"Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself." - A. H. Weiler

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More religious hatred from a known terrorist:


Science, Islam, and Christianity
Robert Spencer

"The idea that Islam extols science while Christianity is hostile to it is historically and conceptually false...

In Islam, Allah's "will is not bound up with any of our categories" and quoting Ibn Hazm saying "Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry," the Pope was not so much saying that in the Islamic view Allah would command his people to do evil, but that he might change the content of the concepts of good and evil. In other words, Allah would always enjoin "justice and kindness," but what constitutes "justice and kindness," just as what constitutes "innocent blood," might change. [Ed: Err. Not like they don't have this in Christianity, especially according to many modern Christians.]

This idea has extraordinarily important implications for the development of science. There is an odd passage in the Qur'an that sums up this perspective, and how it differs from the Judeo-Christian view of God: "The Jews say: Allah's hand is fettered. Their hands are fettered and they are accursed for saying so." (5:64).

The Jews, in their wickedness, claimed that "Allah's hand is fettered," but in fact Allah's hand is not fettered. It is unclear what Jewish concept the Qur'an is referring to in this case, but the indignant response to it is clear: Allah's hand being unfettered is a vivid image of divine freedom. Such a God can be bound by no laws. Muslim theologians argued during the long controversy with the Mu'tazilite sect, which exalted human reason beyond the point that the eventual victors were willing to tolerate, that Allah was free to act as he pleased. He was thus not bound to govern the universe according to consistent and observable laws. "He cannot be questioned concerning what He does" (Qur'an 21:23).

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...

It is logically not impossible that a deviation from this habit should occur, namely, that fire should cause cold, move downward, and still be fire; that the water should cause heat, move upward, and still be water. On this foundation their whole fabric is constructed.

This odd theory was derived entirely from the Islamic conviction of the absolute sovereignty of Allah. Relatively early in its history, therefore, science was deprived in the Islamic world of the philosophical foundation it needed in order to flourish. Consequently, Jaki observes, "the improvements brought by Muslim scientists to the Greek scientific corpus were never substantial." The consequences of this have been far-reaching. Jaki details some of them...

"Islam," notes Stark, "did not fully embrace the notion that the universe ran along on fundamental principles laid down by God at the creation but assumed that the world was sustained by his will on a continuing basis."...

Maimonides' depiction of Muslim philosophers envisioning elephants becoming snakes and fire turning cool. And to be sure, to a pious Muslim of Aquinas's day the idea that God could not do anything would have appeared as the highest form of blasphemy. It would have been equivalent to saying that "Allah's hand is fettered." But Christians did not consider it blasphemous in the least. "The rise of science," Stark explains, "was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God. In order to love and honor God, it necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork. Because God is perfect, that handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover those principles."

The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. Stark concludes: "These were the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and nowhere else."... Much of [the idea that Science originated in Islam] has been exaggerated in regard to both Islam and Europe, often for quite transparent apologetic motives. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as "Arabic numerals" did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle's work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn 'Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu 'Ali 'Isa ibn Zur'a (943-1008), also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate -- not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia - by Assyrian Christians.

In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to draw on and advance the achievements of Byzantine and other civilizations. But when the Muslim overlords had taken what they could from their subject peoples, and the Jewish and Christian communities had been stripped of their material and intellectual wealth and thoroughly subdued, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from which it has not yet recovered...

Stark points out that "Islamic scholars achieved significant progress only in terms of specific knowledge, such as certain aspects of astronomy and medicine, which did not require any general theoretical basis. And as time passed, even this sort of progress ceased."...

Indeed, clocks originated in medieval Catholic Europe, while in 1560, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Austrian ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote that his hosts had "never been able to bring themselves to print books and set up public clocks. They hold that their scriptures, that is, their sacred books, would no longer be scriptures if they were printed; and if they established public clocks, they think that the authority of their muezzins and their ancient rites would suffer diminution." It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, time in which Islamic norms were on the defensive and in retreat, that the first public clock was installed in Constantinople; this may have been the first public clock erected in any Islamic country.

The effects of the Christian openness to innovation and the Islamic resistance to it reverberate in many fields. Even in medicine, while the Islamic world points proudly to many early physicians and medical theorists, it was not a Muslim, but the Belgian physician and researcher Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), who paved the way for modern medical advances when he published the first accurate description of human internal organs, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) in 1543. Why was a Muslim not able to do this? Because Vesalius was able to dissect human bodies, while that practice was forbidden in Islam. What's more, Vesalius' book is filled with detailed anatomical drawings - but also forbidden in Islam are artistic representations of the human body."