An Open Letter to Science and Religion. But first, let's see what's in the secret compartment today. Oh, champagne poppers. What am I supposed to do with these? Dear Science and Religion, you're supposed to be so irreconcilable in everything, but not so much in the Abbasid Empire. I mean, Muslim mathematicians expanded math to such a degree that we now call the base ten number system and the symbols we use to denote it Arabic numerals. And religion was at least part of what pushed all that learning forward.