Often rendered into English as 'theology', ‘ilm al-kalam (or kalam, for short) is the science which establishes and elaborates upon matters of doctrine and belief. Because it depends upon reason-based arguments, it is 'discursive': hence ‘ilm al-kalam is sometimes referred to as discursive theology. In its more conjectural or philosophical form - a form where it…
Intelligent and Informed Faith is Our Only Option
THE LATE GAI EATON PUT his finger on the crux of the matter (as it seems to me), when he wrote 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,…
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…
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…
Pilgrimage of Reason: Proofs for God’s Existence [1/2]
As anyone familiar with anti-religious polemics knows, the core criticism by today's New Atheists is that, allegedly, belief in God is both infantile and irrational. It is, they say, a childish delusion that ought to have died out as humanity reached its maturity. In the New Atheism’s canon, belief in God is likened to believing in the Tooth Fairy or…