When Reason Was Rejected
After rain cleansed the heavens this last week, the nights here in Ohio have been clear — as good for stargazing as it gets in the Cincinnati-Dayton metro area. I use my app and test myself on the star names and positions. Rigel is easy, and Betelgeuse; same for Altair and Deneb.
Those names are all Arabic names, as are those of about 200 other stars. They stem from a time beginning more than a millennium ago when Muslim astronomers in Baghdad, Toledo, and other places played a leading role in the science of the day, compiling tables of stars with their descriptions, locations, and assigning them magnitude (brightness) numbers for the first time.
This is what underlies our confrontation with the mullahs and with those on the Left who share their devotion to death, emptiness, and meaningless power.
We find the same switching to the field of mathematics. The very name algebra is Arabic, as is that area of math that has risen to modern fame in connection with computers and algorithms. The same ninth century genius, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, led in establishing them both.
Muslim philosophers of world rank left their enduring mark at this time. Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd were studied when the European universities arose n Christian Europe, and culture began to rebound from the Dark Ages. Known respectively by their Latinized names of Avicenna and Averroes, their opinions informed the philosophical discussions of the learned Jews and Christians in the late Middle Ages, and were thoroughly debated.
But by the end of the Middle Ages, something had happened in the Muslim world that changed the direction of its cultural development. The Muslim world would no longer be on the cutting edge of science. Only the names of stars and math would remain in use in Western schools.
Understanding the nature of that cultural turn helps us understand the phenomenon we see today of radical political Islamism and the Deconstructionist/Marxist left making common cause. The choice in the name of religion to turn away from the use of the rational mind to reveal truth in the world closely parallels the totalitarian Left’s substitution of their own articles of faith in place of free inquiry and debate and scientific method.
In the earliest years of the Islamic empire, the Arab armies conquered Alexandria, Egypt, with its unmatched library. Though the library was of little interest to the warriors, as the Islamic empire matured, it began to cultivate and advance the scientific and cultural heritage preserved in Alexandria and in other places. Baghdad became a great center of study as did Muslim Spain.
The powerful currents of Greek thought inspired some Muslim theologians to emulate the path followed by such earlier figures as the Jew Philo of Alexandria in the pre-Christian era and the sixth century Christian Arab thinker John Philopinus, who engaged the biblical heritage in enriching debate with the Greek intellectual tradition.
These Muslim theologians, known as the Mutazila, defended key Muslim beliefs but also were willing to read their scripture and traditions as metaphoric or symbolic in many instances where that seemed reasonable. This sophistication, however, struck other Muslim thinkers as a dangerous surrender of key points of revealed truth. Eventually objectors to Mutazilite thought cohered into an opposing theological movement known as the Ashari school. There was a fierce conflict between the two — a fight to death.
One of the greatest objections that the Ashari school lodged was that their opponents denied God’s infinite power by following the Greeks and their emphasis on the laws of natural causality. By embracing natural sciences, which claimed to follow rules of cause and effect to explain the world, they were denying God’s power to make miracles at will.
In fact, as God is all-powerful, this school argued, there cannot be any reality to causation. What we see as cause and effect is at best a mere correlation. There are no underlying laws of nature, only God’s infinite power, which could in the next instant create a reality that worked completely differently. Beneath the surface which seems to cohere, the only real coherence is God’s power, unrestricted by anything outside His will and power.
This undercuts natural science, which is built on uncovering the defining patterns of behavior of nature that are inherent to the world. The Ashari thought, called occasionalism, rejects that the stone falling from the tower of Pisa was obeying the law of gravity. The only truthful explanation of the event would be equally and precisely true of everything else in the world — it was falling because at that moment God was creating it as the thing it was, in this case, a falling stone.
This school gained traction, and eventually political backing, and the Mutazila were condemned as heretical.
The intellectual battle went back and forth, as it would in the Jewish and Christian worlds, where the tensions between the heritage of Athens and of Jerusalem were debated and fought over as well. But it came to a different resolution here.
By the late 12th century, the time of the most sophisticated of the Muslim philosophers, Ibn Rushd, the anti-naturalist thought gained the backing of the Spanish caliph, Yaqub al-Mansur. Ibn Rushd himself was exiled on the caliph’s order and his books were burned. Naturalistic thought in general came under suspicion, and though philosophy continued to be a part of the Islamic culture, it no longer would define its religion and its cultural outlook. In a fundamental way, the culture had decided that science at its core was antithetical to God, believing that science’s explanations relied on premises that portrayed God subject to forces stronger than He is.
In looking at today’s Left, we can see why the Ashari argument for power feels like home. Marxism, as a matter of faith, denies that the transcendent ideas of unified truth, key to both the Greek and the Jewish heritages, are real. In practice as Leninism and Stalinism, this results in the denial of any truth other than the immediately current party line. Apart from the Party, there is no access to the truth, and so its power is as immune to challenge as the Ashari made their doctrines in the face of rational criticism. Both worship power as the prime truth. The left’s dismissal of the Judeo-Christian heritage as harmful nonsense is matched by the Islamist’s belief that all thought that is not their religion is unreal. The reduction of the opponent to nothing is a great commonality.
What remains is an alliance dedicated to pure unaccountable power. Their shared enemies are those who hold ideas transcendent of human control, which they strive to instantiate within the world through the practices of faith and citizenship. Both the Green and the Red cannot abide those who find that the strains of universalism and particularism are necessary complements in the Godly life, and that religious truth encompasses both reason and faith, both intellect and emotion, both the transcendent and the immanent.
The Green and the Red believe they alone can embrace and ride out the chaos they are unleashing on the world. Our order must fall to it, for chaos alone expresses the truth of the emptiness at the core of all things. As true acolytes of that chaos, they will be rewarded with complete power, to be contested by no one and nothing, not even in thought.
The greatest enemies of the Green and the Red are what the mullahs call the Little Satan and the Great Satan — the covenantal societies of Israel and America. These covenantal societies stand for freedom of thought and religion as the core of proper politics. Freedom is God’s gift to His world, the necessary prerequisite for loving Him and His world. The covenantal societies value the least as much as the greatest as members of their covenant. They see the transcendent and the mystical in the most rational and abstract of things as well as the most mundane. They see order and chaos as simultaneously necessary as creativity and tradition, as light and dark, as rest and as activity. They see love and truth as needing each other for either to be fully realized.
They embrace life and choose it. And so they defend it from those who claim they love nothingness and death better.
The better angels of our nature must guide us to see the emptiness at the core of those who seeking nothing less than the demise of our civilization. Their appeal to the ideals of which they do not believe in is an empty thing unless we choose emptiness ourselves.
A Syrian-born Muslim friend of mine uses the name of Averroes as part of his online handle. He is a man of science and faith, who has studied texts from both of our traditions together with me in depth. The brave people of Iran who defied the bullets of the Death Eaters of Tehran share his love of freedom and of truth and believe like my friend that that is the way of God.
They, too, are part of the great alliance that will triumph over the devotees of emptiness and death. It is an alliance universal in its embrace and particular in its respect for the gift each person, each family, each association and affiliation, each nation can bring to the table. It is a unity that springs from a rich diversity, rather than the lockstep of sterile and deadly uniformity. It is the wildly and beautifully variant ever-new world of God, fresh as on the first day of creation every day, and yet eternal and unvarying in the divine truth that underlies its endless coherence and overflowing meaningfulness.
This is what underlies our confrontation with the mullahs and with those on the Left who share their devotion to death, emptiness, and meaningless power. Knowing the true issue at hand strengthens our resolution to triumph in this great battle for the soul of the world.
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