Richard Dawkins criticised for Twitter comment about Muslims

[The Minsky Moment]

Al-Gazali's critique was focused on Aristotle's and neo-platonic metaphysics, not the natural sciences.  It certainly wasn't a criticism of modern experimental science, which didn't exist yet. 

ijtihad is just a method of jurisprudence - it deals like all jurisprudences with the problem of how to deal with gaps or ambuguities in the law; it doesn't entail a general attitude of open social inquiry.

To seek simple unicausal explanations for the "death of critical thought" is not only terribly misguided, it also stems from the basic error of assuming there was a period in which "critical thought" was a norm and a period where it ceased.

[garbon]

To seek simple unicausal explanations for the "death of critical thought" is not only terribly misguided, it also stems from the basic error of assuming there was a period in which "critical thought" was a norm and a period where it ceased.

[Sheilbh]

And I always feel sorry for Al-Gazali. I don't think any thinker's that influential as opposed to real material forces. It seems like blaming Augustine for the Dark Ages.

[garbon]

It seems like blaming Augustine for the Dark Ages.

Sounds fair. At least blame him for being dreadful.

[The Minsky Moment]

Al-Gazali is really more like Kant as against the Leibniz or Wolff of Avicenna and Averroes.  Or like Okham against the schoolmen.   His argument is that the philosophers are "incoherent" - i.e. that their reasoning doesn't satisfy their own criterion of logical demonstration. In that sense his argument probably stands the test of time better than that of his opponents.  It's rather unfair IMO he seems to have taken the blame as a poster child for broad-based civilizational decline.

[Razgovory]

Islam is  a bit more of a real religion than Mormonism though

it's not that odd.
A young merchant on the periphery of the great civilizations of the day hears voices from God and claims to have received the revelation of a new scripture that will complete and cap the revelations of the old monotheistic faiths.  Those who accept the new faith will achieve a worldly paradise in the afterlife.

Wait now I forgot which one I was talking about.

The Hajj also has obvious direct parallels. I suspect Smith and Mohammed were very similar people, And despite the fact that they're at completely different ends of the Monotheist scale there are just a shitton of similarities. Always amused me.

Smith seems to have identified with Mohammed.

[Viking]

Al-Gazali's critique was focused on Aristotle's and neo-platonic metaphysics, not the natural sciences.  It certainly wasn't a criticism of modern experimental science, which didn't exist yet. 

Correct, thought you ignore the fact that he attacks and declares heretical the very building blocks of the rationalist and empiricist scientific methods. Al Gazali argues that contemplating the nature of god is blasphemous and that philosophy is a waste of time since it doesn't prove Islam to be true. He literally makes attempting to understand a sin.

Ibn Rushd pointed out the obvious, that Al Gazali had used reason to argue that reason should be condemned, and I think the point was very well made. Needless to say Averroes books got burned.

ijtihad is just a method of jurisprudence - it deals like all jurisprudences with the problem of how to deal with gaps or ambuguities in the law; it doesn't entail a general attitude of open social inquiry.

Yeah, but Gazali is against Ijtihad (diligence/independent reasoning). He favours Taqlid (following/imitating) which means only copying from the past rather than attempting new understandings.  Gazali effectively ends Ijtihad. At the same time in Europe the Scholastics are contemplating the nature of god and it's implications for the nature of the world. In islam this stops with Gazali (though it takes a few generations (and the power of the almohads) to reach spain.

To seek simple unicausal explanations for the "death of critical thought" is not only terribly misguided, it also stems from the basic error of assuming there was a period in which "critical thought" was a norm and a period where it ceased.

Presenting this as a search for a unicausal explanation for the death of critical thought is misguided in itself. There are other causes for the decline in learning in the islamic world e.g. the burning of the beit al hikma (house of knowledge) library in baghdad and the increasing political power of slave soldiers and imported steppe mercenaries among the ruling classes are two more reasons. It's just that in the islamic world they went out of their way to ban it and they succeeded in banning it. In europe they tried this hundreds of years later and failed catastrophically.

Whatever the complex causes for the end of the islamic golden age of learning Al Gazali and his teaching and the teaching of his school is almost certainly the most important part of that cause.

