God in Proof. Nathan Schneider
the Mediterranean, to the Levant and Persia, but it stopped at the Indus River. India was at the eastern edge of his world. East is also where the sun rises, and the light-as-truth symbolism in that fact meant a lot to Ibn Tufayl—as much as anyone a fugitive from Plato’s cave. Ibn Tufayl was, so to speak, an orientalist: a Westerner who looked to the East for a more spiritual, exotic alternative to the familiar humdrum. People there in Andalusia knew math and science, perhaps, but they were deaf to deeper meanings, to the hidden unity in everything. His mission was to explain the secrets of “oriental philosophy,” and to reconcile them with ideas that were more familiar, and more conventionally orthodox.
An orientalist impulse like this filled my family’s religion when I was growing up. We would take trips out to California to visit an Indian guru, and I got my first pomegranates and mangoes from his hands. We went there for an escape, or a return, to something less restrictive and more pure than the ordinary and familiar. I took to the quest. One night, at the guru’s ashram, my parents heard me saying through a dream, Keep the lights on forever, which would’ve made Ibn Tufayl proud. He had a very serious affection for light.
India deserves a further digression from Hayy’s story. At the time that Ibn Tufayl was writing, India was in a golden age of proofs. Westerners today tend to gravitate toward India’s more unfamiliar outgrowths—pantheist and polytheist forms of Hinduism, or Buddhism. But medieval India didn’t just have proofs; it had a personal, transcendent God, one not so different from what you would find in the West. There were debates about suffering, bodiless minds, and eternity.1
The heyday of theistic proofs in India came during the tenth and eleventh centuries—about the same time as in the Islamic world—with roots going back at least to the fourth. In debates against atheistic Buddhists and materialist Hindus, the Nyaya school of Hinduism honed a doctrine of God and the proofs to defend it. The titles of Nyaya scholars’ books hint at what it all meant to them: Udayana’s Flower-Offering of Logic, Jayanta Bhatta’s Bouquet of Reasoning. Proofs were an act of devotion as well as disputation. There was a moral argument that there must be a lord over the law of karma; an argument that language could only have arisen from divine tutelage; and one that the Vedas—the ancient Hindu scriptures—could only have had a divine author.
The best-developed Nyaya proof was one from “composition”; just as the pieces of a clay pot need a potter to join them—this was a favorite Nyaya analogy—the pieces of the world must have had someone to put them together. The Nyaya school had no doctrine of creation-from-nothing, as in the West, but its scholars argued that an intelligent agent must have fastened composite things as we find them, or at least fastened what in turn fastened them. They went on to reason that this first fastener must also be bodiless, omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good. More or less, it’s the familiar God of monotheism.
Rediscovering the familiar is as much a part of the allure of the East—or of the Moon, or of an island, or of the ancients—as encountering the exotic. I saw this early on by way of Indian gurus who succeeded in acclimating to California culture. Americans were drawn to these gurus by what seemed familiar as well as by what was new. It’s what Ibn Tufayl saw, as an Andalusian reading strange Persian books. When you’re between worlds, you look for what little they share. If something is true there and true here, its proof is that much stronger.
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The diverging stories of Hayy’s origin converge at his infancy, and his journey begins in earnest. A doe finds him, adopts him, and suckles him into childhood. He grows up at her side, imitating her and the other animals on their island. His sole concern is to live like them at this stage, taking care of material needs and nothing else. The doe teaches him to eat wild fruit and drink from streams. She keeps him warm in the cold. He learns no human language, but he can mimic birdcalls and grasp their meaning. Soon, though, he begins to need more than the animals can teach.
By his seventh year, Hayy starts realizing that there’s something different about himself. He learns to use sharpened sticks to ward off hostile creatures. Troubled by his private parts, he covers them and eventually makes himself a costume of eagle feathers. Finally, childhood proper comes to an end when the doe grows ill. She stops moving, and Hayy tries to save her by doing surgery on her insides. But, rooting around in there, he finds that her life force—her sunlike heat—is already gone. She has moved on from her body. The best he can do is autopsy.
He doesn’t know it yet himself, but Hayy’s entrée into medicine also marks the start of his career as a philosopher. Ibn Tufayl’s readers would have recognized this. What medical knowledge was available at the time came mostly from the Greek textbooks that Muslims had collected in their conquests around the Mediterranean. It was a small step from the Greeks’ medical teachings to their theories about the nature of the universe, and each informed the other. The cosmos and the body were intertwined. Ibn Tufayl reflects this belief in his book. He divides Hayy’s life into seven-year segments, a formula that came from Galen, the Roman-era Greek physician. As Hayy’s body matures, he steadily gets wiser about ultimate things.
There were other reasons for the affinity between philosophy and medicine in those days. Philosophy was sometimes considered a suspect activity, a foreign science, spoken of in Arabic using a Greek loanword: falsafa. (Ibn Tufayl judiciously uses hikma instead, a native Arabic word for “wisdom.”) Philosophy attracted Muslims as well as the Jews and Christians who lived among them—making their conversations both rich and potentially subversive. But philosophers often had friends in high places; many of the most famous ones were physicians in royal courts. Ibn Tufayl himself served as doctor to the sultan in Granada, which helped legitimize his speculations. In turn, pronouncing on cosmic truths must have lent some needed gravitas to the medieval physicians’ rather primitive business. Thus it was fitting for Hayy’s career as a philosopher to begin with a surgery.
After the doe’s death, Hayy studies and dissects other animals. He moves into a cave, discovers fire, and learns to cook meat. At twenty-one years old—7 × 3—he begins to venture into metaphysics, speculating on abstractions like variety, unity, the elements, size, forms, and measurement. He discovers the existence of the soul and, by extension, the baseness of his body. Observing the stars, at age twenty-eight—7 × 4—he charts their movements, and they lead him to infer a hidden unity. But the defining moment for Hayy comes at age thirty-five—7 × 5—when he becomes convinced of the existence of a God. Nothing is the same afterward.
The proof doesn’t come all at once. Hayy’s mind has to reason its way through a replay of the history of proofs so far. First, with echoes of Plato’s Timaeus, he concludes that anything that comes into existence must have a cause, beginning with a being who created them according to the blueprints of eternal, perfect forms. He also marvels at the order of the natural world. Like Aristotle, looking up at the stars, he reasons that everything in motion must have been moved by something else; since the sequence can’t go on to infinity, there has to be a first mover. Each of these observations seems to point at the same thing, though even if he could speak he doesn’t know its name. The book’s readers did. This was God, more or less like the God of Islam, but made out of island reason, without a Qur’an or prophets or the law.
Hayy’s speculations start to get even more adventurous, beyond just repeating the ancients. Through him, Ibn Tufayl shows us what Islamic civilization had already added to the Greek proofs. Nobody impressed him more than Ibn Sina, the great eleventh-century Persian, also a physician. Ibn Sina provided the core of the oriental philosophy that Hayy, alone on his oriental island, would discover. Actually, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is the also name of a book by Ibn Sina, and Ibn Tufayl cribbed it as a tribute.
Ibn Sina, too, began with Aristotle. He was especially interested in the idea of something existing necessarily, by virtue of itself. Aristotle used this concept to argue for an eternal universe, but for Ibn Sina it alluded to more. It sounded like God.2
Nothing has to cause a thing like this to exist. It just exists, and it has to. The universe wouldn’t make sense if it didn’t, like a painting with no surface. Other things either exist contingently, having been caused by something else, or are merely possible and don’t