Faith And Reason

From The Times Online, The Times Literary Supplement, January 17,2007, article named
 " A Deadly Certitude"

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century.
The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains.
According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries."

Notice that a Muslim philosopher uses Reason to modify Faith. The Religion itself is not inimical to Science, rather Reason is used to do the dirty work!

Then on Monday in http://www.firstthings.com/ , in an article named  "Reason and Pop Atheism"  we see:

"de Lubac might seem to be elevating the place of reason here to such a height that he ends up conceding reason’s right to judge the things of God—the very procedure he found so objectionable in Descartes and Kant. "

This is a demonstration of a recurring theme: Faith is not opposed to Science and Reason. If you believe a Faith to be inimical to Reason, look at what Reason did to Faith in mediaeval Islam. Al-Ghazzali used Reason to make judgements about the works of Allah. This was a fundamental error on his part:  the works may be necessarily good, but the complexity of the process cannot be divined by Al-Ghazzali, neither in his inquiry nor in his lack of inquiry.
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