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Why the Christian Worldview led to the Success of Science in the West

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In Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science Hillel Ofek explores why the Arabic world went from dominating scientific inquiry as late as the 13th century to a scientific backwater:

Given that Arabic science was the most advanced in the world up until about the thirteenth century, it is tempting to ask what went wrong — why it is that modern science did not arise from Baghdad or Cairo or Córdoba. . . . [The] civilization’s geopolitical decline . . . can be traced back to the rise of the anti-philosophical Ash’arism school among Sunni Muslims, who comprise the vast majority of the Muslim world. . . Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s will is completely free. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God. . . . The Ash’ari view has endured to this day. Its most extreme form can be seen in some sects of Islamists. For example, Mohammed Yusuf, the late leader of a group called the Nigerian Taliban, explained why “Western education is a sin” by explaining its view on rain: “We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.”

Why did this anti-rationalist view arise in Islam and not in the West? In a word, Christianity. The predominate view of Islam is that God is completely free and that any regularity we observe might evaporate tomorrow. Apples fall down because God wills it. Tomorrow God might will that they fall up. Therefore, why should we inquire as to why the fall down? There is literally nothing to investigate. In contrast the West was open to free inquiry, and it is a risable secular myth that Christianity impeded science:

Galileo’s house arrest notwithstanding, his famous remark that “the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes” underscores the durability of the scientific spirit among pious Western societies. Indeed, as David C. Lindberg argues in an essay collected in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009), “No institution or cultural force of the patristic period offered more encouragement for the investigation of nature than did the Christian church.” And, as Baylor University sociologist Rodney Stark notes in his book For the Glory of God (2003), many of the greatest scientists of the scientific revolution were also Christian priests or ministers.

The Church’s acceptance and even encouragement of philosophy and science was evident from the High Middle Ages to modern times. As the late Ernest L. Fortin of Boston College noted in an essay collected in Classical Christianity and the Political Order (1996), unlike al-Farabi and his successors, “Aquinas was rarely forced to contend with an anti-philosophic bias on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities. As a Christian, he could simply assume philosophy without becoming publicly involved in any argument for or against it.” And when someone like Galileo got in trouble, his work moved forward and his inquiry was carried on by others; in other words, institutional dedication to scientific inquiry was too entrenched in Europe for any authority to control. After about the middle of the thirteenth century in the Latin West, we know of no instance of persecution of anyone who advocated philosophy as an aid in interpreting revelation. In this period, “attacks on reason would have been regarded as bizarre and unacceptable,” explains historian Edward Grant in Science and Religion, 400 b.c. to a.d. 1550.

Comments
I take it that you aren't using "being" in the sense of an intelligence?africangenesis
September 4, 2011
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AG: Have you done the half-burned match exercise yet? (Can you therefore tell us what we learn from it about things that have a beginning and their necessary causal factors? if you refuse to do this, then that tells us that you fear the consequences of doing this, for your preferred conclusions.) Now, do a logical step: conceive of a candidate being without necessary causal factors. Will such have a beginning? No. If it has no beginning, then if it is, it has always been, and will always be. (Example, the truth in the statement 2 + 3 = 5) If a candidate for such status has had no beginning and it is not, then by the flip side of the logical coin, it will never be. It is impossible for it to be as it has no on switch, so to speak, and it is not on. (BTW, being is being used rather broadly.) Do you see the immediate sense of impossibility? As to the contingency of the observed universe, that is actually the same as the contingency of the match flame. For it to have a beginning, it depends on an external necessary causal factor. And that there was credibly a beginning, is not now a serious controversy, given the Hubble evidence, and the 2.7 K background cavity radiation. That evidence does not really depend on the validity of general relativity theory, which is why I pointed to the cavity radiation issue. So, even through a multiverse speculation, we are looking at an underlying necessary being. T GEM of TKIkairosfocus
September 3, 2011
