Awhile back, I posted a thread entitled What if Jesus Had Never Been Born? The Impact of Christianity upon Scientific Development. I cited a brief exerpt for the book What if Jesus Had Never Been Born? by Dr D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe concerning the development of science over the course of history that read ...
"Nor could modern science ever have come into existance among the Arabs, because of the Muslim religion. The writings of Aristotle, when lost to the Western world from about A.D. 500 to A.D. 1100, were kept by the Arabs of North Africa and finally reintroduced into Europe in the 1100's and 1200's. Aristotle-unlike Plato-had a philosophy that would lend itself to the scientific type of study because it was more inductive than Plato's deductive kind of reasoning. Plato would get an ideal and deduce all manner of things from it. Aristotle would tend to look at the particulars and induce principles from them. Because of the Aristotelian thought they had access to, the Arabs-including Nestorian Christians-generally made greater scientific and mathematical advances than the Europeans during the Middle Ages.
But during all of that time the Arabs never introduced nor created any real science. Why? Because of their religion. Because of the fatalism that dominates the Muslim religion. Since everything is fatalistically determined, obviously there is no point in trying to manipulate the natural world to change anything, because all things are unchangeable."
But during all of that time the Arabs never introduced nor created any real science. Why? Because of their religion. Because of the fatalism that dominates the Muslim religion. Since everything is fatalistically determined, obviously there is no point in trying to manipulate the natural world to change anything, because all things are unchangeable."
George Neumayr has written an excellent article on the recent arrest of a Pakistani-American who attemted to explode a car bomb in New York's Times Square. The only reason Faisel Shahzad (pictured above) wasnt successful was the faulty construction of his bomb which failed to detonate. That and a quick acting, hot dog vendor alerted the authorities about the suspicious vehicle. If not for that, many New Yorkers and tourists would have been toast.
Toward the end of his article, Neumayer reaffirms that written by Kennedy/Newcombe by stating the following...
"It would appear that Islam's centuries-long indifference to science and technology makes even its terrorism unscientific and shoddy. This has to explain at least in part the rather high percentage of clumsy terrorists like Shahzad. While very motivated, they find themselves having to rely on Western weaponry and products to defeat the West without quite knowing how to use them.
As Robert R. Reilly points out in The Closing of the Muslim Mind, "Those involved in training Middle Eastern military forces have encountered a lackadaisical attitude to weapons maintenance and sharp-shooting. If God wants the bullet to hit the target, it will, and if He does not, it will not. It has little to do with human agency or skills obtained by discipline and practice."
The Islamic conception of God as pure will, unbound by reason and unknowable through the visible world, rendered any search for cause and effect in nature irrelevant to Muslim societies over centuries, resulting in slipshod, dependent cultures. Reilly notes, for example, that Pakistan, a nation which views science as automatically impious given its view that an arbitrary God did not imprint upon nature a rational order worth investigating, produces almost no patents.
Writes Reilly: "Less than a decade ago, an imam in Pakistan instructed physicists there that they could not consider the principle of cause and effect in their work. Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist and professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, said that it was not Islamic to say that combining hydrogen and oxygen makes water. 'You were supposed to say that when you bring hydrogen and oxygen together then by the will of Allah water was created.'"
The "clash of civilizations" is a clash of irrationalities, which now revolves around a kind of inertia: "reason" without faith makes the West too soulless to stop Islamic encroachment while the jihadists' faith without reason makes them too stupid to pull it off."
As Robert R. Reilly points out in The Closing of the Muslim Mind, "Those involved in training Middle Eastern military forces have encountered a lackadaisical attitude to weapons maintenance and sharp-shooting. If God wants the bullet to hit the target, it will, and if He does not, it will not. It has little to do with human agency or skills obtained by discipline and practice."
The Islamic conception of God as pure will, unbound by reason and unknowable through the visible world, rendered any search for cause and effect in nature irrelevant to Muslim societies over centuries, resulting in slipshod, dependent cultures. Reilly notes, for example, that Pakistan, a nation which views science as automatically impious given its view that an arbitrary God did not imprint upon nature a rational order worth investigating, produces almost no patents.
Writes Reilly: "Less than a decade ago, an imam in Pakistan instructed physicists there that they could not consider the principle of cause and effect in their work. Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist and professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, said that it was not Islamic to say that combining hydrogen and oxygen makes water. 'You were supposed to say that when you bring hydrogen and oxygen together then by the will of Allah water was created.'"
The "clash of civilizations" is a clash of irrationalities, which now revolves around a kind of inertia: "reason" without faith makes the West too soulless to stop Islamic encroachment while the jihadists' faith without reason makes them too stupid to pull it off."
May we in the West finally wake up and take seriously the threats posed to our safety and not succumb to the mindset that "everything's going to be allright" and rely on the fatalistic mindset of the enemy to undo their harmful intentions.
5 comments:
Had not thought of this in this line, will have to re-read and contemplate this.
****Off Topic****
The jury is now in on the Shroud of Turin and it's a fraud.
"This note is intended to describe why, from an artistic and anatomical perspective, the shroud image is an embarrassingly obvious fraud committed by a Gothic artist following the standard conventions of his time. The artistic errors are so severe that it is impossible for the shroud to record the image of an actual human body--unless it was a very seriously pathological person with a brain the size of a Homo erectus."----- Gregory S. Paul
It's interesting Gregg. Many skeptics lump all religions in together when they are quite diverse.
Froggie, post the link and I'll check it out.
"It would appear that Islam's centuries-long indifference to science and technology makes even its terrorism unscientific and shoddy."
Yup, that quote has Ken Ham and fudamentalist Christians written all over it.
Thye are anti-science nutwads.
The early Christian church persecuted Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno.
They oppose modern Geology and astronomy, while making false claims against radio carbon dating.
They promote bible myths such as tower of babel and the Noahtic flood as literal truth.
They oppose stem cell research.
They maintain that Gays suffer from a mental disorder, even the ring leader Rekers, who turns out to be gay. hehe, funny, that.
They claim that biological evolution is a conspiracy with all their attendant inanities and misinformation on science.
The only real difference between fundamentalist Islam and Fundamentalist Christians is that the Christians underwent a reformation brought on by the enlightenment seven hundred years ago. Remenants of the pre enlightenment church have survived but are losing ground on a daily basis.
Ken Ham has commissioned studies that conclude that two thirds of fundmentalist kids are leaving the fundamentalist churches in high school and college.
Virtually no homeschooled fundamentalist christians ever acquire a college degree in the natural sciences and many of them cannot get accepted to an accredited college and end up in chincy little bible colleges.
If the fundies had their way science would be dead in this country.
Post a Comment