idea. Other alchemists, however, emphasized the more esoteric aspects of the work, in which the changes of material substances directly reflect changes in soul of alchemist himself. Alchemy in this sense is directly related to the cosmological doctrines of humans as a microcosm of the universe, and Jabir’s work is related to the Quranic verses dealing with the balance. In contrast, al-Razi “demonstrated a firm preference for proof through experiment […] basic alchemical processes such as distillation, calcination, crystallization, evaporation, and filtration gained precision […] the standard alembics, beakers, flasks, funnels, and furnaces began to resemble those of modern times.”31 Islamic alchemy cannot be simply reduced just to chemistry, or to magic, or to psychology, or to philosophy, or to spiritual purification, or to any single aspect; all of these elements operate together in alchemy, which in many ways makes it a paradigmatic example of the Islamic concept of nature.
It’s difficult to make generalizations about a culture that spanned many centuries, included lands from Spain to India, had many different social classes, and ideologically competing elites (the pious ulama scholars, the faylasufs, the courtly literary adibs, the Sufi mystics, and so on). “…the Shariah-minded guardians of the single godly moralistic community maintained a frustrated tension with the sophisticated culture of Islamdom, which they could successfully condemn but not effectively destroy.”32 And yet, the faylasufs did manage to forge a synthetic concept of nature that was characteristically Islamic and highly successful, even if not the centerpiece of the culture. The centerpiece of the culture, of course, was the Quranic revelation, which (along with the Arabic language) held the civilization together. The activities of falsafah needed to accommodate and ultimately merge with these central aspects of Islam, but falsafah also provided numerous practical services in support of them. The faithful needed to know precisely the times of the day for prayer and the direction of the Ka’ba from any geographical point, information provided by the astronomers and mathematicians. Mathematicians also supplied techniques for the division of inheritances in accordance with the dictates of the Quran, and the times for religious observances in the lunar calendar. But beyond these practical considerations, the faylasufs offered an understanding of nature integrated with the overall Islamic vision of reality. It was not a static or simple understanding, as evidenced by al-Ghazali’s critical response to Ibn Sina in order to revitalize the spiritual roots of Islam, but the fundamental idea remained consistent.
This fundamental idea was a concept of nature which was not separate from the concepts of ethical behavior, spiritual reality, historical sense, or even legal rules. All of these aspects of Islamic culture were combined into a hierarchical system stemming from the Quranic revelation. “…they all sought to explain the cosmos in the light of revelation, in particular, in the light of the doctrine of al-Tawhid, the Unicity of God, which made it impossible for two cosmic orders to co-exist. This fundamental principle acted as a prism through which all theories were passed in order to test their validity. It was this powerful doctrine, situated at the very heart of the Quranic message, that made it possible for the Muslim scientists to transform those Greek theories about nature which conflicted with revelation […] It was through the inherent power, simplicity, and uniformity of this principle that was operative in all realms of knowledge that a coherent Islamic worldview appeared.”33 Nature did not exist as a separate thing apart, but instead nature was like all else a manifestation of the divine will such that all parts of nature had a proper place and meaning within the overall order of reality.
3. The Mundane World
Brief Historical Introduction
Materialism is a view of nature that assumes nothing is real except matter and energy behaving according to set rules. Although there are subtle variations among various materialist philosophical schools, all of them share certain core assumptions, such as: the lack of any possible immaterial substances or agencies; the absence of any beginning or end to the material making up the universe; and the purely material basis of mind and consciousness. “This plenitude of being has no gaps, breaks, or noncontinuities. There is no immaterial or supernatural region zoned off from it […] Terrestrial life is an accidental realization of one [kind] of being possible to material substance […] Human thought and feeling […] consists of neural events that individually are as insensitive, unthinking, and unfeeling as all other basic chemical reactions….”34. Since the posited material is governed by rules and since it is the job of science to ascertain what those rules are, materialism and science are closely related (and occasionally confused with each other). The precise relationship between science and materialism is important for the present work, and we will examine it more carefully later.
Various strains of materialism have arisen in many times and cultures. To get a better sense of materialist thinking, let’s briefly examine five examples: materialism in Classical Antiquity, Enlightenment materialism, nineteenth century European materialism, the Carvaka school of materialism in India, and the American naturalist school in the twentieth century.
Among the Greek pre-Socratic philosophical speculations on nature, a version of materialism was prominent. The well-known “atoms” of Democritus were everlasting and indestructible, the only stuff from which all things are made. The forms and structures of the world, including ourselves and the gods, come and go as the atoms bundle together and fly apart; the atoms themselves remain unchanged. An important aspect of this thinking is that these atoms are governed by no kind of animating spirit or intelligence. They move, joining and sundering, only according to necessity, creating worlds and beings that pass away in time. Nothing else exists.
Democritus inherited these ideas from his teacher Leucippus, and the system was later incorporated into the broader philosophy of Epicurus. A more extensive formulation of the ideas is presented in the famous long poem by the Roman Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things). But this school of philosophy was later eclipsed by the schools of Plato and Aristotle, involving Ideas and Purposes. It’s all the more remarkable, then, what a modern-sounding ring the materialism of antiquity has, especially the idea that a deeper understanding of reality is to be found in the myriad motions of invisible particles. Just for this reason, we should also bear in mind the prescientific and highly speculative basis for the ideas, and the often wildly incorrect explanations of specific phenomena.
Materialist philosophies almost disappear in medieval Europe, reappearing in the Renaissance mixed both with Christianity and with the burgeoning new mechanical science. The works of Gassendi and of Hobbes are examples of this reappearance, which is part of a more general phenomenon that we’ll examine in more detail later, namely the desacralization of nature during and after the Scientific Revolution. For now, we’ll look briefly at a purely materialistic strain of thought that resulted from these beginnings after about a century elapsed, during the Enlightenment period. The erosion of clerical authority accompanied an increasingly secular intellectual culture. A new form of materialism was developed, based on two pillars: advancing scientific knowledge (to which it was only loosely related) and a clear commitment to atheism (which had a polemical dimension). This version of materialism is presented in d’Holbach’s The System of Nature. The atheism that had been latent in the materialism of antiquity now becomes a more overt and important point. Meanwhile, the link with science, though largely rhetorical rather than substantive, is an important innovation that continues on (in some sense) to the present day.
This association of materialism with science is even more strongly expressed in the writings of nineteenth century European (mostly German) materialists, such as Vogt, Moleschott, and Buechner. The rise of this materialist movement was driven in part by a reaction to the dominance of romantic and idealist philosophy and in part by the dramatic progress made in the sciences around this time. Two major scientific advances were particularly influential: the development of the principle of the conservation of energy and the explanation of the origin of species by natural selection. Energy conservation is fully consistent with the contention of materialism that nothing in the material universe is ever lost or gained, that the original uncreated material substance is only transformed. Natural selection, on the other hand, enabled thinkers to dispense with the previously perceived need for immaterial influences in the formation of living
