The Moral Law Always Has the Last Word

The central point these people seem not to understand is that the moral life is the foundation upon which every intellectual, philosophical, and political project ultimately stands or falls. Any system or movement that fails to subordinate the intellectual life to the moral life—or to what Immanuel Kant called practical reason—is ultimately destined to descend into internal contradiction, philosophical collapse, and, in some cases, even pathetic madness and death, as the examples of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault illustrate.

The moment a person begins to deviate from the moral law, then that person’s ultimate end is destined to fall into ruin. This pattern can be seen in the lives and ideas of Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Guy de Maupassant, Gustave Flaubert, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred Kinsey, Arthur Schopenhauer, and more recently Jim Goad.[2] Huxley himself acknowledged that he and many of his contemporaries rejected morality because, as he put it, “it interfered with our sexual freedom.”[3]

Huxley was remarkably candid. Anyone who examines the personal lives of those who reject the moral order will often find the same pattern: they want the best of both worlds. They reject objective morality while simultaneously seeking to impose their own worldview on others, as though objective moral principles do, in fact, exist. As we shall see, this existentially untenable position invariably leads to intellectual contradiction, and no one has been able to escape its consequences. Even Friedrich Nietzsche, despite his own irrationalism, understood clearly that such a position could not be sustained.

This brings us back to Jim Goad and his 1994 article, “Let’s Hear It for Violence Toward Women!” That particular essay reads almost like a modernized version of the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, in which Sade infamously declared: “A pretty girl ought simply to concern herself with fucking, and never with engendering.”[4] By 1999, the subject was no longer a matter of satire for Goad. He had begun to act on the violent themes he had previously written about. According to reports, he assaulted his girlfriend, Anne Ryan, while his former wife was battling cancer. He was later sentenced to jail for the assault. The Portland Tribune described the episode as resembling “the Jerry Springer Show.”[5] It stated:

“After breaking her eye socket with his fist and biting her thumb, he kicked her out of his car on Northwest Skyline Boulevard and fled to Washington. Two days later, he was back in town and the police arrested him. He was on his way home from Radio Shack where he had bought equipment for saving her threatening voice mails to him onto tape. Facing 15 years, he eventually copped a plea and served 29 months for assault and attempted kidnapping.”[6]

Goad admitted that “for a full two years before I knew Anne R. existed, I had been cheating on Debbie with an array of anonymous bar skanks.” He moved on to confess:

“I fully admit that it was foul to continue cheating on Debbie after her diagnosis, and that fucking Anne R. on Debbie’s bed on the night of Debbie’s cancer surgery was easily the lowest thing I’ve ever done…. I also continued the affair because I knew that it was something for which Debbie could never forgive me, and that it would finally allow us to make the complete break from each other for which I’d been craving for years.”

Being able to get rid of Debbie is one thing, but Goad was haunted by guilt for the rest of his life, eventually leading to depression. Goad was also an admirer of E. O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist who attempted to explain virtually every aspect of human morality in biological terms. For Wilson, emotions such as hatred, love, guilt, and even fear are rooted in the biological structures of the brain and ultimately shaped by natural selection.

On this view, guilt has an evolutionary origin rather than a metaphysical foundation; it is not an objective moral fact that exists independently of human biology. Let us set aside the problems with that claim for the moment. Evolutionary processes, however, do not tell us what human beings ought to feel guilty about. They do not explain why Jim Goad, for example, ought to feel guilty about cheating on his wife. So where did the sense of guilt come from? Is it merely a product of the brain?

In my view, the answer is clear: the moral law was speaking to Goad, but he suppressed it by pointing fingers at others rather than submitting his passions to that moral law. Goad himself seemed to acknowledge this indirectly in a YouTube interview when he described himself as “a degenerate. I put my finger on everything.” By his own account, he had slept with at least 80 women over the course of his life. The admission was consistent with his self-description, reflecting an unwillingness to subordinate passion and appetite to a moral order. As the Portland Tribune went on to observe:

“Asked why he likes ‘crazy’ girls, he says, ‘Sane girls are boring.’ But he says he will be more careful in the future about getting into ‘masochistic’ relationships. His whole defense was that he only hit women who were already abusing him far worse, and that society has a problem in believing that women can ever deserve to be hit. So have women shunned him? ‘Fifty percent of the support I got when in prison was from women,’ he says. ‘Since I got out, it’s been like Kiss on tour.’ Asked what kind of women are attracted to him now Ñ [sic] true trouble seekers, or just those who are tired of what he calls ‘emasculated hipsters’ Ñ [sic] he replies: ‘All of the above.’”[7]

Goad made his underlying philosophy explicit when he declared, “I think morality clouds understanding.” Whether he acknowledged it or not, the sentiment closely parallels Friedrich Nietzsche’s argument that morality distorts—or inverts—our understanding of reality. Goad himself invoked Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil to support his contention that “morality clouds understanding.”

