Cause, Creator and Epistemic Conjecture – III

David Hume, as Bertrand Russell suggests in the History of Western Philosophy, represents a kind of ‘dead end’ in a certain avenue of philosophical skepticism. Russell argues that it is impossible to go further in Hume’s direction and one can only hope for a relatively less skeptical construct.

Hume’s proposition adds considerably to the complexity of the problem while breaking it into two dimensional fractures. Namely metaphysical, which is rationalism and epistemological, which is empiricism.

A large part of 17th and 18th centuries saw notable philosophers struggling with this intriguing problem. It was Immanuel Kant, who for the first time, tried to reduce both these fractures to some extent. Nature of the world, according to Kantian construct, can be appreciated as a duality at two levels; namely noumenon (as it is) and phenomenon (as it appears to be). The causality, how we perceive it, only reigns in the world as it appears to us and cannot be conceived in the domain where things exist as they are. Human mind, as it cannot go beyond the phenomenal world, has no option but to concede to this cause-effect duo. We always need to beg causes in order to have a coherent experience. However, knowledge, even though based on this experience, is not derived from it.

Contrary to rationalists, we cannot explain the world without resorting to causality; contrary to empiricist, we must not derive the knowledge of noumena from experience.

Kant’s solution, though seemingly plausible, can be deemed problematic as far as application of Hume’s initial proposition to scientific episteme is concerned. Science’s claim, as I have already contended, is to yield knowledge (i.e. explain and predict) and if it is only concerned with the world as it appear to us, its claim is not justified. At maximum, it can claim to be descriptive; for it is through science that we can describe the phenomenon of sun rise but cannot reasonably justify the contention that sun will surely rise tomorrow. It is due to scientific certainty that we do not have any qualms in stating that ‘water gives life to plants’, but reason alone cannot be the basis of our expectation that water would keep on doing so in future.

What then are the bases for unflagging beliefs like these?

Excluding psychological and social domains, as I restrict myself to science, most contemporary solutions to the problem of causation put forth alternatives, which stem from the induction and probability theories. Bertrand Russell brilliantly posits his views on induction in the Problems of Philosophy. He writes:

The question we really have to ask is: ‘When two things have been found to be often associated, and no instance is known of the one occurring without the other, does the occurrence of one of the two, in a fresh instance, give any good ground for expecting the other?’ On our answer to this question must depend the validity of the whole of our expectations as to the future, the whole of the results obtained by induction, and in fact practically all the beliefs upon which our daily life is based.[...] The principle we are examining may be called the principle of induction, and its two parts may be stated as follows:

(a) When a thing of a certain sort A has been found to be associated with a thing of a certain other sort B, and has never been found dissociated from a thing of the sort B, the greater the number of cases in which A and B have been associated, the greater is the probability that they will be associated in a fresh case in which one of them is known to be present;

(b) Under the same circumstances, a sufficient number of cases of association will make the probability of a fresh association nearly a certainty, and will make it approach certainty without limit.

It is pretty obvious that Russell is trying here to circumvent Hume’s dilemma rather than resolving it. Inductive inference, as it is obvious from the above articulation, does not claim to bring about true conclusions from true premises; rather its objective is to yield probable conclusions from true premises. Hume’s argument, on the other hand, established two things beyond doubt; one, that it is impossible to prove that any inductive inference with true premises will have a true conclusion and two, that every inductive inference in future with true premises may yield a false conclusion.

The initial question therefore pops up in a new garb: Is it rational to accept an inductive inference?

to be continued…

Filed under: Philosophy, Series & Sequels

21 April 1938: Iqbal’s Last Quatrain

I found this in my late grandfather’s journal. I couldn’t confirm it from any of Iqbal’s biography that I have but it is reasonable to believe that this clipping is from an issue of the well reputed Civil and Military Gazette (Rudyard Kipling’s first ‘mistress’), just days after the demise of Iqbal. It reads as follows:

Apropos, the quatrain in Irani of which we gave a free translation the other day and which was said to have been composed by Sir Mahomed Iqbal a few minutes before he died, we are told that it was a quatrain which Sir Mahomed Iqbal had composed some time back. After reciting the four lines in Irani, he then recited a new quatrain also in Irani, which freely translated, reads:

Paradise, it is the river of our own friends,
Paradise, it is the river of the pure in heart,
Tell the Muslim of India ‘Be happy’,
Paradise, lies in the Way of God.

