Cause and effect
… Fundamentally, Ash’arism was a rejection of “natural law” and reason in favor of an all-powerful God of pure will and power. The idea of an ordered universe that behaves according to certain ordained laws — whether moral or physical — would have been understood by the Mu’tazilites. For the Ash’arites, this was blasphemy, an outrage against God’s omnipotence.In the language of philosophy, this way of looking at the world is known, somewhat confusingly, as “voluntarism.” To quote Reilly, it “holds that God is the primary cause of everything and there are no secondary causes. There is no causal mediation. Therefore, what may seem to be ‘natural laws,’ such as the laws of gravity, physics, etc. are really nothing more than God’s customs or habits, which He is at complete liberty to break or change at any moment.”
While Christianity recognizes the possibility of miracles, when God intervenes to supersede natural law, in Islam every nanosecond is the functional equivalent of a miracle, the result of God’s divine act. Thus there is no law of gravity, only God’s will, determining moment by moment that the apple will fall from the tree. Neither is there any morality, no objective good and evil as we in the West would see it, only the arbitrary decrees of an all-powerful God. There is no “truth that is written in our hearts,” only the truths that are written in the Koran, which could just as well be otherwise if such were the whim of God. As Ibn Hazm pronounced in the 11th century, “He judges as He pleases, and whatever He judges is just. . . . If God the Exalted had informed us that He would punish us for the acts of others . . . all that would have been right and just.” The problem, one might say, is obvious. In science, the repudiation of natural law meant the explicit denial of cause and effect….
This explains much.
While there is much that is right about evangelical Christianity, and we share considerable ground on social issues, the overemphasis on grace in evangelical Christianity yields a disconnect between a particular class of causes and a specific effect — namely, one’s conduct in life and one’s eternal fate — that explains much that is not right with evangelical Christianity.
The problem appears to be worse in mainstream Islam.
I had the privilege of being taught high school physics by a teacher who actually held a Ph.D. in physics. (He was moonlighting from a poorly-paying postdoctoral position, which would be a fascinating topic for a blog post in itself.) He once took the better part of a class period to discuss basic philosophical terms and concepts, on the theory that a doctor of philosophy should actually know about and teach philosophy occasionally. It was good and interesting, except that he displayed his ignorance of smaller religious groups at one point: He suggested Mormons are voluntarists. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. I know of no other significant religious group that is more willing to believe that God Himself is governed by law.
