Relda,

Islamic scholarship has deep roots. The Islamic “House of Wisdom” was established in 830 CE to undertake universal research and make translations. Abbasid caliphs sponsored the translations of Aristotle, Plato and the Hellenistic sciences. Before the Christian invasion, “…it would be accurate to say that between the seventh and thirteen centuries … Islam not only experienced a “golden age” of science but also eclipsed anything found in Christian Europe. This Body of work influenced both content of medieval science and attitudes about the relationship between scientific ideas and theoretical concepts.” (Whitney) For much this time, the Christian West was in a Dark Ages. In fact, the Middle East, the Far East and India all made progress in areas of mathematics, astronomy and medicine exceeding the West’s knowledge. When logos (Armstrong’s meaning) is not encroached upon by mythos, significant progress is made.

On the other hand, the Muslims had translated works into Latin and, in later centuries the Chinese tried –unsuccessfully- to explain celestial mechanics to the Jesuits. So it seems the knowledge was available to be transferred, yet one wonders whether the Western Church and State(s) did not see the folly in subordinating logos to mythos?

Western modernity, especially from the Great Divergence, has separated logos from mythos, wherein episteme acts to guide techne (Crombie). Yet, in the wake of the West’s push forward, other societies have not countered with better science, rather by accentuating mythos and diminishing logos. Fundamentalism is nurtured. Even Western theists are touched: Sells would like to take us all back to pre-Enlightenment values.

Sells from my perspective is “lost in time,” living between 325 CE and 1760 CE. His perspective on the Christian Trinity could be tethered to Eastern mythos. The Cappadocian model of the ineffable ousia (internal to God, hidden) and the three prosopoi (external from God, revealed expressions) is powerful. Yet, perhaps, Sells’ tethers to Western orthodoxy are too strong to see Eastern mythos become Western kerygma.

Grim,

I believe Satre held that personal consciousness is benefitted by the existence of others: Presumably, he would have (invented?) God as the ultimate other.

Oliver,

Without wishing to contradict you, mathematics does not help you “to understand God”. It is only the awareness of the fact that even physical reality cannot be understood without quite unintuitive conceptual models built on rather abstract mathematics - an awareness brought about only recently by Einstein, QM and the latest physical theories - that can help you to accept metaphysical models, built on rather unintuitive conceptual constructions, as corresponding to some reality.

Of course, these constructions/models are not based on mathematics. They are - at least in case of Christianity - based on a combination of mythological, scriptural, traditional and philosophical considerations. They are models of a reality that we have no direct approach to (in the sense of scientific investigation), and - in distinction to physical reality - we do not even have the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics to mediate our understanding.

It is not easy to comprehend what QM, superstring theory, etc are all about - you need a lot of non-trivial mathematics for that - but it is even more difficult to understand whether, why, and under what circumstances, do these theories adequately describe reality.

The same with the uncritical understanding of e.g. the Christian concepts of God and the numinous (sacred) as professed by the “philosophically unsophisticated“ believer: it is easier than to understand in what sense are these models of reality compatible with the understanding of physical reality provided by contemporary physics and biology.

In the first instance we speak of (uncritical) faith, in the second instance we speak of a critical faith becoming “post-critical“ (Polanyi, Dulles), about “faith seeking understanding” (St. Anselm) compatible with the findings of contemporary science.

This is only very marginally related to the article‘s topic, so perhaps we should leave it at that.

Oliver,

It is not in dispute that, “..Islam not only experienced a “golden age” of science but also eclipsed anything found in Christian Europe..” What needs to be noted, however, is that after nearly a thousand years of unrivalled innovation, contribution and achievement in all spheres of human endeavour, the Muslim world experienced a serious decline and disintegration during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As most scholarship would contend (including Armstrong), the western mould of modernity has been superimposed on its worldview, and Islam has been unable to relate to the modern world except through its awkward and often painfully alien framework. Nursel Guzeldeniz seems also to have given this scant attention in her article – most people do not see Sufism, or that which is in sympathy with it, currently as a driving force within Islam.

Dr. M. Umer Chapra, an eminent economist, social scientist, Muslim scholar and the winner of the King Faisal International Prize said, “We Muslims have to change ourselves and change our institutions in order to become a blessing for mankind”, Chapra also pointed out, although Muslims represent 22 percent of world population, they contribute only eight percent of the global GDP – this is certainly an underlying ‘logos’ (or fact), rather than myth.

Undoubtedly, the world which Islam had built over the centuries, its civilization in the broadest sense of the word, has been seriously undermined. Islam as a spiritual force is alive and well (as with Christianity) but its external manifestation or practical dimension is currently suffering from an unprecedented crisis; as had occurred within Christianity, Islam’s ecclesiasticism is now being severely challenged. It is not Islam, a personal faith, which is our problem. It is Islamism, an ideology that is our problem, and this surely relates well to our topic - where we're in dire need of a “faith seeking understanding”.

