Posted on 10/29/2001 1:27:41 PM PST by sarcasm
The class starts on Monday. The final is Thursday afternoon. Bring your own crayon and a matchbook cover.
I love it. Technological relativism. Can you tell this guy is a college professor?
Much as it pains me to disagree with that font of wisdom known as the New York Times, medieval Islam comes in second to China in science. And the Chinese actually used their science to produce useful technology (gunpowder, movable type printing, paper, the compass, cast iron, canal locks, rudders, wheelbarrows, etc.).
Above from Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes, p. 417.
Seems like the Muslims destroyed more knowledge than they created.
Was it not that learned caliph JMJ333 who said,
"Saying one has read a thousand books is only
to say one has read the same book, the Koran,
a thousand times."?
Because saying that anything real happens by necessity, in Islamic theology, is thought to detract from the omnipotence of God. Everything is supposed to be contingent, utterly dependent on God's will. Which is compatible with fatalism, but not with prediction, let alone a desire to control the forces of nature, which to this orthodox theological view is a gross impiety. They think that mere human reason cannot arrive at knowledge of real causal relationships, that every such understanding is a projection, imposition, and at best a superficial half-truth. And what is their reason for thinking this? Philosophical skepticism, that's what. The same as you will find in David Hume, western enlightenment skeptic, who also argues against the possibility of any certain causal knowledge. Islamic theology has been dominated by that view since the time of Al-Ghazali in the high middle ages, 500 years before Hume was born.
In the conflict between reason and revelation in Islam, it was the revelation backers, the theologians, that played the skepticism card. Not the secularists, as in the west. In the west the theologians taught the ability of human reason to discover the truth, even about metaphysic subjects. Acquinas taught so, based in part on the arguments of medieval Muslim philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes. In the west, Hume, Kant, and the positivists thought they were weakening dogmatic theology when they taught there are many things man can't know anything about. In the Islamic world, the theologian knew that thoroughly disestablishing human reason through skepticism, leaves nothing to contend against received law and tradition.
Al-Ghazali taught that for human thought there is logic and mathematics, which are certain; revelation which is taken on faith; and vanity, which is what all other human thought amounts to. The claim to know anything definite about the real external world, let alone its necessary future in however small a matter, is to claim there is something beyond vanity in the third category. The "definite article truth", as one modern pundit puts it, is real and accessible to human reason. That is the doctrine Dr. Hoodbhoy regards as a heresy. H plus O equals water is definite article truth. Denying man access to definite article truth, he changes the formula to "it appears to be the will of God that things are this way - right now." This removes the offensive claim to a truth binding on God, or the equally offensive (to their theology) view that God acts by definite laws, instead of reserving all power to Himself, to do anything at any time. In other words, the first claim seems to deny miracles, and the second insists on them.
There is a difference between being under a despot and being under a law of liberty. A law of liberty, a rule of law, sets down a formal relationship, without regard to particular individuals. When a case comes under the heading prescribe by the law, the resultant prescribe by that law is carried out. This makes rule predictable by the subject. The acts of the ruler can be foreseen, and counted on. The subject then chooses freely, with knowledge of the consequences for each choice announced by the law. The subject may be said to choose his fate, and however subordinate he may be compared to the ruler, he can be called free. Under a despot, none of this is so. The will of the despot cannot be known beforehand, because it itself is free. So it cannot be predicted. The subject cannot know the consequences of his actions, and therefore cannot with safety follow any plan of his own will. He must submit himself to the whims of the despot entirely, extinguishing his own will in the process. Perfect submission is fatalism about anything the despot requires of one.
Now, in Christendom, it is thought an honor to regard God as a "king" of free subjects. It would be thought gross impiety to ascribe despotism to God, because westerners despise despotism on principle. Nothing can deserve to be called God that is morally worse than many individual men, and chivalrous men are morally superior to despots - they allow for the freedom of others, even for their errors. Chesterton expressed this point, and its relation to chivalry and feudalism, thus - "when God put man in a garden, he girt him with a sword, and sent him forth a free knight, who might betray his lord." The feudal relations and chivalry were all about the mutual trust between ruler and subject, a trust that can only be present if the subject is capable of disobediance - is that much at liberty. The subject's support and loyalty are freely and heartily given, because the ruler shows his willingness to rely on the subject's goodwill.
Despotism is entirely different. The attitude of a free subject appears to such eyes as overwheening pride and self-love, and a desire to be better than others. All are crushed to an equal submission to the arbitrary will of the ruler - that is their equality. What to us appears the most crawling submission, appears to them the only real obediance - complete submission, complete surrender of one's own will. The world "Islam" means such submission, literally. It means submission to the will of God.
(continued)
Now, the reason we could never stand that, is we would regard a God that demanded it is not much of a God, because we can think of many more magnanomous examples among mere men. A God morally inferior to Cincinnatus, William Penn, or Washington, does not seem to deserve the name. But they do not regard despotic rule as something shameful - they regard what they would call the pride involved in the spirit of liberty as shameful instead.
It is this moral difference that is at the root of the great power of philosophic skepticism, as an outlook on the whole of life, in Islamic civilization. It does not just rest on plausibilities about "certainty" that on close examination beg the question, as in Hume. It rests on the idea that submitting oneself to fate, accepting whatever comes in life, is morally good, and that pride is the one evil to be avoided. In order for the ruler to be all powerful, the subject must disappear into fatalism. In order for God to be exalted, man must disappear.
Undoubtedly many will see the theological parallels in doctrine - the Islamic God is truly alone. And the remote consequence of that difference in fundamental outlook on the universe, is what Chesteron once spoke of (warning of similar philosophic views in the west in our own time) as "a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table." Or in this case, to believe that 2 hydrogens and 1 oxygen make water with an absolute necessity. Which is most assuredly not a deficit of skepticism, but an overdose of it. What they have a deficit of, is confidence in man as opposed to God, of liberty as opposed to submission, of reason as opposed to revelation.
They have not always had this problem to this degree, because philosophers influenced by Greek thought were once the leading lights of their civilization. While accepting limits to human reason, they had confidence in it within a robust sphere of applicability. They had confidence in man, and especially in the moral sense of the better among them. But they also had some gnostic silliness and frank overreaching, for example in Averroes' ideas about "union with the active intellect", aka salvation by personal knowledge, independent of morality or action.
Medieval Islamic theologians saw a drift to secularism, pride, and error in those philosophers, and violently reacted against them. Their weapon was skepticism. In order to refute the truth claims of one man, Averroes, they insisted no mere man could possibly know anything as presumptuous as "definite article" truth - beyond the most limited sphere of logic and mathematics, "formal" or "a priori" or "analytic" propositions. They threw out the baby - belief in man's ability to really know anything about the real world. We are hardly without skeptics - of positivist and relativist varities - who make similar claims over here. But they have never been the sole or even the dominant outlook in our own civilization.
The actual content of philosophic and theological views matters, far more than anything else does, in the long run. Exactly as Dr. Nasr said in the article, "Science arose under particular circumstances in the West with certain philosophical presumptions about the nature of reality." So far is it from being true that all beliefs are just like each other, or all are partial, or the other typical "meta dodges" fashionable among the "non-judgmental" today. The intellectual health of a civilization depends on definite propositions - on dogmas - that are not optional, and cannot be changed without intellectual shipwreck being the a result. And one of those dogmas is the existence and attainability by mere human reason of "definite article" truth. Opt out of it because of a different "philosophical presumption", and you will opt out of both modernity, and truth.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.