction that God must have put a more elegant and coherent system in place than the mathematical tangles of both the Ptolemaic system and Copernicius’ equally contrived alternative (Galileo ignored Kepler and clung to the erroneous Copernican model). Writing to Michael Maestlin, Kepler was entirely explicit about his religious motivations:

I wanted to become a theologian. For a long time I was restless. Now, however, behold how through my effort God is being celebrated in astronomy.

(3 October, 1595)

Elsewhere Kepler wrote “I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt” (The Harmony of the World, Introduction to Bk. V, 1619). Here Kepler is referring to the argument of Augustine that Christians should use rather than reject pagan learning (see De Doctrina Christiana, II.40): a principle that was entrenched in medieval thought and allowed the preservation and revival of natural philosophy with the Church’s blessing. Back in the twelfth century William of Conches championed the rational analysis of the physical world in religious terms that Newton and Kepler would enthusiastically accept: “[God] is the author of all things, evil excepted. But the natures with which He endowed His creatures accomplish a whole scheme of operations, and these too turn to His glory since it is He who created these very natures”.

Contrary to Harris’ silly “bridges” analogy, all of these early scientific thinkers came from a tradition that saw “the Book of Nature” as complementary to “the Book of Scripture” (i.e. the Bible). This tradition stretched back to the earliest Christian thinkers. This is why Galileo (who was not particularly devout) could quote Tertullian (who was not especially scientifically-minded) as saying “We conclude that God is known first through Nature, and then again, more particularly, by doctrine; by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word.” (Adversus Marcionem, I.18). The two elements were intricately and essentially interlinked.

But Harris knows nothing of all this. Just as Harris knows nothing of the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. Or the place of science in the Islamic world. Or the complexities and nuances of the Galileo Affair. Or medieval universities. Or … anything much about history. And this is why, as with Sagan or Hawking or Tyson or Dawkins, when a scientist speaks about their field of science, they are worth listening to. But when they opine about history they usually have little idea what they are talking about, and that is even if they are not labouring under Harris’ clear ideological biases. His near total ignorance coupled with those crippling biases means what he has to say on these and most other historical subjects is mostly complete garbage.