I note that you fail to mention the Vietnam war, a debacle where military might proved ineffective in the face of persistent guerilla counter warfare. Some defence analysts have already drawn a comparison with the West’s current military might in the face of Islamist persistence.
I didn’t mention Vietnam because I don’t think the social or military context of the West is comparable, in general, to the Vietnam era. Socially, the US is much more confident of its role in world affairs now than it was in the Vietnam era, although still not confident enough, in my eyes. Militarily, we have an all-volunteer army which actually represents a higher average educational attainment than the civilian population, which is the reverse of the Vietnam-era situation. Thus, I would put the West, mainly the US, as in a position more akin to the North in the US Civil War than the US of the Vietnam era.
Here’s a relevant passage from Hegel on Kant’s dualism (in your example, his dualism of empiricism and metaphysics):
“In every dualistic system, and especially in that of Kant, the fundamental defect makes itself visible in the inconsistency of unifying at one moment what a moment before had been explained to be independent and therefore incapable of unification. And then, at the very moment after unification has been alleged to be the truth, we suddenly come upon the doctrine that the two elements, which, in their true status of unification, had been refused all independent subsistence, are only true and actual in their state of separation. Philosophising of this kind wants the little penetration needed to discover, that this shuffling only evidences how unsatisfactory each one of the two terms is. And it fails simply because it is incapable of bringing two thoughts together. (And in point of form there are never more than two.) It argues an utter want of consistency to say, on the one hand, that the understanding only knows phenomena, and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this knowledge, by such statements as ‘Cognition can go no further’; ‘Here is the natural and absolute limit of human knowledge.’”
Read Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols”, where he deduces the psychological needs driving Kantian philosophy.
Someone once said, “Either Jesus was the Son of God or he was insane”. Your “third way” is incoherent in light of this.
Anyway, you miss the point again and again. If a book that claims to be perfect and contain no variant readings (you do understand how the history of manuscripts works, right?), because it was dictated by God directly, can be shown to have variant readings (forget the whole “God speaks Arabic” and the fact that there are non-Arabic words in the Koran), that is proof that the book was not dictated by God. This falls outside of the Kantian realm of “unprovable metaphysical statements” altogether, partially because the Koran itself opens itself up to empirical disproof by making the claims it does about its non-empirical origins.
Seriously, you don’t seem to understand the first things about textual criticism (not literary criticism, textual criticism) and the implications it has for Koranic theology. Textual criticism shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the the Koran is not what it claims to be. You are so ignorant on this point I feel like I’m explaining quantum physics to a chimpanzee. If the Koran made a more limited claim, akin to the Biblical claim that the authors are inspired by God or by Jesus, it wouldn’t be as big a deal that there were variant readings. If you don’t get that, you are missing the entire point. You are entitled to your opinion, but your opinion is just wrong factually.
If we followed your method of textual analysis, fake Platonic dialogues would still be considered the work of the actual Plato. Believe me, that’s how things used to work, but thankfully we’ve progressed beyond that.
