Size Doesn't Matter, part 3

In this series I am contesting the claim that the unimaginable vastness of the universe, revealed to us in modern astronomy, makes it absurd to ascribe any significance to the earth and its inhabitants. In part 1 I addressed the science side of this claim and in part 2 I addressed the historical side. Ignoring the issues already discussed, this claim assumes that the relative sizes of the earth and the universe demonstrate that the former must be, somehow, insignificant or unimportant. Apparently, on some level, we instinctively equate size with value or significance. The original meaning of the word "great" is "very large", a phenomenon that occurs in many languages. "Bigger" just means "better."

But to take this as an ontological statement about something's actual importance is incredibly naïve. Just because bigger sometimes seems better, it's absurd to think that there is a significant correlation between size and value. What exactly is it about size that would bestow value anyway? Why would a smaller thing automatically be less important than a bigger thing? While it's true that the immense size of the universe can make us feel insignificant, this is a psychological fact about us, not a scientific fact about the universe. For people who accuse others of simple-mindedness, those who argue that the universe's size demonstrates our unimportance are remarkably simple minded themselves.

C. S. Lewis puts this so much better than I ever could that I'll just refer you to the 7th chapter of Miracles:

There is no doubt that we all feel the incongruity of supposing, say, that the planet Earth might be more important than the Great Nebula in Andromeda. On the other hand, we are all equally certain that only a lunatic would think a man six-feet high necessarily more important than a man five-feet high, or a horse necessarily more important than a man, or a man's legs than his brain. In other words this supposed ratio of size to importance feels plausible only when one of the sizes involved is very great. And that betrays the true basis of this type of thought. When a relation is perceived by Reason, it is perceived to hold good universally. If our Reason told us that size was proportional to importance, the small differences in size would be accompanied by small differences in importance just as surely as great differences in size were accompanied by great differences in importance. Your six-foot man would have to be slightly more valuable than the man of five feet, and your leg slightly more important than your brain -- which everyone knows to be nonsense. The conclusion is inevitable: the importance we attach to great differences of size is an affair not of reason but of emotion -- of that peculiar emotion which superiorities in size begin to produce in us only after a certain point of absolute size has been reached.

We are inveterate poets. When a quantity is very great we cease to regard it as a mere quantity. Our imaginations awake. Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality -- the Sublime. But for this, the merely arithmetical greatness of the Galaxy would be no more impressive than the figures in an account book. To a mind which did not share our emotions and lacked our imaginative energies, the argument against Christianity from the size of the universe would be simply unintelligible. It is therefore from ourselves that the material universe derives its power to overawe us. Men of sensibility look up on the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid men do not. When the silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal, it was Pascal's own greatness that enabled them to do so; to be frightened by the bigness of the nebulæ is, almost literally, to be frightened at our own shadow. For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them. As a Christian I do not say we are wrong to tremble at that shadow, for I believe it to be the shadow of an image of God. But if the vastness of Nature ever threatens to overcrow our spirits, we must remember that it is only Nature spiritualised by human imagination which does so. This suggests a possible answer to the question raised a few pages ago -- why the size of the universe, known for centuries, should first in modern times become an argument against Christianity. Has it perhaps done so because in modern times the imagination has become more sensitive to bigness? From this point of view the argument from size might almost be regarded as a by-product of the Romantic Movement in poetry. In addition to the absolute increase of imaginative vitality on this topic, there has pretty certainly been a decline on others. Any reader of old poetry can see that brightness appealed to ancient and medieval man more than bigness, and more than it does to us. Medieval thinkers believed that the stars must be somehow superior to the Earth because they looked bright and it did not. Moderns think that the Galaxy ought to be more important than the Earth because it is bigger. Both states of mind can produce good poetry. Both can supply mental pictures which rouse very respectable emotions -- emotions of awe, humility, or exhiliration. But taken as serious philosophical argument both are ridiculous.

It reminds me of Jodie Foster's comment at the end of Contact (I don't know if it's present in the novel by Carl Sagan): if we're the only living creatures in the universe, it seems like an awful waste of space. But as Victor Reppert writes, "It is not as if energy or time [or space] is a scarce resource for God and we have to ask him, if he seems to be ‘wasting’ it, why he isn't putting it to better use. ‘Waste’ is an issue only where there is scarcity."

