Sam Harris’ Horrible Histories

Sam Harris’ Horrible Histories

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.

Honorius

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”.

Dark Ages

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.

Enlightenment

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.

104 thoughts on “Sam Harris’ Horrible Histories

    1. Most historians have some kind of bias and so perhaps Saliba has some too. But on the point about the myth of al-Ghazali, he’s on solid ground. And yes, there was a typo there – no fixed (thanks).

      1. Thanks – that’s fair. I now see James Hannam himself made a similar point in his review of Saliba’s book:

        “Saliba’s second attack is on the widely held belief that Arabic science declined after the thirteenth century, either due to religious pressure or the Mongol invasions. Saliba makes two points. The first is that Arabic science continued to advance until at least the sixteenth century. He convincingly shows how Copernicus used several unacknowledged cutting-edge astronomical techniques from Arab sources. These techniques for calculating planetary movements were not developed in Western Europe, but in Persia after the Mongol invasion. His second point is that talk of a decline is misleading. What needs explaining is how western science began and maintained its stratospheric progress from the fourteenth century onwards. Noting that Arabic science couldn’t keep up is not something that needs an explanation. The historical conundrum is western advance, not eastern stagnation.”

        He also makes the other interesting point that Saliba “rejects the classical narrative that the conquered Syriac-speaking Christians population taught the Arabs Greek philosophy. He insists, I think quite rightly, that the assimilation of Greek learning into Arabic culture was an internal process within the Caliphate. It was not a case of ignorant Arabs learning philosophy from the Syrian Christians who had already mastered it. Rather, people living under the Islamic Caliphate decided for themselves that they wanted to acquire the philosophy of the classical Greeks and so went off to find it”.

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      1. I can’t do better than quote Tim’s assessment of Huff’s books and his critics:

        “Probably the best analysis of this thorny question is by Harvard’s Toby E. Huff in his (2003) and (2011). Huff notes that both the Christian West and the Islamic world were heirs to the rational analysis of the cosmos by the Greeks and examines why it was only Christian Europe that gave birth to empirical science.

        A key difference lay in how both traditions dealt with the laws of cause and effect and their impact on induction, the foundation of scientific analysis. Western Christianity developed a conception of causality that accommodated an omnipotent God – nature followed divinely ordained rational laws and so could be apprehended rationally, though God could suspend those laws miraculously if he chose. With this idea as their foundation, Christian scholars set about absorbing vast amounts of Greek learning in philosophy and sciences that had been lost during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire but preserved in Arabic translations.

        Ironically, at around the same time Christian scholars were benefiting from this new influx of Greek learning, Muslim scholars were wrestling with the theological implications of causation. Muslim theologians were not comfortable with the idea of a universe that had to obey rules, feeling this put limits on an all-powerful God. In the end they rejected the idea that the universe obeyed consistent laws and developed an kind of “occasionalism” whereby everything happened in any instance by the will of Allah and any seeming causation was an illusion.

        So just when this approach effectively hobbled the development of Islamic science, Christian Europe saw the rise of universities which had the rigorous study of logic as the foundation of all study. Despite some very minor (and largely unsuccessful) attempts at restricting what scholars could speculate about, the medieval scholastic idea that the universe was a rational product of a rational divine intelligence and so could be apprehended rationally laid the foundations for a flowering of new scientific ideas.

        Universities also functioned very differently to the madrassas of the Islamic world. Thanks to the political fragmentation that followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Church had developed a high degree of independence and maintained it in a way that gave rise to a clear separation of Church and State in western Europe. This gave universities a kind of autonomy not seen in similar institutions of learning elsewhere. They evolved as something between a trade guild of scholars and an independent state, which gave them a degree of freedom from political and religious control not seen elsewhere.

        European universities also developed a system of qualifications which were recognised across Europe, building an interlinked network of scholarship, allowing transfer of expertise and a culmination of learning over generations of scholars – something accelerated by the printing press. In other parts of the world a scholar from one institution might come to another with something of a reputation, they had to earn recognition in the new place in the way a European master or doctor did not.

        All this added up to interlinked philosophical, politico-religious and institutional structures that developed in a completely unique way in later medieval and early modern Europe. This resulted in a rigorously logical way of examining the world that was based on induction, assuming uniform causality, that was supported by a network of highly autonomous institutions and which assumed that there was a great deal still to learn and understand about the world.

        By contrast, both Islamic and Chinese scholars did not have these inductive frameworks, this infrastructure of learning or this idea that the cosmos was still substantially unexplored and misunderstood. Both developed a complacent assumption that their cultures already knew all that was worth knowing. So Huff tells some amusing anecdotes about how telescopes set off a frenzy of astronomical discoveries in Europe, yet when Europeans introduced them to the Islamic and Chinese worlds, they attracted very little interest (their first use in the Ottoman Empire was to spy on the Sultan’s harem).

        Huff’s thesis has not been without its critics, though many of them have been motivated more by political correctness and a reaction against the “imperialist” idea that Europeans may have done things that no-one else managed than by historical objectivity. Despite some quibbles over details, his theory goes a long way toward explaining why science arose in late medieval/early modern Europe and not elsewhere.”

        https://www.quora.com/Why-did-modern-science-arise-in-the-Judeo-Christian-West-rather-than-other-world-cultures

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        1. That’s just a retread of the hoary old Max Meyerhof stuff about al-Ghazali’s occasionalism, which can hardly be distinguished from ‘a nature that followed divinely ordained rational laws and so could be apprehended rationally, though God could suspend those laws miraculously if he chose”. Like that description of how Christians explained miracles in a rational causal universe is indistinguishable from Ghazali’s ‘God’s habit’.

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        2. “a clear separation of Church and State in western Europe…gave universities a kind of autonomy not seen in similar institutions of learning elsewhere.”

          I think there’s probably some truth to this, but the joke goes that the great comet of 1577 was, in the sense that it was important to astrologers and thus to their patrons, simultaneously responsible for the construction of Tycho’s observatories at Hven and the destruction of Taki al-Din’s observatory in Samarkland.

          1. Though the joke works rather better if I don’t confuse Taki al-Din’s 16th century observatory in Istanbul with Ulugh Beg’s 15th century observatory in Samarkland.

  1. I am fairly sure you have totally misread what Harris was doing here. He wasn’t arguing that Christianity helped catalyse the fall of the Roman Empire, he was demonstrating that that’s an argument that can be made to cut against what Shapiro was saying – that Judeo Christian values are some kind of special sauce for ensuring cultural integrity and civilisational success. He’s propping up a counter-narrative, explicitly trying it on to show Shapiro that his analysis of the history is not definitive. It’s clear from this line: “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”

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    1. “He wasn’t arguing that Christianity helped catalyse the fall of the Roman Empire, he was demonstrating that that’s an argument that can be made to cut against what Shapiro was saying”

      This makes no sense. Either he was saying Christians helped cause the fall of the Empire or he wasn’t. And he quite clearly was. WHY he was doing so is beside the point. The fact is that the claims he made about the fall of the Empire are garbage.

      “He’s propping up a counter-narrative, explicitly trying it on to show Shapiro that his analysis of the history is not definitive.”

      It only works as “a counter narrative” if it was true. It isn’t.

      “It’s clear from this line: “So, I think it’s … you can have it any way you want looking at history”

      And that line is total bullshit. You can’t “have it any way you want looking at history”. Some interpretations of history are well-founded, evidence-based and scholarly and others are outdated, cartoonish garbage. The ones Harris presents are in the latter category.

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      1. Harris is awful in general. He’s devoted much of his career in the public eye to the energetic promotion of Islamophobia and racism. (I also find his belief in moral realism / objective morality to be silly, though admittedly metaethics is not my field of expertise.)

        Harris’ viciously racist, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant politics are sufficient to establish that he is not a decent human being or a serious thinker. This is in the context of a world where, right now, vast numbers of people are suffering and dying because of our governments’ anti-immigrant laws (and this is my field of expertise, since I was an immigration/asylum lawyer for several years, mainly representing people seeking asylum). Harris is complicit in those atrocities insofar as his rhetoric incites anti-immigrant / restrictionist sentiment.

        So I’m not surprised to learn that he also distorts ancient and medieval history for transparently political reasons. Or that he’s willing to share a platform with the likes of Shapiro. He is not a trustworthy thinker and he should not be listened to.

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        1. Harris could protect himself from some accusations of bigotry if he was able to distinguish between Salafism and mainstream Sunni practice and stopped believing there’s a “true” Islam that is fixed and doesn’t change over time and place. Even if someone doesn’t agree that Harris is bigoted towards Muslims (I do think Harris is a bigot), I’d like to think everyone can agree that he doesn’t understand the middle east or Islam, whether in modernity or (as Tim’s post demonstrated) the medieval period.

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          1. It’s ironic that Sam Harris’ readings of scripture are more fundamentalist than most fundamentalists’. If one imagines his role as a warrior against religious dogma — which seems to be what he thinks of himself as performing — it’s rather counter-productive for him to go around insisting that the only proper way to interpret the texts is through a particularly bloody-minded and dark literalism.

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          2. Reginald: The “I have a black friend” defense just doesn’t cut it. Nawaz was until recently on an SPLC page that he used a legal threat to take down, despite the fact that every specific quote they made of him was accurate. (I checked, along with Ali). Nawaz and Ali are actually fairly extreme in anti-Islamic opinion, even if Nawaz himself otherwise has nuanced and somewhat liberal views.

            When you defend profiling of a group, you’re being a bigot. Period. Sam dresses it up in verbiage, but the underlying reasoning doesn’t get any nicer when you do that.

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          3. it’s actually a pretty perilous rhetoric to say that only the literalist fundamentalists are the “true Muslims” or Christians and that the rest are hedging “cafeteria” believers–that the fundamentalists aren’t a recent development but the preservers of the original religiosity

            these people aren’t just talking heads on the tube, their ideas find their way into FBI and NYPD training material, reinforce the concepts behind CIA and State Department skullduggery

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          4. Frederic Christie: I have read the SPLC list, you’ll have to try harder than that, nothing Maajid says was racist or anti-Islamic. I’ll concede that Ali is a bigot, who called for a war against Islam.

            This video explains Harris’ ‘actual’ views on racial profiling:

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          5. Brothers, I’d view it less as “I’m not racist, I have black friends” and more along the lines of “Just because you’re bigoted towards people doesn’t mean you can’t work with them.” I doubt any of us would argue that George Lincoln Rockwell inviting Malcolm X and other NoI figures to give speeches back in the 60’s is evidence that Rockwell couldn’t truly hate blacks, or that Malcolm speaking at Rockwell’s invitation is evidence that he didn’t hate whites while he was in the NoI. However, that is a rather extreme example, and it’s worth noting that Sam, unlike the NoI and Rockwell, does contest the claim that he’s bigoted.

            Honestly though, whether Harris is bigoted towards Islam is beside the point. I mentioned that I thought he was bigoted because it felt disingenuous not to, but I would have left that out if I thought it would start a debate. Frankly, even if Harris was one of those liberal caricatures whose response to Islamic terrorism is to blame America for bombing Muslim majority countries, he’d still be full of crap and not someone worth listening to on these topics.

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        2. Indeed. And I mean, I don’t disagree that Shapiro is spouting nonsense about the supposed special significance of “Judeo-Christian values”. (I’m not convinced that “Judeo-Christian values” is a meaningful expression at all.) But Harris is just as much of a clueless bigot as Shapiro. A plague o’ both their houses.

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          1. To be clear, my “Indeed” above at 11.35 am was in reference to Saint Kyrillos’ comment. I had not seen the other comments on this subthread (which were presumably still in moderation when I commented) and nothing I said should be taken to imply endorsement of them. (I’ve learned my lesson – from now on I will always blockquote the thing to which I am replying.)

    2. Your argument that Harris “wasn’t arguing that Christianity helped catalyse the fall of the Roman Empire, he was demonstrating that that’s an argument that can be made to cut against what Shapiro was saying,” is completely silly as neither of those two descriptions is mutually exclusive.

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    3. I’m personally thrilled to see “You’re misinterpreting Harris!” is still the default defense put forward by Harris’s disciples when his claims are excoriated. Never change, Sam’s fans.

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      1. To me, the fact that so many Harris fans say Harris is misunderstood is quite a bad response. I mean, if a bajillion people read what I wrote and all of them miraculously all misinterpreted it, I’d start to wonder if it’s my fault. A few guys reading it wrong is one thing but so many and so consistently, including academics? That says tremendously bad about Harris’ writing abilities. This is like if loads of people bought a product of mine and all screwed up. I can’t just blame the user.

  2. Another excellent post. It really does depress me slightly to see prominent “public intellectuals” who have no, or very skimpy, knowledge of history and are content to trot out the usual “everybody knows” points on a par with “Columbus set sail to prove the earth was round”.

    I think the problem is that there is an attitude of “oh, history, philosophy, the arts – they’re not *real* knowledge, not the same way as hard science is” and therefore there is a disinterest at best and a contempt at worst in educating themselves on the topics. That Harris should be content to swallow Gibbon uncritically as a source, without being aware of Gibbon’s bias (either as a Protestant polemicist or as anti-Christian), is disheartening because I don’t think he’d do anything similar if it came to a scientific paper or source. If Professor X was making claims about Utonium, I’m sure Harris would read up to make sure he wouldn’t make a fool of himself when quoting Professor X in case X was a crank and the rest of the field was opposed to him.

