Western Superstitions Related to Science: A Preliminary Account

Continued from Previous Page

Abstract

After an introductory summary, we explain how claims of Western “superiority” are linked to earlier claims of White and Christian superiority. We then take up the “Pythagorean theorem” as the simplest case of false history of math. Next we briefly explain how the history of scientific revolutions is Christian chauvinistic. While the colonised worship Newton he was superstitions. His superstitions about time crept into his science, and led to the failure of Newtonian physics. The very term Newton’s "laws" smacks of superstition, since the belief in "Laws of nature" was part of Crusading theology but ought not to be any part of science. We summarize the Crusading politics behind the belief in “laws of nature”.

Introductory summary

Previously, we saw five examples that Indians had scientific temper right from Vedic times. Further, the oft-repeated assertion “Indians lack scientific temper”, used to assert Indian inferiority, involves several coarse falsehoods: a bald denial of facts or twisting of words.

But asserting Western duplicity is not intended to deny that there were some superstitious Indians. Obviously, if Lalla and Vateshvara wrote whole chapters on correction of mythical knowledge, it was because some superstitious people existed in India. It is the people who talk of scientific temper who dishonestly never acknowledge the existence of plenty of superstitious people in the West, today.

Thus, it is easy enough to pull out some superstitious people from every society. For example, as a recent Gallup poll shows [1] in the US the belief in God has fallen from 98% in 1953 to an all-time low of 81% in 2022, though “religiosity is [still] a major determinant of political divisions in the U.S.”. Further, 42% of those believe God can hear prayers and intervene. That is a very large number of people in the US are still superstitious, and lacking in scientific temper.

Despite these figures, people like Ravi Sinha [2] will never say that the vast majority of people in US are superstitious, or dare assert they culturally lack scientific temper, though the conference at which he spoke was organized in the US. Their divorce from facts is clear by now. I will also not go here into the obvious issue of the Western economic linkages of the critic himself which restrains critics of India from speaking against the West. Nor will I go into the postmodernist question of the focus of the narrative (in a mix of science and superstition), which narrative focus (on science in one case and superstition in the other) is confounded with facts.

Though every society has had some superstitious people, the key question I will take up is this: what did the intellectually most-sophisticated people in that society do? Were they superstitious? This key question is about the state of affairs now, though it requires a deep dive into the past. Specifically, I will take up the question of Western superstitions in current science.

The avoidance of facts and the reliance on falsehoods (regarding both India and the US) is a clear indicator of the bias of those who talk of “scientific temper”. It shows their concern is propaganda, not truth. To understand the source of this propaganda, we now explain that these falsehoods are a part of a long-term systematic church project of world domination through lies, asserting its superiority and the inferiority of others.

As this part is complex, we first summarise it. References are given only in the expanded version.

The first thing to understand is that claim of Western superiority is a mere mutant of earlier crudely superstitious claims of White superiority used to justify slavery (or labour-grab) and the still earlier claim of Christian superiority used to incite genocide (and related land grab). But to assert Christian superiority, in a way convincing to sceptical non-Christians, a secular argument from false history was invented in the 5th c., by the post-Nicene church, when it abandoned equity after its marriage to the state.

This false history persists today, but is not easily identified as Christian chauvinist history because (1) during the Crusades it turned into a false history of science (and the common narrative is that science is contra religion, which confuses those who proceed on narrative instead of facts). Further, (2) since there was no pre-Crusading science done by Christians, this false history attributed all pre-Crusading scientific knowledge (in captured Arabic texts) to “Greeks”, regarded as the sole friends of Christians. This same false Crusading history was later recycled and reused to assert White/Western superiority by racist and colonial historians simply by reclassifying Greeks as White/Western. People are easily fooled!

But after the recent end of slavery, segregation, and apartheid, it is difficult to propagate an openly racist history of science, found in innumerable earlier Western texts. However, the related colonial claim of Western superiority, is still propagated openly by our school texts today. A very simple example disseminated by current colonial school education is the term “Pythagorean theorem”.

The term is unjustified for no one has any evidence for Pythagoras or his connection to that proposition. The colonised fight the demand for removal of the term from school texts, but are completely unable to provide evidence, which does not exist (but they are not honest enough to admit it). Instead, they invariably talk of Hindutva chauvinism, a general-purpose rejoinder to every critique, as if that is evidence for Pythagoras! Obviously, that is the only tricky way they have to avoid questions about evidence for the false Christian chauvinist history in our school texts which falsehoods the West and the colonised are so desperate to preserve. Why? Because if one such falsehood is expose, the whole dam full of falsehoods will burst.

The process of concocting a false history of science did not end with the Crusades. The post-Crusade false narrative of scientific revolutions, all by Christians, is based on variants of this Christian chauvinist history called the Inquisitional model (e.g., Copernicus who copied from Ibn Shatir) and the Christian discovery model (e.g., Newton’s claim to the calculus stolen from India). See figure.

