But what real changes, if any, would there have been if Al-Ghazali and Thomas Aquinas had taught opposite of what they did in OTL regarding the compatibility of religion and reason?
Alternatively, if the change of opinions seems implausible, what if Al-Ghazali and Thomas Aquinas didn't exist, and instead we had another Islamic theologian teaching compatibility of faith with philosophy and science, and another Christian theologian teaching that faith is superior to reason?
OTL already had Averroes, who, as you wish, argued for a reconciliation between islamic faith and reason/logic. He openly disagreed with Al-Ghazali.
Honestly, i don't think the whims of one or two "great thinkers" to be later stamped into history schoolbooks have any frequent effect on the development of civilization and technology, which are more tied to environmental, political, and pragmatic conditions.
Most opinions aren't successful because they're voiced by intelligent people, but because the intelligent peoples' audience wants to hear them.
I'm a supporter of the Zeitgeist theory of history, so I say instead of the opinions of two known people, alter the communities that develop them.
Let me say that, as a guy who teaches philosophy and has a major interest in (Neo-)Aristotelianism and Scholasticism -- albeit particularly in the field of ethics -- this subject automatically intrigues me. Much as I admire some of the great thinkers involved here, however, I must stress that the criticism I have quoted above is absolutely valid. A man like thomas aquinas didn't pop up out of nowhere. Simply changing his mind, or removing him, would change certain details and may even alter the shape of *scholasticism, but it can't remove the background that produced the man and his thoughts in the first place. He wasn't alone. He was 'merely' the most famous and lauded representative of a broader movement that was underway.
The same is true for certain thinkers in the Islamic world. As GauchoBadger said, you had such thinkers as Averroes (much admired by many a Scholistic, incidentally). Then again, as Yama951 points out, the broader movement of a more 'Aristotelian' Islamic philosophy ultimately lost out to a competing strain of thought, and this certainly had its effects on the intellectual history of the Islamic world. (How
much of an effect, naturally, can and should be discussed.)
So, indeed, you'd have to change a lot more than than just "removing a few guys from history", Skippy-the-ASB style. Yama951 again makes good points:
In Islam, Mu'tazila theology was the idea that the Quran is not eternal and was man made and that reason is compatible with faith. It died after its last proponent died in the 1050's. It's opposition, Ash'ari, took the opposite approach and thus influenced Islamic theology afterward. Though this is my really basic CKII level knowledge of the subject.
One might imagine a world where the intellectual history of the Islamic world "goes the other way". It's worth pointing out that Mu'tazila theology didn't just "die out", but was actively opposed and more-or-less
wiped out. Given the right POD, I'm sure this could have gone the other way. This is certainly relevant, because Mu'tazila thinking leads to the possibility of causal relationships and fixed laws of nature. The world can be understood through
logic. This premise also formed the thrust behind Scholasticism. The Ash'ari approach is quite problematic to would-be scientists, because it ultimately implies that reality is subject to the whims of God, and that fixed laws of logic, causality etc. cannot exist. They exist only insofar as God wills it, for as long as He wills it.
If your theological premise is that if God can negate gravity tomorrow if He wants to, then an objective understanding of the physical world is both fairly useless (it may become 'outdated' at any point) and in fact impossible (we don't know which 'rules' apply, if any, to the nature of reality). For this reason, I'm fairly convinced that an Islamic world where Aristotelian-inspired thinking (Mu'tazila or otherwise) becomes dominant would be in a far better position to advance intellectually and scientifically.
Then again, I must qualify that assessment. While the way things turned out in this regard in OTL certainly had effects on the intellectual climate in large parts of the Islamic world, drawing a direct line from the Ash'ari theology to Islamic theology today is an absurd oversimplification. Also, this whole thing doesn't take into account that Shi'a Islam stands apart from this whole debate-- we're purely talking about competing schools within Sunni Islam here. So if we (
for the sake of argument!) assume the premise that Islam is intellectually stunted, and that this is because of the victory of Ash'ari theology over Mu'tazila theology... then shouldn't Shi'a countries be completely free from this whole issue? Yet I would not say that we see a vast difference in intellectual development when we compare Shi'a Islamic history and Sunni Islamic history. That indicates that, whatever one thinks about the intellectual history of the Islamic world, there are more factors shaping it than simply the outcome of a theological struggle back in the ninth century!
