Certainly agree that Christianity has contributed a great deal, even if it looks like a mixed blessing.Keating wrote: ↑Mon Apr 16, 2018 1:08 amI don’t think we’d be here without Christianity. What Christianity contains that Islam does not is the idea that the Mind of God is knowable. That’s where science, as we understand it, is birthed from. The early naturalists where interested in getting a better understanding of God, and studying His creation was one way to achieve that.
Islam short circuits that desire by also declaring itself to also be the last word. So, yes, Christianity does contain the seed of its own destruction in it. Add to that the two ultimate European wars and the collapse of Christianity there makes sense.
But as your later comment - "Meanwhile Spain, by itself, translates more books into Spanish in a single year than the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic since the ninth century" - may have come from a New Atlantis article - Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science - that I've quoted from thither & yon, it might be worthwhile quoting something else therefrom related to the different conceptions of gawd:
Rather profoundly antithetical to Einstein's "God doesn't play dice with the universe", and, maybe somewhat arguably, a large reason why Islamic science and the entire Islamic world is a freaking basket-case.In its place arose the anti-rationalist Ash’ari school whose increasing dominance is linked to the decline of Arabic science. With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life. While the Mu’tazilites had contended that the Koran was created and so God’s purpose for man must be interpreted through reason, the Ash’arites believed the Koran to be coeval with God — and therefore unchallengeable. 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.
Interesting question, though I expect the proverbial "Death of God" is more deeply felt by those who invested most heavily in the concept.