The Proof of God’s Existence and al-Ghazālī’s Tahāfut al-falāsifa One of al-Ghazālī’s earliest works, which he wrote when he was still teaching Ashʿarī kalām at the Niẓāmiyya college in Baghdad before his first crisis in 488/1095, is the Tahāfut al-falāsifa. Al-Ghazālī intended this work—as its title indicates and as he states in its introduction—as a…

The Proof of God’s Existence and the Science of Metaphysics Peter Adamson has emphasized the special place the proof of God’s existence has in Ibn Sīnā’s philosophical thought: “[i]f one were asked to name Avicenna’s greatest contribution to the history of philosophy, one might reasonably choose his proof of God’s existence” (Peter Adamson, “From the…

The Third Argument Based on the Different Forms and Shapes of Things The section on “the affirmation of the creator” finally contains a third argument. Al-Bāqillānī argues that “every single body in this world is receptive (qubūl) to a structure (tarkīb) different from the one it has.” A square, for instance, could well have been…

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…

Al-Kindī is famously known as “the first philosopher of Islam” (Kevin Staley, “Al-Kindi on Creation: Aristotle’s Challenge to Islam,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50/3 (1989): 355–370). Among his works, Fī al-falsafa al-ūlā—concerned, as its title indicates, with metaphysics or “first philosophy”—arguably belongs to the most influential ones, and it is certainly the work…

Binyamin Abrahamov writes in the introduction to his translation and edition of al-Qāsim’s Kitāb al-Dalīl al-Kabīr (al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm, Al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm on the Proof of God’s Existence: The Kitāb al-Dalīl al-Kabīr). “This argument,” he continues to state its purpose, “proves the existence of God through the wonderful design observed all over the universe” (Abrahamov’s…

“Both kalām exponents and philosophers showed akeen interest in advancing arguments for the existence of God […] to respond to physicalist atheism [among other motives]” (Ayman Shihadeh, “The Existence of God,” in TheCambridgeCompanion to Classical Islamic Theology,ed. T. Winter(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2008), 197–217), Ayman Shihadeh notes in his chapter “Theexistence of God” in the Cambridge…