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  3. Great piece, Tim. Islam may not be an area you specialize in, but you clearly have a fairly nuanced appreciation of it’s contributions to proto-science. Having you trash two charlatans is like a cherry on top.

    It’ll be interesting to see how Harris responds when he discovers this article. Here’s hoping he tries to give Tim the Omer Aziz treatment rather than the Teddy Sayeed treatment!

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    1. Tim has a truly impressive knowledge of the history of science generally. I rarely comment on those posts because I know very little about the subject myself. (I came to this blog for the historical Jesus / anti-mythicist posts, which is what I’m into. I’m looking forward to the forthcoming Ascension of Isaiah post.)

  4. The whole ‘Christians were all pacifists who undermined the State by not fighting for it’ mythos is pretty effectively disproved when one considers how many soldier saints from the Roman Empire there are : from the probably mythical (St. Alban) to the very decidedly historical (St.Martin of Tours). The latter seems to have been very supportive of Soldier cults, re-dedicating the cathedral at Tours to S. Martial, another legionary Saint. He was also not adverse to employing military support in removing pagan shrines and replacing them with Christian churches. The Church militant?

    Fascinating information about Galileo, thank you.

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    1. This being said, if you have no stake in “real” christianity, its going to be hard to assess what you consider to be its essential qualities, BUT given the peripatetic nature of the Roman legion, the presence of Christian solidiers only proves soldiers were converted into Christians, not that the Church body endorsed military service. The Church embraced “sinners” after all. It could simply be the case soldiers converted to christianity in spite of its views instead of because of them.

  5. Ken_Watanabe_godzilla_let_them_fight.gif

    But yeah, this just reaffirms that live debate is nonsense devised to showcase personality and public speaking skills instead of truth finding. It’s a performance art, not a science.

  6. I cringed at the “new atheism” that emerged 10-15 years ago in general.
    So it was with prior skepticism of Harris that my suspicions were confirmed with his (unfortunately) well-circulated refutation of the “Islamic golden age”. It’s not just his utter ignorance and misunderstanding of history where I found my confirmation but also his total disrespect of the conclusion the credible scholarship.

    As for this Shaprio; if he’s what passes for a well-educated intellectual amongst the American right-wing today then I only conclude that the deficiency in critical thinking across the US education systems may be becoming a serious problem.

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    1. It is indeed a serious problem, but Shapiro spent his entire adult life being groomed to be a public conservative intellectual by a set of American institutions that are more or less designed for that purpose and that have grown increasingly bound by ideology. He was a columnist at the National Review when he was 17. One of his hobbyhorses is that American universities are hives of left-wing indoctrination. I doubt he ever had much opportunity to expand his intellectual horizons.

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    2. I wouldn’t generalize from right wing pundit Shapiro to American education more broadly. There is a lot of money in promoting conservative views which inevitably involves pushing falsehoods of varying degrees of obviousness. It’s even got its own name: wingnut welfare. No rigor required as long as the result, in this case promoting ‘Judeo-Christian values’ as a cudgel to wield against everyone but Zionists and Christianists, is conducive to conservative funders.

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  7. Thanks Tim, as ever its an entertaining, as well as well researched, tour of ideas.

    The science-deadening dark ages, science is contra religion, and the Galileo affair are tropes often spouted by atheist commentators. As a Christian I sometimes post on the Gaurdian is Free and find these brought out as trump cards of truth. In this case its only a trump of the Donald variety.

    One other such trump card is the “religion causes all violence, … well most wars, … well a heck of lot of it”. I’d be interested in your take on this.

    Am I a Christian apologist looking for weaponry? Only in the sense of trying to engage with thinking people to really find what is true. If that means re-evaluating my understanding of Christianity, I’m all for it. But I enjoy engaging with thinking like what is found on this blog in order to tilt at a few bone headed atheist myths. So, thanks for what you put out.

      1. The main problem with ideology on the march is that it seldom leaves any room for nuance, and the study of history is not an unambigous exercise once you get to the elevated perspective ideologies tend to operate on. So the two don’t mix well.

  8. I think Harris’ statement: “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. ” is a anti-immigrant dog-whistle. I’ve heard the argument that Rome fell because of the “migration” of foreign barbarians, obviously meant to be a parallel to the current situation in Europe, and I believe that’s what Harris is referencing.

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    1. Sorry for breaking it to you but this phrase ‘dog-whistle’ being thrown around by the left by anyone who breaks with their orthodoxies sounds a bit like being able to call someone a Nazi without actually calling them a Nazi. No, you can’t read Sam’s mind, no, his pseudohistory on the Roman Empire has nothing to do with a malicious take on immigration. And I have a very low opinion of any argument where the mind-reading accusation of “dog-whistling” crops itself up.
      https://quillette.com/2018/07/16/understanding-and-misunderstanding-dog-whistling/

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      1. Jimmy, you do know that words have connotations that you don’t control, right?

        Even if you intend to give Sam intellectual charity that he has long since squandered by being this repeatedly wrong on the issue of Islam and not correcting himself, to say nothing of his utter inability to understand Chomsky’s point in their discussion, it doesn’t matter. Because what Sam says will still be interpreted by the alt-right in that way, and Sam has long since stopped using his language with care.

        In other words, it doesn’t matter if you know what the whistle is, the dogs will still hear it if you blow on it.

        Nice apologetics, though.

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        1. I’d have to consider this response of yours even less credible than your original post. As Harris has said, you’d need double down syndrome to associate him with the alt-right. Sorry, but cherry-picking little occasions where you didn’t think Sam did as well (Chomsky, which he really didn’t do that badly in at all) is irrelevant, I think Harris is wrong on virtually every ideological position he holds but your take on him clearly demonstrates you’re part of a certain leftist crowd that can’t take dissenting opinion on a topic like modern Islam (a fairly accurate one, at that, contrasting to his screwing up ancient Islam) without concluding that the person must therefore be a supporter of a white ethnostate — a member of the alt-right. Sorry Frederic, but all your posts so far have basically just been “Sam Harris is a Nazi.” The only people hearing the dog whistle are those suffering from auditory hallucinations.

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          1. Brother Jimmy, I must ask, what about Harris’s views on the modern middle east do you consider to be accurate? I’m more familiar with the modern middle east than other periods, and unless he’s changed over the past three years, Harris is every bit as full of crap on the modern middle east as he is analyzing the medieval era. I absolutely agree with your loathing of the many idiotic left wing caricatures who consider any critique of Islamic practice bigoted, and whose response to Jihadist atrocities is to go “it’s our fault for bombing them” (should note that I don’t agree that’s applicable to Frederic based on his comments). However, their stupidity and inability to call a spade a spade doesn’t magically transform Harris’s analysis into an accurate one.

            Just off the top of my head, Harris claimed in his debate with Omer Aziz that Hamas and ISIS are identical on Jihad and Israel, which really betrays Harris’s inability to make important, uncontroversial distinctions between radical Sunni Islamist groups, to say nothing of more moderate Islamic factions.