A day to reflect upon his message without the usual lip-service.

Filed under: Iqbaliat

Discussion on Jamia Hafsa

A religious discussion on Jamia Hafsa issue featuring Javed Ahmed Ghamidi and others will be aired on Geo TV tonight.

I’ll review main points of discussion after watching it. Insha’Allah.

I hope it is being broadcasted on Geo US and UK too.

Update 21/4/07: That was an enlightening discussion; instructive for those who are not familiar with Ghamidi’s methodology. As it was revealed, discussion would probably constitute few parts; at least two. I’ll obviously recapitulate after it finishes, which would be a week or two from now.

Filed under: Debates & Disputes, Land of the 'Pure'

Cause, Creator and Epistemic Conjecture – II

The problem of causation remains an intriguing avenue of thought for philosophers, at least for the last few centuries. At the heart of it lies the proposition that causes and effects cannot be discovered by reason and all our explanations, in this regard, depend upon past experiences and observations. This proposition was best described by David Hume in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. He prepares his case while raising skeptical doubts about operations of human understanding:

[...] Let an object be presented to a man of ever so strong natural reason and abilities; if that object be entirely new to him, he will not be able, by the most accurate examination of its sensible qualities, to discover any of its causes or effects. Adam, though his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water that it would suffocate him, or from the light and warmth of fire that it would consume him. No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses, either the causes which produced it, or the effects which will arise from it; nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever draw any inference concerning real existence and matter of fact[...] In like manner, when an effect is supposed to depend upon an intricate machinery or secret structure of parts, we make no difficulty in attributing all our knowledge of it to experience. Who will assert that he can give the ultimate reason, why milk or bread is proper nourishment for a man, not for a lion or a tiger?

It would amount to oversimplification if I continue elaborating the problem at hand without acknowledging the development of classification of causes by Scholastics during Middle Ages, especially when the Aristotelian notion of Motor Cause was substituted with Efficient Cause. Without going into unneeded details, it is appropriate to assume at this stage that causation, as we are discussing it now, is the efficient cause, that is: what acts in order to make something happen or exist. However, it does not mean that present discourse is completely unconcerned with ‘What a thing is made of’ or ‘Why it is how it is’; it is just that causation as we understand it conventionally is the one that is efficacious.

Interjecting this subtlety, I now return to what was being asserted.

According to Hume’s proposition, our understanding of any causal relation between an event A and B cannot truly escape our own impression of their constantly conjoined occurence. Our mental faculties keep inferring fallaciously that A is actually causing B, i.e. causing it to happen, or to be more precise, bringing it out of nowhere. Hume continues:

Were any object presented to us, and were we required to pronounce concerning the effect, which will result from it, without consulting past observation; after what manner, I beseech you, must the mind proceed in this operation? It must invent or imagine some event, which it ascribes to the object as its effect; and it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary. The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it. Motion in the second Billiard-ball is a quite distinct event from motion in the first; nor is there anything in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other. A stone or piece of metal raised into the air, and left without any support, immediately falls: but to consider the matter a priori, is there anything we discover in this situation which can beget the idea of a downward, rather than an upward, or any other motion, in the stone or metal? And as the first imagination or invention of a particular effect, in all natural operations, is arbitrary, where we consult not experience; so must we also esteem the supposed tie or connexion between the cause and effect, which binds them together, and renders it impossible that any other effect could result from the operation of that cause.

Though seemingly tautological, Hume’s presentation literally establishes the impossibility of deducing anything about existence of a thing or event by reflecting upon the one with which it is conjoined. This effectively means, if I go back to my earlier example, that we cannot use ‘gravity’ to explain the phenomenon of falling of physical bodies without begging the question.

