The Existence of God-5
The Existence of God
Al-Baqilani (d. 1013) who belonged to the second generation of Ash‘arite doctors and who is credited with refining the methods of Kalam, sums up this argument in succinct way.
The world being temporal (hadith), he writes, it must of necessity have a Maker and Fashioner (muhdith wa musawwir), “just as writing must have a writer, a picture must have a painter and building a builder.”
To this argument, however, he adds two others in which the ‘middle term’ differs but which reveal the same dialectical structure. In the first, he maintains that the priority of certain things over others presupposes an “Agent who made them prior” since priority does not belong by nature to a pair of equals; and this “determinant of priority” is God.
In the second, he introduces a concept of contingency (jawaz) and argues that things in themselves are capable of receiving various ‘forms’ or qualities. The fact that existing things are endowed with certain determined ‘forms’ presupposes a ‘determinant’ who has determined that they should receive these ‘forms’ and no others; and this ‘determinant’ is God.
The element common to these three arguments, it will be noticed, is the “principle of determination” which they all invoke. Only the first argument, however, presupposes in addition the beginning of the world or its temporality.
As to the third, it constitutes the basis of the argument a contingentia mundi (dalil al-jawaz) which was later developed by Al-Juwayni (d. 1086) as Averroes states in Al-Khasf, in a treatise which has not come to us, Al-Risalat al-Nizamiyyah.
This proof, as Wensinck rightly observes, is affiliated to Ibn Sina (d. 1037) who seems to follow the lead of Al-Farabi (d. 950) in his respect, as Madkour has shown in his monograph on Al-Farabi.
In his major treatise, Al-Irshad, Al-Juwayni sets forth the more popular argument from temporality or huduth. “if the temporality of the world (hadath) is established and if it is established that (the world) has a beginning (muftatah al-wujud), since the temporal can equally exist or not exist … reason requires that (the world) must have a determinant (mukhassis) who determined its actual existence.”
Al-Baghdadi’s argument, as expounded in Usul ‘al-Din, differs little from that of either Al-Baqilani or Al-Juwayni. All rest, as we have seen, on the thesis that the world consists of atoms and accidents which have no subsistent being in themselves since they cannot endure for two moments of time. What, we might ask, is the extent of their debt to ‘Abul-Hasan al-Ash‘ari? The publication recently of Kitab al-Luma‘ enables us to give a provisional answer to this question, pending the discovery of fresh material.
The arguments of Al-Ash‘ari in this treatise has a distinct Quranic ring. It has nothing of the dialectical stringency of the later arguments and rests on the observation of the ‘phases’ of man’s growth from “a drop of water, to a leech to an embryo,” which the Qur’an has rendered classical.
In so far as it is impossible for man himself to cause this change in his condition (tahawwul), the author argues, it is necessary that an “Agent should have transformed him from one phase to the other and disposed him according to his actual state;” for it impossible that this should happen without an agent of transformation, and by analogy the whole universe requires such an “agent of transformation.”
This terse argument is of course in keeping with the nature of Al-Luma‘, as an introductory treatise, but confirms nevertheless the view that Ash‘arite Kalam was not fully developed by the beginning of the 10th century so that the authors of this period in general were content with purely rhetorical arguments based on the Qur’an or the Traditions.
It is only with Al-Baqilani that a rigorous application of syllogistic methods of proof begins to make its appearance. But even here as we have seen no attempt at an elaborate analysis of the logical concepts involved is made.