More importantly, long-term Church hegemony over the West injected church superstitions into all knowledge (including science), whether invented or appropriated by the West, to make it “theologically correct”. That was inevitable, for the church banned theologically incorrect knowledge for centuries. Because the West will never acknowledge its superstitions, we must. That is, any Western knowledge, even that appropriated by the West, acquired a layer of inferior superstitions. A simple example is the current scientific belief in “laws of nature”, a belief which originated with the politics of Crusading church theology. Another example, considered later, and also elsewhere, is that of the calculus and mathematics, which acquired church superstitions after going from India to the West. But those who talk scientific temper will never walk their talk, they never acknowledge Western superstitions. Why? Because their aim is domination of the non-West.

Thus, the aim of church propaganda, or assertion of Christian superiority, was to psychologically dominate people and force them to imitate Christians. Similarly, colonial temper, or the assertion of Western superiority aims to psychologically dominate the non-West and is tied to a demand that the colonised should mindlessly imitate the West. This demand to imitate the West is today confounded (deliberately or otherwise) with scientific temper. The superstitions in science will stay, for they remain politically useful for this purpose: to condemn as inferior and lacking in scientific temper all those who don’t accept these superstitions and won’t imitate the West! An example is Hoodbhoy’s long-standing claim that Islam is unscientific because it does not accept superstitious belief in eternal and universal “laws of nature”. Scientists, are loyal not to truth but to their funding and hence to the scientific community, dominated by the West; hence they will refuse to address even such coarse superstitions IN Western science even while talking of scientific temper.

However, the fact is that the West was deeply superstitious and lacking scientific temper during most of this pre-colonial period. Therefore, also, the kind of science imposed by colonialism was mixed with Western superstitions.

As regards Western superstitions, though there are some superstitious people in every society, but the point of Western society was that even the most prominent Western intellects were superstitious. We have so far mentioned only two examples of Bacon and Kepler, and will see below the case of Newton. There was a good reason why even so many prominent Western intellects were superstitious for so long. The church hegemony over the West encouraged superstitions, because the church ruled with the help of superstitions, hence propagated them.

Colonialism involved the state-church nexus through colonial education, which was church education and globalised its superstitions, e.g., through its calendar. Because of church hegemony the West has had a long tradition of telling the most abject lies tailored to its political and economic advantage. Those lies are the real source of its power. Indeed, the lie falsely demonising the non-West and falsely glorifying the West and suppressing its superstitions is itself a key church superstition, a hallmark of colonial temper.

Let us now go through the above in detail.

Western “superiority” linked to earlier claims of White and Christian superiority

The state-church nexus during colonialism is important because the colonial claim of Western superiority (since Macaulay) is itself a deep-seated church-sponsored superstition: a direct outcome of two earlier and exceptionally evil and absurd claims of superiority: (1) the claim of White superiority which replaced (2) the still earlier claim of Christian superiority.

I have explained this connection in depth, in my Tubingen-Pretoria keynote on “Euclid must fall”.[3] Those claims of White and Christian superiority were exceptionally stupid, but were terrible superstitions. The enormous human deaths and suffering that they caused has absolutely no parallel in human history (Hitler and fascists pale into insignificance).

Initially, the ground for the genocide in the Americas and for enslaving Blacks, both, was that they were not Christian (Bull Romanus Pontifex, 1452) hence inferior. Specifically, in the 15th c. slavery was about the color of the religion, NOT the color of the skin.

But after the trans-Atlantic slave trade, many Blacks converted to Christianity; therefore the church invented another reason to justify and preserve the economic advantage of slavery to Christians: Blacks, even if Christian, were declared inferior Christians,[4] because they were Black. Their blackness was related to a superstition: the Christian god’s curse of Ham or curse of kam (from kemet meaning black). That was the beginng of modern racism. This is an example of the enormous evil caused by widespread church superstitions in Western society which lays down the notions of morality in the West.

Though this Biblical reason for White superiority was widely accepted, the church had a back-up: a secular argument from history used against the pagans since the 5th c. Orosius and his History Against the Pagans. Church power is ALL based on lies, but these new lies were about the past instead of the future (apocalypse, heaven, hell etc.). This con-trick of the post-Nicene state-church developed into an utterly false history of science, during the Crusades against Muslims. It easily persists because (a) the gullible colonised never cross-checked this false history against evidence in centuries (the “trust the West” syndrome) and (b) after colonial education they fanatically and polemically refuse to cross-check it against actual evidence today (they distrust the non-West like Wikipedia). Further examples below illustrate this.

Though this false history of science first developed during the Crusades,[5] it involved a small trick: it was not obviously Christian chauvinistic because it attributed the origin of all scientific knowledge to the pre-Christian early Greeks, claiming they were the first to do everything, or did it in a superior way. Just open any Western text today: it invariably begins with talk of imaginary achievements of some or the other Greek who did it first. (Of course, there is nil evidence, but you never checked, did you?) But why Greeks? Since early Christians had no science and the Greeks were regarded as the sole friends of Christians. In short, Greeks were a proxy for Christian chauvinism.

During the Crusades, this simple-minded lie of Greek origins of all knowledge provided a way to grab all knowledge in Muslim texts captured during the Crusades by declaring these texts as a theologically-correct Christian inheritance (since due to Greeks). That theological correctness enabled the texts to be translated. Recall that the translations of these texts from Arabic to Latin were the first textbooks[6] used in the various universities (such as Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris) set up by the church[7] during the Crusades.