This deceitful inference, instigated by the idea of efficient cause, and the realisation that follows, point us towards various startling conclusions.

Foremost being that scientific laws may be based on unjustified causation as coexistence of A and B cannot be ideally called a ‘law’. It also purports an understanding of a purely Mechanical world where independant objects keep acting on each other, thereby producing change. It also means that causal laws of nature are not true logically and there is no concrete evidence that these will continue to hold in future.

to be continued…

Filed under: Philosophy, Series & Sequels

Cause, Creator and Epistemic Conjecture – I

There is no specific motivation of the present series. Like most students of knowledge, I too remain preoccupied in my humble capacity with the problem of asserting Islamic ideals while trying to avoid destructive engagements with modernity. Unlike many, I do believe that this assertion is not possible without formulating and promoting a new Islamic discourse that is validated by the conditions set by modernity. Brother Abul Hussein of Ahl al-Hadith blog has recently reminded us of another scholar who undertook one such contemporary discourse. Though being familiar with Badiuzzaman Said Nusri’s project since some time, I am not fortunate enough to read Risala-i-Nur directly. My extremely limited experience of Said Nusri is through secondary sources; a good deal of which came from Yamine Bouguenaya Mermer’s excellent philosophical buildups on Nusri’s ideas in Risala. The present rambles are mostly based on Mermer’s reflections.

Have you ever thought about the proposition that a stone might not fall on ground if you throw it from a height or a possibility that a cotton piece may not burn after coming in contact with fire. Albeit most of us consider such propositions to be absurd, these can be transformed into objective questions and help us analyze the problem of explanation in science.

For instance, one may ask: What will happen if a stone is dropped down from some height? The proposition that it might not fall on ground is just one of many and should be considered well for answering the question. Our mind however, deals instinctively with universals and as there are no stones which do not fall on ground if dropped from some height, it rejects all the other propositions which were should have been equally valid and logical. Excluding the metaphysical and subjective realm, these universal principles are nothing but causal relationships between the ‘act’ and ‘effect’ both of which are readily observable most of the times. In our example, the causality between the act of dropping the stone and the effect of its fall on ground is described as the law of gravity.

Our reliance on law of gravity to explain the falling of physical bodies is through sheer experience bounded by a set of conditions. We observe that things always fall when they are lifted and dropped and our mind do not record any exception to this experience. The physics we create to describe this experience is called ‘Gravity’ and we later use this physics to explain the same very phenomenon.

Is it logically justified then, to explain an experience through a causal law that is derived by the same experience?

Indeed it is a problem of science’s attribution of ‘necessity’ to physical laws which is based on presupposition of uniformity of nature through which science tries to achieve its two primary objectives; namely explanation and prediction. To put it differently, science is not satisfied merely with a plausible explanation of a phenomenon; rather it claims to establish knowledge of facts which are unobserved as yet. It is also true that science is reasonably successful in its generalizations of contended uniformities in nature and establishing universality of these generalized physical laws.

However truer is the contention that these laws have only experience on their side. For science can only state empirical matters of fact and cannot argue with a priori certainty. Philosophy, on the other hand, does that far efficiently and leads us to affirm that two events stand distinct even if they are related through an empirical law. This affirmation, though subtle, is the kernel of problem of causation.

to be continued…

Filed under: Philosophy, Series & Sequels

Is Javed Ghamidi a True Scholar?

Respectfully to a seeker who stumbled upon my blog through the search string: “Is Javed Ahmed Ghamdi a true Islamic scholar”.

It has been narrated that Awzai (the Syrian jurist), who was a contemporary of Abu Hanifa, once asked Abdullah Ibn Mubarak, “Have you heard about the innovator from Kufa whose kunyah is Abu Hanifa”.

Ibn Mubarak ignored his question and started narrating complicated jurisprudential issues, the juridic opinions regarding those and the fine deductive reasoning leading to those opinions.