A similar objection that I mentioned in part 1 needs further comment. I pointed out that the universe's mass density -- the amount of matter in the universe -- must be extremely fine-tuned. Otherwise, the universe's expansion would have precluded the possibility of life existing anywhere at any time in the universe's history. In other words, the universe must be the particular size it is in order for us to exist. However, one could point out that while this matter may have been necessary at the universe's inception, it seems gratuitous for it to still be here. To insist that this vast universe is all there for our sake seems absurd. Every piece of matter may have had some relevance to the universe's initial expansion billions of years ago, but there is no obvious connection between distant pieces of matter and the human race's present existence. There are plenty of galaxies billions of light years away, which have plenty of planets orbiting plenty of suns. What does a particular rock on one of these planets have to do with life on earth now? The absence of such a connection makes humanity appear irrelevant to the universe.

Ignoring my previous response, this objection assumes that life or the human race is the only possible reason why the Judeo-Christian God would have created the universe. But just because all this matter has no relevance to humanity's existence today, it does not mean that God does not delight in it for some other reason, and so sustains it in existence. Again, this point is made best by C. S. Lewis:

There is no question of religious people fancying that all exists for man and scientific people discovering that it does not. Whether the ultimate and inexplicable being -- that which simply is -- turns out to be God or "the whole show," of course it does not exist for us. On either view we are faced with something which existed before the human race appeared and will exist after the Earth has become uninhabitable; which is utterly independent of us though we are totally dependent on it; and which, through vast ranges of its being, has no relevance to our own hopes and fears. For no man was, I suppose, ever so mad as to think that man, or all creation, filled the Divine Mind; if we are a small thing to space and time, space and time are a much smaller thing to God. It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion.

A final point: in order to assert that the premoderns thought that the earth's size somehow rendered its inhabitants significant, it would require us to believe (at least) that they thought the earth and its inhabitants significant. In order for the statement, "they believed X because of Y" to be true, it has to be true that "they believed X." The argument that they thought the earth's size bequeathed significance on humanity can't even get off the ground unless they thought humanity had significance.

But this is not the case. We've already mentioned one criterion: brightness. The earth was thought to be less important and valuable than the celestial objects because they were bright while the earth was not. Another criterion that's often misunderstood is the earth's location at the center of the universe. This is usually twisted to imply that the center was the place of prestige, but the exact opposite is the case. They thought Earth was located at the bottom of the universe, which, in their view, was the least prestigious place therein. And the further down you went, the worse it was; this is why hell was thought to be at the center of the earth, and Satan at the center of hell. Arthur Lovejoy, in The Great Chain of Being, wrote that the medieval model is better described as "diabolocentric" than "geocentric." See the essays by Dennis Danielson on this.

However, one might object that Christianity conceives human beings as being so significant that God chose to be incarnated as one to die on their behalf. But this misunderstands exactly what the Christian claim is.

Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. It does involve the belief that God loves man and for his sake became man and died. I have not yet succeeded in seeing how what we know (and have known since the days of Ptolemy) about the size of the universe affects the credibility of this doctrine one way or the other. ... If it is maintained that anything so small as the Earth must, in any event, be too unimportant to merit the love of the Creator, we reply that no Christian ever supposed we did merit it. Christ did not die for men because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because He is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely.

In other words, whatever significance or value human beings have is derivative. The moral law tells us that people do have an inherent value; the reason murder is wrong, for example, is because each individual is of infinite worth. But the reason each individual is of infinite worth is because he/she is created in God's image. And the reason God loves us is not because we are lovely or lovable, but because he is loving; indeed, the claim is that God is love itself.

(see also part 1 and part 2)

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Linkfest

-- Temporal anomalies in popular time-travel movies; an interesting website run by a Christian.

-- From the "Ha! I knew it!" file: Dogs are smarter than cats.

-- It turns out if you draw Charlie Brown realistically, but still with his cartoon proportions, he looks really creepy. Ditto for Homer Simpson.