Intellectually sophisticated Westerners sharpened this crude argument for superiority from false history of science. Thus, the philosopher Immanuel Kant[8] used the church trick of false history to give a secular argument for White superiority: and to justify slavery and the whipping of Blacks as ethical by declaring Black as non-creative using that false history of science, that Greeks did everything first. Later, racist historians re-used and inflated that false history by simply re-classifying Greeks as Whites. They also appropriated many achievements of Black Egyptians to Greeks,[9] by reflexively using the Kantian claim that Blacks were not creative, therefore it must all have been done by Greeks!

But this claim of White superiority could not be used for the colonised after the Aryan race fantasy,[10] which declared the colonised were the same race as the coloniser from an earlier fantasized conquest. Therefore, colonial historians again recycled and reused that false history, but now declared Greeks as part of the West, to bolster the new claim of Western superiority critical for colonial loot.

The important point to understand here is the economic importance of each of these false claims of superiority. Most of the wealth of the West was initially built up using these lies about Christian/White/Western superiority. Thus, land and labour were the two key sources of producing wealth then. The assertion of Christian superiority over native populations, led to their subsequent genocide morally justified by those lies. But economically speaking, it made a huge amount of free land Christian property (3 whole continents of North America, South America and Australia). (In fact, the original plan, as announced in the notorious Bull Inter Caetera 1493 was to make the whole world Christian property.) Hence, as the basis of its prosperity, the West is wedded to those claims of superiority based on lies. (And some of the colonised hope to share a part of the loot.) Since the US is a big investor in science, and scientists, too, are primarily loyal to their source of funding, they avoid mentioning this source of US wealth, or do so very discreetly.

That genocide of native populations in 3 continents which provided free land was combined with “free” (=near-zero cost) slave labour to work the land (also demanded on grounds of Christian superiority) of people from a 4th continent, Africa. However, despite the huge human cost (which makes Hitler and the fascists seem irrelevant) the wealth from free land and labour was overshadowed by the subsequent loot (of wealth AND knowledge) during colonialism. (Moreover, the British lost most of their slaves after the independence of White Americans, and faced serial bankruptcies in their Jamaican slave farms etc.) Hence, to dominate the colonised (the new source of wealth), the way indigenes and Blacks were decimated or dominated, the claim of White superiority mutated to the claim of Western superiority.

Politically speaking, today, while native Americans protest the genocide and land grab[11] and burn the related Christian religious pronouncements (papal bulls), they are politically insignificant, hence even the related US Supreme Court judgment based on those bulls was never annulled. But Blacks have greater political clout. Hence, after the end of slavery, AND subsequent segregation, AND apartheid (a mere 30 years ago), assertions of White superiority are now hard to maintain publicly. Despite numerous racist incidents, it is no longer possible to publicly put those claims of White superiority in law books and school texts as was done earlier right up to 30 years ago.

However, the claim of Western superiority still continues to be TAUGHT as part of our current school education. It is very much still in our school texts, and in African school texts. Colonial temper means that Indians simply failed to notice the similarities between the claims of Christian/White/Western superiority. Even when it is pointed out, the colonised never dared challenge that claim of Western superiority or cross-check the false history of science on which it is based even 75 years after political independence. This colonial temper is the worst kind of “superstitious temper” imaginable, brought by colonialism and confounded with scientific temper.

The “Pythagorean theorem”: a simple case of false history

As the simplest example of false history of Greeks, let us consider our NCERT class X math school text which repeats the term “Pythagorean theorem” 32 times, to indoctrinate children into believing the (superior) “Greek” origins of geometry. Now what is the evidence for Pythagoras (that he is a real historical figure[12]) or the evidence to connect the geometric proposition to him? Nobody knows. More importantly, no one cares, hence no one will check. Instead, they will denounce as Hindutva fanatics all those who want to check, and demand evidence. That is their one-response-fits-all-cases answer.

In the recent public controversy over removing that term “Pythagorean theorem” from our school texts, no one produced the evidence, despite my offer of a large reward of Rs 2 lakhs for such evidence.[13] I will not here get into the question of the sulba sutra. I have discussed elsewhere whey the Manava sulba sutra has a far more sophisticated account of “Pythagorean” calculation,[14] not theorem, using square roots, unknown to the West, until very late, since the Greeks and Romans were arithmetically backward and lacked even a way to represent general fractions. Obviously, those who persistently shirk evidence while talking of scientific temper cannot be expected to understand this and will launch into myth jumping to confound issues. One myth cannot be evidence for another: but all-narrative-no-facts, is a sure sign of superstitious colonial temper.

The immediate point is this: colonial temper (based on narrative) demands that we must “trust the West”, and therefore that it is heresy, an unacceptable challenge to Western authority, even to want to investigate any facts, regarding these Western narratives. (Is that scientific temper? But our advocates of scientific temper maintain a studied silence on this indoctrination of school children.) Because checking facts is lese-majesty not a single journalist who reported on this Karnataka move to remove the term “Pythagorean theorem” from our school texts bothered to check the facts, though they were free in their denunciation of Hindutva. This a real national shame; a pandemic of superstitious colonial temper.

