FAITH AND REASON IN ISLAM:

Paper given at a seminar on Faith and Reason in Islam,
Council for Research in Values and Philosophy
Catholic University of America
March 2008

God takes the initiative in the process of our coming to know him. Gratuitously (we cannot talk of a “right”), He meets everyone at the dawn of his or her consciousness (can we say, even in the womb?), discloses himself to the person’s primordial understanding as the source and goal of existence, and invites and enables a response.[1]

This response is made possible by God himself, acting—Christians hold—through the saving deeds of his incarnate Word, which reverberate backwards to Adam and onwards to the end of human history.

Such a person thereby receives the free stamp of God’s likeness in his soul, replacing the infinite alienating gap between God and creature with the bridge of friendship. This empowers the person to believe in God with a faith informed by love.

This primordial grasp of God by the mind is intuitive or mystical and at the same time imperfect. It develops in two concurrent ways:

1. The beauty of our ambience attracts the human mind to contemplation, in spite of its distraction by the debris of development defacing the earth. The book of nature is a text that calls for reading with an open mind, so as to discover not only the secrets of its composition, but also its struggle for survival, both on the plane of the individual and on the plane of ecological balance.

An open, probing mind can be led further to the overall source of natural beauty and goodness, a source that sustains its ebullience and transcends its temporality. And this we call God.

2. Secondly, our knowledge of God is nurtured by the further public revelation God has made of himself in the history of salvation, culminating—Christians hold—in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, with the promise of a direct visionary embrace in the next life.

This faith is articulated in the Biblical narrative of these events and in credal statements. Faith in God cannot be separated from some basic articles, such as that “God exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 11:6). These two articles implicitly contain any others that might be formulated.[2]

Why is it that some innovative thinkers complain of repression by religious authorities? And on the other hand, why do some religious thinkers complain of being dismissed or marginalized by the secular world?

This raises the question what are the territorial limits of reason and revelation? When is one wrongly encroaching on the other? And under what circumstances can they intermingle and interact?

Faith, in this discussion, is the equivalent of revelation, or the divine mind made known and accepted by man.

Whereas Greek tradition uses the term mind (νοῦς) for both man and God, the term common to God and man in Islamic tradition is knowledge (علم) or insight (بصر). Reason (عقل) belongs to the order of creation.

Reason and revelation pertain to the realm of knowledge, and this mirrors the realm of being. Whatever we say about being will be reflected in our views about reason and revelation.

Therefore I will start with the views of the pre-Socratics on being, and then see how this is exemplified in the case of Christological debates and views of the Christian life, in order to throw light on the inter-relationship of faith and reason in Islam.

1. Among the pre-Socratics, Parmenides held that, since everything is being, nothing can be differentiated; all being is one, and change is impossible. Parmenides is the ancestor of all pantheism, up to today’s New Age religious movements, because the Parmenides mind-set allows no distinction between creator and created. All is divine; nothing is made; nothing is natural.

In the discussion at hand, the divine swallows up the created and nothing is left. If reason is anything, it is part of the divine mind at work, the manifest surface of a vast reality approached only by faith.

2. At the opposite end of the pre-Socratic thinkers stands Democritus, who recognized no cosmic unity and not even any natural unit, such as a horse or a man. All these apparent natural units are nothing but a cohesion of discrete atoms which happened to drift together, like dust forming a cobweb on the ceiling. The Democritus mind-set allows no reality beyond a swirl of countless atoms. Without any outside guidance these evolve into the variety of things we find in the world today. There is no creator, nothing divine, only the material universe that we live in.

In the discussion at hand, the natural swallows up the divine. Reason reigns sole and supreme. There is no place for faith.

3. Differing from all the other pre-Socratics, Anaxagoras admitted the full reality of the world as we see it, full of many different species of minerals, plants and animals, but above all these he posited a Mind that orchestrates the whole cosmos, a Mind that is eternal and separate from the cosmos.

If we apply Anaxagoras’ thought to the discussion at hand, reason studies and discovers the composition of this world. Reason also can trace the world’s existence and harmony to its source, the divine Mind. Reason operates freely in the world of experience, but cannot penetrate the core of the divine Mind. There lie mysteries which the divine Mind might choose to reveal. In that case reason would have to yield to faith.

Here, both reason and faith have a constituency. The question remains, how do they reach across to each other and interact?

1. In the early centuries of Christianity, various Christologies emerged, based on the same philosophical frameworks that attracted the pre-Socratics. In Alexandria, the likes of Dioscurus were propounding Monophysitism, the teaching that Christ had only one nature, a divine nature. His humanity was only an appearance; hence this teaching was also known as Docetism. The divine had swallowed the human.

In particular, human thinking, or reason, and human willing had no place in Christ. He had only one mind, the divine mind, and one will, the divine will.

The exaltation of the divine to the elimination of the human led to predestinarianism, such as that of Gotescalc in 9^th century France, who maintained that God has determined some to glory, and however hard they try they cannot be lost, whereas those he has destined to be lost cannot be saved no matter how hard they try.[3]

The same exclusive exaltation of the divine led others to downplay the use of reason and devalue good works, presenting pious rusticity as the sign of Christian authenticity. Tertullian asked what business Jerusalem could have with Athens. Luther condemned philosophy outright, along with the speculative theology he met and attributed to Thomas Aquinas, although it was really Nominalist philosophy and theology that he was exposed to.