          2. Realized after making my post that this is off topic; I’d love to continue this conversation, but I hope we can all agree to shut it down if/when Tim tells us to stay on topic!

          3. Time to shut it down and get back on topic. Harris’ pseudo history is the topic here thanks.

  9. A bit of nitpicking: historical research when done like you did actually is a branch of science. Sometimes it even provides harder data than physics. See, history does collect empirical data, does formulate theories and hypotheses, does test them, does make predictions (the Roman camps east of the Rhine a few years ago) and does use rigid methods to improve theories. So opposing historical research to science doesn’t make much sense. What Harris and Shapiro do is quack, comparable with for instance Flat Earth Theory (which actually makes more sense than this duo as long it’s limited to relatively small distances).

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    1. All history is subjective to a certain point which is why it is not a science. Once we start pretending that writing history is objective, we are failing to disclose our biases which are always there.

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      1. If you think physics is not subjective you better think twice. Fred Hoyle cough, cough, cough.

        “pretending that writing history is objective”
        Then it’s a good thing I didn’t pretend that and that you attacked a strawman.

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  10. Excellent dissection for this utter dumpster fire of an “interview” by Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro (never really liked Shapiro either, through I do agree with some of what he says. The problem with him to me is that he’s too much of a Bush-era conservative).

  11. There are too many comments to sort through, but, if it’s helpful, I believe it was Origen who is the first to use the “gold of the Egyptians” metaphor (you cite Augustine, who may have been where Kepler read it, I don’t know), in one of his letters — was it one to Gregory Thaumaturgus?

    FWIW. Love your posts, BTW. Excellent work.

    1. Actually I think Clement of Alexandria came up with that idea first. But Augustine’s formulation is most like the source of Kepler’s comment.

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  12. Rather looks like your antipathy to Sam Harris is skewing this piece. He is generalizing and exaggerating, as mortals do in spoken conversation, and you attack him in detail that’s entirely one-sided. You’re not obliged to give both sides of an argument of course on your own blog, but a little balance wouldn’t half be welcome.

    I doubt Harris would claim any depth of knowledge on the history, but that doesn’t make him wrong. Take the fall of the Roman Empire. He says Christianity is somewhere there in the mix, that’s all, and given the decline of the stern old Roman virtues, public service and military self-reliance then it’s hardly outrageous to say it’s a likely factor. If enough people think that way, as they clearly did in Gibbon’s time in the age of faith, there’s likely to be some truth in it, especially if we ever admit that sometimes perception itself can be part of the reality (wouldn’t it be good to ask an ancient Roman of the old school?). And the comparison between the Western and Eastern experiences is pretty spurious, given that the latter underwent several near-total and protracted destructions. There were numerous possible causes of their respective declines, not least the existential threat posed to the Eastern by Islam very early on. Probably too many and too much to go into here, and you’re not expected to, but if you don’t at least make some allusion to the whole to temper your own partial statements then you are not doing history much service either.

    I never thought I’d find an atheist apologist for the Inquisition. (Which doubtless you’re not, but that’s the point: on this reading you very well could be!)

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    1. “Rather looks like your antipathy to Sam Harris is skewing this piece. “

      I have no strong feelings toward Harris at all, apart from some mild irritation at the way he has said ill-informed things about history in the past. So I have no “antipathy” towards him, just towards bad history.

      “He is generalizing and exaggerating, as mortals do in spoken conversation, and you attack him in detail that’s entirely one-sided.”

      I’m afraid saying he is “generalising” or even “exaggerating” doesn’t help him here. None of the things he claims are correct. It wouldn’t matter if he went into in more detail on them. In fact, that would almost certainly make them worse.

      “You’re not obliged to give both sides of an argument of course on your own blog, but a little balance wouldn’t half be welcome.”

      The only “other side” here is Harris’. And I give his “side”, in his own words. Twice, no less. If you’re under the impression there are current historians who argue the things Harris says and I have somehow not represented them, then you’re wrong. In fact, that’s kind of the point. There is no “other side” here – Harris is just dead wrong on every point.

      “I doubt Harris would claim any depth of knowledge on the history, but that doesn’t make him wrong.”

      He’d be wise not to claim that. And he is wrong.

      “Take the fall of the Roman Empire. He says Christianity is somewhere there in the mix, that’s all, and given the decline of the stern old Roman virtues, public service and military self-reliance then it’s hardly outrageous to say it’s a likely factor.”

      There was no decline in those Roman “virtues”, public service increased as did the numbers and activity of the military. So, he is wrong. This is why no modern historian accepts that Christianity was some kind of factor.

      “If enough people think that way, as they clearly did in Gibbon’s time in the age of faith, there’s likely to be some truth in it, especially if we ever admit that sometimes perception itself can be part of the reality (wouldn’t it be good to ask an ancient Roman of the old school?). “

      I’ll admit to having little to no idea what any of that sentence even means.

      ” And the comparison between the Western and Eastern experiences is pretty spurious, given that the latter underwent several near-total and protracted destructions. “

      As I said, in the fifth century it stood firm while the West collapsed. Then in the sixth century it expanded. So it is not “spurious” to note that all the things Harris claims caused “the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire” were equally or more prevalent in the East and yet it got stronger in the very period in which the West disintegrated. Those “near-total and protracted destructions” came later and so are irrelevant here. You seem to be demonstrating about the same level of knowledge as Harris.

      “but if you don’t at least make some allusion to the whole to temper your own partial statements then you are not doing history much service either.”

      Bollocks. See above.

      “I never thought I’d find an atheist apologist for the Inquisition. (Which doubtless you’re not, but that’s the point: on this reading you very well could be!)”

      Also bollocks. Only an idiot would draw that conclusion from anything I said.

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      1. You’ve put an argument and you think you’ve proved Harris wrong, but you haven’t actually, probably for the most part because it’s not provable, and you only read into the few facts that we do know what you want to, excluding any other possible interpretation (yes, historians do interpret), dismissing out of hand both subjectively and on the very limited objectivity available any other view which doesn’t accord with yours.

        Pity, I thought I had found an interesting site where there would be some respect and courteous exchange, instead of which it’s just unpleasant. But carry on and alienate, you’ll probably go far.

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        1. I don’t claim to have “proven” anything, given that, as anyone who reads this blog knows, I routinely explain that historical analysis doesn’t deal in “proof”. So I really don’t need your high school level lecturing about how history is about interpretation, thanks all the same. But that does not mean all analysis is therefore equally valid and anyone can think whatever they like. Harris presented a succession of statements which simply do not fit with any detailed grasp of the relevant evidence and so are not supported by modern scholarship. End of story. There is no “other side” that I’ve neglected. He is not being treated unfairly because he was “generalising” – no elaboration is going to make any of his points anything but worse. He can’t be excused because he was somehow “exaggerating”. And your attempts at defending one of his points and countering one of my arguments just shows how wrong he is and how feeble your grasp of the material is.