The colonised cannot accept even the possibility that this narrative of Greek origins could be Christian chauvinistic history:[15] no historian ever used that phrase “Christian chauvinistic history, even in the 75 years since independence, though the church has been openly concocting false history since the 5th c. Orosius.[16]

However, that Christian chauvinism is implicitly recognized, since asking for evidence for history in our school texts is regarded as a sure sign of Hindu fanaticism, and lack of “scientific temper”! No one explains what that evidence is for Pythagoras or why evidence is not needed for history of Greeks, or why the demand for evidence is contrary to scientific temper and a sure sign of Hindutva fanaticism. And this is the ONLY pathetic response of the colonised, to the false history in our school texts.

Actually, science goes (or ought to go) by evidence, and asserting real or fictitious religious and political affiliations of a critic is not an acceptable way to respond to a demand for evidence. But it is beyond Western scholar to either find evidence or to accept the crushing truth that the West has been telling systematic lies for centuries for its political advantage.

To reiterate, the simplest case of the Pythagorean theorem shows that scientific temper is here clearly confounded with colonial temper which demands unquestioning trust in the West, and loyalty towards it. Contrary to scientific temper, colonial temper regards any demand for evidence as a crime, exactly in the manner of the church which, to encourage superstitions, demanded unquestioning trust and punished people as heretics for challenging any of its silly dogmas. This shows that the claim of scientific temper is being used ONLY as an excuse to assert the inferiority of the non-West, for the advantage of the West, exactly in the utterly evil manner of asserting the inferiority of non-Whites and non-Christians to kill and enslave them (this time mentally).

Christian chauvinist history of scientific revolutions

The moment we drop the attitude of blind trust in the West, the (de)colonised need to cross-check those church/Western narratives against facts. But the issue of false and unverified Western history of science hardly ends with Crusading history and later racist advancement of the concocted Greek origins of science. Referring back to the diagram of Christian chauvinistic history[17] down the ages, the concoction of false history of science of course began before the Crusades, with the Byzantine model, and continued after the Crusades: with the Inquisitional model, the Christian discovery model of false history etc.

Indeed, the whole mythology of scientific revolutions is based on subsequently concocted history. E.g., Kuhn’s assertion of the “Copernican revolution” was not based solely on falsehoods about the Almagest (a late accretive Arabic text, of Egyptian origin, falsely attributed to an early Greek, Ptolemy). It is well known, for over 70 years, and from before Kuhn’s book, that Copernicus did nothing except to translate (without full understanding) the work of Ibn Shatir,[18] from Greek to Latin, having found a Greek translation from Syriac in the Vatican. That is exactly the kind of “scientific revolution” one can expect from a professional priest like Copernicus, during the Inquisition, as made clear by his pathetic preface to his supposedly revolutionary work, citing various church authorities, popes cardinals etc., to show the theological correctness of his point of view.

Likewise, the “Newtonian scientific revolution” was based on the calculus. The calculus relates to the solution of differential equations, and every problem of Newtonian physics just involves the solution of differential equations. A general technique to do so (“Euler method”) was first discovered[19] by the 5th c. Aryabhata, who used it to calculate very precise trigonometric values. This developed into the most precise system of trigonometric values then available. These were stolen from Cochin by Jesuits in the 16th c. to solve the European navigational problem.[20] Eventually, Newton grabbed calculus on the wretched doctrine of Christian discovery,[21] by applying to knowledge the same genocidal church dogma used to grab land in the Americas (and still part of US law[22]).

Setting aside all the voluminous historical evidence for the Indian origin of calculus, the dead giveaway is the epistemic test: those who steal knowledge, like students cheating in an exam, do not fully understand it.[23] And the fact is Newton did not even fully understand calculus and spoke in a completely confused way of “fluxions” as if time itself could flow.[24] Even Karl Marx, 150 years after Newton’s death, declared Newton’s calculus as mystical.[25] But those with colonial temper, who dare not contradict even coarsely false factual claims, can hardly accept the stupidity of Newton’s fluxions. No need to apply common sense: if fluxions made the slightest bit of sense, why are they not ever mentioned today?

Colonial temper teaches us to uncritically worship these false gods of Western science, and accept their authority even if it means bad teaching of the calculus on which most science depends today. (We return to this in later on.)

Worshipping Newton vs Newton’s superstitions

Worship of the West and its false gods of science is what is expected from the colonised mind. In accord with this expectation, Sinha starts by adulating Newton, calling him

“the greatest icon of science, whose genius did put its final and authoritative seal on the Scientific Revolution...the young and solitary scholar single-handedly[26] laid the foundation of modern science.”

However, given that Newton’s false biography had to be eventually revised 50 years ago, Sinha, despite his adulation, and without explicitly admitting the gross falsehood of Newton’s earlier biographies, is forced to admit Newton’s superstitions:

“he devoted a large part of his long life to the practice of alchemy and to the theological labours of interpreting the Bible. He denounced what he thought were corruptions of Christianity”

But it is not enough just to admit Newton’s Christian superstitions; we need to examine how they affected his thinking, for the fact is Newton’s superstitions did affect his theories. For example. Newton denied the antiquity of Egypt. He laughed: “The Egyptians anciently boasted of a very great and lasting Empire...and out of vanity have made this monarchy some thousands of years older than the world”.[27] (e.a.) But the laugh was actually on him and his vanity: on Newton’s Christian superstitious belief that the date of creation of the world as calculated from the Bible genealogy is true. But since the colonial political objective is to instil adulation of the West and deprecation of the non-West, such questions are taboo for the colonised (scientific?) mind.