JR, I have to say there is something slightly scheisterly about your argument here. Gazali did argue against what was the closest thing there was to a scientific method at the time. If a scientific method did exist he certainly would have denounced it. Empiricism would have horrified him. The man argues AGAINST cause and effect ffs. It is also scheisterly to argue that in defense of Gazali that there was such a thing as Ijtihad when he was against it (for everybody else but not himself it seems). I expect better of you.

[Razgovory]

Al-Gazali is really more like Kant as against the Leibniz or Wolff of Avicenna and Averroes.  Or like Okham against the schoolmen.   His argument is that the philosophers are "incoherent" - i.e. that their reasoning doesn't satisfy their own criterion of logical demonstration. In that sense his argument probably stands the test of time better than that of his opponents.  It's rather unfair IMO he seems to have taken the blame as a poster child for broad-based civilizational decline.

I think it stems from the old conflict thesis and the myths and nonsense that goes with it (Columbus, the rational man of science, was hampered by clergy who thought the Earth was flat.).

[Viking]

And I always feel sorry for Al-Gazali. I don't think any thinker's that influential as opposed to real material forces. It seems like blaming Augustine for the Dark Ages.

It's more like blaming Luther and Calvin for the Wars of Religion, or blaming Rousseau for the French Revolution, or blaming Marx for the Russian Revolution. Without the idea the materialistic forces don't work.

Is there anybody who blames Augustine for the Dark Ages? That seems a bit Post Hoc ergo Procter Hoc to me.

Gazali does have some reasonable points about the philosophy of his time and it's problems. However, his solution is to abandon the project of trying to understand the world and source all knowledge in the Koran which is a bad case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[Neil]

I love it when Jos gets involved in a thread like this.

[The Minsky Moment]

you ignore the fact that he attacks and declares heretical the very building blocks of the rationalist and empiricist scientific methods.

No so - in the preface to the Incoherence he refers to astronomical theories of the causes of eclipses, and states - "He who thinks it is his religious duties to disblieve such things is really unjust to religion, and weakens its cause. For these things have been established by astronomical and mathematical evidence which leaves no room for doubt ."

Al-Gazali's objection was not to such scientific inquiry based on observation and mathematical proof but the Aristotlean or neo-platonic projects of constructing a scientific system based entirely on a priori reasoning from syllogistic logic - an effort which, far from being a building block for empricist methods, was in fact a wrong turn, a dead end.

Gazali is against Ijtihad (diligence/independent reasoning). He favours Taqlid (following/imitating) which means only copying from the past rather than attempting new understandings.  Gazali effectively ends Ijtihad.

I don't know where this comes from; it seems to echo some of the old Western scholarship on the "closing of the gates to ijtihad" that my understanding is not au courant in modern scholarship about medieval Islam.
In any event, I disagree about the signifiance of these kinds of technical jurisprudential theories for the broader history of thought.  Even in our own day, there are jurisprudential debates between formalists who insist that interpretations must be strictly limited and hew to literal legal texts and "realists" or others who advocate looser interpretive methods.  While I might disagree with the formalists, I hardly think that their position amounts to intellectual philistinism.

JR, I have to say there is something slightly scheisterly about your argument here. Gazali did argue against what was the closest thing there was to a scientific method at the time. If a scientific method did exist he certainly would have denounced it. Empiricism would have horrified him. The man argues AGAINST cause and effect ffs. It is also scheisterly to argue that in defense of Gazali that there was such a thing as Ijtihad when he was against it (for everybody else but not himself it seems). I expect better of you. 

I don't think it is "shysterly" to disagree on how to interpret the facts.  I don't think Avoerestic metaphysics was the "closest thing . . . to a scientific method" and this gets to our disagreement in the other thread.  I also think you misunderstand Gazali's argument in key respects or take it out of context.  I have seen you badly miscontrue occasionalism before in other threads.  David Hume argued against the logical connection of cause and effect.  So did Berkeley.  Gazali isn't arguing there isn't a connection in the empiricist sense we understand today - indeed the bold quotation from his Second Preface above demonstrates otherwise.  What he rejects is the notion that effect necessarily follows from cause as a matter of pure a priori syllogistic logic.  And in that respect he has quite a bit in common with Western philosophers as well.

[The Minsky Moment]

Gazali does have some reasonable points about the philosophy of his time and it's problems. However, his solution is to abandon the project of trying to understand the world and source all knowledge in the Koran which is a bad case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Gazali was not a Rennaissance man like Avicenna or Maimonides.  He wasn't an astronomer or doctor.  Just because he didn't discuss these things in detail doesn't mean he opposed them or thought them offensive to religion.  Needless to say, Gazali wasn't shy about saying what he found offensive to religion.

[grumbler]

Gazali was not a Rennaissance man like Avicenna or Maimonides.  He wasn't an astronomer or doctor.  Just because he didn't discuss these things in detail doesn't mean he opposed them or thought them offensive to religion.  Needless to say, Gazali wasn't shy about saying what he found offensive to religion.

Wasn't Gazali the guy who argued that all physical effects were the result of god imposing his will on the world - that, if you drop a hammer, it goes to the ground because God pushes it to the ground, and that if God doesn't push it to the ground, nothing happens?  That, thus, all "natural laws" were just the way god had decided to do things and that he could change his mind at any time (and did, thus resulting in what some called "miracles"?  That, thus, it was foolish to study the world rather than gods will because studying phenomena just told you what God had done in the past, and not what God would do in the future?

If he is the guy I am remembering him to be, that's a pretty far cry from being indifferent to (or even supportive of) empiricism.  He dismisses observation because it doesn't "prove" anything, and then asserts mere theory as "truth" to replace that merely deduced from observation.

...  Since the inquiry concerning these things (which are innumerable) may go to an indefinite length, let us consider only one example — viz., the burning of a piece of cotton at the time of its contact with fire. We admit the possibility of a contact between the two which will not result in burning, as also we admit the possibility of the transformation of cotton into ashes without coming into contact with fire. And they reject this possibility.

There are three points from which the discussion of the question can be started

Firstly, the opponent may claim that fire alone is the agent of burning, and that being an agent by nature (not by choice), it cannot refrain from doing what it is its nature to do — after it comes into contact with a subject which is receptive to it.

This is what we deny. We say that it is God who — through the intermediacy of angels, or directly — is the agent of the creation of blackness in cotton; of the disintegration of its parts, and of their transformation into a smouldering heap or ashes. Fire, which is an inanimate thing, has no action. How can one prove that it is an agent? The only argument is from the observation of the fact of burning at the time of contact with fire. But observation only shows that one is with the other, not that it is by it and has no other cause than it.

http://www.ghazali.org/books/tf/Problem_XVII.htm

[Sheilbh]

That seems to show JR's point though. Fire is an inanimate object with no teleological cause.

I think we use cause in a different way now. My understanding of Medieval thought was that it was closer to purpose or making than just consequences - hence his mention if fire as an agent of burning. So Medieval science wouldn't say fire burns cotton, but fire (of its nature and purpose) makes cotton burn.

Though I'll easily yield to others, I'm very out my depth here.

[grumbler]

That seems to show JR's point though. Fire is an inanimate object with no teleological cause.

I think we use cause in a different way now. My understanding of Medieval thought was that it was closer to purpose or making than just consequences - hence his mention if fire as an agent of burning. So Medieval science wouldn't say fire burns cotton, but fire (of its nature and purpose) makes cotton burn.

Though I'll easily yield to others, I'm very out my depth here.

Interesting that you take your conclusion from the writing:

the opponent may claim that fire alone is the agent of burning, and that being an agent by nature (not by choice), it cannot refrain from doing what it is its nature to do — after it comes into contact with a subject which is receptive to it.

This is what we deny.

That's not what JR was arguing at all, and, in fact, argues against the idea that things happen because it is their nature to happen.  Instead, Gazali directly states that " it is God who — through the intermediacy of angels, or directly — is the agent of the creation of blackness in cotton; of the disintegration of its parts, and of their transformation into a smouldering heap or ashes" - that all that is necessary is that god wills it, and the fire is unneeded.  If this is true, then any observation that applying fire to cotton results, every time it is observed, in the transformation of the cotton to "a smouldering heap of ashes," and looking for exceptions and extensions of those observations, is a foolish waste of time, since those will only represent different choices by God, and thus tell us nothing of what would happen if you apply flame to cotton in the future.