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AR 25:11 - Assumed "unitary Islam,” bin Laden's "greatest victory?"
In this issue:
ISLAM - the unhelpful myth of a "unitary Islam"
MEANING - "leading physicist" says big death follows Big Bang, is compelled to "reach for eternity," but stopped by entropy
Apologia Report 25:11 (1,468)
March 19, 2020
ISLAM
"Islam Is Plural" by Guy Sorman (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Wtr '20) -- begins: "Muslims are experiencing persecution and cultural genocide in China and being wiped out in Yemen; yet the Muslim world is largely silent. Why? Probably because, despite claims to the contrary, there is no single 'Islam.'
"Before 9/11, the term 'Islam' was rarely used in the West. Instead, we spoke of Muslims in their diversity, or we designated Muslims by their culture of origin: Moroccan, Pakistani, Mauritanian, or Bengali. ... The fact that all Muslims are now grouped together under a single term is, in fact, Osama bin Laden's greatest victory. It is he who convinced Westerners - but not Muslims - that he was making war on the Christian and Zionist West in the name of Islam and that all his fighters and associates should be considered Islamists. ...
"As the Algerian sociologist Mohammed Arkoun explains, a unitary Islam does not exist; there are only Muslims. ...
"The diversity of the Muslim world goes well beyond the distinction between the two main branches, Sunnis and Shias. This reality largely explains the absence of solidarity among Muslims from one region to another, despite the Koranic imperative that Muslims are supposed to belong to a single community - the Ummah, which is like a body or family.
"The lack of solidarity is sometimes explained in economic terms. Turkey, in this case, which practices a similar form of Islam as the Uighurs, and whose languages are mutually intelligible, needs Chinese funding. Similarly, Saudi Arabia depends on Chinese capital to finance the privatization of its oil industry. If we accept this financial determinism, we should observe that while the plight of the Uighurs does not weigh heavily on the consciences of Islam's political leaders, neither does it seem to trouble its religious leaders. ...
"Against this diversity, the call for a universal Islam, divorced from all cultural origins and innovation, has struck a chord among the disaffected, especially among uprooted migrants. ... Sometimes called 'the Islam of the (immigrant) suburbs,' this new global Islam insists on a fundamentalist approach to religion, rejecting centuries of careful, scrupulous interpretation of the Hadith, the source of actual Islamic practice. This literalistic Islam can be violent, and it serves as the recruitment base of jihadist fighters. ...
"In the end, the true resistance to jihadist Islam should come not from Westerners of Christian background but from Muslims themselves." <www.bit.ly/2wQKUXU>
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MEANING
Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, by Brian Greene [1] -- The Week (Mar 6 '20, p22) explains the Greene "aims to place humanity and its long quest for meaning in the context of the almost unimaginably longer history of the universe. That requires first explaining how the universe began and how the nature of its evolution underlies all of human culture. ...
"Reading the book 'is like riding an escalator up through ... the lower floors [where] you find things like time, energy, gravity, and the Big Bang.' Farther up, ... Greene leads the way into debates about the mysteries of consciousness and the origins of religion ... and tries to be an honest broker about the answers to questions we can't really answer. ...
"He also concludes that the universe manifests no grand design and that entropy will ultimately erase everything humans achieve. In a 'virtuosic' final section, he ushers us into a distant future to help us imagine the sun burning out in a billion years and the Milky Way later falling into a black hole." [4]
In stark contrast to the above, the analysis of the New York Times Book Review, (Mar 8 '20, p15) will bring anguish to anyone who has *tasted the heavenly gift, and shared in the Holy Spirit*. Here, "A leading physicist" puts a brave face on the eventual "bleak" ending of all life and settles for a weak claim as to its meaning. With the words, "In the fullness of time all that lives will die," Columbia University physicist and mathematician Greene's latest book "sets off ... on the ultimate journey, a meditation on how we go on doing what we do, why and how it will end badly, and why it matters anyway.
"[N]ot only are we going to die, but so is all life everywhere in the fullness of eternity, according to what science now thinks it knows about us and the universe," writes reviewer Dennis Overbye, who describes the message of the book as "often heartbreaking."
"Greene's main idea ... is that we want to transcend death by attaching ourselves to something permanent that will outlast us; art, science, our families and so forth.
"For Greene this impulse has taken the form of a lifetime devotion to ... the search for laws and truths that transcend time and place. ...
"As our trek across time will make clear, life is likely transient, and all understanding that arose with its emergence will almost certainly dissolve with its conclusion. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is absolute.
"Depressing. But in a Starbucks one day, he says, he had a realization, a sort of conversion to gratitude. ...
"The universe is expanding - why? So far the best explanation is ... a virulent antigravitational force dubbed 'inflation'....
"All living creatures that we know about on Earth share the same genetic tool kit.... And we are all battery-operated, deriving energy from a molecule called adenosine triphosphate...." (Yet, the first time someone sees a wristwatch, they know it had a designer - right? - RP)
"Can physics explain not just how the mind - neurons and electrochemical impulses - works but also explain the feeling of *having* a mind, that is to say consciousness? Greene is cautiously hopeful it can. 'That the mind can do all it does is extraordinary. That the mind may accomplish all it does with nothing more than the kinds of ingredients and types of forces holding together my coffee cup, makes it more extraordinary still.' ...
"Two main themes run through this story. The first is natural selection, the endless inventive process of evolution that keeps molding organisms into more and more complex arrangements and codependencies. The second is what Greene calls the 'entropic two-step.' ...
"In the end, Greene says, entropy will get us all, and everything else in the universe, tearing down what evolution has built. ...
"'Nabokov's description of a human life as a "brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness" may apply to the phenomenon of life itself,' Greene writes."
Overbye ends: "'We can contemplate eternity, Green concludes, 'and even though we can reach for eternity, apparently we can not touch eternity.'"
No, not if one rejects the "good news" about Christ. A good antidote to such thinking: Timothy Keller's 2018 book Making Sense of God.
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, by Brian Greene (Knopf, 2020, hardcover, 448 pages) <www.amzn.to/2vmMXm8>
2 - Making Sense of God, by Timothy Keller (Viking, 2016; hardback, 336 pages) <www.amzn.to/2Uflefq>
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