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The Forum > Article Comments > Islam's coming renaissance will rise in the West > Comments

Islam's coming renaissance will rise in the West : Comments

By Ameer Ali, published 4/5/2007

The authority of the pulpit is collapsing by the hour. A wave of rationalism is spreading from émigré Muslim intellectuals.

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Pericles, to understand what brought you back to this dance around the word logic, I had to go back to your statements that made me object to the use of “logic” and “logical” with its populist meaning in debates involving fundamental philosophical questions. You wrote

“Each of us has the capacity to absorb and accept things that defy logic or are external to it. That we choose not to believe in God does not diminish or invalidate this capability.”

and

“… there are people who rely upon faith instead of logic to inform them of the nature and dimensions of the universe”.

For those, who still follow, let me summarise:

Logic cannot be an arbiter of your belief or unbelief in God, neither can it tell you that you cannot know (though you might have very good reasons for any one of the three alternatives). Like logic cannot be an arbiter of your belief or unbelief that John Howard is a better PM than his alternative, nor can it tell you that you cannot know (though you might have very good reasons for any one of the three alternatives). In both cases there are many rational (or irrational) arguments to defend or justify (to yourself and hopefully to others) your choice: just do not bring logic into play, because if logic (as it is uderstood by specialists today) worked like that you would not have, for instance, a computer on which to write these postings.

Your reaction to my example of logical inference “If A implies B (or A is part of B) then necessarily nonB implies nonA (or nonB is part of nonA)” seems to indicate that you indeed have problems with what logic is about . The premise here is IRRELEVANT (you can replace the two-handed humans with three-handed humans if you like, which will defy common sense as you rightly point out, but will not effect the inference
Posted by George, Friday, 8 June 2007 11:21:04 PM
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It was you, George, who brought me "back to the dance" with your dismissive reference to my understanding of logic. And like it or not, you are still arguing down a blind alley.

>>Logic cannot be an arbiter of your belief or unbelief in God, neither can it tell you that you cannot know<<

We agree on this. Only faith will lead you to a belief in God. Not logic. We are in agreement. No need to bring this up again.

>>logic cannot be an arbiter of your belief or unbelief that John Howard is a better PM than his alternative<<

Interesting use of the word "belief" here.

Are you equating "belief in God" with "belief in Howard", as a means to further your argument? I would suggest - unless you are Alan Jones or David Flint - that we are in the arena of "opinion". As in "it is my opinion that John Howard etc. etc."

>>in both cases there are many rational (or irrational) arguments to defend or justify (to yourself and hopefully to others) your choice<<

You make the mistake that all religionists make, which is that empiricists make a "choice" between belief and non-belief on the same basis that we decide whether a Prime Minister is doing a good job or not.

The difference is that the existence of John Howard is not in question. You don't need religion to tell you that, an empiricist will be just as likely to come to the same conclusion.

By confusing belief with opinion, no amount of logic will be able to complete your argument.

I'll say it again for you, more slowly. "Each of us has the capacity to absorb and accept things that defy logic or are external to it. That [empiricists] choose not to believe in God does not diminish or invalidate this capability."
Posted by Pericles, Saturday, 9 June 2007 7:09:22 PM
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Pericles, of course I agree that faith (a state of mind with its rational, emotional, etc. components or stimulants) will lead you to a belief in God. Not logic. Similarly another state of mind (whatever name one gives it) with its rational, emotional, etc. components or stimulants will lead you to a belief that no God exists. Not logic. And again another state of mind will lead you to the conviction that there is no need to believe one way or another, just sit on the fence. Not logic.

You are right that “I believe in God” is taken from the Christian Creed, originally written in Latin (I think) which does not distinguish between belief and faith, but I thought that it was rather obvious that in this dispute “belief in God” was an abbreviated form of “belief in the truth of the statement that God (as defined by e.g. Christians) exists” and nothing more.

I think most of the readers would have understood that I correlated the statements “God exists” and “John Howard is a better PM”. Nobody would have thought that the existence of John Howard was in question. Again, as in the example with the two-handed humans, John Howard is here completely irrelevant. “I believe JH is a better PM” is the same as “In my opinion JH is a better PM”.

I can understand that you think that rationality makes you a priori entitled to your choice (that you do not want to call a choice) like Christians in the Middle Ages thought (and some fundamentalists still do) that belief in the existence of God was not a matter of rational (and other) choice, but an priori given rational position.

However, I got into this dispute with you not so much as a Christian defending his belief in God (a notion one would first have to define anyhow) -- or even deny you your reasons for having a different attitude -- but as a mathematician defending the proper meaning of the word logic, e.g. when you presented faith and logic as mutually exclusive alternatives.
Posted by George, Saturday, 9 June 2007 9:47:54 PM
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>>you presented faith and logic as mutually exclusive alternatives.<<

I still do.

Your three possibilities help achieve this:

>>i) faith... will lead you to a belief in God. Not logic.

ii) Similarly another state of mind... will lead you to a belief that no God exists. Not logic.

iii) And again another state of mind will lead you to the conviction that there is no need to believe one way or another, just sit on the fence. Not logic.

We are agreed on i) No need for further dispute.

ii) is not true in every instance, and therefore is only an opinion, stated here as fact. Since logical deduction from the things we know, as opposed to the things we believe, cannot lead us to the conclusion that God exists, it is a reasonable assumption that no God can be shown to exist until this knowledge changes.

iii) I agree with you on the fact that logic cannot draw the conclusion "I don't need to know this", but that people can and often do.

So we are left with a single proposition: that there is no series of logical deductions that can lead to a disbelief in God.

You may well be right, since it is somewhat difficult to prove a negative, but the empiricist is entitled to assert that there is insufficient evidence one way or the other.

Which leaves us with the only possibility that does not fail under examination: to believe in God requires faith.

If logic cannot lead to a belief in God, and only faith lead to a belief in God, why is it that you have so much trouble understanding that they are mutually exclusive? You say:

>>I got into this dispute with you not so much as a Christian defending his belief in God... but as a mathematician defending the proper meaning of the word logic<<

I'm not asking you to defend your belief, but show where where the statement, applied to belief in God, that faith and logic are mutually exclusive, fails?
Posted by Pericles, Sunday, 10 June 2007 3:00:37 PM
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Pericles, on the assumption that there are still people reading this thread and finding it interesting, besides us two, let me try again to comment on your first and last sentence, even if I might repeat myself.

Two different things do not have to be mutually exclusive: the skills of speaking French and playing piano are different but not exclusive. You will not object here, because we both agree on the meaning of all the words involved.

Most disputes are held in a context where the meaning of some terms are A PRIORI ACCEPTED by all, like “speaking French” in any context and “John Howard” in the context of Australian politics: if you disagreed with the statement that John Howard is a better PM I could not object unless it would follow from your arguments that by John Howard you mean a little boy living in the NT. The meaning of other words have to be CLARIFIED during the dispute (like “better PM” in the above example). [One important exception is the statement “God exists” in the context of a rational debate, where BOTH the terms have to be clarified (there are many philosophy books trying to do just that) before any rational argument one way or another can be offered. The same with words “evidence”, “experience” etc. in the context of fundamental questions of philosophy.] (ctd)
Posted by George, Sunday, 10 June 2007 10:23:45 PM
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(ctd) The two crucial terms in your sentence are “faith” and “logic”. In the context of a congregation (of a particular denomination) the first term is more or less understood in the same way by all. This is not our case, therefore I tried to hint at what I meant by “faith”. However the term “logic” should have the same meaning for everybody involved. This implies, as shown before, that you cannot make “logical deduction from the things you know”: you can logically deduce only one STATEMENT from a set of other STATEMENTS in the sense that if you accept the truth of the set of “input” statements then logic forces you to accept the truth of the deduced “output” statement.

Another example, although I am repeating myself: if you accept that “the one who wins the next election will be the future PM”, and “Kevin Rudd will win the next election” then logic tells you that “Kevin Rudd will be the next PM”, but it cannot tell you anything about the Australian political system, who is Kevin Rudd, or whether he is going to win the elections. Of course, you can put together statements in a logically much more complicated manner - that is what software programmers do - but the essence is the same.

What I claim is that in your statement made in the context of a rational debate the term “faith” is of the kind “better PM”, i.e. it needs further clarification, whereas the term “logic” is of the kind “John Howard”, i.e. it should be used in its meaning as understood by all philosphers, mathematicians and computer scientists. If a young girl said “I am not going to marry that old man, that is logical” I will not mind because in that context the misuse of the word “logical” is inconsequential.

You can live without religious faith, I suppose, but you cannot live without logic that structures not only rational propositions and arguments – uttered by “religious” as well as “irreligious” people - but also your computer software is built on it
Posted by George, Sunday, 10 June 2007 10:27:31 PM
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