Hannah Christine Erlwein - Arguments for God’s Existence in Classical Islamic Thought: A Reappraisal of the Discourse

Hannah C. Erlwein

Arguments for God s Existence in Classical Islamic Thought

ISBN 978-3-11-061764-1

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-061956-0

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-061791-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937687.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Cover image: EA1978.2573 Zakariya ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini, The angel Ruh holding the
celestial spheres.

Image Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

www.degruyter.com

This book grew out of my doctoral research on arguments for Gods existence in the classical Islamic tradition conducted at SOAS University of London. First and foremost I am indebted to express my gratitude to my main supervisor Dr Mustafa Shah. With encouragement and probing questions he pointed me in the right direction and taught me what academic work means. His scholarly advice remains a guide to me. Gratitude is owed also to my other two supervisors, Prof Muhammad Abdel Haleem and Prof Stephan Sperl, whoduring and after my PhDdid a lot to encourage me in my academic work.

Dr Tony Street and Dr Jan-Peter Hartung, the examiners of my PhD thesis, shall be thanked as well. Their comments and suggestions were insightful and helped me improve the presentation of my ideas.

I also wish to thank the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) for the scholarship I received, which helped facilitate my doctoral research.

Thanks are due to Prof Peter Adamson who encouraged me to turn my PhD thesis into a book during my time as a postdoctoral researcher at LMU Munich. Being invited to present a paper on the research topic of this book at a workshop organised by him was a welcome opportunity and allowed me to flesh out my argument.

I wish to express my thanks also to Dorothea Khler, Sophie Wagenhofer, and especially Alice Meroz of De Gruyter whose very friendly and professional manner facilitated the publication of this book.

There have been numerous people along the way leading to the publication of this book whose support and presence in my life means a lot to me. Some of them had to endure months and years of my thinking out loud about Islamic theologians and philosophers. I wish to thank them.

Above all, I am grateful to my parents. In so many ways. To them I dedicate this book.

The endeavour to prove the existence of God through reason and rational argumentation was an integral part of medieval Islamic theology ( kalm ) and philosophy ( falsafa ), it has often been argued in the secondary academic literature. Both kalm exponents and philosophers showed a keen interest in advancing arguments for the existence of God [] to respond to physicalist atheism [among other motives], thus underscoring the role these proofs played in Muslim intellectual history.

* * *

In the secondary academic literature, the medieval Islamic discourse

[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 kalm argument as a proof for Gods 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.

Not only is the medieval Islamic discourse on arguments for Gods existence frequently linked to the discourse on arguments for Gods 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 Kants (17241804) classification of arguments for Gods existence as cosmological, teleological, or ontological, 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 Gods existence are absent from their works. By this, I do not mean that there existed the endeavour to prove Gods 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 Gods existence are absent from the works of medieval Islamic thinkers, I am referring to the objective of these argumentsobjective 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 Gods 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 Gods 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 Gods existence; while such a comparative approach would certainly be interesting as well as insightful, intellectual tradition of Islam exclusively. Yet, it seems appropriate, in order to put forward the thesis that arguments for Gods existence are absent from the works of medieval Islamic thinkers, to clarify first what arguments for Gods 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 Gods 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 Gods existence.