Raju argues that Western formal Mathematics has a theological bias, which is being perpetuated by presentday mathematicians who do not question its underlying meta-structure, says Shailaja Sharma.
Book Review:
“Euclid & Jesus: How and Why the Church Changed Mathematics & Christianity across Two Religious Wars”, by C.K. Raju, Multiversity & Citizens International, 2012.
This book is for those who have at some point or the other wondered: Why do mainstream discussions of science and philosophy centre around European and Greek traditions to the exclusion of all other traditions?
Raju argues that Western formal Mathematics has a theological bias, which is being perpetuated by presentday mathematicians who do not question its underlying meta-structure, says Shailaja Sharma.
Book Review:
“Euclid & Jesus: How and Why the Church Changed Mathematics & Christianity across Two Religious Wars”, by C.K. Raju, Multiversity & Citizens International, 2012.
This book is for those who have at some point or the other wondered: Why do mainstream discussions of science and philosophy centre around European and Greek traditions to the exclusion of all other traditions?
Is Science a Western gift to the world? Are the ways and means used by our ancestors to solve real-life problems (in astronomy, architecture, healing, etc.) nonscientific, or failing in some way to measure up to the standards of science? Were the philosophical musings of our ancestors unfit to qualify as good philosophy?
This book is also for those who were turned off from Mathematics, when they were 11 or 12 years of age. What on earth is happening in Mathematics? Why are we learning a round-about way of understanding why ‘2’ follows ‘1’ and so on (Peano’s Axioms)? Why are simple and obvious things being taught as important Theorems to be learnt by-heart (Geometry Theorems)? For many youngsters, this is also the point at which Mathematics becomes unintelligible, and computation begins to be side-lined in favour of the ability to reproduce the language of axioms, theorems and proofs.
This book is also for those who may have asked, why, when Indian mathematicians (and others) are known to have established and used the result of the so-called Pythagoras Theorem” centuries before Pythagoras himself (if he existed), the theorem is named after Pythagoras and continues to be so described.
And finally, this book is for those who have wondered how modern Western states like the USA fuse religion with reason. The book addresses the central question, is Science secular? Is Mathematics universal?
The story goes thus. An investigation into the origins of Euclid, the supposed Father of Geometry and the source of deductive mathematical proof as epitomised by the ancient Greeks, leads to the discovery that there was possibly no such person and further that the Elements (the key work of Euclid) was written most likely about a thousand years after its supposed date, and that too, most likely not by a white-skinned Greek philosopher, but a black woman philosopher in Egypt – Hypatia.
A study of history shows that Hypatia was lynched by a religious mob, as was her father the philosopher Theon (whose name is mentioned in many commentaries on Elements); and her follower Proclus left Egypt in order to escape religious persecution. This was around the 5th century CE. Geometry was ridiculed as idolatry. The underlying philosophy of Mathesiz was equity and justice, which was unacceptable to those who wanted to distinguish between faithful believers versus nonbelievers, pagans and skeptics. The hitherto Christian belief of reincarnation (rebirth) was replaced with that of resurrection (bodily revival from the grave); cyclic time (a recurring cosmos) with linear time starting with creation and ending with apocalypse; immanent god (god within each human) with an external (transcendental) allpowerful god, to be feared. And the mathematics of Theon and Hypatia argued (or demonstrated) in favour of all these points which the Church reinterpreted in a new and different manner, leading therefore to their persecution.
Prior to this period, Christianity was a mystic religion, following in the tradition of various other mystery religions of Egypt, Greece and Persia at the time and the story of Christ was considered to be a mystery open to interpretation. However, in the 4th century CE, the Roman emperor embraced Christianity and the Catholic church became inseparable from state-power. In the altered scenario, the church leaders reinterpreted the Bible – making it literal – cursed the hitherto influential interpreters such as Origen – who demonstrated that there were 6 different versions of the Bible – and declared war on the heretics. Their enmity extended to the philosophers who had flourished in Alexandria (in Egypt), including Theon and Hypatia. This was the first religious war – against the pagans – c. 500 CE, which led to the complete conversion of Europe to Christianity. The war was carried out with book burning and destruction of temples. This led to the end of philosophy for the time being and the onset of the European Dark Age.