          I was about as “courteous” as that kind of wrongheaded, bumbling rearguard action deserves. And I’ve spent the last day dealing with similar pathetic and ill-informed efforts from other Harris fans on a couple of other venues. I didn’t have much of a view about Harris before I wrote this piece, but judging from the petty, ignorant, ideological and downright weird reactions from some of his more rabid supporters, I’m sure as hell developing one now. Finally, if you don’t want an experience that is “unpleasant”, don’t stumble into a forum where a high standard of historical knowledge is required and start making the kind of half-baked and badly supported arguments you made above. Especially when you finish it off with that moronic “Inquisition apologist” jibe. It will not end well, as you just discovered.

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          1. oh, now my interest’s piqued as to the “downright weird” part: funny how Gnu Atheism can always produce something to surprise us

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          2. Apart from the usual (“you’re a fake atheist”, “why are you attacking atheism?”), and the pathetic (“you’re just being pedantic”, “he was just generalising”, “leave Sam alone!!”) I had one person cite “respected historian Richard Carrier” and his opinion of me as a reason to ignore me and declared me an “enemy of the enlightened society I want to create”. Another one said I was a “Ben Shapiro wannabe” (!!) and said I was “low energy”. Though he did stop short of calling me a “cuck”. I had no idea so many of Harris’ followers were so strange, but many of them had a decidedly “libertarian” tinge that non-Americans like me find totally alien.

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          3. While Greenwald’s a rather controversial figure, I can’t help but quote his addendum to a piece he wrote which drew the ire of Harris’s fanatics. Not much has changed since 2013, it seems:

            “Having dealt somewhat extensively with Harris and many of his supporters this week, I can say that I haven’t encountered such religious-type fervor and jingoistic and tribalistic self-love (My Side is superior to Theirs!!) in quite a long time.”

            Given Harris fans are attacking this blog for strengthening the position of Christians, I should note as one of Tim’s Christian fans, learning that it’s far more likely James rather than Peter led the Jesus sect following the death of Jesus, or that Jesus doesn’t claim to be God in the Gospels, did not strengthen my faith in Christian orthodoxy or the reliability of the Gospel accounts. Quite the opposite, in fact. There are also numerous instances in the comments where Christian apologetic bad history is torn to shreds.

  13. I’ve just been told that a couple of days ago someone asked the following question on the “Ask Me Anything” section of Harris’ website:

    “The following article [i.e. mine] claims that you have made numerous history mistakes in your talk with Ben Shapiro. Can you read it and comment? Did it alter your views?”

    We’ll see if Harris responds.

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  14. I agree for the most part with Tim but here’s where I have some minor objections. He claims West Rome’s decline was a political and economic not a military affair. That is half the truth. Rome’s decline and fall happened because of an increasing inability to militarily defend its integrity against Hunnic and certain Germanic (mostly Gothic) barbarians. This military inability (largely) resulted from home-grown political convulsions as Rome’s political failures would in time exhaust the economic and military resources of the empire leading to a military vulnerability that finally put an end on Rome’s prerogative to dictate on its own and through its own processes and quarrels who is going to be emperor. Instead Rome lost this right to the Goths and never managed to reclaim it. Following that, the Western Germanics succeeded the Goths in that role and so the Empire split into permanent alien realms and the prospect of reuniting it faded altogether. It’s also wrong to consider the Eastern Roman Empire a faithful continuation of the Roman simply because it carried the “Roman” name. In fact the post-Roman western Europe was far more Roman than the Eastern empire, both in terms of language and surviving institutions.

    There’s also no doubt that by the 5th century at the latest the Roman Army came to rely for its effectiveness on Germanic units without which it was basically a whole lot of wasted meat. This fatal reliance, in great measure a result of Rome’s own expensive political failures, was what led to its demise. Put simply, the empire fell for the same reason virtually all empires and states have fallen so far. Foreign domination by direct and indirect means. The process that leads to this can be incredibly complex. But the cause is the same. Human life is nothing more than a game of elimination, a game assuming both the subtlest and crudest forms.

    About Islamic science, Tim fails to explore why it stagnated while Western science didn’t. The reason it stagnated was the same hat led Hellenistic science to stagnation and on straight to the dustbin of history. It was still permeated by the spirit of religion, not the spirit of naturalist nihilism. Indeed, as Tim’s text suggests, Galileo was not much of a scientist really. He was much more of a philosopher. But he has yet to investigate how his philosophy was radically different and opposed to the theocentric philosophy that antiquity and christianity had in common. It was that new worldview that Galileo introduced that prevented Western science from going the way of the Dodo and allowed our glorious advanced societies and selves to happen. Without it, we would hardly be able to boast of our undisputed superiority over the backward Moslem.

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    1. “He claims West Rome’s decline was a political and economic not a military affair. That is half the truth. Rome’s decline and fall happened because of an increasing inability to militarily defend its integrity against Hunnic and certain Germanic (mostly Gothic) barbarians. This military inability (largely) resulted from home-grown political convulsions as Rome’s political failures would in time exhaust the economic and military resources of the empire “

      I wouldn’t actually disagree with that, though I would maintain that this inability was a later symptom of the political and economic problems I referred to. As I said, the Romans actually were able to defeat those invaders on almost every single occasion, even right up to the end. But the economic and political decline meant that their forces were spending too much time fighting each other and toward the end the political and economic disintegration meant sometimes they could not field troops where they needed to. The barbarians only got a foothold when the Romans were distracted by civil war or, later, in areas where the overstretched Army was engaged elsewhere or had been withdrawn. The barbarians were a symptom of this decline, not its cause.

      ” It’s also wrong to consider the Eastern Roman Empire a faithful continuation of the Roman simply because it carried the “Roman” name. In fact the post-Roman western Europe was far more Roman than the Eastern empire, both in terms of language and surviving institutions.”

      How “Roman” the Eastern Empire was later is another debate, but largely irrelevant to anything I’ve said. In the key period of the decline and fall of the Western Empire – from the mid-fourth century to the end of the sixth – the Eastern and Western Empires were more or less identical in religious make up, administration and the nature of their armies. Where they differed was in economic strength and political stability. It was those weaknesses in the West that caused its collapse, not the stuff Harris claims.

      “There’s also no doubt that by the 5th century at the latest the Roman Army came to rely for its effectiveness on Germanic units without which it was basically a whole lot of wasted meat. “

      There is great doubt about that and it did not “lead to its demise”. As I said, that idea is contradicted by a mass of evidence as summarised by Hugh Elton. And those units were as highly effective in the fifth century as they had been for all the other centuries they had made up a substantial part of the Roman Army. Finally, both Empire used these “non-Roman” troops in large numbers, so I makes no sense to argue they somehow only caused a fall in the West and not the East. This is an outdated nineteenth century idea and it does not fit the evidence at all.