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"A candidate for such a being will either be so in all possible worlds, or it will be IMPOSSIBLE." Not really, it could be POSSIBLE to imagine without contradiction, and it just didn't happen. And why would it be a "being", and not some inanimate it, dark matter perhaps? Change the definition and you could define a whole menagerie into existence by the same "logic". The singularity of the big bang puts a limit on our knowledge looking back in time in a certain way. But that singularity, just like dark matter, dark energy, and the singularities that are black holes are just the current problems with general relativity which obviously is an incomplete theory. The big bang doesn't make the universe contingent, in the sense of constraining what came before to a "being". If there was a "creator" that somehow initiated this process, there is no reason the creator would have to have survived the big bang and still be with us.africangenesis
September 3, 2011
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"Many materialists I have encountered were/are of the opinion that it is not right to judge behaviors in other cultures as evil." Judge not lest ye be judged. Few materialists these days acknowledge the debt they owe to their judeo/christian heritage.africangenesis
September 2, 2011
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AG: You seem to confuse a logical case for an assumption. Have you done the half burned match exercise yet? What does it tell you about the nature of a contingent being? Do you not see that such a being has one or more necessary causal factors, absence or withdrawal of which are incompatible with existence? Do you then see that by logic, we can contemplate a POSSIBILITY, the existence of a being that has no such factors. Such a being is not dependent on external events or factors, so it will not have a beginning, and since no such factors are there to be withdrawn it has no end. A classic, generally accepted example is the sort of thing like the truth in 2 + 3 = 5, which has no beginning or end, it is so in all possible worlds. A candidate for such a being will either be so in all possible worlds, or it will be IMPOSSIBLE. As a simple instance, again we see cases where we see 2 + 3 = 5 is true in this possible and indeed actual world. It holds in all possible worlds. The challenge comes in when we see that our observed universe is contingent and had a beginning. That points to a beginner that at root is a necessary being. Which -- together with the evident fine tuning of the cosmos -- brings up possible candidates that are not very comfortable for materialists. So what? Back in the heyday of the steady state cosmos, it was held that our contingent planet was caused within a wider cosmos that was a necessary being. It's just that the evidence has gone the other way since the 60's: our observed cosmos as a whole now seems per evidence, to be contingent. The logic follows, as can be checked in any decent study on modality or possible worlds. So, please stop tossing around unjustified claims of "assumptions." GEM of TKIkairosfocus
September 1, 2011
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Did they do good old Euclidean Geometry? That seems to be a crucial test.kairosfocus
September 1, 2011
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Many materialists I have encountered were/are of the opinion that it is not right to judge behaviors in other cultures as evil. I had a discussion with one such materialist who supposed that in some cultures it's the norm for fathers to sell their daughters into sexual slavery, or for yet other cultures to allow a father to kill a daughter due to sexual infidelity and we have no business judging them for such. Of course not all materialists believe this; most, in fact condemn it, and rightfully so, but relative morality tends to stem from materialist beliefs. Cultures that approve of the above examples tend to be theistic cultures who accept that there's a theistic basis for morality. So for them, the behaviors are justified on that basis. Of course we also live in a predominantly theistic culture in the US (Canada, UK, etc), and we for the most part condemn such behaviors. We don't do so on the basis of relativistic morality but on certain Judaeo-Christian moral imperatives. The materialists who object to/condemn such behaviors have no concrete basis for such an objection or condemnation. At the same time the moral relativists have no basis for the "rightness" of moral relativism either. Part of what seems to cause materialists to doubt the theistic basis for morality is that they often point to such examples with the question of why there should be any difference from one theistic culture to another. Why is the behavior ok in some theistic cultures but not ok in others? with the conclusion that all morality is relative, even theistic morality. The problem with this assessment is that it assumes that the behaviors are necessarily consistent with theistic morality. To assume that since not all theists behave the same, that there's no basis for theistic morality is an example of a failure to distinguish exactly what the basis for theistic morality is, and a failure to differentiate between the behavior exhibited in a theistic culture and what theism teaches about morality. Many Islamic cultures tend to criticize Christian cultures because of the immorality exhibited by some, forgetting that it is not Christian teaching that encourages such behavior. It's the same misunderstanding as we get from materialists.CannuckianYankee
September 1, 2011
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Gem of TKI, "Namely, that there is a possible class of being that does not have a beginning, and cannot go out of existence; such are self-sufficient, have no external necessary causal factors, and as such cannot be blocked from existing. And once there is a candidate to be such a necessary being, if the candidate is not contradictory in itself [i.e. if it is not impossible], it will be actual. " Begs the question. Assumes the being that cannot go out of existance, came into existence. We'd have to know more than just generalities, to know whether it is possible. If it is made of matter what prevents it from going out of existance. If it has no mass, does it really "exist"?africangenesis
