Islam in *Logos Rising* by E Michael Jones
GROK:
In Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality, E. Michael Jones discusses Islam in the context of its philosophical and theological development, particularly in relation to the concept of Logos—the rational order or principle underlying reality, which he ties to Christian theology. He argues that Islamic thought diverged from the Trinitarian understanding of Logos found in Christianity, impacting its intellectual trajectory. Jones suggests that the suppression of the Mu’tazilite school, which emphasized reason and human agency, led Islamic theology to prioritize God’s will over His love and reason, a shift he sees as limiting. He contrasts this with Shi’a Islam, which he claims partially recovered from this imbalance. Additionally, he connects these developments to broader historical events, such as the 1979 Iranian Revolution, viewing it as a moment where Logos reasserted itself against modern secular influences. His analysis frames Islam’s evolution as part of a larger narrative about the rise and fall of rational order in human history.
GOOGLE AI:
In Logos Rising, E. Michael Jones argues that Islam's failure to develop science stemmed from its inability to grasp the concept of secondary causality, a key breakthrough attributed to Aquinas. This concept, central to Western science, posits that God empowers created things with the capacity to cause other things, allowing for natural processes to unfold. Jones suggests that Islam, in contrast, did not fully embrace this idea, viewing God as constantly intervening in natural events, thus hindering the development of scientific inquiry.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Secondary Causality:
Jones emphasizes that Islam, unlike Christianity, did not fully incorporate the concept of secondary causality into its worldview. This concept, developed within the framework of Christian theology, suggests that God creates things with inherent causal powers, allowing for natural processes to unfold.
God's Constant Intervention:
Jones argues that Islam tended to view God as constantly intervening in the natural world, rather than allowing for secondary causes to operate naturally. This perspective, according to Jones, hindered the development of a scientific understanding of the universe, which relies on recognizing natural laws and processes.
Contrast with Christianity:
Jones contrasts this with Christianity, particularly the development of Western science, which he sees as rooted in the acceptance of secondary causality. He suggests that the Christian understanding of God's role in the world, as both the creator and the one who empowers creation, paved the way for scientific inquiry.
Persia ... did not convert to Islam; Islam was imposed on Persia by force of arms.
So what?
Christianity was spread by Western imperialism.
The Muslims succeeded “because they were able to organize an effective conquest movement,” which provided “the ideological underpinnings . . . of the new religion of Islam. . . . In this sense, the conquests were truly an Islamic movement.
Islam is an imperial religion and the Koran a book of bargains with guidance from God.
That beats the New Testament hands down - not even from Jesus, let alone God.
Islam was first and foremost an Arabic religion.
But what if Arabs are not morally superior and in practice ignores and disobey Koranic principles?
Because they lacked the abstraction which was a salient feature of the Greek language, the authors of the Qur’an ended up proposing something deceptively concrete, namely, the book which is the Qur’an itself as a substitute for the concept of Logos.
Logos is just logic ie deductive reasoning.
The Islamic belief system is more logical than the Christian one since it is profoundly illogical to worship an executed blasphemer as the co-equal of God.
"To say that Logos was God smacked of blasphemy, and so the authors of the Qur’an deified a book instead, making it the source of all knowledge."
Surely to say God is illogical is blasphemy? The Trinity is profoundly illogical.
It is easier to be illogical than it is to be logical, easier to be mistaken than correct, and it is easier to fail than it is to succeed.
Muhammad capitalized on the absence of an Arabic translation of the Bible by creating a new book which summarized Jewish and heretical Christian beliefs in a language which gave the Arab-speaking tribes national unity and, therefore, political power, which the caliphs then projected outward through military conquest.
It is assumed in this passage that Muhammad wrote the Koran. Muslims however call him the Unlettered Prophet, presumably as a complete defence to accusations of the Koran having been written by Muhammad himself. Muslims believe the Koran to be the directly revealed Word of God in Arabic.
The Koran actually means "the recitations" ie Muhammad reciting what he heard from Gabriel dictating to him the Word of God in Arabic.
In Muslim usage the Word from God became a way of avoiding the crucifixion and the fundamental Christological problem, namely, the relationship between Christ’s divine and human natures.
Muhammad was a lot like the German reformer Martin Luther: he had difficulty controlling his passions, and he gave his people a national epic in their own language which assured them that the “Ishmaelites” too were children of Abraham and, therefore, on an equal footing with the Jews but superior to Christians, who could claim Abraham as their father by faith but not by blood.
Unlike Jesus whom we are supposed to think died an executed blasphemer and a virgin because he never married, Muhammad had wives and children and was also a successful military and political leader.
The Muslim commentators who follow this later interpretation often explain that God raised Jesus to heaven before the crucifixion and made someone else look like Jesus (according to some traditions, a faithful disciple such as Peter who volunteered to die in the place of Jesus; according to others, the traitor Judas, who was thereby punished for his treachery). This “substitute” was taken away and killed on the cross.'
The narrative that Jesus did not die on the cross conclusively exposes the hypocrisy of Christians.
If they love Jesus, they should be happy that he did not die a horrible death, but it seems they do not. Even now, they still want him to die horribly to atone for their sins and pretend to eat his flesh and drink his blood. It is grotesque and obscene.
This is in spite of knowing that God forbade human sacrifice in the story of Abraham and Isaac and the Koran assuring them that there is no need to believe this to get to heaven.
Their rabid Islamophobia breaks the bounds of reason and humanity.
In spite of recounting vivid stories from the Old Testament, “the Qur’an does not seem to have a clear idea of the Bible’s contents.”