“Whose fatawa are these?,” Awzai asked, after hearing him with interest .

“I met him in Iraq” Ibn Mubarak replied.

“He is surely a great scholar. I would some day meet him and learn from him,” Awzai said.

“He is Abu Hanifa,” Ibn Mubarak told him.

We have come a long way since those pre-modern times and like everything else, grapevine has been evolved considerably and transformed into a pseudo-conventional medium of attaining knowledge. It has now become customary in the cyber world to do cursory homework on scholars and jump upon the task of writing and discussing. But even though surfing can give you a lot to chew over, it cannot be an alternative for traditional methods of judging veracity and credibility of scholars.

As I suggested in the past, it is better to spend time in reading the scholars themselves, rather than gathering all the meat from those who have criticized them; sometimes derisively and in harshest of the ways. And I am not overreacting, as one of the search parameters in question, besides pointing to my rambles, retrieves links where Javed Ahmad Ghamidi is called a liar, cheat, fitna and even shaitan (the devil).

There is nothing more heartrending than ignorance.

I do not intend presently to do an extended entry on Ghamidi’s works or methodology and feel it enough to assert that his life and work represents a deeply rooted quest of knowledge. Even if one disagrees completely with whatever he has produced, his truthfulness and purity of intent is extremely hard to miss and these traits are very well embedded in the tradition of thought that he cherishes, carries and channels forward. The wikipedia entry, though helpful in directing towards many important resources, cannot obviously point towards this valuable tradition. Ghamidi himself calls it Dabistaan-e-Shibli (the school of Shibli) in one of his essays. I just aim to limn this tradition for those who don’t know.

Two distinct and usually rival currents of Islamic thought, i.e. traditionalist and modernist, can be identified in the Muslim Subcontinent since its exposure to western civilisation in the 19th Century.

Those who identified themselves with the traditionalist stream primarily contended that religion cannot be re-interpreted and reformed beyond the canons of their respective traditions and any enquiry into religious sources, i.e. Quran and Sunnah, must not remain independent of tradition. A logical byproduct was an attitude that willfully disregarded all the western methods of education, the categories of education itself and ultimately shaped a weltanschauung that was completely ignorant of modern socio-political philosophies. Great scholars like Qasim Nanotwi, Rashid Ahmed Gangohi, Mahmood ul Hasan Deobandi, Anwar Shah Kashmiri and Ashraf Ali Thanwi were torchbearers of this school of thought. A religious seminary in Deoband was established to uphold this tradition and disseminate its contents to next generations.

The Modernist School, as opposed to the traditionalist one, virtually set aside most of the tradition – at least in theory – and went about reforming Islam from scratch. Syed Ahmad Khan, who is arguably the pioneer of Modernist Movement in Subcontinent, established a school in Aligarh in order to introduce modern fields of study and impart education on a relatively progressive curriculum, never adopted previously in Muslim India. Aligarh movement was successful to a great extent and produced few notable scholars, for instance Syed Ameer Ali.

Shibli Nomani (1857 – 1914) brought forth a third current of religious thought in contrast to the above two. This third dimension, though progressive and revivalistic, claimed to carry the burden of tradition as well. Those who associated themselves with it, felt the need to go back to original sources and interact directly with Quran, as it was revealed in history, while trying not to be anachronic. Shibli was undoubtedly the first voice in Subcontinent asserting the need for modernisation of speculative theology (Jadeed ilm al-kalam). It can arguably be contended that Sulayman Nadwi, Abul Kalam Azad, Mawdudi, Muhammad Iqbal and Abdul Majid Daryabadi remained associated with this school of thought in one way or the other.

However, Hameedudin Farahi (a comparatively less known scholar from Azamgarh) can be called the ideal manifestation of this doctrine and the only one dedicating his life in establishing and articulating the canons of this new methodology which was supposed to be rooted firmly in the language of Quran. His student Ameen Ahsan Islahi carried forward the project of his mentor and climaxed it in the form of Tadabbur-i-Quran. Javed Ahmad Ghamdi remained under the tutelage of Islahi for a large part of his life and worked with him on various intellectual projects.

