Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
Tell me what you make of this interview with Robert Reilly at Frontpage. Reilly has written what sounds like a fascinating book called The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. I haven't read it, so can't properly evaluate the argument he advances, but I thought this part of the interview was intriguing and puzzling:
The answer ... completely hinges on God’s relationship to reason in Sunni Islam. Is God reason, or logos, as the Greeks would say? If God himself is reason, then it is hard to close the mind because one would then be closing oneself to God. This, in fact, was the view of the first fully-developed theological school in Islam, the Mu‘tazilites. The Mu‘tazalites asserted the primacy of reason, and that one’s first duty is to engage in reason and, through it, to come to know God. They held that reason is a gift from God given to come to know Him through the order of his creation. All men have this gift, not only Muslims. Therefore, they were disposed to accept Greek philosophy and the moral truths it contained.
However, the school of theology that arose to oppose the Mu’tazilites, the Ash‘arites, held the opposite. Unfortunately, by the end of the ninth century, they prevailed and became the formative influence in Sunni Islam. For the Ash‘arites, God is not reason, but pure will and absolute power. He is not bound by anything, including his own word. Since God is pure will, He has no reasons for his acts. Thus what He does cannot be understood by man. One of the things that God does is create the world, which also cannot be understood.
To protect their notion of God’s omnipotence, the Ash‘arites denied cause and effect in the natural world. For God to be omnipotent, nothing else can be so much as potent. Therefore, fire does not burn cotton; God does. Gravity does not make the rock fall; God does. God is the direct cause of everything and there are no secondary causes. To say otherwise is blasphemy – comparing something to the incomparable God. Everything therefore becomes the equivalent of a miracle. By their very nature, miracles cannot be understood. Without causality in the natural order, anything can come of anything, and nothing necessarily follows. The world becomes incomprehensible because it is without a continuing narrative of cause and effect.
It's a rich idea, obviously, but it struck me as I was reading it: This idea entered European thought and philosophy, too--via al Ghazali--and can be traced clearly through Hume and well beyond. Skepticism about causation is hardly alien to the European philosophical tradition.
So why would the Ash'arites' view have proven so limiting to scientific enquiry, whereas the same views had nothing like this influence in Europe? I should read the book, of course, before drawing conclusions, but I wonder how complete or satisfying this answer could ultimately be.
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Sep '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
If you'll recall, Hume awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers. If you look at the dates that these thinkers occupied, I think its a fair statement that both the medieval and renaissance periods had passed before these thinkers came on the scene. You'll recall that the Catholic Church was the major patron of both the arts and the sciences (who else was going to do it?) and that many clerics were active natural philosophers at the time of Galileo. I cite The Beginnings of Western Science by David C. Lindberg 2nd edition as a source. O'Reilly is saying that this shutdown happened in Islam many hundreds of years earlier. Also significant is that Kant was a German post reformation thinker, working in German awoken from his slumbers by an Englishman writing in English. I leave the Arabic speaking output of the time as an exercise for the reader.
Sep '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
I also refer you to Aquinas against the Averroists: On there being only one intellect by the late Ralph McInerny. A pivotal text for understanding the difference between Islamic and Christian philosophic thought and the roles of faith and reason.
Edited on October 19, 2010 at 2:58pmRe: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
Pseud, you see this line of reasoning way, way back--Ockham, for example. But something in the way Europeans approached it left people saying, "Well, that's interesting, now let's move on and figure out how blood circulates." Yet this idea, if Reilly's right, put the Islamic world in a practical vice-grip. Why exactly? It's pretty easy to deny induction (kind of hard not to, if you think too much about it), but at the end of the day, most of us see the value in making the refrigerator work, so we live with the philosophical problem and put it in an "interesting, but you can't do much with it" box. Like the problem of determinism and free will.