-- John Hughes passed away recently; here's a very moving tribute to him. And here's a funny scene from the original script of Ferris Bueller's Day Off that never made it to the movie.

-- Scientists have discovered what they think is a 14,000-year-old map. Cool.

-- Knights and Knaves puzzles. Knights only tell the truth and knaves only tell lies, so you have to figure out who is what. Some add spies who can tell the truth or lie. If you want some clues, see here. If they're too easy for you, see if you can solve The Hardest Logical Puzzle Ever.

-- The Postmodern Generator creates a completely meaningless postmodern essay every time you load the page. Heh.

Quote of the Day

What, then, was the fate of the foreign sciences in Islam? No simple answer, applicable to all times and places, is possible. Indeed, the historical situation was so complex that historians who specialize on Islam cannot agree on how to characterize it. Two quite different interpretations are currently in circulation. According to one of them, the foreign sciences never ceased to be viewed by the great majority of Muslims as useless, alien, and perhaps dangerous. They went against the grain of orthodox thought, met no fundamental need, and were excluded from the developing educational system. As a result, the foreign sciences were never deeply integrated into Islamic culture, but survived on the margins. The undeniably great achievements of Islamic scientists and natural philosophers, therefore, must have emanated from isolated enclaves of scholars protected from the pressures of orthodoxy (as at a royal court during a period of unusual tolerance) or willing, for reasons known only to themselves, to swim against the cultural stream. This has been called the 'marginality thesis,' because of its claim that science in Islam was never more than a marginal pursuit.

The alternative theory views the Islamic encounter with Greek learning in a quite different light. While acknowledging that suspicion and hostility existed, this theory maintains that on the whole Greek science and natural philosophy enjoyed a reasonably hospitable reception in Islam. After all, Islam did not reject the fruits of foreign learning but, despite conservative opposition, undertook a remarkable program of recovery and cultivation. Moreover, one can point to many examples of the integration of Greek disciplines into traditional learning and Islamic culture more generally. Thus logic became incorporated into theology and law; astronomy became an indispensable tool for the muwaqqit, who was responsible for determining the times of daily prayer in his locale; and mathematics became essential for a wide variety of commercial, legal, and governmental purposes. That mathematics and astronomy were occasionally taught in the most highly developed of the Muslim schools, the madrasahs or colleges of law, testifies to the high level of acceptance and integration. According to this interpretation, Islam successfully appropriated large portions of foreign learning, despite opposition; let us call this the 'appropriation thesis.' On this view, the foreign sciences did not conquer the traditional disciplines, but made peace with them by agreeing to serve as their handmaidens.

The gap between these two interpretations is substantial; and, given the current state of research on the history of Islamic science, the dispute does not seem likely to be soon resolved. But several things can be said, which may help to mediate between the two positions. First, we must acknowledge that the marginality thesis in its strong form is untenable. The cultivation of Greek natural philosophy and mathematical science was far too widespread and successful to be viewed as a marginal product of Islamic culture. But while granting this to the "appropriationists," we must go on to point out that science was far from central to Islamic culture and that there were forces within Islam tending to marginalize the foreign sciences -- which is to say that the "marginalists" have their eye on some genuine feature of Islamic culture. To be specific, Greek learning never found a secure institutional home in Islam, as it was eventually to do in the universities of medieval Christendom. One reason why this was so, is that Islamic schools lacked the structure and uniformity of those in the West, particularly at the higher levels. This lack of structure offered freedom to the individual scholar to pursue whatever specialty he wished. Freedom insured diversity and created room for the practitioner of Greek philosophy and science; but it also insured that Islamic schools would never develop a curriculum that systematically taught the foreign sciences. In short Islamic education did nothing to prohibit the foreign sciences; but neither did it do much to support them. This fact may help us to understand the decline of Islamic science in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

David C. Lindberg
The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450

Christianity and Science

Tyson has passed along a couple of links: the first deals with Francis Collins, author of The Language of God, who was appointed by President Obama to be the Director of the National Institute of Health. Since Collins is a Christian, it is alleged by some that he can't possibly be a good choice for this position. You see, Christians simply must be anti-science. They're scary.

The second link is to an interesting disparity between how scientists view themselves politically and how the public views them.

