Arguments for God's Existence in Classical Islamic Thought

A Reappraisal of the Discourse

Hannah C. Erlwein

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783110617641
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110617917
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

The endeavour to prove God's existence through rational argumentation was an integral part of classical Islamic theology (kal?m) and philosophy (falsafa), thus the frequently articulated assumption in the academic literature. The Islamic discourse in question is then often compared to the discourse on arguments for God's existence in the western tradition, not only in terms of its objectives but also in terms of the arguments used: Islamic thinkers, too, put forward arguments that have been labelled as cosmological, teleological, and ontological. This book, however, argues that arguments for God's existence are absent from the theological and philosophical works of the classical Islamic era. This is not to say that the arguments encountered there are flawed arguments for God's existence. Rather, it means that the arguments under consideration serve a different purpose than to prove that God exists. Through a close reading of the works of several mutakallim?n and fal?sifa from the 3rd?7th/9th?13th century, such as al-B?qill?n? and Fakhr al-D?n al-R?z? as well as Ibn S?n? and Ibn Rushd, this book proffers a re-evaluation of the discourse in question, and it suggests what its participants sought to prove if it is not that God exists.

1Introduction

The endeavour to prove the existence of God through reason and rational argumentation was an integral part of medieval Islamic theology (kalām) and philosophy (falsafa), it has often been argued in the secondary academic literature. “Both kalām exponents and philosophers showed a keen interest in advancing arguments for the existence of God […] to respond to physicalist atheism [among other motives],”1 Ayman Shihadeh notes in his chapter “The existence of God” in the Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology. In her monograph Freethinkers of Medieval Islam, Sarah Stroumsa notes, in similar fashion, that “[a] significant part of kalām works, written by Muslim […] theologians, is dedicated to the attempt to prove that God does exist,” adding that “[i]n theological summae this discussion [is] presented as the cornerstone of religious thought.”2 In past decades, numerous academic articles have been published which identify and analyse arguments for God’s existence in the works of medieval Islamic thinkers. After Majid Fakhry’s 1957 introductory article “The Classical Islamic Arguments for the Existence of God,”3 Lenn E. Goodman discussed “Al-Ghazālī’s Argument from Creation. (I) & (II)” (1971),4 while Michael E. Marmura examined “Avicenna’s Proof from Contingency for God’s Existence” (1980).5 In 1986, Binyamin Abrahamov proffered an analysis of “al-Kāsim ibn Ibrāhīm’s Argument from Design,”6 and Taneli Kukkonen discussed “Averroes and the Teleological Argument” in 2002.7 A plenitude of other similar article titles could be mentioned. Mention should finally be made of Herbert A. Davidson’s 1987 monograph, Proofs for Eternity, Creation, and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy, the only monograph dedicated to this subject.8 His detailed discussion opens with the remark that “[v]arious procedures for proving the existence of God are […] discernible in medieval Islamic […] philosophy,”9 thus underscoring the role these proofs played in Muslim intellectual history.

* * *

In the secondary academic literature, the medieval Islamic discourse10 on arguments for God’s existence is then frequently linked to the discourse on arguments for God’s existence found in the Western tradition.11 These two discourses with their evident similarities did not merely happen to exist side by side, rather, it has been emphasised, they had a mutual influence on each other: the Islamic discourse first took its inspiration from Greek philosophical thinking and later came to shape the European philosophical tradition in turn. Davidson observes in this regard that “[t]he starting point both for the history of the [Islamic] proofs and the history of their components is, with rare exceptions, Aristotle. […] The direction in which the Aristotelian conceptions developed in the Middle Ages was, however, often determined by the late Greek philosophers […] [such as] Proclus (5 th century) and, in greater measure, John Philoponus (6 th century).”12 With a view to the mutakallimūn in particular, Davidson observes that they “followed what has been called the Platonic procedure [for proving God’s existence], that is, the procedure of first proving the creation of the world and then inferring therefrom the existence of a creator,”13 thus taking their inspiration from Plato’s (427–347) Timaeus.14 Davidson has also drawn attention to the influence Islamic arguments for God’s existence had on the same class of arguments in the Western philosophical tradition. He remarks:15

[f]rom the time of Descartes, there appears a series of both cosmological and ontological proofs of the existence of God as a necessarily existent being. Although precise filiation cannot be traced, inspiration undoubtably came from the medieval cosmological proofs, initiated by Avicenna, of the existence of a being necessarily existent by virtue of itself. Descartes and, to a greater extent, Spinoza and Leibniz were after all familiar with the medieval discussions.

William Lane Craig has likewise stated that the so-called “kalām argument as a proof for God’s existence [this being a particular version of the cosmological argument] originated in the minds of medieval Arabic theologians, who bequeathed it to the West, where it became the centre of a hotly debated controversy.”16

Not only is the medieval Islamic discourse on arguments for God’s existence frequently linked to the discourse on arguments for God’s existence in the Western tradition in terms of their shared objective and mutual influences. The secondary academic literature also establishes a link between the two discourses when applying the classification of arguments primarily associated with the Western tradition to the Islamic arguments. Following Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) classification of arguments for God’s existence as cosmological, teleological, or ontological,17 Islamic arguments are likewise placed in these categories. This has been seen in the article titles mentioned above, and becomes further evident in Davidson’s evaluation that “medieval Islamic […] arguments for the existence of God are, in the main, cosmological; teleological arguments are also found; and no argument is ontological.”18 While there is some disagreement among scholars whether ontological argument for God’s existence do or do not exist in the Islamic tradition,19 the Kantian terminology to classify such arguments is unanimously accepted.

