Aquinas and Classical Islamic Philosophy on the Divine Term Paper

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The way in which this argument is employed differently in classical Islamic philosophy is actually quite interesting. We might compare Aquinas' argument here with Avicenna's use of Al-Farabi's concept of the "active intellect." Aquinas' prime mover argument is fundamentally Aristotelian, and thus Avicenna and al-Farabi were both familiar with the Aristotelean notion that God as Prime Mover could be logically deduced from the motion of planets and stars. For Avicenna, however, the notion of "active intellect" (borrowed from al-Farabi but here repurposed) is understood as the necessary manifestation of God in the world: the movements of things from potentiality to actuality is an intellectual movement (as well as a physical) and the form and shape that appears in matter is actually -- in Avicenna's philosophy -- an emanation from God's active intellect. As Leaman puts it, "this is not a matter of choice or God's grace but rather a necessary implication of the active intellect's essence" (Leaman 113).

Another of Aquinas' arguments that has interesting parallels in classical Islamic philosophy is the argument from degree. This too is Aristotelean in derivation. In Aquinas' handling, it hinges upon the notion of perfection. Aquinas argues that perfection may be found in varying degrees throughout the universe, which thus implies that there is finally an ultimate standard -- a definition of that which is most perfect. The existence of degrees of perfection implies that there must be a most perfect being, and this most perfect being is what we call God. The objections to this argument are again fairly easily stated. One is that the perfection of goodness which we call God is an abstraction that does not sustain the concept of goodness -- if goodness is essentially a transactive quality (i.e., actions or deeds or thoughts can be good, but an object is not good or bad in itself) then it does not follow that there would necessarily be a most good being.

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Likewise the standard of measurement of such perfections is not obvious: if God is infinitely perfect, then he provides no logical point of comparison to the next thing down on the hierarchy. There is also the existence of evil, which calls into question God's perfect goodness -- this does not make it clear why the same logical process could not be used to prove the existence of an all-powerful evil entity. The interesting point of comparison with classical Islamic philosophy can be found in the debates of the tenth and eleventh centuries C.E. among Islamic theologians. Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani, for example, suggested that the existing human language was insufficient to define or approach God -- thus, human beings are fundamentally limited in their ability to approach the idea of God at all. Reason only gets us so far in apprehending God, and reason should therefore have a recognition of its own limits here. This relates, as Leaman notes, to a larger debate at the time in Islamic thought about how to define God's attributes. As Leaman notes, "many thinkers came to argue that the problems of defining God should be resolved by concluding that he is beyond existence and non-existence, that only negative properties should be applied to him (i.e. he is not finite, he is not mutable, and so on)." (Leaman 4). This seems like an acknowledgement of some of the limitations in Aquinas' argument from degree, particularly in how such qualities would be defined, and also in terms of how the infinite degree exhibited by God makes no rational comparison with any other entity. The acknowledgement of limitation here corrects Aquinas' rationalist approach: reason itself may have limited utility in apprehending the divine.

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