God in Proof. Nathan Schneider

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 to exist.

      a.An infinity of past events is impossible.

      b.It is impossible to form an infinite by successive addition.

      c.Scientific cosmology describes a universe with a beginning.

      3.Therefore, the universe has a cause, and that cause is God.

      a.The cause must transcend space and time.

      b.The cause must be changeless and immaterial.

      c.The cause must be unimaginably powerful.

      d.Causes are either scientific or personal; this one cannot be scientific, so it must be personal.

      Craig’s dissertation appeared in print as The Kalam Cosmological Argument in 1979—kalam roughly means “theology” in Arabic—and it would become the most argued about philosophy of religion text in recent memory.⁷ “If our discussion has been more than a mere academic exercise,” the book concludes, “this conclusion ought to stagger us, ought to fill us with a sense of awe and wonder at the knowledge that our whole universe was caused to exist by something beyond it or greater than it.”⁸ For Craig, this was never merely academic. He would turn the argument into his opening volley in public debates. Proclaiming it became his ministry. When you’re confronted with the logic, if a proof like this means anything, he thought, it changes you.

      And on that note the great dilemma of creation and eternity brings us back to Hayy, alone on the island. Assembling these proofs changes everything for him. But it does so only when he finally realizes that the dilemma isn’t worth his worry.

      Hayy’s mind thinks its way to a proof of the first cause, and to something like Ibn Sina’s being that is necessary-by-virtue-of-itself with an eternal universe. Each, like al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, pokes objections at the other. From where Hayy stands on his island, and in his short island of time, he can’t decide which story is really true—eternity or creation. He has no revelation or ancient authorities to incline him one way or another. But what he finally discovers is that the implications are the same. A God worthy of worship awaits him at the end of either proof: a cause without a body and a perfect, unchangeable ground of being. It dawns on Hayy that, no matter what, he can be sure there is a God, and that’s assurance enough for him.

      It was also enough, evidently, for Ibn Tufayl and the sultan when Ibn Rushd found them talking together and when the sultan raised his question about the universe. This sultan was a reactionary ruler who sought to purge his society of heretics and unbelievers. But as philosophers alone in a quiet room—their little island, away from the mainland public—they could confess to one another that the truth might be more ambiguous than they would publicly admit. Ibn Tufayl finally managed to calm the younger Ibn Rushd, who told them what he knew about the ancients’ opinions. The sultan sent him home with money and a robe and a horse to carry them.

      ∴

      With thirty-five years behind him, Hayy’s life takes a sudden turn. It’s all because of the God he found in proofs. He had become possessed.

      By now thought of this Subject was so deeply rooted in his heart that he could think of nothing else. He was distracted from his prior investigation of created being. For now his eye fell on nothing without immediately detecting in it signs of His workmanship—then instantly his thoughts would shift from craft to Craftsman, deepening his love of Him, totally detaching his heart from the sensory world, and binding it to the world of mind.⁹

      This God makes him lose interest in the things around him and even in taking care of his body beyond what it needs to keep the ecstasies coming. He gets better and better at making the periods of bliss last longer and longer. He learns that it helps to spin in circles—like a Sufi dervish, or pilgrims circumambulating the Ka’ba in Mecca, or the stars overhead.

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