The philosophers migrated to Persia and were allowed to settle in Jundishapur, where they established a hospital, where the Unani (Ionian) tradition flourished. Indian texts such as the Panchatantra, were translated into Persian and Indian medicinal knowledge was incorporated into this tradition. Later on, these ‘hakims’ were patronised by the Khalifas of Baghdad, as Baghdad grew into the world’s centre of learning and culture.
The movement of knowledge was often in the opposite direction to the direction of conquest and the conquerors learnt from those they conquered. In this way, the Arabs gained knowledge from the Persians. They adopted the philosophy of ‘aql’ (creative interpretation) as opposed to ‘naql’ (copy-cat behaviour). Thus the Arabs interpreted Indian mathematical texts and other sources of learning and set up great libraries in Baghdad and Spain. The Dark Age of Christendom coincided with the Golden Age of Islam.
Around 1000 CE, the Church instigated the ’Holy Crusades’, as the wealth and glory of their Muslim neighbours contrasted with their own situation. This was the second war. When military crusades failed repeatedly, the Church had to alter its tactics. The fall of the city of Toledo (in Spain) led to the huge library of 600,000 Arabic works coming into the hands of the Church. The Church finally abandoned its policy of burning heretical books and undertook a massive campaign to translate the works thus amassed by the Arabs, in order to better understand their enemy.
The Church, confronted with the vast repertory of the Arabs, including translated works from all over the world, had to make new doctrinal changes in order to adopt this knowledge without seeming to be taking from heretical sources. Raju proposes that it was this dilemma that led to the Church doctoring texts and altering history in order to attribute all previous knowledge to the theologically correct ancient Greeks while asserting that the Arabs only made literal translations, which is not true. This myth of ancient Greece’s infallible and all-encompassing wisdom obtained additional grist when the Baghdad book bazaar started churning out lots of books attributed to the ‘old Greek sage’ Aristotle so as to better sell those books. The myth was further sustained when Constantinople fell to Muhammad the Conqueror in the 15th c. CE, and many Greek translations found their way into Europe. Raju proposes that the distortion of history was an active practice patronised by the mediaeval Church, given first that it advocated pursuit of all means including grave violence and grave falsehood to achieve its ends, and secondly that the scientists themselves were scared of acknowledging non-Christian sources. Thus we have Newton’s calculus – although he probably learnt it from Indian sources which preceded him by two centuries, and Mercator’s map – although he learnt it from Chinese sources, and Copernican solar system – although he did not invent it – all translated in the Toledo library by the Arabs.
The main point is that the philosophy of reason (aql) was propounded by Islamic philosophers such as Al Ghazali. The theological debate about whether there were eternal laws with which God ruled the world (after having created it) or whether God could behave as he chose (divine intervention) was dividing the Islamic clergy. The Church appropriated the ‘eternal laws’ stand, and thereby transformed Christian doctrine into the doctrine of reason.
It has since used that doctrine to claim superiority to all other races and civilisations not to speak of religions. The identification of the ancient Greek tradition with the Church has been used to justify racism, colonialism (the doctrine of ‘Christian discovery’ of new lands) and slavery and to denigrate ‘pagan’ learning, including Indian. The doctrine of ‘pure reason’ has been used in the 20th century to make Mathematics ‘purely logical’ as per a defined Greek two-valued logical system. This has made the language of Mathematics unintelligible to students all over the world. Mathematics, which is mainly computational and preoccupied with problem-solving in most cultures, has been converted into metaphysics of ‘pure reason’ with no relation to real things. This ‘pure & eternal laws’ approach is incompatible with problems in physics and engineering, which are based on or require empirical observation and real life problemsolving. However, it is what is being taught in schools and colleges as formal Mathematics. Further it is incompatible with other systems of logic and therefore problematic to apply in some frontier areas of science.
The above is a very short summary of a long and complex story. Raju presents his theories with compelling evidence. His plea is that Western formal Mathematics has a theological bias, which is being perpetuated by present-day mathematicians who do not question its underlying meta-structure. He suggests that the elimination of this bias will free up Mathematics and end the intellectual slavery that exists in the world of the sciences.
The author is a Mathematician and an independent business and sustainability consultant.