By arguing that morality is unnecessary for understanding reality, Goad unwittingly embraced a philosophical position that, in his own case, culminated in guilt, then depression, and ultimately suicide. Whether that philosophy caused those outcomes is a separate question, but his life reflected tensions that he never fully resolved. Nietzsche, one of Goad’s principal intellectual influences, recognized that once objective morality is removed from the intellectual sphere, whether political, aesthetic, or economic, the foundation for objective truth itself is called into question. If there is no objective moral order, truth becomes relative: what is true for one person may be false for another, with no universally accepted standard by which competing truth claims can be judged.[8] As the late German-American philosopher and translator Walter A. Kaufmann put it,

“Nietzsche prophetically envisages himself as a madman: to have lost God means madness; and when mankind will discover that it has lost God, universal madness will break out. This apocalyptic sense of dreadful things to come hangs over Nietzsche’s thinking like a thundercloud. We have destroyed our faith in God. There remains only the void. We are falling. Our dignity is gone. Our values are lost. Who is to say what is up and what is down? It has become colder, and night is closing in….[Nietzsche] felt the agony, the suffering, and the misery of a godless world so intensely, at a time when others were yet blind to its tremendous consequences, that he was able to experience in advance, as it were, the fate of a coming generation.”[9]

If objective morality does not exist, then the distinction between truth and falsehood ultimately collapses. Nietzsche himself rejected the very notion of objective morality, declaring, “I deny morality as I deny alchemy, that is, I deny their presuppositions.”[10] As an alternative to objective morality, Nietzsche called for the revaluation—or transvaluation—of all values, a project he also associated with the figure of the Antichrist, the title of one of his books. He likewise devoted an entire chapter of Twilight of the Idols to the subject under the title “Morality as Anti-Nature.”[11]

As already suggested, passion must be subordinated to what Kant called practical reason; without such restraint, chaos inevitably follows. But if that is so, did Nietzsche mean that human passions should never be governed? If morality clouds understanding, why did Nietzsche react so intensely upon seeing a horse being whipped in Turin on January 3, 1889? Why did he rush to intervene, embracing the animal in a desperate attempt to stop the abuse? And why did that episode mark the beginning of his final psychological collapse? If morality truly clouds understanding, why was Nietzsche so deeply moved by the suffering of a horse?

Here we encounter a fundamental philosophical contradiction. Nietzsche denounced the Church as “the enemy of life” for teaching that human passions should be governed by moral restraint. Yet he evidently believed he was justified in trying to stop a man from acting on his own passions—the very freedom Nietzsche elsewhere celebrated. The contradiction is difficult to ignore.

Nietzsche’s rejection of the moral order left his philosophy unable to account coherently for its own moral judgments. His embrace of what he called the “Antichrist” symbolized a repudiation of the moral framework he sought to overturn.

Nietzsche rejected Kant’s argument that a universal moral law binds all human beings. Although he praised Kant’s commitment to reason, he nonetheless criticized him for lacking what he called “intellectual conscience” and “intellectual integrity.”[12] Nietzsche’s reasons for reaching that conclusion were remarkably superficial. For example, he dismissed Kant on the grounds that he “clung to the university, submitted to governments, [and] remained within the appearance of religious faith.”[13] This criticism has little to do with Kant’s actual moral arguments. In fact, one could reasonably accuse Nietzsche of introducing a red herring by focusing on Kant’s personal circumstances rather than engaging with the substance of his ethical philosophy.

What we are arguing here is that Nietzsche’s intellectual project was, from the outset, undermined by its rejection of the moral order. Moreover, those who inherited and developed aspects of his thought have often confronted similar philosophical dead end. This helps explain why Jim Goad’s own writings frequently appeared to be marked by internal contradictions.