But the fact remains: Newton’s Christian superstitions did affect his view of history. Therefore, we need to ask: did they also affect his science? It is one thing that Sinha entirely avoids issues related to the false history of science. But this question (“did Newton’s Christian superstitions affect his science?”) is a question Sinha ought to have asked in the context of “scientific temper”, but carefully avoids asking. For anyone who does, the answer is blowing in the wind.

Newton’s laws

Thus, Sinha talks of Newton's "laws" of motion and theory of gravitation, still taught as Newton’s “universal law of gravitation” in our class XI NCERT science school text (p. 152). The first point to note is that they are not two separate “laws”, as is taught. Sinha seems unaware of Popper's assertion that Newton's "laws" of motion, by themselves, are not falsifiable or refutable, hence not science.

As I explained it:[28] take Newton's first "law". The term "uniform motion" in it is quite meaningless. Thus, "uniform motion" means a "body" covers equal distances in equal times. But what are equal times? One cannot lay one hour in the past side by side with one hour in the future to compare the two in the present. One must use a clock. But can one use any clock, say my heart beats? No! Well, then, which clock should one use?

Newton was well aware of this difficulty and stated in his Principia that there may be no actual clocks which measure what he called "equal intervals of time", not days and nights, not the swings of a pendulum. His predecessor Barrow had rightly said that those who do physics without a proper definition of time are quacks.[29] Barrow did provide a reasonable working definition of equal intervals of time. Nevertheless, Newton ignored it, and obstinately did not define equal intervals of time, and his physics eventually failed and was replaced by relativity for just that reason.

The key point here is to ask: why Newton did not define equal intervals of time, despite Barrow’s strongly worded and correct analysis? The only answer is that Newton superstitiously thought his

god knew what equal intervals of time are. And his god was not thinking of mundane things like sand clocks when he created the laws of the world. In other words, Newton’s superstitions did affect the content of his science.

This effect was critical. Because of this error, due to Newton’s superstitions, Newton’s “laws” of motion are not falsifiable hence not science by themselves: they become falsifiable only when combined[30] with the “law” of gravitation or some other external definition of force. But this is an uneasy compromise which holds only if the external force acts instantaneously. Hence, Newtonian physics failed when confronted with electrodynamics, which involves forces and delayed (and/or advanced) action at a distance. Technically speaking, the electrodynamic 2 body problem[31] involves coupled partial and ordinary differential equations or functional differential equation. Hence, Newtonian physics had to be replaced by relativity.[32]

However, this is merrily still ignored by most mathematically illiterate physicists drowning in the narrative of Einstein. How can an inferior non-Westerner correct the two great icons of Western science: Newton and Einstein? That is contrary to colonial temper which regards narrative as primary and facts or even an understanding of science as secondary: hence contrary also to scientific temper! Until Newton’s successor and president of the Royal Society, Michael Atiyah plagiarised[33] my previously published work saying “don’t forget that I suggested it”, in the glorious way Newton stole calculus, because that is the divine right of Christians to steal land and knowledge from non-Christians: the pope said so, and even the US Supreme court approved it. On the same principle that ethics has no place in science, in practice, because science is just a way to dominate others, by hook or crook, the American Mathematical Society continues to slyly defend that theft.[34]

Anyway, to reiterate, this failure of Newtonian physics and its replacement by relativity was due to internal conceptual confusion in Newton’s laws, due to Newton’s superstitious failure to define a clock, and not due to the Michelson-Morley (MM) experiment, as physics mythology in school and undergraduate texts asserts.

Briefly, the MM experiment was designed NOT to test the existence of ether but to test between the two ether theories of Fresnel and Stokes, which theories we already encountered in the case of Varahamihira’s objections to Aryabhata. The MM experiment, alas, came out in favour of the Stokes theory which involved a mathematical impossibility.[35] Further, the MM experiment could NOT have measured the speed of light since Newton did not define a privileged clock with respect to which that speed could be measured. Hence, Miller’s subsequent repetition of the MM experiment, claiming a positive result, proved nothing. But because colonial science is inextricably mixed with colonial politics, these simple facts are persistently ignored: facts are irrelevant to colonial temper with which scientific temper is consistently confounded.

To summarise, Newtonian physics failed just because of internal conceptual confusion in it due to Newton’s Christian superstitions. But few physicists will admit this (or publicly contest the above issues) because physics mythology absolves Newton, and physicists confound their mythology and social practice with scientific temper. They laughably believe the history from Cambridge, which could not, for centuries, give an honest account of one of their own. And the West still suppresses Newton’s heretical work on the church,[36] three centuries after his death.

Laws of nature as Crusading theology

The failure to define equal intervals of time was hardly the only superstition in Newtonian physics. The terminology of Newton’s “laws” is still taught in our school texts. Why call them “laws”? Newton believed that the Christian god had created the world as described in the Bible. In his time, as the saying went “the Bible is the word of god, nature is the work of god”.