      “Put simply, the empire fell for the same reason virtually all empires and states have fallen so far. Foreign domination by direct and indirect means.”

      This weird comment stinks of modern political preaching about immigration.

      “About Islamic science, Tim fails to explore why it stagnated while Western science didn’t.”

      Tim could have “explored” all kinds of things and my 10,000 word article could have become a book. There is good work on why that happened – the stuff by Toby HUff already mentioned in comment above, for example. But it was not my aim to write a comprehensive history of all related topics. Why the scientific tradition continued in the Muslim world, or the Byzantine world for that matter, yet didn’t develop into full-blown empirical science is a huge subject and not one directly relevant to Harris’ comments.

      “It was that new worldview that Galileo introduced that prevented Western science from going the way of the Dodo and allowed our glorious advanced societies and selves to happen. Without it, we would hardly be able to boast of our undisputed superiority over the backward Moslem.”

      Is this where you raise your tiki torch and shout “White Power!”? Fuck off you loon.

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      1. The barbarians were a symptom of this decline, not its cause.

        That’s not Peter Heather’s view as I read him. Rather, he argues that the Empire unintentionally transformed its Germanic (and later, Hunnic) neighbours into much more formidable enemies over time. And the battle of Adrianope (378) and Geiseric’s invasion of north-west Africa from 429 on would seem to cast doubt on your generalisation that the Romans were able to defeat the “barbarians” in almost every encounter right up to the end – and to support Heather’s thesis: there’s no way the Germans of the 1st or 2nd century could have managed either. Admittedly, if the Romans had been able to get sufficient forces to Africa in time, they would probably have beaten Geiseric – but that they couldn’t was itself a result of the Hunnish threat. The Romans had been fighting civil wars ever since the days of Marius and Sulla, so that can’t explain the western Empire’s fall. But I think the rise of the Sassanian Empire in the 3rd century contributed: it precipitated a crisis which was successfully met, but left an always-formidable rival to the east – and if there was a choice between defending the east and the west, it had to be the east, the much richer half. (Incidentally, I wonder if the adoption of Christianity was at least in part an ideological response to the Sassanian reform of and identification with Zoroastrianism.)

        1. “That’s not Peter Heather’s view as I read him. “

          No, it isn’t. As much as I admire his scholarship on many points, I think Heather, as a Germanicist, overemphasises the barbarians as a cause rather than a symptom of the West’s collapse.

          “Rather, he argues that the Empire unintentionally transformed its Germanic (and later, Hunnic) neighbours into much more formidable enemies over time.”

          More formidable, yes. But generally able to be handled. If the West had not constantly been fighting itself, the mainly fairly small incursions up until the first quarter of the fifth century would not have been much of a problem. The issues arose when they spent their dwindling resources on civil conflict.

          “And the battle of Adrianope (378) and Geiseric’s invasion of north-west Africa from 429 on would seem to cast doubt on your generalisation that the Romans were able to defeat the “barbarians” in almost every encounter right up to the end “

          And those were the two exceptions I had in mind when I used the word “almost”. Germanic armies had always been able to inflict defeats on Roman ones in the right circumstances. And the North African situation is another illustration of what happens when internecine conflict took priority over careful defence.

          “there’s no way the Germans of the 1st or 2nd century could have managed either.”

          Tell that to Varus. Tell that to Decius. Both beaten and killed in battle with earlier Germanic armies.

          “Admittedly, if the Romans had been able to get sufficient forces to Africa in time, they would probably have beaten Geiseric”

          Yes. See above.

          “The Romans had been fighting civil wars ever since the days of Marius and Sulla, so that can’t explain the western Empire’s fall. “

          Yet in the third century the period of civil war saw barbarian incursions much like those in the fifth century. It’s just that the Empire, drawing on its full resources from both the eastern and western halves, stabilised before it collapsed that time. But it came very close.

          1. I concede your example of Decius, but in 251, the transformation of the German tribes into larger confederations was already well underway. Varus’s defeat in the Teutoberg Forest was very different – it wasn’t the result of an organised “barbarian” invasion of established Roman territory, but of a revolt against attempted expansion led by a supposed ally who lured Varus into an ambush by false reports. But even in that case, Hermann’s ability to plan and carry through the ambush was probably a result of the military education he received in Rome as a hostage – i.e., the Romans making their potential enemies more formidable, but in this case, on an individual level.

            Alrthough Heather doesn’t deal with it, a process of inadvertent Roman encouragement of the growth of larger political units similar to that which he sees as occurring among the Germans, could also be hypothesised for the Arabs in the run-up to the Muslim conquests of the 7th century.

          2. The point of the examples of Decius and Varus is that a couple of isolated examples of barbarian armies inflicting defeats on Roman troops doesn’t tell us much about systemic weaknesses. Gaiseric’s annexation of Africa was more due to strategic blunders that let him effectively walk in without substantial military opposition. Which really just leaves you with Adrianople, which was in the East and was a victory over the Eastern Praesental Army, so tells us nothing much about any military weaknesses in the West over the following century. Again, almost every single time the Western Army met the barbarians in battle, the Romans won.

    2. “Islamic Science”? There’s no such thing and never has been.

      What there is and was; is Science conducted by people who happen to be Muslim or living in nations that could be considered “Muslim nations” (by their rulers or majority of their populace).
      And this science was just as irreligious as that conducted anywhere else in the world. Your idea that it was influenced by the religion of Islam is ignorant claptrap. Do yourself a favour and google the name Ali Qushji and note that he was more than a century before Galileo Galilei.

      And no the science in the Muslim empires never “stagnated”. It merely didn’t progress between the 17th and late 20th centuries as quickly as that of Western Europe & the states on the Italian peninsular. It’s no different to the science of China, the Indian subcontinent, Japan, Siam or even Eastern Europe being overtaken by western Europe & the Italian states during those centuries. You could hardly say that the Russian empire or even the Habsburg Austrian empire were any more hotbed’s of progress and scientific enquiry than the Ottoman empire was.
      I’m no authority on exactly why the pace of scientific progress within the Persian and Ottomans fell behind that of western Europe but my natural first suspicion is that it had something to do with what usually leads to periods of stagnation and decline within empires; the emergence of privileged ruling classes who inevitably become effete and adopting a mostly complacent & hubristic attitude within a few decades. The ultimately poisonous influence of the Janissary class within the Ottoman court is very well documented. They wouldn’t have had such a general perceived benefit of education and free-thinking that the aristocracy in France and the British Isles etc adopted during the age of enlightenment.
      I also suspect that the highly exhaustive long wars that the Ottoman and Persian empire fought against each other and the exhaustive & long wars both empires fought against the growing behemoth that was the Russian empire was a factor.

      But it clearly has nothing to do with Islam itself.

