In principle, there's good cause to counter the allegation that, historically, Islam impeded the development of modern science in the medieval Muslim world. In practice, this must not translate into the belief that scientific progress is an absolute value upon which the credibility of Islam must actually rest. ≡ In principle, a Muslim scholar possessed…
Stephen Hawking and the Fate of Non-Muslims in the Afterlife
In 1985, I started my degree in Astrophysics up in the north of England, at one of the only two places in the country which offered this course. It was more or less what I had set my heart on studying ever since reading Isaac Asimov's, The Collapsing Universe: The Story of the Black Holes…
Contemporary Challenges to Islam & Muslims: Atheism
The late Gai Eaton put his finger on the crux of the matter (as it seems to me), when he expressed three or four decades ago: ‘I think it must have been easy enough in earlier ages in the Christian world, and is still easy in those parts of the Muslim world which remain traditional,…
Does Science Point towards God or Atheism?
'Atheism,' writes John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, 'is on the march in the Western world. Noisily. A concerted attempt is being made to marshal the atheist faithful, to encourage them not to be ashamed of their atheism but to stand up and fight as a united army. The enemy is…
Pilgrimage of Reason: Proofs for God’s Existence [2/2]
In the first part of the blog (here), I discussed a 'proof' for the existence of God vis-a-via the kalam cosmological argument. We saw how, as a rational argument, it is well reasoned, cogent and logical; hence giving a lie to New Atheism’s allegation that belief in God is irrational. But since the proof is highly abstract and theoretical, I suggested…