What ISIS Really Wants

The Atlantic has published a long, but readable analysis, on "What ISIS Really Wants." The bottom line: the West, including, apparently, most of our political and military leaders, has not taken ISIS seriously enough. They believe what they are saying. For example, with the establishment of a Caliphate, it becomes the duty of Muslims who agree with the interpretation of the Koran accepted by ISIS to come to the place where the Caliph resides. For another example, they believe that there is a sacred duty to take slaves.

Scary reading.

Were religious beliefs/was Islam responsible for the bombings in Boston?

In case you didn't realize it, some people would answer both of the questions above with a resounding "yes!" They would claim that militant intolerance, even violence, are the inevitable consequence of deeply held religious belief.

The Panda's Thumb blog, not exactly a friend of conservative Christian beliefs, at least beliefs on origins, has blasted biologist Jerry Coyne, who, in addition to being an important scientist, is a militant atheist, for his "yes!" responses, and given evidence to show that Coyne, and other people who want to make religious belief the root of all of violence, and other problems, are wrong. There are some pertinent links in the Panda's Thumb post.

Good for the Panda's Thumb!

The Panda's Thumb also posted a reaction to a believer in Intelligent Design, who claimed that "Darwinists" are incapable of showing proper compassion.

Most any tragedy can be used to reinforce our prejudices, and often gets used as such by people with a wide variety of such prejudices. Sigh. 

Islamic anti-science philosophy?

I am not an expert in the subject of this post, which is the result of an hour or so of searching and reading in the Internet. The subject is important, and was an eye-opener to me.

Steven Weinberg, author and Nobel Prize-winning physicist, supports the atheism of Richard Dawkins, except that Dawkins' attacks on Christianity are misplaced, he says -- he really should be attacking Islam, because Christians don't usually act as if they really believe what they say they do. (If they did, they would be making more of an effort to convert him, he writes.) Weinberg says that, in the twelfth century A. D., an Islamic philosopher named Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (there are variations on the name -- Weinberg used Ghazzali) did away with the foundation of science under Islam (which had, a few centuries earlier, been the center of developing science) by saying that there could be no laws of nature, because these would tie the hands of the deity. See here for al-Ghazali's website.

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Added Jan 30th, 2007. See the comment below by Jeremy Pierce, which casts grave doubt on Weinberg's main thesis.
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Weinberg seems to be correct about one thing, namely that al-Ghazali was an important philosopher. (The Wikipedia article on him says that his influence has been compared to that of Thomas Aquinas in Christianity.) He is also mostly, or entirely, correct about another idea, namely that al-Ghazali attacked the very foundations of science (although he really seemed to have broader aim, at philosophy, or even more fundamentally, at reason itself). Here's what the al-Ghazali web site says about his The Incoherence of the Philosophers (this book has other names):

The so-called necessity of causality is, says al-Ghazali, simply based on the mere fact that an event A has so far occurred concomitantly with an event B. There is no guarantee of the continuation of that relationship in the future, since the connection of A and B lacks logical necessity. In fact, according to Ash‘arite atomistic occasionalism, the direct cause of both A and B is God; God simply creates A when he creates B. Thus theoretically he can change his custom (sunna, ‘ada) at any moment, and resurrect the dead: in fact, this is 'a second creation'.

This web site goes on to affirm what Weinberg stated about al-Ghazali.

This article, in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, presents a more complex picture of al-Ghazali.

The history of the development of science is a complicated subject, and opinions vary. However, it is possible to argue that Christianity has been, at least at some times, and in some ways, friendly to the development of science. (So was Islam.) To me, belief in a God of order and pattern is crucial to the development of science, although perhaps that is a simplistic view. If I really believed that there was no meaning in the universe, no fundamental laws, why try to uncover them? For example, Isaac Newton, although he would probably be classified as belonging to a Christian cult today, believed that science was an enterprise that, by showing what God had done, glorified God. Although the roots of Western Science pre-date Christianity, it grew and matured among civilizations that were, at least nominally, Christian, and I don't think that was an accident.

It seems likely that al-Ghazali really did undercut science for Muslims. If so, he did them a great disservice.

I will not go into the coherence of Weinberg and Dawkins, or that of the late Francis Crick (who is mentioned favorably by Weinberg) except to say that they have denied what I believe to be the source of the laws of nature.

This post is not meant as an attack on Islam.

I write as a Christian, and too much of what Weinberg says about the lack of certitude in Christians rings true.

Thanks for reading.