Islahi is no more, but Dabistan-e-Shibli still continue to live in the form of Javed Ahmad Ghamdi and others who have been learning directly and indirectly from him. It is only after drinking from the fountain of this tradition that you can judge about the veracity or mendacity of those who belong to it. No amount of googling can do it for you.

Filed under: Islam & Modernity, Scholars

The Dialogue that Started with a Firefly

“Show me Allah!”, he asked me while looking towards the night sky with a slight tinge of peevishness in his babyish accent.

I was having the routine after-dinner stroll with Ahmed and Muhammad (my three year old twins) on my sides. Three of us decided to move out without their mother who was glued to the telephone in an unusually long conversation. I was aimlessly conversing, teaching them silly things like how to walk on the wayside, when the bunch of fireflies in a nearby frontyard caught my attention. Kids were unable to pick them up from some distance so I decided to take them closer in order to have a better look.

The glow was captivating enough for me too, however enthrallment on their faces was completely obvious. Ahmed, the more talkative among the duo, asked me to let him have an even closer look. I carefully picked one of them and fearful that I might hurt the restless insect, bent my palms to make a hollow cup. As I showed them the glowing abdomen, they excitedly tried to touch it with their little hands, moving me ultimately to release the little creature. This triggered our brief dialogue which might grew them up as thinking persons and which surely matured me as a parent.

“Why does it glow?”, Ahmed asked me inquisitively, not interested in touching it anymore. Having no clue how to explain him the phenomena, I escaped with a quick reply that there is some luminescent powder under their bellies. “Why is it there?”, he quickly responded with another question. This was enough to make me realise that a three-year-old cannot possibly be satisfied with any more biological reasons. He did not actually want the ‘reason’ why nocturnal beetles do what they do; rather, through a completely natural mechanism, he was just trying to simplify the world around him. At least, that is what I thought at that moment and told him that it is called a firefly (Jugnoo in Urdu) and Allah has made it as such. I didn’t want to engage his mind at that time with my own questions and was completely caught by surprise when he asked me where is Allah.

Keeping quiet, I did not reply for few moments as he repeated his question several times. “What should I tell him!”, I asked myself as my mind restlessly moved in various domains.

I instantly remembered the slave girl of Muawiah ibn al-Hakm whose incident is recorded in Muwatta of Imam Malik (and I believe in Muslim’s Sahih too). In response to a similar question by the Prophet, she pointed towards the heavens silently or said fi al-sama (in the sky) according to a different version. I thought about Quran which mentions that Allah is closer to us than our jugular veins. The face of that pious-looking old man also came to my mind who used to recite Allah’s 99 names on television in Ramadhan transmission in a studio with heavenly background and who was God according to most of us when we were very young. I remembered asking my mother similar questions when I was growing up. I couldn’t remember exactly what she said but I had a vague memory that she somehow made us believe that God is everywhere. “How he is everywhere?” is a question that we never thought to ask her in those days.

In that continued state of helplessness, I did a miserable job and told him that Allah is above in the heavens. As a result, his present demand was pretty logical. Like all the parents, I came out of this situation as a winner, telling him that nobody can see God and he will understand it when he’ll grow up. Not interested anymore in the dialogue, he turned his attention somewhere else.

In his own cute little way, he understood, and probably got the first lesson of suspending judgements.

I got my own lessons too.

Since that night, I couldn’t get those questions off my mind for too long. How many of us do believe REALLY in an invisible, always communicating, governing and law-sending God, each and every second of our lives. How many of us are unable to do without a Creator-Hypothesis when we sit to calculate various probabilities that concern our lives each day. Are we completely at home with notion of a providing Creator. To put it simply, how many of us can describe God to an innocent’s intellect whose raw logic is not yet trained to impulsively deal with universals.

Filed under: Parenting