Jun '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
The Ash‘arites, it seems, envision a God with no complexity. Why would God ever build a clock mechanism if he still has to be there to make every movement of the clock's hands? And if we're created in God's image, then where does that leave us? It leaves us without the creativity that comes from building new things upon some existing structure of rule and reason. It makes Jack (or Mohammad) a dull boy.
Sep '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
Claire,
Ockham was a nominalist, but he was already a post scholastic thinker by the time he came on the scene, Bonaventure and Aquinas had already done their work. Ockham did set the stage for Luther by the way, but I'll leave that argument for another day. And don't forget how nutty the arts faculties were at Paris et al. Just like they are now. And Aquinas at one time had a Bishop's condemnation hanging on him. The Christian world understood a difference between both faith and reason, as well as the political and secular realm, even though in embryonic form at the time of Aquinas (Aquinas would have assumed a monarchy was the natural order of things, thereby reflecting the political thinking of the times).
Aug '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
Do you mind sourcing these assertions? If you mean secular and sacred realms, the Augustinian two kingdoms, then I get it. Except that it took Luther and the reformers to separate the two kingdoms assunder after Rome had put them together.
How was there a difference between faith and reason? I don't find that duality in the Bible. It seems to me that Paul is constantly arguing from facts to conclusions - very reason based.
Aug '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
What strikes me is how closely the Mu'tazalites' view of logos imitates that of the earliest Christian philosophers (like Clement of Alexandria).
I don't know how much of the early Christian logos theology penetrated though to medieval times, but I do know many early theologians would agree that:
"One’s first duty is to engage in reason and, through it, to come to know God. Reason is a gift from God given to come to know Him through the order of his creation."
Edited on October 19, 2010 at 3:33pmMay '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
..."One’s first duty is to engage in reason and, through it, to come to know God. Reason is a gift from God given to come to know Him through the order of his creation." · Oct 19 at 6:20am
Edited on Oct 19 at 06:22 am
I seem to recall that Newton felt that way. He thought he was doing theology, not science as we understand it.
Oct '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
I'm going to have to respectfully beg to differ: denying induction when it's been working successfully—by which I mean, there's no such thing as science without it—for millenia requires a level of sophistry that... well... only Hume and people very much like him seem to possess. :-)
The mechanics of induction have been understood and lost, understood and lost, repeatedly throughout history. Laplace understood them, Bernoulli understood them, Gauss understood them, Bayes understood them... they seem to find their best modern articulation in http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-Logic-Science-Vol/dp/0521592712/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1287495461&sr=8-1. Highly recommended.
Oct '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
outstripp
I seem to recall that Newton felt that way. He thought he was doing theology, not science as we understand it. · Oct 19 at 6:27a
m
Essentially all of the 17th-century Natural Philosophers believed that. Newton certainly did; Leibniz certainly did, etc.
The most important philosophical question to ask, IMHO, is whether the universe is teleological or not. Teleology has fallen into disrepute over the centuries, but it needs resurrecting; see http://www.amazon.com/Anthropic-Cosmological-Principle-Oxford-Paperbacks/dp/0192821474/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287495683&sr=1-1, http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Immortality-Modern-Cosmology-Resurrection/dp/0385467990/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287495702&sr=1-3, and http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Christianity-Frank-J-Tipler/dp/B003TO6EN6/ref=pd_sim_b_1 for some reasons why. :-)
Oct '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
It's not obvious that they did prove so limiting to scientific inquiry: to this day, I do algebra (الجبر), and as a computer scientist I both use and create algorithms (أبو عبد الله محمد بن موسى الخوارزمي)). The Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_mathematics covers this aspect of Muslim history well, IMHO. There's also a nice entry on the Muslim contributions to optics at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_optics#Optics_and_vision_in_the_Islamic_world.
