Re:Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)
by disease on Friday October 09, 2020 @12:12PM
(#24731335)
I'll admit to not having read the full article, but would a belief like this make the assumption that God's will could even overrule logic itself. Could God will 2 + 2 = 5? How would you rationalize this? Or perhaps the point is to irradiate rationality.
Re:Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)
by mmmmmk on Friday October 09, 2020 @01:03PM
(#24731959)
Yes, Al-Ghazali made that point. I don't remember the specific passage but he made the comment that if he left a book in his library, he has no way to know that god did not turn it into a donkey, which was at that moment pissing on all his other books. I'll search for that quote, because it was pretty exciting for a medieval philosophy class.
After many paragraphs telling that the reason is not simple, it finally centers in occasionalism.
> At the heart of Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s will is completely free. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God.