Keep in mind that Goad is also the author of Whiteness: The Original Sin, a work in which he repeatedly invokes moral language to advance his arguments. For example, he criticizes Salon and Mediaite for what he describes as their “primitively mystical notions of morality.”[14] On the very next page, Goad expresses alarm over what he describes as a “ceaselessly embarrassing national moral panic” in American culture.[15]

According to Goad, American culture has been consumed by what he calls “chest-pounding moral panicking,” citing examples such as “major corporate vendors” banning the sale of Confederate memorabilia. He also points to other cases, including “the City of Memphis voting to exhume Nathan Bedford Forrest’s corpse, The Dukes of Hazzard being pulled from TV syndication, and even calls to ban Gone with the Wind.”[16] And then this:

“Arguing that white-skinned Africans were the first large-scale victims of racial persecution in the world—that the original great human exodus from Africa was less a peaceful migration than it was a violent purge of light-skinned undesirables, that it was ‘less out of Africa’ and more ‘get the hell out of Africa’—gives white people a moral leg up in the stubbornly idiotic gave of racial karma and intergenerational guilt-tripping.”[17]

A “moral leg”? What exactly does that mean? After all, Goad himself argued that “morality clouds understanding.” If that is the case, should we conclude that his own appeal to a “moral leg” is likewise clouding his understanding?

Here Goad appears to be attempting to have it both ways. Like Richard Spencer and others, he becomes trapped in a philosophical tension of his own making—a contradiction that ultimately undermines his writings. In this sense, Goad’s position reveals the difficulty of rejecting objective morality while continuing to make moral judgments.Either Goad failed to fully consider the implications of his own arguments about morality, which would represent a serious philosophical inconsistency, or he was unwilling to follow those principles to their ultimate conclusions. As E. Michael Jones might argue, lust darkens the mind.

Either way, Goad’s failure was fundamentally moral and superficially intellectual. He failed not because he was incapable of understanding the political climate, but because his underlying metaphysical framework rested on irreconcilable contradictions. Goad and others who embrace a Nietzschean worldview find themselves in a difficult position: they argue that morality “clouds understanding,” yet they continue to evaluate political and ideological questions through moral categories. The contradiction is difficult to escape. As G. K. Chesterton observed long before Jim Goad was born:

“The new rebel is a Skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty…and the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it…As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie.

“He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”[18]

Chesterton was not alone in arguing that the modern revolutionary often finds himself undermining his own foundations. People like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre recognized that abandoning a transcendent moral order carries profound consequences. In Sartre’s own formulation, human beings are ultimately condemned to what he called “useless passion.”[19] If Logos does not exist, Sartre argued in Existentialism and Humanism, then “man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can’t start making excuses for himself.”[20]

Similarly, Nietzsche—whom Goad regarded as an intellectual influence—understood that once a person rejects or dismisses morality, the concepts of right and wrong become, in his view, remnants of a bygone era.[21] Goad found himself trapped in a world of unresolved contradictions because he rejected practical reason and objective morality while embracing the ideas of Nietzsche, Darwin, and others. His ideological commitments produced a profound intellectual and moral conflict—one that was accompanied by a persistent sense of guilt and personal turmoil, ultimately culminating in his suicide.

In other words, Goad did not destroy the moral universe; rather, his rejection of it created an internal conflict that he could not ultimately resolve. As human beings, our nature is oriented toward practical reason—a principle that thinkers such as Kant sought to articulate in a philosophically consistent manner. For Kant, the moral law is what unites rational beings and provides the foundation for ethical action. Any philosophical, political, and even “scientific” system that attempts to dismiss this universal moral framework, he argued, risks collapsing into contradiction because it undermines the very principles required for rational judgment. Kant maintained that for an action to possess genuine moral worth, “it is not enough that it should conform to the moral law—it must also be done for the sake of the moral law.”[22]

This brings us to an essential point: the confusion experienced by Jim Goad and others stems from their failure to place morality within its proper philosophical framework. Any individual who dismisses practical reason as a foundation for human judgment will inevitably encounter internal contradictions and incoherence within his own system. This is precisely what occurred in Darwin’s case, and his intellectual successors have continued to grapple with those unresolved tensions.

Goad and Historical Christianity

Finally, Goad was manifestly clueless about the historical role of Christianity in the West. Perhaps the experiences he described from his childhood continued to shape his outlook throughout his life, influencing the way he attempted to reconcile—or suppress—the tensions he felt between his personal choices and his moral guilt and failures.