September 1, 2011
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However, a God (the only God) who rules by justice, by what IS as opposed to what IS NOT, by example of what outht to be and backs it up by appeal to our sense of ought is justified also by might. Might by itself bears no justification.CannuckianYankee
September 1, 2011
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Sorry, logged in with the wrong name above ... I'm meleagar. Now if I can just figure out how to erase that account and keep it from auto-logging :) One of the things I find really interesting is that it seems that many materialists/atheists have problems understanding the concept of first principles, and argue as if their arguments require no axiomatic basis, or at least can be drawn without really understanding the necessary ramifications of their premise. If "good" is relative, it is necessarily true that anything can be justified as moral, and the consequence of that is as long as one has the might (physical, emotional, rhetorical, willful, intellectual) to claim an action as moral, then that action is moral by consequence of its innate subjective-ness. I may not initially like the taste of beer, but I can, over time, develop a taste for it, and grow to enjoy it, which means that I have made beer "good" by force of might. Similarly, there may be some things I dislike (find immoral), but by training myself, and desensitizing myself, I can claim those things (by a form of might) as moral, because I can learn to enjoy them. If one cannot see that without an objective basis for "good", one must essentially be a moral solipsist, and thus lose all grounding for arguments about morality, I'm not sure how to even proceed. Arguments based on which personal proclivity is "better" are not rational unless they are compared to some objective standard.William J Murray
September 1, 2011
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[blockquote]So, even if “might makes right” were characteristic of materialism, which I don’t accept, it doesn’t distinguish it from religion.[/blockquote] It may not distinguish it from all other philosophies, but it does distinguish it from the theistic philosophy of a god that is good (not "has" good qualities, but "is" good, as the non-alterable - even by god - objective source of what good is). Thus it isn't the "might" of any entity that makes any arbitrary goal good; it is what good is at the source of all that exists, a fundamental quality of all existence - even god's.Meleagar
September 1, 2011
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AG: Why not respond to the disucssion here on that there is a serious candidate for an IS who can in fact ground OUGHT, breaking the might makes right circle. GEM of TKIkairosfocus
August 31, 2011
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africangenesis, Materialism doesn't make any kind of right, the old is/ought dilemma.Clive Hayden
August 31, 2011
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So, even if "might makes right" were characteristic of materialism, which I don't accept, it doesn't distinguish it from religion.africangenesis
August 31, 2011
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africangenesis,
All religion adds to “right” is a different (nonhuman or inhuman) might.
So?Clive Hayden
August 31, 2011
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All religion adds to "right" is a different (nonhuman or inhuman) might.africangenesis
August 31, 2011
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Hi Alan, I hope others are enjoying your contributions as much as I am! I love that quote, too: I went to the West and saw Islam, but no Muslims; I got back to the East and saw Muslims, but not Islam. Ultimately, objective religious truth (or the Book of Scripture) is not in any way affected by the rise and fall of Jewish, Christian, Muslim or indeed any other civilizations. Likewise with scientific truth (or the Book of Nature): indeed, it would come as no surprise to me if we’re missing numerous important chapters from the Book of Nature (lost with the destruction of long-forgotten civilizations), areas of scientific knowledge that we’ll never regain. I am in strong agreement with you when you say: Rather than deny each others achievements, I hope to see Muslims, Christians and Jews participating together, in this ID effort. We should be natural allies as far as ID is concerned. That is certainly the best and truest way forward. We are natural allies in more than just ID too. Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error. I wish I was at the table in Malvern too… God willing, a similar opportunity will arise in the future.Chris Doyle
August 31, 2011
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First its not the west. its about people and not regions on the globe. i know they try to say Islam civilization was great in science but in reality it was ninor stuff. that they retreated from even that is not evidence that without the retreat they would of done very much. I insist the progress of the modern world came from a rise in the intelligence of certain peoples. The intelligence is not from trickle down smarts from Italian elites. It was from the rise of the common man in the new protestant societies. A rising tide lifts all boats. From a general rise came specific progress. its simple. Smart people figure things out and so one has what they, wrongly, call science. In fact science is just a manifestation of the protestant peoples. Everything got better. Especially in the British world as it had the most determined and numerous of bible believing Christians. Modern civilization and science is the result of Puritan/Evangelical English and Scottish people way ahead of the rest. in short as one would expect the true faith brought man the best.Robert Byers
