My column today, a very brief take on Islam, the West, and science. This e-mail over-interprets what I said about the Enlightenment, but makes good points (and is perhaps Derb bait):
Mr. Lowry,
With all due respect, crediting the Enlightenment for science is like crediting Archie Bunker for the Emancipation Proclamation. It not only didn’t happen that way, it COULDN’T have happened that way. The Scientific Revolution had been under way for centuries before the beginning of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, some leaders of the Enlightenment, like Hobbs and Voltaire, seem to have been scientific nincompoops. But virtually all great early scientists were zealous religious believers.
One factor that encourages good science, and good economics, is, as you say, freedom. More particularly, a functioning pluralistic society in which there are structures and laws but not all power eminates from the top down. (This killed maritime science in China, when one of the Ming emperors ended the Chinese Voyages of Discovery by fiat.)
Christianity and Islam differ in their theology of power. While a religious (or any other) power structure will tend to monopolize a society if it can get away with it, Christianity makes more room for pluralism — as Bernard Lewis also points out. Separation of church and state has its roots in both Old and New Testaments, and was slowly developed in the West over thousands of years. Western science and technology began to develop in earnest centuries before the “Scientific Revolution,” which is one reason Medieval Europe was (it really was) so advanced. This coincided with more freedom than in most great civilizations. So the “space” you speak of was, in my opinion, Christianity reforming and returning slowly to its theological roots, beginning already in the alleged “Dark Ages.”