For example, he declares that “From the fall of Rome until the Renaissance, there was a dark, almost thousand-year stretch during which Christianity reigned supreme in a Europe that wallowed in disease and backwardness compared to non-Christian civilizations in the Middle East, Asia, and Northern Africa. The unpleasant truth is that for the first few hundred years and possibly the first thousand, Christianity’s rise correlated with Europe’s decline.”[23]

This claim is demonstrably false, and no serious historian would risk his or her scholarly reputation by endorsing such a historically spurious claim.[24] But Goad was only beginning to make one sweeping error after another. He went on to make the following claim:

“In the real world—the one unclouded by the fog of superstition—the West only began dominating the rest of the world when it started focusing on technology and trade to the detriment of blind mysticism and blind faith. One could likewise argue that the Islamic world—which had a leg up on Europe throughout much of the Middle Ages—ultimately languished behind Christendom due to its dogged embrace of blind faith over scientific curiosity.”[25]

Complete nonsense. Goad was fundamentally mistaken about both Christianity and Islam in this instance. Perhaps he would have benefited from spending less time glorifying violence against women and more time studying the historical record to understand what actually occurred in the past.[26] As I have argued in an earlier article, several Arab societies have made significant contributions to the advancement of science, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine.

These achievements represent an important part of the broader historical record and deserve to be acknowledged in any serious discussion of civilization and intellectual development.[27] This is a scholarly judgment, not an argument that Western culture has stolen the intellectual legacies of the Middle East. Recognizing historical contributions from different civilizations does not require embracing the claim that one culture has illegitimately appropriated the achievements of another.“From the eight century to the end of the fourteenth,” writes historian Toby E. Huff, “Arabic science was probably the most advanced science in the world, greatly surpassing the West and China.”[28]

Some historians—even scholars such as Niall Ferguson—have credited the Muslim world with producing one of the earliest pioneers of experimental science: Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–1039), whose work in optics and scientific methodology represented a major development in the history of empirical inquiry.[29]

Moreover, Arab societies produced some of the most brilliant mathematicians in history. The very word algebra, for example, is derived from the title of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi’s seminal work, Al-jabr wa-al-Muqabalah. This influential treatise was later translated into Latin and remained widely studied in European universities for centuries, serving as a rigorous foundation for the development of mathematical thought.[30]

It was al-Khwarizmi who, to a large extent, helped establish algebra and geometry as two distinct yet complementary fields of mathematics. His systematic approach to solving equations laid the foundations for algebra as an independent discipline, while his work demonstrated how abstract mathematical reasoning could be applied alongside geometric methods.[31] It was through al-Khwarizmi’s Al-jabr wa-al-Muqabalah that Europe inherited a systematic approach to algebraic mathematics, a discipline whose very name derives from the title of his groundbreaking work. His treatise played a crucial role in shaping the development of algebra in medieval Europe and laid the foundations for a field of mathematics that continues to bear the legacy of his contribution.[32] This view is widely accepted among historians of mathematics.[33] Mathematician and historian E. T. Bell writes,

“While Europe slept and all but forgot Greek mathematics, the Moslem scholars were industriously translating all they could recover of the works of the classic Greek mathematicians. Several of these translations became the first sources from which Christian Europe revived the mathematics it had all but let die. For this timely service to civilization, the Moslems no doubt deserve all the gratitude they have received.”[34]

Al-Khwarizmi also made significant contributions to astronomy through his detailed astronomical tables and explanations, which incorporated knowledge derived from both Ptolemy and Brahmagupta. “The Algebra of Alkarismi holds a most important place in the history of mathematics, for we may say that the subsequent Arab and the early medieval works on algebra were founded on it, and also that through it the Arabic or Indian system of decimal numeration was introduced into the West.”[35]

Hence, al-Khwarizmi is widely regarded as the father of modern algebra.[36] Al-Khwarizmi’s achievements, however, did not emerge in isolation. His works drew upon earlier traditions of Greek philosophy and mathematics, as well as contributions from Babylonian mathematical knowledge.[37]

For more than fifty years, a number of writers have promoted the claim that Christian monks not only contributed to Europe’s supposed intellectual decline but also hindered the advancement of Western civilization. According to this widely repeated narrative, scientific progress regressed during the Middle Ages because Christianity was allegedly incompatible with scientific inquiry. This interpretation was popularized in the nineteenth century by John William Draper in his 1874 work, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science.[38] Draper’s thesis was further developed and expanded by Andrew Dickson White in his 1896 work, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.[39] Yet those ideas have since been shown to be historically inaccurate, as subsequent scholarship has challenged many of the central assumptions of the conflict thesis.[40]

By the end of the twentieth century, White’s thesis had been largely abandoned by the majority of historians of science, who came to regard the conflict model as an inadequate and overly simplistic explanation of the complex relationship between religion and scientific development.[41] The late historian of science Ronald L. Numbers of the University of Wisconsin–Madison described it as “the greatest myth in the history of science,”[42] a narrative that continues to influence public ideologues such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.[43]

As the celebrated historian of science Edward Grant argues in his magnum opus, Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus, the Middle Ages were not “a time of ignorance” but rather “a period of striking innovation.”[44] But myths often prove remarkably persistent, and Goad continued to repeat these claims as though they were established facts, despite the wide availability of scholarly research on the Middle Ages and the Church’s role in shaping Western civilization.[45]

Goad lamented about the “declining white demographics,” yet he rarely addressed the broader historical forces and figures who shaped debates over contraception and abortion. Among the influential figures often discussed in the history of these movements are Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, and members of the Rockefeller family, whose activities and ideas had a significant impact on twentieth-century discussions of population, reproductive policy, and sexual ethics.

In his study The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement, sociologist Stephen LeDrew of Uppsala University argues that many participants in the atheist movement adopt an ideological framework that they are often unwilling or unprepared to critically examine.[46] Jim Goad appeared unwilling to subject some of the fundamental views he advanced to rigorous logical and critical examination. This returns once again to the broader idea that unchecked passions can cloud judgment and obscure clear reasoning.

 Video Link

[1] E. Michael Jones, “Guilt by Association,” Culture Wars, March 25, 2007: https://culturewars.com/news/guilt-by-association.

[2] For a comprehensive examination of some of those people, see Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: HarperCollins, 1987).

[3] Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization (London: Chatoo & Windus, 1946), 273.

[4] Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom (London: Arrow Books, 1965), 201.

[5] Joseph Gallivan, “Citizen Goad,” Portland Tribune, July 5, 2002.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 47.

[9] Walter A. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950 and 1974), 97, 98.

[10] Friedrich Nietzche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xiv.

[11] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), chapter 5.

[12] Kaufman, Nietzsche, 104.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Jim Goad, Whiteness: The Original Sin (Stone Mountain, GA: Obnoxious Books, 2018), 215.

[15] Ibid., 216.

[16] Ibid., 299.

[17] Ibid., 249.

[18] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 52-53; emphasis added.

[19] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 615.

[20] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotion (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), 22.

[21] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 515–516

[22] Emmanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Torchbooks, 1964), 390.

[23] Jim Goad, “So What If Jesus Was Jewish?,” Taki’s Magazine, January 7, 2019.

[24] For historical studies on these issues, see for example David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 and 2007); Edward Grant, Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome (New York: HarperOne, 2007); Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief (New York: HarperOne, 2007); Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

[25] Goad, “So What If Jesus Was Jewish?”

[26] For historical studies on these issues, see Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); George Saliba, A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories During the Golden Age of Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1994); Howard R. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam (University of Texas Press, 1997); Ahmad Dallal, Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Ahmad Y. Hassan and Donald Routledge Hill, Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[27] See Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter 2.

[28] Ibid., 145.

[29] Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin, 2011), 51.

[30] Philip K. Hitti, The Arabs: A Short History (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1996), 146.

[31] Ferguson, Civilization, 51.

[32] Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics (New York: Wiley, 1968), 228.

[33] B. L. van der Waerden, A History of Algebra: From al-Khwarismi to Emmy Noether (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1985), 4; E. T. Bell, The Development of Mathematics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1945), 101

[34] Bell, Development of Mathematics, 104

[35] W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (New York: Dover, 1960), 156.

[36] Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 230

[37] Ibid., 230-236.

[38] John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (New York: D. Appleton, 1874).

[39] Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: Prometheus , 1993).

[40] See David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Jean Leclercg, The Love for Learning and the Desire for God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961); Edward Grant, Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); James Hanman, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2010). Like Charles Darwin before him, White’s work was not written solely on the basis of scientific considerations. Darwin’s rejection of Christianity was influenced largely by the problem of suffering, while White’s opposition to Christianity was reportedly shaped in part by his personal hostility toward his sister’s conversion to Catholicism. See Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 3.

[41] See Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Gary Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounters between Christianity and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

[42] Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 1.

[43] See Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010); Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without a Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

[44] See Grant, Science and Religion, chapter 1.

[45] For similar studies, see J. L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Edward M. Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); J. N. Hillgarth, ed., Christianity and Paganism, 350-750: The Conversion of Western Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking centuries of anti-Catholic history (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2016); Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957); Richard C. Dales, The Intellectual Life of Western Europe in the Middle Ages (Washington: University Press of America, 1980); Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: An Institutional and Intellectual History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1968); Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries of Misconceptions and (Some) Misfortunes (London: SPCK, 2017).

[46] Stephen LeDrew, The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).