August 31, 2011
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I don't see any difference between the Muslim and the Materialist "might makes right" maxim; they just point to different ultimate justifications. A god that is right by warrant of might is not any better than right warranted by material might.William J Murray
August 30, 2011
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Hi Chris A widely circulated anecdote describes a visiting Muslim scholars impression of the West, over 100 years ago: "I went to the West and saw Islam, but no Muslims; I got back to the East and saw Muslims, but not Islam." This irony is not lost on Muslims, given that over one thousand years ago, their predecessors established hospitals, universities, a legal system, public services, orderly societies and advanced cities would provide a blueprint for Western civilisation. I am certainly not an expert on the Muslim failure to continue to build on several centuries of scientific progress, but I do know that people are the same everywhere, and civilisations fail for many of the same reasons. The rise and fall of civilisations is a common theme in the Qur'an, and it is apparent to any Muslim that, as fallible individuals, we, rather than Islam, are to blame for our current predicament. One only needs to look around and see the extent to which most Muslims fall short of the Islamic ideal, to see why we are where we are today. That is not to excuse the West, who, from their current position of dominance, are able to relentlessly present a narrative in which Muslims are the backward extremists who always initiate violence, while they are the unfortunate victims. This relentless propaganda has led to a situation in which Muslims are seen as being suspect, generally. Western domninace allows responsibility and accountability, even for dreadful excesses, to be simply brushed aside e.g. the death of over one million Iraqi's based on poor intelligence (or worse). When Christianity was the dominant inflence on Western society (formerly Christendom), Christians experienced periods of darkness, superstition and religious extremism too. Many recent examples of Christian extremism can be pointed to. Muslims recognise that they are subject to all the same failures, temptations, weaknesses and extremist trendencies as the rest of Mankind, as the following hadith (saying) of the Prophet Muhammad(saw)indicates. It says essentially that the Muslims will start following the people of the book (Christian and Jews), so much so, that if they enter a lizard hole, the Muslims will do the same. Generally, Muslims believe that the best people were the direct followers of Muhammad (SAW), known as the "Sahaba" followed by those who learned from the sahaba after the death of the Prohet (SAW) and so on. So while this gradual decline in true religious knowledge and sincere practice was predicted, the job of the sincere Muslim is to stem the tide as far as possible by reviving the best of what went before. Knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, has to be treated with patience and caution, due to the harm caused by attempting to reconcile faulty science with religion. Rather than deny each others achievements, I hope to see Muslims, Christians and Jews participating together, in this ID effort. We should be natural allies as far as ID is concerned. I recently attended the ID summerschool at Malvern. The highlight for me was finding myself at a table with a Christian and a Jew who shared the same hope.Alan
August 30, 2011
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bb, Mohammed founded Islam as a religion for Arab people. Mohammed is a descendent of Ishmael, who is said to be the father of the Arabs. Hence Ishmael is the father, not the founder, of Islam. It all go back to Abraham. It is the same God- just because they worship God differently does not mean it is a different God.Joseph
August 30, 2011
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If someone were to describe you as having characteristics that are not yours you would say "that's not me". Even though the fictional description has your name and address.bb
August 30, 2011
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Joseph, Islam was not founded by Ishmael and was a supposed "correction" to Christianity centuries later. The only connection to Ishmael was that this was a religion manufactured by his descendents. Part of the "correction" was a man-made definition of God that rendered him "other". The distortions makes Islam a cult that honors another god of their own manufacture. It's like a car dealer trying to sell a motorcycle as if it's a sedan. Or the repackaging of Abraham Lincoln as a homosexual as they're doing in California now.bb
August 30, 2011
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NZer @4.2.1.2.1 Here's a couple The Crusades: The Worlds Debate by Hilaire Belloc God's Battalions by Rodney Starkudat
August 30, 2011
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NZer,
This text seems to make it quite plain that God hates sin and is angry against sinners.
