God in Proof. Nathan Schneider
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Название: God in Proof
Автор: Nathan Schneider
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Религия: прочее
isbn: 9780520957565
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There were other reasons for the affinity between philosophy and medicine in those days. Philosophy was sometimes considered a suspect activity, a foreign science, spoken of in Arabic using a Greek loanword: falsafa. (Ibn Tufayl judiciously uses hikma instead, a native Arabic word for “wisdom.”) Philosophy attracted Muslims as well as the Jews and Christians who lived among them—making their conversations both rich and potentially subversive. But philosophers often had friends in high places; many of the most famous ones were physicians in royal courts. Ibn Tufayl himself served as doctor to the sultan in Granada, which helped legitimize his speculations. In turn, pronouncing on cosmic truths must have lent some needed gravitas to the medieval physicians’ rather primitive business. Thus it was fitting for Hayy’s career as a philosopher to begin with a surgery.
After the doe’s death, Hayy studies and dissects other animals. He moves into a cave, discovers fire, and learns to cook meat. At twenty-one years old—7 × 3—he begins to venture into metaphysics, speculating on abstractions like variety, unity, the elements, size, forms, and measurement. He discovers the existence of the soul and, by extension, the baseness of his body. Observing the stars, at age twenty-eight—7 × 4—he charts their movements, and they lead him to infer a hidden unity. But the defining moment for Hayy comes at age thirty-five—7 × 5—when he becomes convinced of the existence of a God. Nothing is the same afterward.
The proof doesn’t come all at once. Hayy’s mind has to reason its way through a replay of the history of proofs so far. First, with echoes of Plato’s Timaeus, he concludes that anything that comes into existence must have a cause, beginning with a being who created them according to the blueprints of eternal, perfect forms. He also marvels at the order of the natural world. Like Aristotle, looking up at the stars, he reasons that everything in motion must have been moved by something else; since the sequence can’t go on to infinity, there has to be a first mover. Each of these observations seems to point at the same thing, though even if he could speak he doesn’t know its name. The book’s readers did. This was God, more or less like the God of Islam, but made out of island reason, without a Qur’an or prophets or the law.
Hayy’s speculations start to get even more adventurous, beyond just repeating the ancients. Through him, Ibn Tufayl shows us what Islamic civilization had already added to the Greek proofs. Nobody impressed him more than Ibn Sina, the great eleventh-century Persian, also a physician. Ibn Sina provided the core of the oriental philosophy that Hayy, alone on his oriental island, would discover. Actually, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is the also name of a book by Ibn Sina, and Ibn Tufayl cribbed it as a tribute.
Ibn Sina, too, began with Aristotle. He was especially interested in the idea of something existing necessarily, by virtue of itself. Aristotle used this concept to argue for an eternal universe, but for Ibn Sina it alluded to more. It sounded like God.2
Nothing has to cause a thing like this to exist. It just exists, and it has to. The universe wouldn’t make sense if it didn’t, like a painting with no surface. Other things either exist contingently, having been caused by something else, or are merely possible and don’t exist at all—though in principle they could. Contingent things can cause contingent things, and they’ll go from being possible to actual. Take, for instance, the book 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.
∴
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 СКАЧАТЬ