Abū ’l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (d. 324/936) Proof of God’s Existence (Prof. Erlwein)

1. The Proof of God’sExistence and al-Ashʿarī’s Kitāb al-Lumaʿ
2. Al-Ashʿarī is to be regarded as one of the most significant mutakallimūn in the history of Islamic thought. Not only would his name later become associated with one of Islam’s major theological schools of thought, the Ashʿariyya. On the roots of the Ashʿariyya in the Kullābiyya, see: Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra: eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam, 6 vols (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), vol. 4, 180–194; “Ibn Kullāb und die Miḥna,” Oriens 18/19 (1965/1966): 92–142. In his article entitled “The Classical Islamic Arguments for the Existence of God,” Majid Fakhry briefly refers to al-Ashʿarī’s Kitāb al-Lumaʿ and his “proof that there is a creator for creation” (Majid Fakhry, “The Classical Islamic Arguments for the Existence of God”, The Muslim World 47/2 (1957): 133–145). Fakhry, thus, reads al-Ashʿarī’s proof in the Kitāb al-Lumaʿ as a proof along the lines of cosmological arguments. Al-Ashʿarī “proceeds from the glaring fact of the world’s contingency—the fact that it is not self-caused but depends on something outside itself for its existence” and infers from this fact that God must exist (Eric Ormsby, Ghazali: The Revival of Islam, 53). In the same vein, Muḥammad Ramaḍān ʿAbdAllāh has described al-Ashʿarī’s proof in the Kitāb al-Lumaʿ as seeking “the affirmation of the existence of God on the basis of the proof the mutakallimūn called the proof from the originatedness of the accidents” (Muḥammad Ramaḍān ʿAbdAllāh, al-Bāqillānī wa-ārāʾuhu al-kalāmiyya, Risāla duktūrā, 402). Al-Ashʿarī does not seek to give an answer to the questions “does God exist, and how can His existence be proven?,” nor does he reason that the fact that the world, in being created and requiring a cause for its existence, points to the existence of yet another entity besides itself, thus proving that God exists.

1. Al-Ashʿarī’s proof of the creator in the Kitāb al-Lumaʿ seeks to establish that God, whose existence is taken for granted, is to be credited with the creation of the world.
2. Al-Ashʿarī puts forward two lines of reasoning to prove “that there is for creation a creator.” The first one is that humans were once not more than a drop of sperm, then became a blood clot, then flesh. It is well-known that humans cannot bring about the transformation from state to state (ḥāl) by themselves. The second line of reasoning is that humans begin their existence as children, then grow into young adults, then elderly people, and finally grow old. Once more, al-Ashʿarī reminds the hypothetical interlocutor that this transformation is not caused by humans themselves. Based on these two considerations, he concludes: “what we described, therefore, proves that […] there is for humans one who transforms them, from state to state, and who arranges them as they are. For it is impossible that they are transformed from state to state without there being one who causes the transformation and arranges (bi-ghayr nāqil wa-lā mudabbir)” (Al-Ashʿarī, Kitāb al-Lumaʿ, 18). The argument invoking the transformation of a drop of sperm into a full human being, which al-Ashʿarī praises as “the greatest miracle” and “first in proving a creator,” is strikingly Qur’anic (Al-Ashʿarī, Kitāb al-Lumaʿ, 19). It brings to mind verses such as Q. 75:37–38, which reads {Was he not just a drop of spilt-out sperm, which became a clinging form, which God shaped in due proportion}, and Q. 23:14, {then We developed that clot into a clinging form, and We developed that form into a lump of flesh, and We developed that lump into bones, and We clothed those bones with flesh, and later We developed him into other forms—glory be to God, the best of creators!}. Al-Ashʿarī’s explicit preference for this line of reasoning is probably not surprising given that, in the aforementioned Risāla, he is eager to stress that the mutakallimūn make use of nothing but Qur’anic forms of argumentation.

Al-Ashʿarī adds, for him who looks at a wasteland and expects clay to transform into bricks and to staple themselves one on top of each other without a maker or builder being involved (Al-Ashʿarī, Kitāb al-Lumaʿ, 18). Al-Ashʿarī evidently derives the principle of causation from observation of this world and seeks to affirm its validity based on—what became known as—the analogy between the shāhid, the realm of things observable by the senses, and the ghāʾib, the unobservable realm. In order to prove that God is to be credited with the creation of the aforementioned transformations (which is al-Ashʿarī’s objective in the section on the proof that there is for creation a creator), he needs to provide good reasons that these occurrences have a cause, external to them, in the first place. For him, observation of the shāhid provides these reasons.