Posted on 11/06/2007 7:02:15 AM PST by DogByte6RER
Let’s assume that this is TRUE.
So what? The Chinese invented printing and gunpowder and marvelous casting techniques. They sent out voyages of exploration. And what did they do with these marvelous inventions? Nothing.
It took the Europeans to figure out how to make these things work for the benefit of mankind. But at least these were neutral for the Chinese (relatively speaking, of course). In the hands of the Muslims, they would be a force for evil and despair.
Fine by me, after all we did just send out a space probe outside our solar system saying that the “Muslim Planet of Earth will behead all those in the Galaxy that defy Islam!”
Independence Day 2?
The fact of what he calls “modern” explains why they stuck where they stuck.
Is there a saying that if one says a lie enough, it becomes the truth?
The problem is more fundamental. Islamic theology undercuts empiricism altogether, because the notion of the supremacy of the will of Allah is taken beyond reason. In Islam, Allah can will good or evil, and even irrationality.
Science operates under the preconceptions of Christian cosmology, that the universe is ordered and comprehensible, and that physical laws apply universally. In Mohammedan cosmology, every act (or phenomenon) is willed directly by Allah.
This is why Mohammedans failed to build on the philosophy of Aristotle, and why the discovery of Aristotle's philosophy, through the Mohammedans, led to the great philosophical synthesis of Scholasticism, and the birth of science in Christendom.
In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science's unique birth in Christian Western Europe:1)"Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a break-through in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms."2)"The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures."
3)"Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man's rationality as somehow sharing in God's own rationality and in man's condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man's reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm."
4)"At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard agains the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix."
But what about the other monotheistic religions?
Jaki notes that before Christ the Jews never formed a very large community (priv. comm.). In later times, the Jews lacked the Christian notion that Jesus was the monogenes or unigenitus, the only-begotten of God. Pantheists like the Greeks tended to identify the monogenes or unigenitus with the universe itself, or with the heavens. Jaki writes:
Herein lies the tremendous difference between Christian monotheism on the one hand and Jewish and Muslim monotheism on the other. This explains also the fact that it is almost natural for a Jewish or Muslim intellectual to become a patheist. About the former Spinoza and Einstein are well-known examples. As to the Muslims, it should be enough to think of the Averroists. With this in mind one can also hope to understand why the Muslims, who for five hundred years had studied Aristotle's works and produced many commentaries on them failed to make a breakthrough. The latter came in medieval Christian context and just about within a hundred years from the availability of Aristotle's works in Latin.So how did it all happen? Or fail to happen?
Fr. Paul Haffner writes:
Modern experimental science was rendered possible, Jaki has shown, as a result of the Christian philosophical atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Although a talent for science was certainly present in the ancient world (for example in the design and construction of the Egyptian pyramids), nevertheless the philosophical and psychological climate was hostile to a self-sustaining scientific process. Thus science suffered still-births in the cultures of ancient China, India, Egypt and Babylonia. It also failed to come to fruition among the Maya, Incas and Aztecs of the Americas. Even though ancient Greece came closer to achieving a continuous scientific enterprise than any other ancient culture, science was not born there either. Science did not come to birth among the medieval Muslim heirs to Aristotle.The Origin of Science...The psychological climate of such ancient cultures, with their belief that the universe was infinite and time an endless repetition of historical cycles, was often either hopelessness or complacency (hardly what is needed to spur and sustain scientific progress); and in either case there was a failure to arrive at a belief in the existence of God the Creator and of creation itself as therefore rational and intelligible. Thus their inability to produce a self-sustaining scientific enterprise.
If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.
These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.
The Islamists do not seem to be particularly creative.
They have to plagiarize a seriously/fatally failed system to launch their own propaganda. They need to re-hire Baghdad Bob and get him on this before he gets recruited by the "global warmists" as their spokesman.
* It's like they bought it from a "Used Propaganda Lot"...with all the pennants blowing in the wind and salesmen in really 'creative' attire patrolling for customers.
When you're too stupid to come up with something original, you have to 'borrow' it from someone else.
I had no idea so many Jews converted to islam...
Why is it that American hospitals are filled with specialists who are from Muslim nations?
I’ll give them lobotomy.
Of course.
Modern physics was brought to us by that great Muslim, and Jew, Albert Einstein.
Along with numeric positions based on powers of ten, the use of zero (nil) as a place holder, and a scheme of arithmetic allowing addition and subtraction of multi-digit numbers. There was indeed an Arabic contribution to observational astronomy/astrology but perilously little since the tenth century.
One only need compare the number of books translated into Arabic by the Arab countries with those translated by non-Arab countries to determine the almost total lack of scholarship in the Arab (& Persian) lands. The following quote is from the UAE Khaleej Times Online of 19 August 2004.
"In terms of quantity, and notwithstanding the increase in the number of translated books from 175 per year during 1970-1975 to 330, the number of books translated in the Arab world is one-fifth of the number translated in Greece.
The disparity was revealed in the first half of the 1980's when the average number of books translated per 1 million people in the Arab world during the five-year period was 4.4 (less than one book for every million Arabs), while in Hungary it was 519, and in Spain 920."
Regards,
GtG
#1 They can't practice modern medicine at home.
#2 Some of them are here to kill us.
Should that be 0.4?
Isn't that proof that there is nothing worth translating in the non-møøselimb world?
Ali Bin Einstein
Thomas Edisaddam
Ali Zander Grahammad Bell
Sir Immamudeen Newton
Mohammedangelo
ping
A Muslim doctor in the U.S. saved my life after American doctors told me I was toast.
Proving once again that statistics are useless in predicting a specific outcome.
Good for him, and you.
When I had my health problem I did research as to who were the best in the field and also got recommendations from other doctors. Of the six names I came up with, all were had Muslim names.
The doctor did figure out what was wrong with my was from Iran.
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