And since it's on topic, James Hannam's book God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science has been published. Go get one.

Linkfest

-- Between Two Worlds has links to some audio recordings of C. S. Lewis reading some of his own works. The first two are at the BBC, and I've heard them before. Here's a 14-minute recording of one of his early radio readings that were collected into the book Beyond Personality, which later became part 3 of Mere Christianity. And here is a brief 2 minute introduction to The Great Divorce. The rest I haven't heard. Here are three very short clips (about a half minute each) from The Four Loves, as well as the same essay from Beyond Personality mentioned above. For purchase, you can get The C. S. Lewis Recordings, three and a half hours, including the entirety of The Great Divorce and "C. S. Lewis Speaks His Mind," which consists of several subjects. Via DI1.

-- Amy Alkon links to a post by Wendy McElroy on an apparently innocent senior citizen who has been locked up for sexually abusing a child. Alkon's post has some interesting comments and links by readers, including this one. Via Dr. Helen.

-- Arlo Guthrie's a Republican. Wow.

-- This is old news, and you've probably heard it before; I'm sure I have. But re-reading this reminded me that there is real evil in this world. In the 1980s, two daughters accused their father (all Christians) of sexually molesting them, and in fact of forcing them to participate in a Satanic cult. When the father denied it, his pastor and the investigators told him that of course he wouldn't remember it because he would have blocked out the memories. They were able to put him into some kind of trance state, and told him that if he could imagine these acts in that state, they were actual memories coming to the surface. His pastor specifically told him that these imaginings were from God and God would not reveal anything to him that didn't actually happen. The father was very gullible and very susceptible to suggestion, so he believed them and confessed. Of course, it was all completely bogus. He spent 15 years in jail (released in 2003) for committing horrific crimes that never even occurred.

-- Here's an awesome picture of the Space Shuttle docked with the International Space Station.

-- The dullest blog in the world is up and running again!

By Jove

A week ago, scientists noticed a black spot on Jupiter. Apparently the gas giant was struck by a sizable asteroid or comet. CosmicLog has the details. Jupiter functions as a guard for the inner solar system, deflecting asteroids and comets out of Earth's path. Were it not for Jupiter, the Earth would be struck by asteroids a thousand times more frequently, enough to prevent the possibility of advanced life evolving. Or to put it the other way round, in order for advanced life to exist on a planet, its solar system will require a planet the size and distance of Jupiter. If it were smaller or further, it wouldn't have enough gravitational impact to protect the inner planets; but if it were closer or larger, its gravitational effects would disrupt their orbits. It has to be exactly the size and distance it is. This is one criterion of the Anthropic Principle. Thank God for Jupiter.

That's the good news. The bad news is that we're still vulnerable and need to take the threat of an asteroid strike seriously. Part of the story here is that no one saw this asteroid before it hit Jupiter. It was a complete surprise. Of course we don't have as many electronic eyes out there as we do closer to home; but to give Jupiter as big of a black eye as it did, it must have been big enough so that it should have been seen beforehand. It's only a matter of time before something that big comes our way.

I know some people will not take seriously the claim that the Earth is in danger of being hit with a large asteroid or comet. It doesn't happen that often, it's just a doomsday scenario, etc. I'm reminded of a Dilbert cartoon about pessimists and optimists. If it's been a long time since anything bad has happened (an asteroid strike in this case), the optimist says, "We're safe forever." The pessimist says, "We're due."

(cross-posted on Quodlibeta)

Space programs

I didn't link to the plenitude of commentaries on Apollo 11's 40th anniversary because they were ... umm ... plenitudinous. But here is an excellent essay by Rand Simberg that I highly recommend. It goes into the difficulties NASA has faced since the moon landings, the problems the new NASA program has faced, and rethinks the process.

40 years

It was 40 years ago today that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon and two people -- people just like you and me -- got out and wandered around for a while. As a space enthusiast, I'm disappointed that we only went to the Moon six times and then have spent the last 37 years piddling about in low-earth orbit. We should have had permanently-manned stations on the Moon by the early 1970s (check out the Moon Society if you're like-minded), and by now we should have had manned bases on the moons of Jupiter.