* * *

Contrary to the widely held view, described above, that medieval Islamic theologians and philosophers sought to prove that God exists, this book argues that proofs for God’s existence are absent from their works. By this, I do not mean that there existed the endeavour to prove God’s existence, yet the arguments employed are either flawed or unconvincing so that they fail in their endeavour; this book is not concerned with evaluating strengths or weaknesses of arguments, which has been the concern of many existing publications. Rather, when arguing that arguments for God’s existence are absent from the works of medieval Islamic thinkers, I am referring to the objective of these arguments—“objective” in the sense of the conclusion they seek: what are they meant to prove? What do they seek to establish? (There is, of course, another sense of the “objective” of arguments, such as that they may be meant to convince an opponent, to baffle, or to invite to reflection; this is not the sense this book is primarily concerned with.) The central thesis of this book is that medieval Islamic theologians and philosophers did not intend or seek to prove that God exists. This implies that to identify certain arguments in their works as arguments for God’s existence, as frequently done in the secondary academic literature, seems to pose a misunderstanding of what their arguments are meant to establish. This book, therefore, proffers a reappraisal of the discourse which, in the scholarly meta-discourse, has been regarded as the medieval Islamic discourse on the proof of God’s existence. The chapters to follow will examine and explain what participants in this discourse sought to prove, if it is not the existence of God. In doing so, this book does not attempt a thorough comparison between the Islamic discourse in question and the Western philosophical discourse on arguments for God’s existence; while such a comparative approach would certainly be interesting as well as insightful,20 it is not the concern proper of this book, which is concerned with the intellectual tradition of Islam exclusively. Yet, it seems appropriate, in order to put forward the thesis that arguments for God’s existence are absent from the works of medieval Islamic thinkers, to clarify first what arguments for God’s existence in general try to do and how the different kinds of arguments go about it. In clarifying this terminological and conceptual issue, reference needs to be made to arguments for God’s existence put forward by thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition, who were undoubtedly concerned with this problem. This clarification shall serve to highlight the way in which the objective of their arguments differs from that of the Islamic arguments, which explains why the latter arguments are not to be identified as arguments for God’s existence.

* * *

While especially in recent decades a number of different classes of arguments for God’s existence have been proposed,21 I shall limit myself to discussing the three main classes identified by Kant—the cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments—since the Islamic arguments this book is concerned with have been, in the secondary academic literature, classified making recourse to these labels.

Notwithstanding differences in detail, the way a cosmological argument for God’s existence works can be summarised as follows:22

cosmological arguments are, as the name implies, attempts to infer the existence of God from the existence of the cosmos or universe. Such arguments may take as their starting point the existence of the universe as a whole, the existence of particular objects or the existence of even the individual object. These arguments are sometimes called first-cause arguments [sic] because they attempt to infer that God must exist as the first cause or ultimate cause of the universe.

Many thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition have been credited with attempting to prove God’s existence through a cosmological argument, among them Plato and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). One much discussed example is Thomas Aquinas’ (1224/5–1274) famous “Five Ways” put forward in his Summa Theologica. There, Aquinas answers to the objection that “[i]t seems that God does not exist” and that “everything we see in this world can be accounted for by another principle, supposing God did not exist” by noting: “The existence of God can be proved in five ways.” The second way, to mention but one example, starts, in a manner characteristic of cosmological arguments, from the observation that “[i]n the world of sensible things we find that there is an order of efficient causes.” By ruling out that things can be their own efficient cause, and that there could be an infinite chain of efficient causes, he reaches the conclusion that “it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause [outside and in addition to the world], to which everyone gives the name of God.”23

A teleological argument, a subcategory of the cosmological argument, aspires to prove God’s existence in the following way: “it too begins with the existence of the cosmos. It begins, however, not merely with its existence but with its character as a cosmos, an orderly universe. It is often referred to as the argument from design [sic].”24 A famous proponents of this class of argument is William Paley (1743–1805). The title of his work, Natural Theology or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, indicates the nature of his argument: suppose someone were to stumble across a watch. Observing the intricate design of said watch, “the inference,” Paley argues, “is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker, that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.”25 The watch and its design serve Paley as an analogy to the world and nature, which likewise manifest evidence of design: “every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the world of nature.”26 This insight, Paley continues, necessitates the “immense conclusion, that there is a God; a perceiving, intelligent, designing Being; at the head of creation, and from whose will it proceeded.”27

Finally, an ontological argument for God’s existence is one which “takes its departure from a given concept of the nature of God. Through nothing more than an analysis of the concept, it undertakes […] to deduce the actual existence of the corresponding object.”28 Famous in this regard is Anselm of Canterbury’s (c. 1033–1109) ontological argument for God’s existence put forward in his Proslogion, and after him René Descartes’ (1596–1650) version of the argument in his Meditations. Anselm, for instance, conceived of God as “a being than which no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm (d. 225/860)
• 3 Yaʿqūb b. Isḥāq al-Kindī (d. 256/873)
• 4 Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944)
• 5 Abū ’l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (d. 324/936)
• 6 Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. al-Ṭayyib al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1013)
• 7 Abū ʿAlī Ibn Sīnā (d. 427/1037)
• 8 Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111)
• 9 Muḥammad b. Aḥmad Ibn Rushd (d. 595/1198)
• 10 Muḥammad b. ʿUmar Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210)
• 11 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects