 "Now Ibn al-Haytham was a devout Muslim – that is, he was a supernaturalist.He studied science because he considered that by doing this he could better understand the nature of the god that he believed in – he thought that a supernatural agent had created the laws of nature.The same is true of virtually all the leading scientists in the Western world, such as Galileo and Newton, who lived after al-Haytham, until about the middle of the twentieth century.