Even if this is true, why would it matter? Why would God expect Muslims or those who convert to Islam to be experts on the Bible?
If God exists, He would want Christians to desist from their idolatry of worshiping an executed blasphemer and Jews to state that Islam is the most Noahide of gentile religions while Christianity is the least.
Subsequent Islamic scholars tried to unify the intellectual gaps in the Qur’an by formulating the hadith, which were originally written to save the phenomena but later became much more anti-Christian and anti-intellectual.
What would be these "intellectual gaps"?
The intellectual gaps of the New Testament are significantly greater than those in the Koran, if indeed there are any.
Gabriel Said Reynolds *who is Catholic* concluded that “Muhammad did not found a new religion but rather preached anew the very religion that Abraham, Moses, and Jesus preached before him” as an instrument of military conquest.
Isn't this the Christian pot calling the Islamic kettle black, Gabriel Said Reynolds?
When Christians in the Middle East adopted Christianity, they adopted the thought patterns of the Greek philosophers insofar as they were embedded in Greek terms like “logos.” Islam, however, proved inimical to Logos. After the Arabs imposed Islam on Persia, the Persians were forced to get by with a language that had no concept of “logos” and was inimical to philosophical thought. Instead of engaging in dialogue in Greek for the first three centuries of its existence, as the gentile Christians had done after their conversion, Islam engaged in fratricidal wars, which have left scars to this day.
Again the Christian pot calls the Islamic kettle black.
It was not Muslims that had a continental Wars of Religion nor was it Muslims who started two World Wars. If WW3 breaks out, it will be started by those pesky Christians again who refuse to accept that Christianity has failed again and again and that it is now time to give up their idolatry of worshiping an executed blasphemer before they get into more trouble.
Currently in the West, it is the Catholic Church alone that maintains a rigorous ethical approach that is rooted in metaphysical principles, but that metaphysical foundation is not easily accessible to lay people, and the Church has lost its centrality in the lives of many believers. As such, the results of the Church’s rigorous ethical reasoning are often ignored by many of its adherents, who decide for themselves what path to take—which is the essence of heresy (from the Greek, “to choose for oneself”).
This is a clear admission of the failure of the Catholic Church - a corpse that cannot be revived without the imposition of blasphemy laws and the reintroduction of the practice of heretic burning leading to the abolition of the First Amendment.
Is this what Americans really want?
Do Americans really want a Catholic monarch?
Will that Catholic monarch be E Michael Jones whose coronation will be conducted by the current American Pope Leo?
Do Americans want to abolish 250 years of human progress and restore the institution of absolute monarchy?
E Michael Jones has already said he would forcibly convert Jews to Catholicism. More than that, he has said Jews are not the only people he would forcibly converted to Catholicism if he has his way. American Protestants watch out!
The main reason for the failure of science to develop in the Islamic world was theological: astrology blocked its way. Science did not develop in the East because “the Christian refusal to accept the ancient pagan dogma of the divinity of the heavenly regions and bodies” had no influence over intellectual development there.
Was it Muslims who suppressed the findings of Copernicus and Galileo? No, it was the Catholic Church.
Because Christians were constantly at war with each other - and every war represents of some kind of technological progress in the ability to kill ever larger numbers of people - it is no wonder that Christian imperialism became global and Christians are now on their third global empire.
We must wonder if God has heard of the "three strikes and you're out" rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law
Jesus Christ made astrology unnecessary because the Logos Incarnate de-divinized the heavens. Once the Logos became Incarnate, it became clear to the Greeks that God no longer needed a quasi-divine cosmos as his intermediary. Because Muslims were prohibited from talking about “the three,” the logos of science was doomed to die in its cradle in the Islamic world.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been impressive in its use of hypersonic missiles on Israel and is on its way to acquiring nuclear weapons. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fattah-1
Unlike Christianity, whose seminal texts were written in Greek and, therefore, within the orbit of Greek philosophy, Islam arose in an intellectual backwater in the middle of the largely polytheistic Arabian peninsula, with a sacred scripture written in a language that lacked Logos as part of its vocabulary.
Muslims are not required to believe in absurdities, unlike Christians.
Voltaire: “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
It would take Christianity, rooted in Greek language and culture, roughly 13 centuries to sort out the relationship between faith and reason
It is reasonable to have faith if you are an optimist.
It is reasonable to be an optimist because optimism makes you attempt great undertakings with a positive attitude to take you through a long and arduous journey.
Faith is the belief that everything will turn out for the best if God exists to punish evil and reward good in this life and the next.
However, it is not reasonable to believe that an executed blasphemer called Jesus whose mother was the Virgin Mary created the Universe nor is it reasonable to believe that God would contradict Himself by first forbidding idolatry and then encourage it through Jesus.
Sheikh Nabhani “taught that there was no such thing as morality in Islam; it was simply what God taught. If Allah allowed it, it was moral. If He forbade it, it was immoral.”
That is easy enough to remember.
If you are not satisfied with this, there is Kant's Principle of Unversalisability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalizability
Over its first four centuries, Islam transformed Allah into an exalted caliph, who desired nothing so much as the subordination of intellect to will as the analogue to the obedience demanded of the peoples Islam had conquered.
This is not true and incorrect in expression.
For "Islam" read "unprincipled imams and Islamic scholars".
The Koran is quite clear on how Allah encourages the use of reason.
https://vimeo.com/906867169
Here is my interview with Dr. E. Michael Jones on his book, Islam and Logos, written in 2016. We had a fascinating discussion on the Nestorian roots of Islam.