As we saw, Newton was committed to the Biblical description of creation. But after creating the world how did this god control it? The Crusading theologian Thomas Aquinas asserted that the Christian god just twiddled his thumbs and went by the “laws of nature” which too he created.[37]

It goes without saying that this belief in “eternal” and “universal” laws of nature is not refutable or falsifiable on Popper’s criterion. Indeed, it is a superstition, for when we ourselves exist for so short a time, how do we know something is eternal? How foolish to assert it! When we have seen only such a tiny part of the immense universe, how do we know something is universal? Hence, the belief is NOT science. But it is part of current beliefs of scientists showing that even scientists today lack scientific temper and still bend like Galileo before church propaganda of wily Christian priests.

Indeed, it is known for a century that Newton’s laws fail as soon as we go beyond the solar system to the galaxy. They fail to describe stellar rotation curves.[38] But Newton’s “laws” are saved from this failure by inventing the hypothesis of dark matter. It goes without saying that this method of inventing/accumulating hypothesis can be used to save any theory from refutation for any length of time, as I taught in my undergraduate course in history and philosophy of science. It is precisely to prevent this that the criterion of refutability was invented. Further, scientific temper is NOT blind imitation of what some influential scientists do or believe. Especially not when we are discussing the church superstitions of prominent scientists—we should not relapse into colonial temper which demands sustained uncritical adulation of the West.

In short, belief in “laws of nature” is a church superstition, not part of “scientific temper”. But this superstition is incorporated in the very term “Newton’s laws”, taught in our school texts. Newton himself in his handwritten notes, cancelled “hypothesi” and wrote “lex”,[39] because of his superstition that the Christian god had “revealed” his purported laws of nature to him. Newton was born on 25 Dec (on a laughably wrong calendar!) and survived “miraculously”, hence had the superstition that he was divinely elected.

Colonial temper does everything to encourage this superstition. But as even Sinha admits, Newton had the superstition that the Bible revealed the future: but prediction of the future is not possible unless the world is 100% predictable as Newton wrongly believed. (I am not talking of chaos etc. here, but of mundane time,[40] or the fact that creative and unpredictable decisions of living organisms affect the future, as we observe everyday. This last factor is not incorporated in the existing equations of physics “laws of nature”, though this unpredictability could and should be, but is not just because of the superstitious belief in “laws of nature”.)

Crusading politics behind “laws of nature”
Obviously, also, a church superstition (“laws of nature”) erected during the Christian fanaticism of the Crusades must have a strong political angle to it, which I have analysed in great detail.[41] Briefly, there was a theological debate in Islam about whether God intervened continuously in the world or let the world take its predetermined (causal) course. This debate took place also in Christian theology which copied from Islamic theology during the Crusades. In Islamic theology the argument was between al Ghazali (continuous intervention) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes, deterministic causation). In Christian theology, the argument was between Thomas Aquinas and John Duns. Aquinas, like Averroes, sided with "laws of nature".

The debate was settled differently in Islamic and Christian theology, with al Ghazali and later Aquinas becoming the respective dominant factions. As explained in my analysis, there was a clear political reason for this choice by Aquinas. In post-Nicene Christian theology God had been made transcendent, because making God more powerful made the priest more powerful. But Christian theology, since Augustine, also introduced the doctrine of sin to make people feel frightened and guilty about the most natural actions, and thus justify the need for a priest. But an all-powerful God who also acted whimsically was overkill; it made God too powerful, hence destroyed the doctrine of sin: why should humans be punished of making wrong decisions if the world was unpredictable? This nullified the Christian priests traditional weapons of heaven (hope) and hell (fear of hellfire and brimstone).

In contrast, al Ghazali, a Sufi believed in immanence (God inside man), hence asserting the creativity of Allah was just another way to assert the mundane creativity of humans and other living organisms, for al Ghazali believed that Allah was the real source of the creativity. (E.g. he believed the cause of writing is not the pen, not even the hand that holds the pen, but the will of the person.) In Christian theology, as is well known, Aquinas and the schoolmen adopted Averroes and won the political battle. Ever since then they continuously made fun of the followers of John Duns, calling them “dunces”, and the West has continually attacked his Islamic counterpart, al Ghazali.

The relevance is this: Sinha extols Pervez Hoodbhoy, who propagates the Christian superstition about laws of nature as the essence of science and scientific temper. Hoodbhoy has been asserting for decades that Islam became backward in science due to al Ghazali. This is the worst kind of nonsense being peddled using the authority of science. I have repeatedly pointed this out[42] and communicated this to Hoodbhoy. As I have also pointed out, the belief in mundane creativity is essential for the experimental verification or falsification of scientific theories.[43] However, Hoodbhoy suffers from colonial temper: or he perhaps also lacks adequate knowledge of math, physics, and theology. In either case, he does not engage or even respond. Is that scientific temper? To sit mum when your errors are repeatedly pointed out? No! That is a propagandist’s attitude! One cannot help recalling Imran Khan’s question to Hoodbhoy in a TV debate asking him whether he was paid for his propaganda!