Edited on October 19, 2010 at 3:52pmRe: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
Paul Snively
I'm going to have to respectfully beg to differ: denying induction when it's been working successfully—by which I mean, there's no such thing as science without it—for millenia requires a level of sophistry that... well... only Hume and people very much like him seem to possess. :-)
That's kind of my point, which is why I wonder about Reilly's argument, if I've properly understood it. How plausible is it really that the denial of induction was ever deep-down accepted by the mass of ordinary men in the Sunni world? You don't need a millennium of scientific inquiry to conclude that whatever your philosophical scruples, induction gets you through the day alive better than any rival theory.
Jul '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
To update the story, in today's world the Ash‘arite would fall upon the Mu‘tazilites and slay them for apostasy.
Oct '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
Claire Berlinski, Ed.
How plausible is it that the entire Sunni world deep-down accepted this? You don't really need advanced science to see that induction has daily benefits that outweigh the philosophical scruples. · Oct 19 at 6:47am
Ah, I see what you mean now. Wholeheartedly agreed. As different as people in antiquity were from us in many ways, they were still Homo sapiens sapiens, and quite capable of looking around and thinking "Reality doesn't comport with this theory I've heard." Similarly, I can't help but notice that the entire world didn't freeze in place upon hearing of Zeno's paradoxes circa 400 BC.
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
Exactly. And yet this is a fascinating question. To put it unoriginally, what went wrong? Something did. And either it just went wrong, with no cause, or there was a cause.
Maybe I should read this book before saying anything more; I fear I may be engaging with an argument no one actually made.
Aug '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
I wonder... Does the Quran contain anything like the hymns to Wisdom in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus? Or the beautiful Creation poetry found in the Psalms and the Book of Job?
My point: The Bible (Tanak in Judaism), with its diversity of authors and styles, contains much in it to inspire reverence for learning and wonder at the natural world. I have not yet read the whole Quran, so I honestly don't know: does the Quran contain comparable passages?
If the Quran does not, that may explain why Ash'arite-style views couldn't limit scientific inquiry in the same way in Europe: we always had those passages in our Scripture reminding us of the wonder of Creation. And as Plato said,
"The beginning of philosophy is to feel a sense of wonder." (Theaetetus)
Edited on October 19, 2010 at 5:47pmJun '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
Sorry! I wandered in here looking for the caption contest
Aug '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
What's interesting, of course, is that the Biblical passages marveling at Creation's wonders make a point of saying "God did all this". So how is that any different from saying
?
What's different is that God is described as doing these things in the Bible through a created order.
The Biblical God doesn't just do, willy-nilly, but lays the foundation for an ordered world (see Job 38:4-7; Psalms 93, 104). He also creates the world through Wisdom (Sophia -- see her speech @ Proverbs 8:22-31; Ecclesiasticus 1:1-8), who is cleverly personified as an extremely desirable woman, thus assuring that men will pay attention to her from age to age.
Even the natural world itself speaks and declares God's glory.
If all this is so, then those who wish to seek God ought also to seek Wisdom, to seek the order in God's world, to understand the speech that nature pours forth so volubly if we just take the time to listen.
Edited on October 20, 2010 at 7:35amJun '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
Firstly, Islamic culture, especially as reflected by the Sunnis is an honour shame culture, which by its nature renders it a very public cultural-religious experience. Public religion is one of enforced conformity, where the community controls the individual by means other than suasion. Combine that with the Ash 'arite description of a God that is the reason for everything and you have a recipe for paralysis in an intellectual and scientific sense, for the stronger your God the weaker you. Christianity and Judaism posit a shared creation, one in which God depends on his servants, homo sapiens, to affect his plan. The difference is stark in that the Christian/Jew is charged with completing God's plan, and that can only be done through among other gifts, reason, for if the plan is to be completed some understanding of God laws must be had.
Aug '10
Re: Hume, the Ash'arites, Causality and Islamism
Perhaps it's also worthwhile to note that from the beginning of Christianity, Christ was considered logos incarnate:
"In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God... Through the Logos were all things made, and without the Logos, nothing was made... And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us... full of grace and truth." -- John 1:1-14
If logos is not only God, but God in the flesh and living among us, then logos becomes rather harder to ignore.