Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Kalam Cosmology

There were Greek philosophers.
Then there were their followers.
It so happened that some of them either entered Islam or some Muslims fell prey to the charms of the superficially beautiful lady called philosophy.
To defend Islam against this onslaught Muslims developed the art of Kalam.
That is Muslim scholasticism.
And Greek philosophy was temporarily contained.
It was decimated by persistent and consistent onslaught by Imam Ghazali (RA) and his disciples like Imam Razi and Ibn Khaldoon and others.

In recent times a Christian debater, William Craig, has been using the Kalam Cosmology argument to give nightmares to atheists.

This would have been alright except for a minor detail - the atheists this time happen to be highbrow physicists. Here is a quote from Cosmic Variance blog:

Craig is sufficiently good at debating that atheists are now advising each other to stay away from him for fear of looking bad — e.g. here and here.