It's important to note that God's anger is not like man's anger. That's why in the space of a few verses we are told to avoid wrath while yielding to his wrath. Why okay for him and not for us? Because we get irrational and act wrongly when we are wrathful. When we are angry it tends to dominate us. God may be angry over sin, but notice that he is not presently acting on that anger. Rather, he is acting out of love toward those who anger him. When the time comes that he does act on that wrath, it will be controlled and just.ScottAndrews
August 30, 2011
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Hi everyone, Perhaps I can share a little bit of light on this theological dispute, as it pertains to a medieval philosophical dispute which I discussed in my lengthy reply to Professor Michael Tkacz (a Thomist critic of Intelligent Design) last year. What it boils down to is three views of Divine causality: conservationism, concurrentism and occasionalism. Darwinist Christians adopt the first view; medieval Christians (with very few exceptions) adopted the second; medieval Muslim philosophers adopted the third. (A few Christian philosophers have defended this view, as well.) Here are the views, in a nutshell. Consider the example of fire heating and subsequently burning a piece of cotton. Where does God fit in? Three views are possible. (1) Conservationism. God immediately conserves the fire and cotton in being, but He takes a back seat when it comes to change: He is simply a remote first cause of the cotton's burning. He is not immediately involved. (2) Concurrentism. God immediately conserves the fire and cotton in being. Additionally, whenever a natural change occurs, it is immediately caused by both God and the creature. What do concurrentists mean by immediate? They mean two things. (a) First, God acts through natural agents: they are His instruments, whereby He achieves the effects that He wants to bring about. Here, the effect is immediate because it is directly intended by God as an end; natural agents being the means to producing it. (b) Second, God acts in co-operation with each natural agent. God is not just a remote cause: He acts in partnership with each and every natural agent in a causal chain. His co-operation with each agent is absolutely vital: for without God's co-operation, no action by a natural agent would produce any effect whatsoever. The natural agent would still retain its powers and dispositions, but it would be prevented from exercising them if God "turned off the taps" on His side. (3) Occasionalism. In this scenario, divine causal activity is maximal and creaturely causal activity is non-existent, since divine causal activity is the only type of genuine causality. Creatures provide at most an occasion for God's activity, which is direct and immediate in bringing about all effects in nature. Thus cotton burns in a fire, the fire isn't really burning the cotton. God is burning it. He just happens to only do it when the fire is around. The fire is the occasion of God's burning, but not the cause. I discuss the differences between these viewpoints here: http://www.angelfire.com/linux/vjtorley/thomas1.html#smoking5 and in a lengthier "scholarly" exposition here: http://www.angelfire.com/linux/vjtorley/thomas1long.html#smoking5 . (I'd recommend reading the shorter account first. And if you're wondering about whether concurrentism makes God directly responsible for evil, don't worry: I discuss that too.) What is the upshot for science? If you're a concurrentist, you will believe that God is free; He can switch off His co-operation with any causal agent, any time He wants to. This is what He did for the three young men in the fiery furnace (see Daniel 3): the fire retained its inherent disposition to burn, but because God refrained from co-operating with it in His normal way, the fire was powerless to burn the young men. Even when God does this, however, causal agents (e.g. fire) retain their inherent dispositions, which spring from their nature. Thus God can stop an apple from falling down by refusing to co-operate with the Earth's attractive force of gravity, but He cannot change the law of gravity tomorrow and command apples to subsequently fall up. Gravity is inherently attractive; to make the Earth repel apples instead of attracting them, God would have to literally destroy the Earth and replace it with a new kind of entity - maybe one possessing negative mass. Concurrentism, then, allows God to suspend the normal course of events, but He cannot change the nature of a thing while keeping it the same thing. Apples cannot fall down today and up tomorrow. Occasionalism is very big on God's absolute liberty. The Earth, on the occasionalist view, doesn't make apples fall; God and God alone does. And if God wants apples to fall down on Tuesday and up on Wednesday, who's to stop Him? Conservationism (also referred to as weak deism by its opponents) says that God is not immediately involved in natural changes. He just keeps apples and the Earth in being; He doesn't make apples fall. Conservationists don't like acts of Divine intervention at all. The course of Nature never changes, on their view: they regard Divine intervention, and even God's refraining from co-operating with causal agents in their normal fashion (as in the example of the fiery furnace) as interference with what they call the "autonomy of creatures". Their God is very much a "behind-the-scenes" God: He conserves things in being, but never intervenes. What are the implications for science? If you're an occasionalist, the idea of a scientific law makes no sense. Most Muslim philosophers in the Middle Ages were occasionalists; Barry's point is that that's why their science stagnated. That leaves two remaining "science-friendly" views: conservationism and concurrentism. The former might seem more science-friendly, as it gives Nature (and hence scientific inquiry) total autonomy. That's why most scientists