Summary and conclusions

The claim of Western superiority is a direct continuation of earlier superstitious claims of Christian and White superiority and the inferiority of others (non-Christians, non-Whites) based on a secular argument from a false history of science. These evil genocidal claims of superiority-inferiority were the primary source of Western capital accumulation for centuries, before any industrial revolution.

Any society has some superstitious people (and there are plenty of superstitious people in the US), so the question about scientific temper really relates to the beliefs of the most prominent people in that society.

One of the most prominent Western scientists was Newton, who was steeped in all kinds of church superstitions. What is more, those superstitions fundamentally affected his science, and the related internal conceptual confusion (that god knew about equal intervals of time) was the reason for its eventual failure. But this is never acknowledged by the proponents of scientific temper who think it their duty to only sing paeans of praise of the West and criticise the non-West, for that is what colonial temper taught them.

The simplest example of Newton’s superstitions, however, is the belief that the Christian god rules the world with “eternal and universal laws of nature” (which Newton superstitiously thought had had been revealed to him). This superstitious belief arose from the political machinations of Crusading Christian theology.

Though the belief in “laws of nature” is irrefutable (or repeatedly refuted by everyday experience), it is passed off as “scientific temper” today, because imitating the West (and its superstitions) is the essence of colonial temper, being peddled to us as scientific temper. This is because those superstitions in science still have political value for the West, and help it to brand other who reject them, even on scientific grounds as inferior.

The Christian superstitions in present-day science are an excellent reason why scientific temper should NOT be equated with imitation of the science community or its icons. As we will see in the next part, there are deeper, structural superstitions (arising from Newton’s theft of calculus, and consequent failure to fully understand it) which continue in present-day science.

