God in Proof. Nathan Schneider
you’re reading. As I write, the words begin as only possibilities, blinking one by one into actual existence. I, the one writing, am a contingent being if there ever was one. I follow this story, from one contingency to another, in the hope of reaching a ground beneath them all. Whatever lurks there, as something must: that’s necessity.
Ibn Sina then collects these concepts into a proof, similar to Aristotle’s argument from motion. An infinite regress of contingent things causing other things is absurd. There must, at the end of the line, be a necessary being, one that depends on nothing else to account for its existence.
What’s really distinctive—and really “oriental,” in Ibn Tufayl’s view—is Ibn Sina’s interpretation of what it all means. He analyzes this concept of necessity and finds a God of pure intellect who is unitary, good, and beautiful. Intellect, in particular, is key. By contemplating a proof of such a God, one can actually reach its object. One can see, feel, and know God. This is contact. This is for real. As he reached the climax of his proof, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy started to feel its power.
But first Hayy ran into a hitch, which plagued him for years on end. For all his persistence of thought on that little island, he knew of just one question that wouldn’t lead him to an answer.
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The man who would become Ibn Tufayl’s successor as Andalusia’s leading philosopher, Ibn Rushd, used to tell a story.3 Still young and inexperienced, Ibn Rushd arrived at his first audience with Sultan Abu Ya’qub—the exalted Commander of the Faithful, and so on—to find him talking alone with Ibn Tufayl. The first thing the sultan said to Ibn Rushd as he entered terrified him. “What do the philosophers believe about the heavens?” he demanded. “Are they eternal or created?”
This was a loaded question, a test. Ibn Rushd probably knew something about the answer—he would later write a definitive commentary on Aristotle—but the problem was whether to admit it. Aristotle’s unmoved mover appealed to Muslims, along with Christians and Jews, except for one big problem: it presides over an eternal universe. That would contradict the first verse of Genesis, for one, as well as what passages about creation seem to be saying throughout the Qur’an. The God of scripture was supposed to have created the universe with a beginning in time, out of nothing. Sultan Abu Ya’qub’s question, for this time and place, was philosophy at its most dangerous. It didn’t help that the sultan’s Almohad dynasty had a brutal policy of intolerance for whatever didn’t fit their literalistic kind of Islam.
The authority of ancient philosophy and that of Muhammad’s revelations were at odds: one seemed to say the universe is eternal, the other that it had a definite beginning. Ibn Sina had brought the God of philosophy a bit closer to one recognizable by his fellow Muslims, but it wasn’t close enough. His God still exists coeternally with its universe, like Aristotle’s, and against the most common interpretation of the Qur’an.
Ibn Rushd knew this well enough to keep his mouth shut. Could he be punished for studying Aristotle’s heretical teachings? “I was seized with consternation and did not know what to say,” Ibn Rushd wrote. At first he pretended not to know. For all the awkwardness of the moment, though, Ibn Tufayl seemed curiously unconcerned.
Proofs for the existence of God in the medieval Islamic world always hinged on whether to insist on creation from nothing or follow Aristotle back through eternity; you had to choose one or the other. The argument for creation had a head start thanks to the sixth-century Christian philosopher John Philoponus, who lived in Alexandria in the decades before it came under Muslim rule.4 He used Aristotelian methods to derive a seemingly un-Aristotelian conclusion.
Aristotle’s mathematics held that there can’t be an infinite number of any things in existence, or anything infinitely large. It would lead to unconscionable absurdities—for instance, ∞ – 1 = ∞. An infinitely long sequence of causes couldn’t happen either, for similar reasons. (This occurs to Hayy on his island.) But if Aristotle was right about infinity, as John Philoponus saw it, he must have been wrong about the eternity of the universe. Just as there can’t be infinitely many causes, there can’t be an infinite quantity of time or events or motions. Matter, too, is changeable and fickle—how can it be coeternal with the divine mind? The universe must be finite. Time must be finite. There must have been, therefore, a beginning, a creation, and a creator. Aristotle himself feared that if he was wrong about the eternal universe, “there is no alternative to the world’s generation being from night and everything being together and from that which is not.”5 Creation from nothing—from “night”—wasn’t a prospect he relished. But John Philoponus, a Christian, emphatically did. So did a lot of those who read him in the medieval Middle East. Among the first of Islam’s philosophers, al-Kindi, introduced his ideas to Muslims, while Sa’adia ben Yosef brought them to Arabic-speaking Jews. As opposed to Aristotle’s physics, they came closer to the logic of Plato: the universe itself must have a cause. From such parts, these men assembled proofs—not for the eternal God of the ancients, but for the creator in scripture.
This was a task most famously carried on by Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad at-Tusi al-Ghazali, who died early in the twelfth century. Rather than an eccentric courtier, he was a theology professor and legal scholar with an important teaching post, well poised for his influence to spread and to last.
In his famous polemic, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali lists twenty of philosophy’s most grievous mistakes. The first and the worst, from which the others flow, is the eternity of the universe. He mounts his attack against it on several fronts, refuting the philosophers’ interpretation of celestial motions and, in the footsteps of Philoponus and al-Kindi, showing the absurdity of an infinite past. Using philosophy against philosophy, he lists self-contradiction after self-contradiction. Al-Ghazali’s chief targets were Ibn Sina and his predecessor, al-Farabi, whose followers—“Muslims in name only”—he accuses of moral depravity as well as philosophical error.6 While al-Ghazali ultimately adopts the basic structure of Ibn Sina’s proof for God’s existence, he’s careful to insist that this God is the creator of the universe, from nothing.
He wasn’t interested in bending Islam around philosophy. People called al-Ghazali himself the “proof of Islam,” so fully did he embody orthodox religion. The God he was after was a God who would make a difference, who made a world that couldn’t be confused with a godless one, or with one run by some distant narcissist like Aristotle described. A God that didn’t create the universe from nothing was not worth his time.
The medieval proof from creation found an unlikely defender much more recently in the evangelical philosopher William Lane Craig. Even as a boy, growing up in a not especially pious family, Craig remembers—proverbially enough—looking up at the stars at night and intuiting that all of it must point back, somehow, to a first cause. That cause got a name when, thanks to a girl in his high school German class, he became a born-again Christian. He studied philosophy at Wheaton, an evangelical college. But only a bit later, while trudging through Frederick Copleston’s nine-volume History of Philosophy, did he learn that his childhood intuition had been thought of before by medieval Arabs and Jews. He decided he had to go back to school and study it.
“I wanted to resolve once and for all in my own mind whether this was a sound argument,” he says. “It captivated me.”
When he began doctoral work in philosophy during the mid-1970s, Craig read everything he could about the argument from creation. In translation, he studied versions of it by al-Kindi, Sa’adia, and al-Ghazali. He measured what they said against the latest science—the big bang, the expanding universe, the mathematics of infinity—and he concluded that they were right. In thousand-year-old Arabic texts, this evangelical from the American Midwest found a simple, powerful syllogism he could work with. He summarized what they had said and added modern evidence to support it, step by step:
1.Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
a.Intuition suggests that from nothing, nothing comes.
b.Nothing we know of came from nothing.
2.The universe began