In a thread that was about the book that inspired this thread, I wrote the following:
The whole move away from a more Platonist take on Christianity (which involved actively expecting the Millennium around the year 1000 and being often more strongly focused on both the immaterial and the mystical than on the earthly and the rational) towards a more Aristotelian take was undeniably a factor in shaping European history. The central idea of this more Aristotelian take was that God's creation can be explained and understood through reason (this became arguably the defining idea of what we call "the West") and the physical world, being God's creation, is worth experiencing in itself. Scholasticism, yay!
But on the other hand, even I have some caveats. Orthodox Christianity stayed far closer to the Platonist take on Christianity (hence the fact that Orthodoxy is far more set on the central role of divine mysteries), but this hardly doomed the Orthodox world to some truly backward position in the world. (I'd argue that the Mongols had waaaaaay more to do with certain problems in russian history around that time, for instance, and that being threatened and then conquered by the Ottomans was a deciding factor for Souh-Eastern Europe).
So what I'm saying is: a Europe that features no Scholasticism would no doubt be weaker and less likely to make certain scientific and technological leaps, but would -- much like an Eastern Europe that never encountered Mongols or Ottomans -- hardly be destined to become a meaningless backwater. In the same way, attributing the OTL problems of large parts of the islamic world to "an error in philosophy" seems... a bit bold, I'd say.
I stand by that assessment. That is not to say, however, that the prevalent theological assumptions of a culture as meaningless. On the contrary: even if not
the factor, it is still
a factor. A world where a significant part of the Islamic world embraces an Aristotelian view of the world, including the immutable laws of logic, automatically becomes a different world than the one we inhabit. And a world where Christianity fails to embrace Aristotle (where Scholasticism is never born) will likewise see a much-different Western world. I don't think it'll be as simple as "Christendom becomes intellectually barren while Islam marches on towards its version of the Renaissance", but we
will see major changes. I daresay that, yes, the scientific method would indeed be a product of the Islamic world, in such an ATL.
In Christianity, you would need to shift the trend of monastic scholasticism that helped bring back reason and learning in Europe with a more spiritual purification trend perhaps, maybe a bit of a Gnostic like shift in Christian theology where the material world is seen as evil, sinful, and Devil made and ruled and the spiritual world is seen as good, pure, holy, and God made and ruled.
I think a victory of some sort of Gnosticism is easily your best bet. An inclination to dismiss physical reality as a meaningless, false world-- that's the "best" start you can have, if you want a dominant theology that is opposed to the idea that reality is worth studying (or even able to be studied in a meaningful way).
So, for this to work, Mu'tazila theology has to win out and Christian scholasticism and its connection to Platonic philosophy had to die.
I do want to point out that, the conflicts of thousands of various groups of Neo-Platonists and Gnostis and whatnot aside, it's gnosticism that fundamentally owes a lot to Plato. Scholasticism is far more Aristotelian than Platonic. In fact, the victory of the Scholistics may properly be called the victory of Aristotle over Plato. (That's obviously a simplification -- Thomas Aquinas actually did his best to salvage what he could of Plato's thought and reconcile it with Aristotle -- but the trend is clear: Scholasticism represents a move from a Platonic, not-of-this-world theology towards an Aristotelian, within-this-world theology.)
Now that you mention it, Catholic Church didn't have any problem with heliocentric universe during Copernicus's lifetime. But when Martin Luther's (who disapproved of heliocentric thought) Protestant Reformation spread out, the Catholic Church had to respond, in this case by changing tolerance to science into repression. In the end, Galileo wasn't a victim of the Church itself, but the audience it sought to please.
Funny really, alternate histories where Reformation doesn't happen tend to present the timeline as less scientific than OTL, but if Protestant Reformation was the catalyst leading to scientific repression, would it be so?
It's completely true that the Reformation caused the Counter-Reformation. Both sides became embittered and dogmatic, and this caused many terrible things. I am convinced that a world without the Reformation would be better off, and that the modern image of a repressive Catholic Church is unfairly back-projecting the Counter-Reformation Church onto the High Mediaeval Church. For long centuries, the Catholic Church was the bulwark of science and learning in Europe, and people tend to forget that. (And again, Scholasticism didn't come out of nowhere: Catholic thinking produced that, built up towards that. Such a development hardly implies that the Church was deeply anti-intellectual. On the contrary.)
