Cómo suena una doctrina que niega la causalidad

Esto está sacado de un excelente artículo sobre la Historia de la Ciencia en el mundo musulmán en The New Atlantis y que explica su decadencia por el predominio de las comprensiones antirracionalistas entre la secta musulmana mayoritaria – los suníes -

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.

As Maimonides described it in The Guide for the Perplexed, this view sees natural things that appear to be permanent as merely following habit. Heat follows fire and hunger follows lack of food as a matter of habit, not necessity, “just as the king generally rides on horseback through the streets of the city, and is never found departing from this habit; but reason does not find it impossible that he should walk on foot through the place.” According to the occasionalist view, tomorrow coldness might follow fire, and satiety might follow lack of food. God wills every single atomic event and God’s will is not bound up with reason. This amounts to a denial of the coherence and comprehensibility of the natural world. In his controversial 2006 University of Regensburg address, Pope Benedict XVI described this idea by quoting the philosopher Ibn Hazm (died 1064) as saying, “Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.” It is not difficult to see how this doctrine could lead to dogma and eventually to the end of free inquiry in science and philosophy.

The Ash’ari view is.. evident (today) when Islamic leaders attribute natural disasters to God’s vengeance, as they did when they said that the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano was the result of God’s anger at immodestly dressed women in Europe. Such inferences sound crazy to Western ears, but given their frequency in the Muslim world, they must sound at least a little less crazy to Muslims

No tan “crazy”. Un cura de mi colegio iba clase por clase diciendo que las erupciones volcánicas se estaban acercando a España por causa de nuestros pecados. Claro que el profe de Ciencias, también cura, se llevaba el dedo a la sien cuando el viejo Padre Jaime salía del aula y seguramente, no hay quien se atreviera a hacer algo semejante en una cultura islámica de la época.

La cosa también afectó al Derecho, donde al parecer, los musulmanes hicieron el viaje al revés: sometieron el Derecho a los dicta de las autoridades religiosas.

... The first four centuries of Islam saw vigorous discussion and flexibility regarding legal issues; this was the tradition of ijtihad, or independent judgment and critical thinking. But by the end of the eleventh century, discordant ideas were increasingly seen as a problem, and autocratic rulers worried about dissent — so the “gates of ijtihad” were closed for Sunni Muslims:

Y luego analiza las diferencias institucionales entre el Cristianismo y el Mahometanismo. Curioso lo que dice sobre la importancia – para el desarrollo de la ciencia – de la existencia de organizaciones independientes, esto es, de personas jurídicas o corporaciones

The contrast is most obvious in the realm of formal education. As Huff argues, the lack of a scientific curriculum in medieval madrassas reflects a deeper absence of a capacity or willingness to build legally autonomous institutions. Madrassas were established under the law of waqf, or pious endowments, which meant they were legally obligated to follow the religious commitments of their founders. Islamic law did not recognize any corporate groups or entities, and so prevented any hope of recognizing institutions such as universities within which scholarly norms could develop. (Medieval China, too, had no independent institutions dedicated to learning; all were dependent on the official bureaucracy and the state.) Legally autonomous institutions were utterly absent in the Islamic world until the late nineteenth century. And madrassas nearly always excluded study of anything besides the subjects that aid in understanding Islam: Arabic grammar, the Koran, the hadith, and the principles of sharia. These were often referred to as the “Islamic sciences,” in contrast to Greek sciences, which were widely referred to as the “foreign” or “alien” sciences (indeed, the term “philosopher” in Arabic — faylasuf — was often used pejoratively). Furthermore, the rigidity of the religious curriculum in madrassas contributed to the educational method of learning by rote; even today, repetition, drill, and imitation — with chastisement for questioning or innovating — are habituated at an early age in many parts of the Arab world.

En la parte final, el autor no llama a los musulmanes a recuperar su esplendoroso pasado.

while there are many things that the Islamic world lacks, pride in heritage is not one of them. What is needed in Islam is less self-pride and more self-criticism.

Hillel Ofek, "Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science," The New Atlantis, Number 30, Winter 2011, pp. 3-23.