Oliver,

How many Christian atrocities have there been compared to Islamic atrocities? Please give examples.

Your rabid anti-Christian stance is so tiresome. The founding father of genetics was actually a Catholic monk, Gregor Mendel. A Jesuit, Matteo Ricci brought Western cultural and scientific relations to China. The Jesuits also contributed greatly to seismology and astronomy. Irish monastaries and Charlemagne preserved much of western knowledge.

The so called Islamic Golden Age was not any product of Islamic scriptural knowledge, nor was it due to any degree of devoutness of religion Islam, rather it was due to short-lived opportunity of freethinking and rationalism induced by the famous Mu’tazillites and facilitated by the liberal minded Abbasid Kingdom.

The Quran emphatically forbade pursuance knowledge and learning that falls outside the scope of Quran and Sunnah for fear of going astray by emulating path of error and heresy. Quran directly contradicted the very principle of Mu’tazilies. Hence, Islamic theological knowledge had very little to contribute to the attainment of the Golden Age.

Today, almost 95% of world's leading scientists are the sons of Christians. Should we then consider that Christian religion/Bible are the storehouse of all science? Does the world history support this? Or, should we say that ancient Hindu Kafirs got science of mathematics (numerals) from Rada krishna?

A French scholar, Sylvain Gouguenheim has challenged Islamic intellectual heritage to the West. He claims knowledge acquired by the West is the product of its own discoveries. The West benefited from the translations done at the request of abbots and bishops by clerics familiar with the Greek language, like Jacques de Venise who, after studying several years in Byzantium, spent the rest of his life translating Aristotle and other Greek philosophers at the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel, in Brittany. The West also benefited from a constant relationship with Byzantium, where Greek was the everyday language and Byzantine scholars were quite familiar with the Greek heritage. Thus, most of the knowledge discovered or transmitted throughout the period extending from the 8th to the 12th centuries resulted, not from Islam, but from the intellectual appetite of European Church elites. This explains the first Western Renaissance, known as the Carolingian Renaissance, which took place at the turn of the 9th Century.

“Greek knowledge became accessible to the Islamic world thanks to the work of Eastern Christian scholars who translated Greek works into their own Syriac language, and then from Syriac into Arabic. Islamic civilization is itself culturally indebted to early Christian scholars. For example, because the translation of Greek documents into Arabic raised major problems occasioned by the total absence of scientific terms in that language, it became incumbent on Christian Melkite translators to develop most of the Arabic scientific vocabulary. They were responsible in particular for translating into Arabic 139 medical books by Galen and Hippocratus and 43 books by Rufus of Ephesis. Also of interest is the fact, attested by several Muslim writers, that the Arabic “coufic” writing was developed by Christian missionaries in the 6th Century."

Constance,

Your latest post was very interesting.

My mention of the Islamic achievements at a time when our civilization was young was meant to underline societies tend to ebb and flow. Comments made were not especially directed at Christianity beyond its domain over medieval Europe. Before the Western Roman Empire collapsed (476 CE), Vulgar Latin held ascendancy over Attic Greek, consequently much classical knowledge was lost. The West entered a Dark Ages and established Fiefdoms.

In the late fifteen century, (Catholic) Spain emerged strong and was “modern”. So, in a sense, we have been there before. Only then, the dawning in Spain was largely founded on economic success rooted in unification, colonisation and the slave trade. The Muslims and Jewry suffered as a result.

In the seventeenth century, Industrialisation and Democracy acted to supplant the Christian church in the West: A process that worked well, up until the beginning of the twentieth century, after-which there has been a revival in Christianity.

Today, with globalisation, “democratic values” encroach on the Middle East, as these values encroached on the West 250 years ago.
People burn Western flags in the Middle East and Western others are fearful of Islam, seeing “religiosity” at the crest of the wave of change, yet it is really secular waters which threaten to unseat Islam, as before, when Christianity was unseated. Moreover, those in the Middle East having tribal or religious credentials will bark “religion”, but it is loss of their sovereignty they fear most. On TV, how many times have you heard a Sheik, exclaim, “we will accept Democracy slowly, but it will be our kind of Democracy”?

I have no quarrel with history you present, especially Byzantium. Yet, the early Christian West, as a transmutation of the Holy Roman Empire, did borrow from the Orthodox East and the Middle East.
My comment about the Jesuits was to emphasise that they wouldn’t listen – mythos over logos. China’s main interest in the Jesuits was the West’s superiority in cartography. Mendel’s work was suppressed for some decades, if I recall. I consider the Bible an ancient scripture (mythos).