It’s a question of whether you’re looking for where things started to go wrong, versus the last major opportunity to turn things around again.

A thousand years ago, Islamic math and astronomy were trying to answer just one question: Given any point on the Earth, which way is Mecca?

Once that question was answered, such subjects were of no further use.

It is my understanding that a major aspect of what happened was move towards religious fundamentalism as constructed by al-Ghazali and the later part of the Ashari movement. In general, people became more religiously focused. Moreover, the general philosophical attitude emphasized strongly that natural laws didn’t exist in any meaningful sense. All was subject to the whim of God. The standard example of al-Ghazali was that a fire didn’t burn a piece of wood. Rather, when a piece of wood was near a fire God decided to burn that individual piece of wood. This attitude is really not a great one when one is trying to do science. The combination of al-Ghazali’s work and a general trend towards heightened religion made things quite bad.

Can’t remember where, but I’ve read at least one analysis which had it that the “Golden Age” of Islam ended when the Caliphate became so wealthy and powerful that it channeled most of its efforts into good old-fashioned secular imperialism. The next step was to quash independent thinking in general as potential dissent from the Muslim Way of Life (a tendency pushed past the point of no return by a series of terroristic “Frankish” invasions you may have heard about).

Of course, modern Western societies are immune from such jingoistic militarism, corruption, and short-sightedness – aren’t they?

Greg Laden: The problem is fundamentalism.

Particularly flavors of fundamentalism insisting on Inerrancy, I suspect. Science philosophically requires accepting association of uncertainty (howsoever slight) with every observation.