Anyway, here's audio of the first Moon landing (strong language warning):



And here's video:

Three points on abortion

-- The Anchoress quotes Sen. Tom Coburn as saying, "We now record fetal heartbeats at 14 days post-conception. We record fetal brainwaves at 39 days post-conception." Coburn, an OBGyn, makes an interesting argument about this, but my focus is in the claim about brainwaves. I had heard that there were measurable brainwaves at 40 days gestation before, but elsewhere, I've read that they're not actually observable until about 25 weeks gestation. I'm more inclined to believe an OBGyn, but does anyone out there have any info on this, and why there are such disparate answers? This raises two points: 1) if there's a functioning brain at 39 days, which is before nearly all abortions are performed, it becomes very difficult to maintain that the fetus is not a living human being, independent of the mother. By "independent" I don't mean that it could survive outside the mother so early. Rather, I mean that the fetus is not merely a part of the mother, but gives every appearance of being a little person in its own right. It has its own organs, including a functioning heart and brain. 2) If there are brainwaves there are very probably pain receptors by the time abortions are actually performed. So an abortion is not merely removing a clump of undifferentiated tissue. It is submitting what gives every appearance of being a helpless human being to a painful death.

-- Closely related, fetuses have been shown to have memories at 30 weeks gestation, and "34-week-old fetuses are able to store information and retrieve it four weeks later." Most abortions, however, are performed long before this point.

-- Also via the Anchoress, President Obama apparently lied to the Pope regarding his commitment to reduce the number of abortions. What is at issue is that, while telling the Pope this, his health care bill would include taxpayer-funded abortion, something that has been shown to increase the number of abortions by 20-35%. The study showing this increase was performed by Planned Parenthood, so it wasn't biased in favor of the pro-life platform.

H*R

I can't believe this cartoon. It's just all the loading screens.

Cool

The Codex Sinaiticus is online. This is one of the oldest Bibles (with half of the Old Testament and all of the New) that have survived, dating to the fourth century AD. It's things like this that the Internet is for.

Neo-geocentrism

A big part of the claim that Christianity is at war with science is geocentrism, the belief that the earth is at the center of the universe. As readers of this blog are aware, this issue is almost entirely misunderstood: in the ancient/medieval cosmology, the closer you were to the center of the universe, the less privileged and esteemed you were. This is precisely why hell is even closer to the center of the universe than the surface of the earth, and why Dante placed Satan at the exact center of hell (and thus of the entire universe), immobilized in a field of ice.

The misunderstanding is that since the premoderns thought the earth was at the literal center of the universe, they must also have thought it was the metaphorical center as well. It confuses geocentrism with anthropocentrism. But this can only be maintained by completely ignoring their Aristotelian cosmology, according to which the universe was arranged in concentric spheres, with God on the outside as the prime mover. The furthest place in the universe from God, therefore -- the furthest place in a sphere from what is outside the sphere --, is at its center. Of course, this ignores the fact that in Christian theology God is not merely transcendent to the universe but omnipresent within it as well; nevertheless, the premoderns maintained that the closer you were to the center, the less valuable you were. This has been amply demonstrated by Dennis Danielson in his essays "Copernicus and the Tale of the Pale Blue Dot", "The Great Copernican Cliché", and chapter 6 in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion; Humphrey wrote an enlightening post on this issue as well.

But I find it interesting that when Christians are told that their worldview requires a belief that conflicts with science, some respond by embracing the belief in question. Thus, there are geocentric ministries today which argue that being a Christian requires belief in a geocentric universe -- although they prefer the term "geocentricity" as it doesn't have as much historical baggage. The Geocentricity website is the official site of the Association for Biblical Astronomy, "biblical astronomy" meaning Aristotelian/Ptolemaic astronomy. The second link takes you to a collection of the publications of their journal.

There's another site that bothers me more. When I was in (Protestant) seminary, my favorite theology professor used a book for one of his classes written by a Protestant-turned-Catholic entitled, Not by Faith Alone. I didn't take that class, but I did plan to someday study this book, maybe together with Alister McGrath's Iustitia Dei, and see where I came out. However, the author of Not by Faith Alone has also published a two volume work entitled Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, volume 1 of which deals with "the scientific case for geocentrism", thus absolving me of any requirement to take him seriously. (Update: Just to be clear, I'm not tying the Catholic doctrine of justification to geocentrism. I'm only saying that particular author is not credible.)