loathe ID. ID, by the way, is very compatible with concurrentism (which allows God to act as an immediate causal agent); however, one could still be a conservationist and an ID-supporter, if one believed in a front-loading version of ID, where God packs in all the information at the Big Bang. Conservationism, however, by regarding scientific laws as set in stone, discourages intellectual inquiry as to why these laws hold in the first place. Laws are "just there" and cannot be changed. Scientists who take this view of Nature tend to fall into the intellectual trap of regarding the laws of Nature as necessary. In fact, they are nothing of the sort: they are totally contingent. On the other hand, the occasionalist answer to the question of why laws of Nature hold (because God wants them to) is scientifically uninformative and allows God to do anything He wants, for any reason. Such a solution makes God whimsical and irrational. Concurrentism offers a middle way: it allows scientists to ask why God acts in the way He does. God makes laws for a reason - i.e. the production of a universe that is capable of supporting life (and especially intelligent life). Having made things with certain dispositions, God does not and cannot remake them: God cannot make gravity an attractive force tomorrow. God can however suspend the laws of Nature for a grave reason (e.g. protecting human lives) if He chooses to do so. Additionally, He is free to "reach in" and manipulate the cosmos (e.g. bringing chemicals together to make the first living cell), if front-loading proves insufficient to bring about the specific ends He desires, as physicist Dr. Rob Sheldon argues that it would in some cases (see his article The Front-Loading Fiction ). Well, I hope that clears the air a little. I personally believe in giving credit where credit is due: Muslim scholars, for many centuries, were the preservers of the science and philosophy of the Greco-Roman world. They also acknowledged God's freedom to over-ride Nature whenever He saw fit. Failure to recognize this point puts science in a straitjacket: one becomes blind to the sheer contingency of the world. It is a pity that medieval Muslim philosophers over-emphasized God's freedom; however, I think that modern Muslim philosophers might warm to the philosophy of concurrentism, if it is presented to them in an intellectually attractive way. Well, that's enough from me. What do other readers think?vjtorley
August 30, 2011
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BTW Scruffy, Sir Isaac Newton, a Christian, was a Unitarian, meaning he did not accept the divinity of Jesus. It seems Jesus as a God came well after Christianity started- the trinity stuff was an add-on.Joseph
August 30, 2011
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Hi Alan, I hope you are well. You said: Perhaps the Muslim scientists(sorry, the Arab scientists)recognised that faith in (scientific)progress was replacing faith in God, and that the fruits of science and discovery can bring some harm as well as good. And I find this fascinating. Something in that for sure. I can see a large and interesting gap between theory and practice here: Islam, in theory, particularly as espoused by the Qu’ran is just about as good as it gets. Unfortunately, the practice of Islam – by certain groups in certain parts of the world – does not do the Qu’ran (and its wisdom) justice. Whereas Christianity, in theory, particularly as espoused by the Bible, can be problematic: especially when it comes to reconciling St Paul’s teachings with the Jewish tradition he attached those teachings to. And yet the practice of Christianity – by certain groups in certain parts of the world – more closely resembles Islam! With the discipline of good religious theory, we can, in practice, embrace the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture (esp. the Qu’ran and the Old Testament) and make substantial progress as a civilization. Not that we have, in practice, but that’s the theory!Chris Doyle
August 30, 2011
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By emphasising Gods ultimate freedom, perhaps Muslims managed to avoid the slavish commitment to scepticism of miracles and the naturalism that would inevitably give rise to something like the Darwinism that came to dominate Western thought. Perhaps the Muslim scientists(sorry, the Arab scientists)recognised that faith in (scientific)progress was replacing faith in God, and that the fruits of science and discovery can bring some harm as well as good. The Christian world took off recklessly from where Muslims left off, only to see their religion decimated by sceptical thought, the heart taken out of it by secularism, their historical achievements denied, and the fruits of their work used to bring humanity to the verge of self destruction. It's not easy holding together an empire (that was twice the size of the Roman empire) for hundreds of years. The reasons why Muslim science declined is clearly tied in with the decline in financial support for science , brough on by the decline in the Islamic empire, due to wars, corruption, and arrogance etc, just as the secular Western world is declining for the same reasons. It's nice to see UD begin to acknowledge the debt that is owed to Muslims e.g. as effective initiators of the programme to turn science into a universal search for knowledge that transcended religion, culture and time. Naturally, such an admission, made on a predominantly Christian oriented website, had to be made in such a way as to take the shine of the achievement.Alan
August 30, 2011
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I am NOT religious. If the Bible, Qu'ran, and every other reliious text were refuted today I would not be bothered. I have looked around enough to understand there isn't any ONE religion who "has it right"- but that is another story...Joseph
August 30, 2011
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