2. Back to Christology, an earlier heresy was Arianism, which excluded divinity from Christ altogether and made him purely and simply human, although a supremely perfect man.

For the Christian life, Arianism was translated into Pelagianism, the doctrine that man works out his salvation alone without divine assistance: “Adam’s sin never hurt us; Christ’s grace never helped us.” The human, the secular, reigns supreme. God is out of the picture.

Applied to the discussion at hand, Arianism and Pelagianism correspond with rationalism. Reason and science explain everything, and there is no place for faith or revelation.

3a. A Christological attempt to allow room for both humanity and divinity in Christ was Nestorianism. Here the Patriarch of Constantinople posited a Christ in whom humanity and divinity were juxtaposed. The man Jesus and the eternal Word of God coexisted under the umbrella of the Christ-phenomenon, but they remained totally distinct from each other. This position differs little from Arianism, since it made Jesus essentially no more than a man who hosted the indwelling Word of God.

In Christian life, this translates into the doctrine of extrinsic justification, propounded notably by Luther. For him the Christian in this life, though registered in God’s good books, forever remains his old corrupt self; grace covers sin, it does not remove it.

When we come to the inter-play of faith and reason, Nestorianism and extrinsic justification translate into a schizo mind-set, with religion bracketed to Sunday for the Christian and Friday for the Muslim, with certain other religious observances intruding into other moments of the day and week, while the majority of the time the person reasons in this-world parameters, unaffected by his faith.

3b. Orthodox Christology sees in Christ an integral humanity joined to the person or hypostasis of the eternal Word of God. Here we find perfect, sinless humanity, radiant in God’s grace, in the closest union possible with God.

This union is mirrored in a finite way in the Christian life, where nature is uplifted and perfected, and never diminished, by grace. It echoes a philosophical provision for overlapping causality, variously designated by a “moved mover”, or “intermediate causality” or “divine pre-motion”, where the creature can be 100% the author of its acts, and at the same time be 100% moved by God. This applies not only to moral goodness but also to prophecy and the composition of Scripture.

When it comes to the interaction of faith and reason, reason has full autonomy in all that it can probe, but faith comes in as an extrinsic guide, first to call its attention to vistas of reality it would never dream of exploring on its own, and secondly to prevent reason from stumbling into error in recondite questions about God, human nature and ethical values.

Similarly, revelation (faith’s content) is autonomous, because it does not derive from reason. But science (reason’s content) can challenge theology, the human interpretation of revelation. Not any dubious theory, but scientific certainties can rightly force a revision of theology, e.g. the revolution of the earth around its axis and around the sun, and the age of the universe.

Instead of following historical order, I keep to the order of tendencies described in the above two sections. Here I take for granted the distinction between Muslim thought and Islam.

1. Therefore, the first movement to be considered is Ash`arism. This school of thought, started by al-Hasan al-Ash`ari, starts with the first statement of the shahada, لا إله إلا الله, taking not only الله, but any of the 99 divine names substituted for it, in a univocal sense. Thus, paramountly, it concludes that nothing has power except God. Logically it should say that nothing has being except God, but it avoids going that far. The main position of Ash`arism is that created things have only the appearance of power (or free will), but not the reality. God is the only efficient cause of everything that happens, good or bad. I once heard a speaker of Ash`arite background state that to Islamize science textbooks, all we would have to do is substitute the word “nature” with the word “God”.

Here we have a case of the divine swallowing up the created or human, and when it comes to faith and reason, since it denies nature, Ash`arism explicitly denies the capacity of human reason to discover any natural law, whether in the realm of physics or of ethics. All must be decided by revelation. The only exception to the impotence of reason, Ash`arites say, is that the human intellect is capable of discovering the existence of God (by attempting to demonstrate that the universe has a beginning in time), and of seeing miracles as evidence for prophecy.[4]

2. The opposite position, that of extolling the created and the human at the expense of the divine, is attributed by the Ash`arites to the Qadariyya, an early movement stressing human free will and responsibility. But in Islamic history there has scarcely been any movement that did not accord a supreme or prominent place to God.

The closest we come to it is the thought of some Muslim philosophers. The most radical of all is Muhammad ar-Razi, who had no time for prophets and their pretended revelations. Ibn-Tufayl came close to the same position. The other philosophers, maybe for their own security, gave at least lip respect to the dogmas and institutions of Islam. But when they asserted, as did Ibn-Masarra and Miskawayh, that reason can know everything taught by revelation, only that reason starts from below and goes up, whereas revelation starts from above and comes down, they are close to saying that revelation is superfluous.

3a. Parallel to the Nestorians, the Mu`tazilites, champions of free will and created power, portioned power between God and creatures. Each had its own sphere, and there was no overlapping. This left them wide open to the Ash`arite charge that by attributing power to creatures, even if by 1%, they subtracted that much power from God.

