As Mr. Spencer dryly observes, today’s excerpt from the Qur’an explains why modern science developed in the Christian West rather than the Islamic caliphate:
Accordingly, there was no point to observing the workings of the physical world; there was no reason to expect that any pattern to its workings would be consistent, or even discernable. If Allah could not be counted on to be consistent, why waste time observing the order of things? It could change tomorrow. Stanley Jaki, a Catholic priest and physicist, explains that it was the renowned Sufi thinker al-Ghazali who “denounced natural laws, the very objective of science, as a blasphemous constraint upon the free will of Allah.” The great twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides explained orthodox Islamic cosmology in similar terms, noting that Islamic thinkers of his day assumed “the possibility that an existing being should be larger or smaller than it really is, or that it should be different in form and position from what it really is; e.g., a man might have the height of a mountain, might have several heads, and fly in the air; or an elephant might be as small as an insect, or an insect as huge as an elephant. This method of admitting possibilities is applied to the whole Universe.”
Relatively early in its history, therefore, science was deprived in the Islamic world of the philosophical foundation it needed in order to flourish. It found that philosophical foundation only in Christian Europe, where it was assumed that God was good and had constructed the universe according to consistent and observable laws. Such an idea would have been for pious Muslims tantamount to saying, “Allah’s hand is fettered.”
I think that the Christian view is not that God’s actions are falsely constrained, but that observation shows His creation to follow natural law — with exceptions ranging from dramatic to mundane that scientists shrug their shoulders over and others call miracles. Further, His actions are constrained by His Own Nature, which merely means that He cannot act in contradiction to Himself.
Catholicism particularly recommends that reason and faith work together to understand God, His Creation, and man’s place in God’s economy.
Science tends to overload the value of reason and observation while neglecting anything unprovable within its bounds. If science’s own limits are kept in mind, however, its benefits are manifold.
One of the limitations of science is its crippled morality — and that indeed is why Christianity insists on faith and revelation informing scientific inquiry.
Click through to read the entire article, which also covers verses in which ’Isa (the Muslim Jesus) disavows divinity for himself and his mother. At least we can all (Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Muslims) agree that Mary isn’t divine…
Previous posts:
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Sura 2, Part 1
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Sura 2, Part 2
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Sura 2, Part 3
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Sura 2, Part 4
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Sura 2, Part 5
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Sura 2, Part 6
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Sura 3, Part 1
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Sura 3, Part 2
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Sura 3, Part 3
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Sura 3, Part 4
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Sura 4, Part 1
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Sura 4, Part 2
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Sura 4, Part 3
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Sura 4, Part 4
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Sura 5, Part 1