Continued to Next Page  

Footnotes

[1] Belief God Dips New Low.
[2] Ravi Sinha, ‘The Absence of Scientific Temper in the Lands of Bose, Raman and Salam’
[3] C. K. Raju, ‘“Euclid” Must Fall: The “Pythagorean” “Theorem” and The Rant Of Racist and Civilizational Superiority — Part 1’, Ar?mar?ka: Journal of Conversational Thinking 1, no. 1 (2021): 127–55, https://doi.org/10.4314/ajct.v1i1.6; Video: ‘Euclid’ Must Fall, 2021.
[4] Josiah Priest, Bible Defence of Slavery: To Which Is Added a Faithful Exposition of That System of Pseudo Philanthropy, Or Fanaticism, Modern Abolitionism ... and Proposing a Plan of National Colonization (W.S. Brown, 1851).
[5] C. K. Raju, Is Science Western in Origin?, Dissenting Knowledges Pamphlet Series (Multiversity, 2009); Raju, C. K. and Bernard Bel, L’occident A-T-Il Inventé La Science?? (Méréville: Éditions le Hêtre Myriadis, 2022),
[6] C. K. Raju, ‘How to break the hegemony perpetuated by the university: decolonised courses in mathematics and the history and philosophy of science (Arabic)’, in Culturalistion of Humanities: Vision and Experiments. (Proceedings of the International Conference on Culturalization of the Humanities, held in Beirut on 20-21 November 2018.) (Beirut: Al Maaref University, 2019), 77–114; Raju, C. K., ‘How to Break the Hegemony Perpetuated by the University: Decolonised Courses in Mathematics and the History and Philosophy of Science’, Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences 26, no. 2 (2019): 86–109.
[7] trans Dana C. Munro, Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, No. 3, The Medieval Student, vol. II: No. 3 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1897).
[8] Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Other Writings, ed. P. Frierson and P. Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); C. Neugebauer, ‘The Racism of Kant and Hegel.’, in Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy, ed. H. Odera Oruka (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 259–72.
[9] Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1: The fabrication of ancient Greece (London: Free Association Books, 1987).
[10] C. K. Raju, Refutation of the Aryan Race Conjecture: The Arithmetic Evidence and Conquest-of-Greeks Theory (Delhi: Kant Academic Publishers, 2022).
[11] https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/.
[12] Pythagoreans were real, but from that it does not follow that Pythagoras was real just as from the historicity of Christianity one cannot infer the historicity of Jesus.
[13] See this two tweets:Tweet part 1, Tweet part 2.
[14] C. K. Raju, ‘“Euclid” Must Fall: The “Pythagorean” “Theorem” and the Rant of Racist and Civilizational Superiority - Part 2’, Arumaruka: Journal of Conversational Thinking 1, no. 2 (2021): 57–105, https://doi.org/10.4314/ajct.v1i2.5; C. K. Raju, ‘Black Thoughts Matter: Decolonized Math, Academic Censorship, and the “Pythagorean” Proposition’, Journal of Black Studies 48, no. 3 (2017): 256–78, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0021934716688311.
[15] Raju, ‘“Euclid” Must Fall: The “Pythagorean” “Theorem” and the Rant of Racist and Civilizational Superiority - Part 2’.
[16] See, "Models of Christian chauvinist history".
[17] http://ckraju.net/papers/presentations/images/models-of-Christian-chauvinstic-history-from-AJCT-Euclid-must-fall-Part-1.jpg
[18] Raju, Is Science Western in Origin?; Raju, C. K. and Bel, L’occident A-T-Il Inventé La Science??; N.M. Swerdlow and O. Neugebauer, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, vol. part 1 (New York: Springer, 1984).
[19] https://twitter.com/CKRaju14/status/1612427950980476933.
[20] C. K. Raju, Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: The Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of Calculus from India to Europe in the 16th c, CE (Pearson Longman, 2007).
[21] C. K. Raju, ‘Marx and Mathematics. 2: “Discovery” of Calculus’, Frontier Weekly, 31 August 2020.
[22] C. K. Raju, ‘The Meaning of Christian “Discovery”’, Frontier Weekly 47, no. 29 (2015): 25–31.
[23] C. K. Raju, ‘Marx and Mathematics. 4: The Epistemic Test’, Frontier Weekly, 8 September 2020.
[24] For a popular-level account see C. K. Raju, ‘California, Indian Calculus and the Technology Race. 1: The Indian Origin of Calculus and Its Transmission to Europe’, Boloji.Com, 11 December 2021; C. K. Raju, ‘California, Indian Calculus and the Technology Race. 2: Don’t Cancel the Calculus, Make It Easy!’, Boloji.Com, 24 December 2021.
[25] C. K. Raju, ‘Marx and Mathematics-1 Marx and the Calculus’, Frontier Weekly, 28 August 2020.
[26] Of course, Newton did not do anything single handed: even Sinha should know he relied on Kepler, who ran away with Tycho’s data after Tycho untimely death or murder. Tycho as Astronomer Royal to the Holy Roman Empire was the other recipient of astronomical texts stolen from India, and hence the Tychonic model (“independently Christian re-discovered”) was identical to Nilakantha’s earlier model. The ability to convert between linear and circular motions was invented by Nasiruddin Tusi, and Hooke knew how to explain circular orbits using an inverse-square law force. What Newton did was to extend this to elliptic orbits.
[27] Isaac Newton, Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (London: J. Tonson, J. Osborne and T. Longman, 1728).
[28] Raju, Time: Towards a Consistent Theory.
[29] Raju, ‘“Time: What Is It That It Can Be Measured?”’
[30] Raju, Time: Towards a Consistent Theory.
[31] C. K. Raju, ‘The Electrodynamic 2-Body Problem and the Origin of Quantum Mechanics’, Foundations of Physics 34, no. 6 (2004): 937–62.
[32] Technically speaking all problems of Newtonian physics involve the solution of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) or partial differential equations (PDEs), separately, whereas the many body problem of classical electrodynamics involves the solution of coupled ODEs and PDEs or functional differential equations. C. K. Raju, ‘Functional Differential Equations. 1: A New Paradigm in Physics’, Physics Education (India) 29, no. 3 (September 2013): Article 1, ; C. K. Raju, ‘Functional Differential Equations. 2: The Classical Hydrogen Atom’, Physics Education (India) 29, no. 3 (September 2013).
[33] ‘Retarded differential equations and quantum mechanics’, Notices of the American Mathematical Society 54(4) (2007) p. 472.
[34] ‘Plagiarism by ex-President of the Royal Society. 1: the facts’ , ‘2. The cover up by the American Mathematical Society’.
[35] C. K. Raju, ‘Michelson-Morley Experiment’, in Time: Towards a Consistent Theory, vol. 65, Fundamental Theories of Physics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994), 49–58.
[36] Raju, The Eleven Pictures of Time: The Physics, Philosophy and Politics of Time Beliefs chp, 4, Newton’s secret.
[37] Thomas Aquinas, Sumnma Theologica, n.d., http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2091.htm.
[38] C. K. Raju, ‘Functional Differential Equations. 4: Retarded Gravitation’, Physics Education (India) 31, no. 2 (June 2015).
[39] Raju, The Eleven Pictures of Time: The Physics, Philosophy and Politics of Time Beliefs chp. 4, Newton’s secret.
[40] C. K. Raju, ‘Mundane Time’, in Time: Towards a Consistent Theory, vol. 65, Fundamental Theories of Physics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994); C. K. Raju, ‘Time Travel and the Reality of Spontaneity’, Foundations of Physics 36 (2006): 1099–1113; C. K. Raju, ‘Functional Differential Equations. 5: Time-Travel and Life’, Physics Education (India) 31, no. 4 (December 2015).
[41] C. K. Raju, ‘Benedict’s Maledicts’, Zmag, 2006, .
[42] C. K. Raju, ‘Islam and Science’, in Islam and Multiculturalism: Islam, Modern Science, and Technology, ed. Asia-Europe Institute University of Malaya and Japan Organization for Islamic Area Studies Waseda University, 2013, 1–14, ; C. K. Raju, ‘Islam and Science’, Indian Journal of Secularism 15, no. 2 (2011): 14–29; C. K. Raju, ‘Philosophy of Science and Islam”’ (Public lecture at USM, 10 April 2012); C. K. Raju, ‘Science, Reason, Superstition. 2: The Superstitions in Science’, Frontier Articles on Society & Politics, 8 June 2020, ; C. K. Raju, ‘Response to Hoodbhoy’, Frontier Articles on Society & Politics, 11 April 2020. Also C. K. Raju, ‘Decolonisation, Islam, and Science’ (The Hague, 15 February 2021). Video.
[43] Raju, Time: Towards a Consistent Theory.