An interesting piece at NRO which reviews a new book by Robert Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind.

It traces features of Islam (and indeed Christianity) back to the very deepest roots, namely core assumptions about God’s nature laid down centuries ago:

While Christianity recognizes the possibility of miracles, when God intervenes to supersede natural law, in Islam every nanosecond is the functional equivalent of a miracle, the result of God’s divine act.

Thus there is no law of gravity, only God’s will, determining moment by moment that the apple will fall from the tree. Neither is there any morality, no objective good and evil as we in the West would see it, only the arbitrary decrees of an all-powerful God…

As hard as it is for the secular Left to accept, Western culture is founded on and steeped in the Judeo-Christian assumption that our innate understanding of what is right is a direct reflection of God’s goodness and justice as reflected in His universal law, to which even He adheres.

We make a mistake when we assume other cultures are necessarily speaking the same moral language.

Assumptions. Tricky things.

That reminds me of this:

Another former colleague recently said to me, "the trouble with you is that you reduce everything to first principles!"

He’s right. I do. 

The risk for someone who does that lies in sounding like the wily but annoying Irishman who tells a lost traveller trying to get to Dublin that it is "no good starting from here".

The key advantage in looking hard and regularly at First Principles is that one is less likely to build a tall edifice on wobbly foundations. And perhaps more likely to be a better source of advice as to when something tall and imposing is in fact risking collapse.