3b. Parallel to orthodox Christology, we do find, particularly among Muslim philosophers, the notion of intermediate causality, found notably in the hierarchical cascade of motion from the outer heavens down to earth. Ibn-Sina took this in a deterministic way and accordingly said that divine providence extended to everything in its individuality. He was opposed by Ibn-Rushd, who insisted on the reality of random or chance results, and accordingly said that divine providence extended only to the species of things. Neither of them could harmonize the universality of God’s causality with the autonomy and freedom of creatures.

Therefore, when we come to the relationship between faith and reason, both Ibn-Sina and Ibn-Rushd defended reason by defending the legitimacy of philosophical or scientific studies. Yet Ibn-Sina effectively merged reason with revelation by saying that all knowledge comes by illumination from on high, while Ibn-Rushd put the specialists of reason who enjoy certainty (the philosophers) above the specialists of revelation who are limited to conjecture (the Ash`arites and Mu`tazilites), while the ordinary Muslims who cannot reason at all occupy the lowest place. (Al-Farabi even denied them immortality.)

As for faith and reason in Islam, no Muslim would deny the supreme importance of faith. It would also be hard to find a Muslim who has no time for reason, especially the sciences upon which our modern technological world depends.

Nevertheless there are areas of conflict between the exponents of faith and the exponents of reason. The first is the contradiction between the divine determination of the whole universe preached by the Ash`arites and philosophers such as al-Kindî and Ibn-Sînâ, and the pragmatic mindset of most Muslims who take the world on its own terms and manipulate it as they freely choose. This contradiction goes largely unnoticed, as Ash`arism is still taught in theology schools, while ordinary Muslims take note of it only on the occasion of a death or other mishap, for the comfort it gives that God knows best and he cares.

The Mu`tazilites, by their portioning causality between God and creature, could not answer the Ash`arites. Neither could al-Fârâbî by his insistence on chance, nor Ibn-Rushd (along with Moshe ben Maimon) by restricting divine providence to species, exclusive of individual things and events. In my Philosophy of the Muslim World, where I discuss this at length, I propose the solution offered by Thomas Aquinas.[5]

Another area of contention, which is everywhere very much evident, revolves around the distinction between Shari`a and Fiqh, between which laws are divine in the strict sense and non-negotiable, and which stem from the historical application of Shari`a and over the years acquired a quasi-sacred status of its own. Endless questions arise about how a Muslim must or may conduct his private or family life, how society must be structured, and how Muslims may relate with outsiders.

It is not for me to propose answers to any of the latter questions, but simply to put them in the context of harmonizing a genuine respect for the human person and his freedom to think and choose, and a respect for God and his guidance.

A third area of contention, which became evident in the course of the seminar, is between the puritan Hanbalites or Wahhabis and the proponents of mystical experience, whether in Sufism or in the philosophy of ishrâq. It is well known that wherever Wahhabism prevails Sufism is not tolerated, and philosophy schools of whatever tendency cannot be found.

It is true that much Sufic literature and the works of philosophers such as Mulla Sadra are fuzzy. On the other hand, the clarity of their theological opponents belies a shallow grasp of reality. Both sides could profit from a sound grounding in natural science and its related philosophical issues, with a look at the Thomistic contribution, to see how the concrete sensible world manifests the glory of God.

The battle for turf between the camps of religion and reason is as old as mankind, and spreads across philosophical and religious frontiers.

By pointing out the opposing extremes and middle positions on this question in the pre-Socratics and in Christian history, I have tried to show the strengths and weaknesses of the various positions held among Muslim thinkers on the same question, and pointed out ways towards solving the problem.

Yet, as the seminar discussion showed, the question is very complex and there is wide disagreement among the people we heard. I pray that this paper, along with the others of this volume will contribute to bringing minds closer together, to appreciate the glory of both faith and reason and their mutual harmony.

[1] Vatican II Gaudium et spes, n. 22, which opens the way for salvation of all through Christ “in a way known to God”. That way Thomas Aquinas attempts to explain, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 2, a.7, ad 3, and I-II, q. 89, a. 6. See my “The salvation of non-Christians, specifically Muslims” on my web site, www.diafrica.org/kenny/SalvationOfMuslims.htm. The whole of Revue Thomiste, 2006, is devoted to Thomas and all he says about the salvation of non-Christians.

[2] On the relationship between dogmas and faith, see Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 2, a. 2.

[3] See his name in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique.

[4] On these points of Ash`arism and their logic, see my Ph.D. thesis, Muslim theology as presented by Muhammad ibn-Yûsuf as-Sanûsî, www.diafrica.org/kenny/Isltheology/Sanusi.htm, and “Islamic monotheism: Principles and consequences,” Association of Episcopal Conferences of Anglophone West Africa, in Christianity and Islam in dialogue (Cape Coast, 1987), 139-149, online at www.diafrica.org/kenny/Monoth.htm.

FAITH AND REASON IN ISLAM:PHILOSOPHICAL AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES

FAITH AND REASON IN ISLAM:
PHILOSOPHICAL AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES