God in Proof. Nathan Schneider

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СКАЧАТЬ still a picture at my father’s old house in San Diego of my grandmother next to Mead. Grandma would arrange for Mead to give a lecture at the university when she was in town, and then they would go shopping together.

      Our truest selves live on islands—so goes the mythology—because they’re free from all the junk of society, with its distractions and phonies and stale dogmas. Islands are Eden before the Fall, where we can still walk around naked, unashamed. (Eden, protected from the world outside, was itself a kind of island.) This is life as it was meant to be. Philosophy started on the islands scattered around Greece, and it was on one of those too that John the Revelator saw his visions of how the world would end.

      As a teenager I used to think about islands a lot. Lonely islands. I would draw pictures of them and imagine them while I was falling asleep. This threatened to divide me into two people at once: the one I ostensibly was—with this family, these friends, these expectations—and the one I would be if finally left on my own, just me and my island, alone with the melodrama of existence. It became an Occam’s razor for cutting down on habits and possessions; I would try to minimize what I would miss if I were instantly transported there; things like contact lenses and coffee became sins against it.

      I mention all this to give some indication of the feeling that rises up in me when I read a singular book about an island, written in twelfth-century Granada by a Muslim philosopher named Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl. It’s called Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. The title is also the protagonist’s name, which means “Alive, son of Awake.” His story was popular and cosmopolitan, even while describing just about the most solitary kind of life imaginable. It also happened to be a pithy summary of what philosophers at the height of medieval Islamic civilization longed for with their proofs, and what they thought proofs could accomplish.

      In the centuries after Rome fell, the ancient Greek classics found a new home in the world under Muslim rule. More than ever before, the genre of proof familiar today began to take shape in earnest. There was a God that some people felt the longing to prove, and there were ancient proofs in need of a God. The reappearance of the genre later on in Christian Europe owed a lot to what happened there and then, in the cities of the Muslim world.

      It’s fitting, I think, that one of the world’s first philosophical novels can’t decide between science fiction and plagiarizing scripture; Ibn Tufayl gives two possible explanations for how his hero came to be, from infancy, the only human being on his entire island. Initially we learn that, by a convergence of natural forces explained in poetically licensed pseudoscience, Hayy comes about through spontaneous generation, from a mix of supernal sunlight and island mud. But Ibn Tufayl realizes that not everyone will think this plausible. So as not to obstruct the narrative at its outset, he offers a second alternative: Hayy is born elsewhere under suspicious circumstances and set adrift in the sea by his mother, like Moses in the Bible and the Qur’an, entrusted to God’s care. Natural or mythic: take your pick.

      In either case, the mystique necessary to suspend our disbelief comes by way of the story’s location. We’re told that Hayy’s island lies in the equatorial seas near the coast of India. This was, for Ibn Tufayl, like setting a novel in low Earth orbit would be now. India was at the edge of the familiar; the Islamic dominion stretched from where he was in Andalusia—southern Spain on today’s map—along 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 СКАЧАТЬ