The Crawl Space Under the Neutral Zone

The next chapter of Dawkins’ book concerns the arguments for God’s existence. He addresses, in turn, the traditional Thomist arguments, the ontological argument, the aesthetic argument, the argument from personal experience, the argument from Scripture, the argument from admired religious scientists, Pascal’s wager, and a Bayesian argument involving probability calculations. Not surprisingly, since Dawkins is …

Secularism, Reformism, Fundamentalism

“Searching for answers to escape from this dilemma, Muslims have developed three major responses: secularism, reformism, and fundamentalism. Secularism holds that Muslims can only advance by emulating the West . . . Reformism, which offers a murky middle, is very popular. Whereas secularism forthrightly calls for learning from the West, reformism sneakily appropriates from it …

Profound Frustration

“Muslim society has a hard time explaining what caused the loss of power and prominence . . . Whatever index one looks at, Muslims can be found clustering toward the bottom, whether in terms of military prowess, political stability, economic development, corruption, lack of human rights, health, longevity, or literacy” (Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches …