Dangerous Expansions: A Brief Note on Mr. Soroush's Religious Debate

PREFACE: In recent years, to synchronize Islam with modern aspects of life has became the most important worry of some of the Iranian religious intelligentsia, and it has also provoked attacks and counterattacks in both frontiers of conservatives and reformists.

Mr. Soroush is a talented person who is known both inside and outside of Iran by his huge amount of work that he has done on Islamic studies. One of his greatest ideas is to outline a theory in which religion stands for the very basic spiritual, cultural, economical, and ethical needs and cannot be treated as a source for all the rules that we need to survive in the modern world. This hypothesis means to remain Muslim and to derive or to invent some new rules and to use them instead of the old traditional ones that were based on the belief that Islam is a complete source of rules for all times. He mentions very important valid and useful points. But, in his way he claims that all of religions are corrupted and felt far apart from their original state and since he has built his own theory on the ground of Islam and he has to extend his hypothesis to make something out of it, he extends his axiom of "very basic needs", to the heart of Islam. Here we have nothing to do with the core of his hypothesis. All we want to do is to determine whether or not his theory expansion is valid. Among his lines Mr. Soroush uses, but does not wholly accepts, a tale made by Akhbarioun or some of other Shiite groups that Qoran is corrupted like Bible and because of that we cannot trust it to be our ultimate source of rules. He does not accept this, but he tends to use it as reinforcement for his theory.

I

Some philosophical terms cannot be expanded to rule as mathematics axioms

By use of some aspects of philosophy of mathematics and set theory, we can conclude that some of the philosophical conceptions, terms or axioms cannot be expandable to mathematics. Smallness of portion or subset, for instance, in comparison to the whole set or the main set is one of the most valuable principles of any philosophical system that is also valuable in Euclidean geometry and in fact is the superior of the Euclidean geometrical axioms that the whole classical geometry is based upon it. But this axiom cannot be valid in certain fields of the Set Theory. Suppose Z stands for the set of integer numbers and N stands for natural numbers, thus, we have two sets as follows:
Z = {…,-1, 0, 1 …} and N = {1, 2 …}
By expansion of the axiom we got to conclude that since N is a subset of Z, then Z has more number of elements than N which is natural according to the axiom. But it is not true anyway. The numbers of elements in both sets are equal. The cardinal number (by definition the number of elements which an infinite set can possess) of N and Z are both represented as א!! This result is very natural in the set theory which is the base of the modern age of mathematics and related sciences like modern physics and besides, denies such an expansion.

II

Expansion of philosophical ideas to be combined with religious thoughts is not always valid

We saw by part I that we cannot expand any philosophical idea to any field we deserve to proof our hypothesis. Now we can also prove that expansion of philosophical ideas to combine them with religious thoughts is not always creative and valid too. In this case Mr. Soroush has extended his theory from a pure pragmatic and also experimental point of view to, at the first step, substantiate his modern concept of challenging applicability of religious presumptions, and next he tries to push the limits of religious thoughts to put them behind the bars of his theory and he claims some unnatural idea enough weird for a Muslim thinker that is questioning the originality of Qoran.

III

An Anti-Modern Approach

Here we reach a critical point that I have mentioned before in my post: The Road to Destruction. Instead of fitting his theory to get it some flexibility and freshness, Mr. Soroush tries to manipulate the very basic belief of a religion – a predefined system of axioms and relationships- to fit it in his own theory which outlines a paradox, that is, of course, not peripheral but too essential to be abandoned.

IV

Final Denial

By part III, it can be resulted that he has done more than a premature judgment. First he denies the most important axiom of the included system – that his own theory is based upon it – which is the originality of Qoran, which it is, indeed, not a challenge but to destruct his own debate basis. Second, he has repelled his own claim that is to fund a brand new set of conceptions based on Islam to fit within the contemporary sociological conditions. Simply he denies himself!