Thomas Aquinas? William of Ockham? Mere curiosities today, one might argue; part of an irrelevant tradition of religious superstition. They [the philosophers] address the full range of philosophical topics, from ethics and political philosophy to logic, philosophy of language, you name it. This was an era when Muslim thinkers were at the forefront of reasoned debate in mathematics, science and philosophy. Adamson, a specialist in ancient and medieval philosophy, highlights in his latest book Philosophy in the Islamic World just how influential certain theologians and mystics from this milieu have been.
What Avicenna wants to do is show you that although all the things we experience directly are indeed contingent, there is also something else that exists necessarily, in other words, whose very nature guarantees that it exists. I am contingent, meaning that I am the sort of thing that could easily have failed to exist.
Now Avicenna observes that the aggregate whole of all contingent things — in other words the physical universe — is also contingent. After all, everything in the universe is contingent, so taken all together as one thing, it too must be contingent.
Thus it also needs an external cause, just like I do. So it is necessary. And this, of course, is God. There must be something that just has to exist, to explain why everything else has wound up existing.
Of these four, by far the richest tradition for women thinkers is, surprisingly, the last one. The very fabric of the cosmos, from the macroscopic stars to the microscopic world of microbes and everything in between, contains a set of universal, natural laws that produce order.
The result of these laws is that many things in the universe exhibit identifiable purpose. Our eyes were made to see. Our ears were made to hear. Our lungs were made to breathe. Our trees were made to produce fruit and clean air. Our water was made to sustain life, and so on. With so many clear instances of purpose that we repeatedly experience in the different parts of the universe, it is only logical to conclude that the entire universe itself exists as it is for a purpose.
Indeed, teleological language is unavoidable in daily life and especially in life sciences. Charles Darwin himself, often held up as a champion of atheist philosophies, was unable to convey his scientific ideas without frequent recourse to the language of design and purpose.
We are called to engage in thoughtful reflection tafakkur upon all of these signs as a means of recognizing our purpose and attaining conviction. True faith, then, is not the result of an abandonment of reason, as some people imagine. The apparent dichotomy between religion and science is a false one. There are signs of God in everything that we see at every level: the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets, the night and day, the mountains, the oceans, the wind, the clouds, the rain, every plant and animal, all types of fruit and food and drink, the miracles of the human genome, virtues such as love, wisdom, and beauty, and much more than can be counted.
The more we examine these signs and think deeply about them, the more it will reinforce our conviction. Though deductive arguments may be correct, their usefulness is lacking. Worms eat it and produce silk. Bees eat it and produce honey. Goats, camels, and cows eat it and deliver offspring.
Deer eat it and produce musk. Yet, all of these come from one thing. The outside is like white silver and the inside is like pure gold. It is built in this way and, behold! Its walls crack and out comes an animal hearing and seeing with a beautiful shape and a pleasant voice. As we have said, it is natural and intuitive to recognize them. A sky that holds the stars, a land that has fairways, and a sea that has waves? Does not all of this testify to the existence of the Kind, the Knowing?
At this point, someone might accept the idea that the universe was indeed designed, but why should it be only one Creator? Why not many different gods? The answer to this question lies in the fact that the natural laws of the universe are deliberate, consistent, and united in their purpose. All of the forces in the universe work together towards a common end: the creation of the world and the sustaining of life.
We can infer that there is a single intelligent force behind all of it. There is nothing to suggest that one god created gravity, another created electromagnetism, and other gods govern every other natural force, all for a common unified purpose. We would expect the existence of many creators to result in arbitrary, or perhaps competing, natural phenomena.
That explanation may have seemed plausible to ancient societies for which nature appeared to have no discernible order. As science has advanced considerably, we now take for granted our recognition of the consistency and universality of natural laws.
In fact, science could not advance at all without assuming uniform patterns within the fabric of the universe. The law of gravity applies in the same manner to any object with mass, regardless of its location on earth or in deep space. Ironically, modern science implicitly depends upon a monotheistic premise.
Physicists like Paul Davies note that the natural laws of the universe require a plausible explanation. It is simply irrational—and unscientific—to assume the laws of the universe appeared as they are for no reason:.
Tracing the series of explanations for why things are as they are leads to the reasonable conclusion that the universe is designed for life. Scientists have referred to this as the finely-tuned universe or the anthropic principle, that the laws of nature are configured in such astonishingly precise measurements in order for the universe to exist and for life to thrive.
In either case, life would be impossible. Collins elaborates on this thinking by examining six compelling cases of fine-tuning built into the fabric of the universe:. Each of these forces and phenomena are balanced in a way that produces the wondrous universe in which we live. It is hardly rational or logical to assume—without hard evidence—that all of these natural laws, with every miracle that they produce, appeared without cause or purpose.
In the scientific community, the idea of a finely-tuned universe has its critics and skeptics. Even so, the abundant evidence in nature and the plausible, rational argument for theism it produces cannot honestly be denied.
Antony Flew was a long-time atheist philosopher who wrote against theism for over fifty years, but upon examining the emerging evidence of fine-tuning he later came to conclude that some intelligence beyond humanity must account for the origins of life and the complexity of the universe.
Perhaps the real superstition, then, is the ungrounded dogma that the universe is a purposeless accident. In other words, the anti-theists themselves have a worldview without a strong foundation in evidence and logic. In reality, it is impossible to conclusively determine or prove that God does not exist. Even Richard Dawkins, one of the most strident atheists and harshest critics of religion, admitted that he could not be sure that God—and by extension the Hereafter—does not exist.
Yet the denial of theism—or at least the existence of a higher power and purpose—has always been, and will continue to be, entertained only by a minority of humanity overall, as belief in God is hardwired into our human nature and can never be erased entirely. Even if religious faith recedes for a time, it can and will always be revived again. Lastly, a common objection to the belief in God is that God cannot be directly seen or perceived.
Why should we believe in what we cannot see? The answer is that God, as the Almighty Supreme Being, unique and otherworldly, exists beyond the cosmic veil in the Unseen al-ghayb. Although we cannot see God directly, we can reasonably infer His existence by the signs of His design in the world.
The argument of the Meccan idolaters was not proposed as an honest question, but rather as an excuse not to practice faith. No one can logically claim that the inability to see something confirms its non-existence. There are many things in the world we cannot see, but in which we believe, because we deduce their existence from their signs or effects.
We cannot see the wind, but we see it blowing the grass and trees. We cannot see radio waves, but we can see the results of their transmission. Science only deals with the physical, tangible world of things that can be measured. God is beyond the physical world and beyond measurement.
Consider for a moment the world of microbes that live in a petri dish being studied by scientists. The organisms are so small that the scientists must use powerful instruments to observe them.
Is it possible for the organisms to perceive that the scientists are there? Is it possible for the organisms to measure the scientists in any meaningful way? The sheer difference in scale precludes the ability of microbes to fully comprehend a reality that is beyond their reach. Our relation to God is similar to those organisms observed by the scientists, except that our finite existence is even feebler as compared to the infiniteness of the Supreme Being.
We can become aware of God through His signs, but we can never comprehend the full measure of God. The reality of God is too vast to be seen directly or measured with instruments. If the cosmic veil had been lifted, the awesomeness that is God Almighty would eradicate us. Second, had God turned into man close to the time of Adam all mankind would have had an equal chance to eternal life, unless those before the time of Jesus had another purpose for their existence!
Third, how can people today who have not heard of Jesus fulfill the Christian purpose of creation? Naturally, such a purpose is too narrow and goes against divine justice. The Prophet peace be upon him teaches us that God created this primordial need in human nature at the time Adam was made. God took a covenant from Adam when He created him. He addressed their souls directly, making them bear witness that He was their Lord.
Since God made all human beings swear to His Lordship when He created Adam, this oath is imprinted on the human soul even before it enters the fetus, and so a child is born with a natural belief in the Oneness of God.
This natural belief is called fitra in Arabic. Consequently, every person carries the seed of belief in the Oneness of God that lies deeply buried under layers of negligence and dampened by social conditioning. If the child were left alone, it would grow up conscious of God — a single Creator — but all children are affected by their environment.
Is a potential life accorded the same rights as an actual life? For that matter, are there rights to begin with automatically, or are there criteria that must be met in order to procure rights? In short, questions that strike at the very core of who we are.
A number of these questions were debated by Muslim theologians and legal scholars in the pre-modern world when considering contexts of abortion or issues surrounding paternity.
In the modern world, these questions have grown to include in vitro fertilization and surrogacy amongst others. Muslim scholars continue to grapple with these bioethical questions as the medical sciences grow more advanced and technology allows us to have ever more control over the basic aspects of reproduction, growth, and development. Per the question, When does human life begin? This is interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is the possible change in perspective with regard to how religious authority is derived and its relationship to the medical sciences.
We might rephrase it as: When does a human being begin to exist? In other words, when do we consider this living thing to be properly human, part of the species homo sapiens? Establishing the point at which a human being comes into existence is important insofar as it is at that point that we would seriously consider that human life possesses some sort of special moral claim over and above other kinds of life in general.
Then We placed him as a drop of sperm, firmly fixed.
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