      As for your “boasting of undisputed superiority”, that’s something I’ve only ever noted from sad people who suffer inward complexes of their own individual inferiority…

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      1. ‘“Islamic Science”? There’s no such thing and never has been.’

        I mean, George Saliba makes this point as well and he still wrote a book titled… “Islamic Science”. Because everybody uses it as shorthand for the scientific or proto-scientific progress that took place in the Islamic world.

  15. I have great admiration for Sam Harris and would no doubt be considered a paid-up member of his fan club by some of his detractors above, but I have no problem with acknowledging that he is sorely out of his depth on all things historical, as Tim’s excellent and instructive post shows.

    Martha (above) is probably on to something: There is a lack of awareness on the part of Harris et al that history is an evolving body of knowledge just like any other scientific and academic endeavour. If you’re not aware of how the work of the historian is done, of course the interpretations of a Gibbon or a William Draper seem as solid now as the day they were penned.

    Harris is, as Tim has also made clear, sadly in good company when thinking he can use history to make points about the present without first swotting up on the subjects.

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  16. Another romp. And thanks for the Al Ghazali quote. I’m collecting them contra NdGT. There are more. These are from the R.J. McCarthy translation in “Al Ghazali Deliverance From Error: Five Key Texts Including His Spiritual Autobiography.”

    “The mathematical sciences deal with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. But nothing in them entails denial or affirmation of religious matters. On the contrary, they concern rigorously demonstrated facts which can in no wise be denied once they are known and understood.” p.63

    “Great indeed is the crime against religion committed by anyone who supposes that Islam is to be championed by the denial of these mathematical sciences. For the revealed Law nowhere undertakes to deny or affirm these sciences, and the latter nowhere address themselves to religious matters.” p.64

    1. While I agree that Al Ghazali was a brilliant philosopher and largely correct in his critique of Aristotle, it should be noted that he did advocate branding (some subset of ) his intellectual opponents as infidels and punishing them with death (see the conclusion of The Incoherence of the Philosophers. http://www.ghazali.org/works/taf-eng.pdf .) I trust we can all agree that’s not cool. Now, I suspect that recommendation was rarely if ever acted upon, and Tim is quite right that Islamic contributions to the sciences continued long after Al Ghazali, but it’s not like those who want to demonize him are basing their assessment on pure imagination.

  17. I went to one of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s talks and he said the exact things you gave in this article and now I’m angry. Angry that he spread such things to the hundreds of other people at the talk he gave. Angry that I bought to some degree what he said. Thank you for this website.

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  18. I just found a NASA website that claims Galileo did find evidence for heliocentrism besides tides.
    https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/307/galileos-observations-of-the-moon-jupiter-venus-and-the-sun/

    It mentions the Venus phases, but those only demonstrated Venus goes around the sun, not Earth, but it also mentions ‘sunspots’. I don’t personally see how sunspots could demonstrate heliocentrism. Was the Ptolemaic model capable of explaining sunspots? NASA are scientists, not historians, so I can’t take them at their word here.

    1. Galileo did argue that all the observations mentioned by NASA supported Copernicus, and some of his contemporaries agreed. The arguments were somewhat indirect, often merely undermining arguments in favor of the other systems.

      Sunspots demonstrated that the sun was not a perfect unchanging orb and that it rotated on its axis. This undermined the Aristotelian argument that astronomical objects were made of a unique quintessence that unlike the Earth could be eternally moved about the heavens. Moreover it undermined the argument that the Earth couldn’t simultaneously orbit the sun and turn on its axis (objects have only one natural motion according to Aristotle) since any system where the sun orbited the Earth would now require the same.

      The moons of Jupiter provided an argument from analogy for Copernicus. The little things go around the big thing and the closer ones go faster. This analogy supports the Copernican system over the Tychonic system, since in the Tychonic system the larger object ( the Sun) orbits the smaller ( the Earth) while the closer object (the moon ) moves slower than the farther object ( the Sun). The Copernican system requires no such exceptions.

      There also were the moon and the stars. The moon’s craters and mountains, like sunspots undermined the Aristotelian notion of quintessence, much like sunspots. The stars appeared smaller through the telescope than was expected based on naked eye observations. This at least weakened the claim that they would have to be much larger than the sun in order not to show any parallax (although there was some remaining confusion over star sizes in subsequent decades due to illusory effects like diffraction.)

      And of course, there were the phases of Venus, which as you said disproves Ptolemy, but not Tycho.

  19. Just curious, are you gonna do a blog entry in the future about the revelations of the Catholic Church scandals now and throughout the ages? The 900-page report and whatnot?

    1. Unless atheists are saying things about that subject which are historically incorrect, no. This blog is devoted to atheists mangling history, nothing else.

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    1. That article has some correct information, but the last statement that all this “vanished into a dark age, not to be rediscovered until the modern era” is nonsense. The writer is getting all this stuff largely from the works of Galen. And Galen’s works were preserved and studied in the so-called “dark ages” – first by Byzantine scholars and commentators, then by Muslim ones and then, from the eleventh century, in the growing medical schools of the west such as Salerno and Montpellier. The writer also exaggerates how “advanced” Roman medicine was and skips over ideas in it which were plain wrong and which had to be unlearned despite centuries of Roman writers like Galen being regarded as unquestionable “authorities”.

      The writer also says De Medicina by Aulus Cornelius Celsus is “the only complete medical text that has survived from antiquity”. Not only is this wrong, but Celsus was an encyclopaedist and this work seems to be just part of a much larger one on a range of subjects. And it was preserved in the so-called “dark ages”. This article is a good example of someone who knows just enough about a subject to get it mostly wrong.

      1. Thanks for your kind quick and accurate answer. Prof. Richard is known as the distingished scholar, so i first read his article, i tbought it was fact. But when i saw his mention about the anatomy, i realised the differnces between what you said before and his. Staying up all night(because i am living in korea), i was finding some researches. However i couldn’t find some answers satified wiht me, and i ask your opinion.

        Becasue of your answer, i finally can fall a sleep. Thank you.

        One more question; Could you recommand some medieval history books dealing with medicine?

      2. Oops! I almost forgot this question.

        What exactly Richard exaggerates and skips? I havn’t been studying ancient rome thoroughly, so i cant imagine that.

        1. Gabriel is a Professor of Politics at the U.S. Army War College, so I can see no sign he has any great training in or understanding of pre-modern history. His book on the subject seems like many generalist histories of a topic by a non-specialist – one that draws on other generalist histories and shows little knowledge of the primary source material. He clearly exaggerates the Roman grasp of the need to keep wounds clean, given that Galenic medicine regarded suppuration and infection to be necessary and beneficial parts of the healing process and advised binding up infected wounds and allowing the infection to run its course. Galen also ridiculed the use of the tourniquet on the basis of the Theory of Humours. So Gabriel has selected some Roman medical ideas (the ones that fit with ours) and ignored others (despite them being more widespread and influential). He is not a very reliable guide as a result.