The Geocentric Bible is essentially an online book arguing for geocentrism; he says he first heard of this view from a young-earth creationist ministry. This leads to another point: most young-earth ministries have embraced a neo-geocentrism in order to account for the problem of starlight travel time. They argue that the universe we know is actually a white hole -- a black hole so crunched that light begins to escape via quantum tunnelling -- with our galaxy (the Milky Way) at its center. They call it "galacto-centrism" since the earth is only approximately at the universe's center. I critiqued the scientific case for this claim here. For now I'd just like to point out that in arguing for this view, they appeal to the idea that if we're important to God, we should expect to find ourselves at the center of the universe. In other words, they accept the conflation of geocentrism with anthropocentrism, a conflation which is not only unhistorical, but which was invented in order to mock and ridicule Christianity. This strikes me as an extremely unwise concession: when fighting the spirit of the age, you shouldn't let it define the terms of the debate. Moreover, the fact that they have to appeal to geocentrism in order to defend their belief in a young earth makes the latter even less plausible than it already was.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Linkfest

OK, I'm back in Belgium, and had very limited Internet access during my trip to the States. However, I did manage to collect a few interesting links that I thought I'd share (aren't you lucky!).

-- Five reasons Tolkien rocks. Only five?

-- James explains why the common belief that science and religion are in conflict is false. The commenters evidently think their knee-jerk reactions are more reliable than his Ph.D. studies on the subject.

-- Oo de lallies from around the world, including Russia, China, and Israel.

-- Raskolnikov argues about language, meaning, and naturalism.

-- I may have prematurely lamented NASA's desires to return to the Moon. They launched a rocket to scope out potential sites for a station. However, I'm still open to the possibility that we should just skip the Moon and head for Mars.

-- Oldest musical instrument found. It's a flute that's apparently 35,000 years old. Cool.

-- Tyson writes about a heretical movement in Christianity and reviews a book on the Peloponnesian War entitled ... wait for it ... The Peloponnesian War.

-- Some scientists speculate that Saturn's moon Enceladus may have an ocean of water deep below its surface. A large part of the interest here is that the presence of liquid water is one (of several dozen) necessary prerequisites for life to exist.

-- "I once had a girlfriend who quit journalism and went into PR “because it’s more ethical.”" Heh.

-- Buzz Aldrin explains how to get to Mars and why we should get off our butts and do it.

-- John Scalzi, author of Old Man's War, consoles me about the fact that I'm a middle-aged man writing his first novel.

Islam's influence

My blogging may be spotty for the next few weeks, as I'll be traveling to the States because of a family emergency. In the meantime, here's an essay by physicist Frank Tipler arguing that Islam's contributions to science, mathematics, etc. have been greatly exaggerated:

If one reads history of science textbooks prior to about 1980, one will find very little mention of Muslim “contributions” to physics and astronomy. This is reasonable, because there weren’t any. In the past generation, however, political correctness has dictated that Muslims be given credit for discoveries they did not make.
...
During the Cold War, it was commonplace for leftist academics to attribute many discoveries to scientists in Communist countries, discoveries that had actually been made in the West. So now leftist academics attribute to Muslims discoveries that had actually been made by others.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Islam and peace

A passage in the Qur'an that's upheld as an example of Islam teaching peace is Sura 5 (the Table) verse 32. It states "if any one slew a person -- unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land -- it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people."

The Corner recently raised two interesting points about this passage. First, this idea is not original to the Qur'an, but forms a part of the Babylonian Talmud, written in the 2nd century (and recording traditions that pre-date that).

The second interesting point about this passage is that the verse following it, 5:33, states, "The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter." I think (and I could be wrong) that those who strive against "Allah and His Messenger" refers to those who do not accept Islam. In other words, this passage seems to command Muslims to commit violence against non-Muslims simply for being non-Muslims. At the very least, it puts the previous verse in a different light.