  20. Sam Harris and Stephen Fry – good examples of ‘intellectuals’ who think they are cleverer than they actually are. But at least Fry can be entertaining.

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  21. Here is a similar podcast, filled with bad history from both sides. Ed Husain (a member of Harris’ friend’s organisation) cites Gibbon as evidence that Christianity destroyed the classical world, caused the dark ages and caused destruction at Alexandria. Grove claims at one point that Islam ’caused’ the dark ages.

    https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-Can-Islam-overcome-sexism-and-violence-Ed-Husain-vs-Beth-Grove

  22. I just discovered your website and I found your critique
    of Harris to be right on in your criticism.
    I’ve listened to many of Harris’s debates and have always
    wondered if I had listened to the same one that many
    of the commenters were highly praising.

    By listening to them a second time , it only enhanced my
    first opinion which was that there was no point made other
    then several partial topics on tangents to nothing.

  23. Why do you think so many “educated” people, I mean people with degrees who have published, trash the “Dark Ages” or “The Middle Ages,” but when you press them about anything, you realize they know next to nothing about that time period?

    The comment about Galen’s work “being lost in the Dark Ages” is what inspired me to comment. As someone who enjoys studying a lot of medieval writings, it genuinely perplexes me when I see so many people believe everything from 476 to Francis Bacon is a black hole.

    It’d be one thing if it were simple ignorance, but it rather seems like willful antagonism and complete disregard for an entire millennium’s worth of history.

    1. I’ve gotten very bored lately explaining to people that the witch burnings they are talking about didn’t happen (often) during the “dark ages” but peaked in the 17th century during the 30 Years War.

  24. Thanks Tim. I just found your site via a Quora article on Sam Harris and am looking forward to reading your other pieces on great myths. I found it very well written and I appreciated the quotes, citations and logic that contribute towards refuting Sam historical claims. All new to me.

    Thanks also to the commenters above who made great contributions. I’d like to add that on the whole, I expect that many that admire Sam Harris’s views, and Sam Harris himself, would be open to modifying their views when faced with rational and fact-based arguments that contradict those views (such as the arguments in Tim’s article). Representing Sam and his “fans” as dogmatic idealogues is as irksome as Harris’s own historical inaccuracies.

    Onwards and upwards.

    1. Harris is clearly an ideologue. How dogmatic he is would be up for debate, though I have seen him change his mind on Hitler and the Church when he finally bothered to read a book on the subject. His problem is that he blithely accepts general stuff that he kind of picks up along the way and doesn’t bother to actually check any of it so long as it fits his ideology. So he may not be absolutely dogmatic, but his ideology makes him deeply lazy.

      And many, but not all, of his fans are fucking fantatics. Dogmatic, close-minded, wilfully ignorant and obnoxious clowns. If you aren’t one of those then that’s great, but I have had too many encounters with those who are to pretend they don’t exist.

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    2. “Representing Sam and his “fans” as dogmatic idealogues is as irksome.”
      Why? There are quite a few examples of Harris’ fanboys flooding blogs that dared to criticize their hero. Their common themes are “Harris meant something differently and you quote him out of context” and “Harris is playing the devil’s advocate”. But if you stick to your charitable view I’d like you to explain what Harris and his fans exactly have learned from Harris’ disastrous encounter with Noam Chomsky, someone who actually knows what he’s talking about.

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    3. Keith, with due respect, if you read what Harris’s fan say in this very thread, none of them prior to you have come out in support of Tim’s arguments, or even acknowledged that this piece led them to question their preconceived notions. Same goes for most Harris fans on his reddit. Tim’s observations about Sam’s fans is also fairly common from folk who have criticized Harris. I already posted Greenwald making a similar observation after interacting with Harris fans, but the best summary may come from from PZ Myers:

      “Sam Harris has an amazing talent: he can say the most awful things, and a horde of helpful apologists will rise up in righteous fury and simultaneously insist that he didn’t really say that, and yeah, he said that, but it only makes sense.”

  25. …actually, I’m wrong, and there are a few Harris fans on here who have acknowledged he talks out of his ass on history. A nice reminder to reread the thread in question before making absolute claims! (Tim, sorry if this is a double post, clicking post comment gave me some error)

  26. I applaud Ben Shapiro for challenging Harris on this stuff. Say what you will about people like Shapiro, at least they are actually confronting folks like Sam Harris on these matters. He earns some respect from me for that

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    1. Shaprio is about as dumb as Harris when it comes to history. He doesn’t say as many stupid things as Harris here mainly because he’s countering Harris’ extended claims, but I’ve heard Shaprio mangle history for the purposes of peddling his right wing ideology and do so every bit as badly as Harris does here.

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      1. I disagree some there, as Shapiro in this instance [not anywhere else BTW] at least is coming against Sam’s anti-theistic nonsense and at least being a popular voice is a start. To me, that earns some shred of respect. I never said he was the best, but the more people fight back, the better, I say. I respect your opinion.
        More popular voices need to resist. BTW, good job on this blog entry BTW.

        1. Shaprio is just doing what Harris is doing, but from an opposing ideological perspective. They are both as ignorant and dangerous as each other.

  27. A Wonderfully erudite post I have cited in numerous occasions. I have a couple of genuine questions relating to history. One of the theories on the aftermath of the battle of Adrianople is that the Late Roman Army was much more limited in its capability to raise new experienced troops, thus meaning that relatively smaller defeats yielded greater impacts than before. But, as you have said, “ This was a period in the which the army expanded to its largest size – possibly up to half a million troops.” I would much desire your thoughts on this matter or a gesture towards a juicy source I could eat up. Secondly, the image of the proud Roman legion all clad in Lorica Segmenta is a popular imagination wholly ingrained within many minds. By contrast, the Late Roman Army (Let’s be real; If ever depicted) all have mail shirts, all to portray the earlier Romans as wearing higher-quality armor that was bulkier, invoking a popular imaging of “decadence” and “decline.” This view is certainly false given how the Lorica Segmenta was expensive and hard to maintain, making it wholly not ordinary equipment. What I want to know is just how extensively was the Lorica Segmenta used and in what period was this armor used, as pop culture spontaneously fails to account for change. Also, what armor did the Romans actually use the most?

  28. I am currently reading Adrian Goldworthy’s magnificently written How Rome Fell after a thorough reading of Hugh Elton’s Warfare in Europe 350 – 425. Tim, what are your personal thoughts regarding the matter of the Arcasid or Sassanian Empire as a ‘superpower’ rivaling the Romans? Adrian Goldsworthy and Hugh Elton make soldi claims on the minimal impact of the barbarians but I find Goldworthy’s assessment of the Sassanian Empire as not truly Rome’s equal to be surprising and profound.

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